Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Grameenphone's First Quarter Earnings Call for the year 2024. I'm Chowdhury Tazrian Israt, the Head of Investor Relations. Joining me on the call today are Mr. Yasir Azman, our CEO; and Mr. Otto Risbakk, our CFO. Please note, in consideration of local regulations, we'll not be providing any forward-looking statements during the call. Our earnings release, financial report and other documents related to our results, can be found in the Quarterly Results section of the Investor Relations website. [Operator Instructions] With that, let's get it over to our CEO, Mr. Yasir Azman, to tell us about our results.

Thank you, Chowdhury Tazrian, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our Quarter 1 2024 earnings call. I'm Yasir Azman, Chief Executive Officer of Grameenphone. As per our regulator's report, till February 2024, the telecommunications industry has reached 191.4 million subscribers, increasing by 0.6 million subscribers from December 2023. During the same period, mobile data users decreased by 1 million, reaching 117.5 million in February 2024. Moving on some of our key business highlights for the quarter, Owing to the rise of emerging technologies and evolving needs of our customers, we have advanced our network capabilities focusing on a progressive and future-ready network that is equipped to cater personalization at core and revolutionize the digital landscape. We have continued our efforts to remain the most reliable connectivity partner that can seamlessly accommodate future capabilities for a smarter tomorrow. Our primary objective in revamping our portfolio was to prioritize on increasing customer satisfaction by implementing innovative features and streaming offers for a more convenient experience. This is what we did in Q1 in this year. Our value-driven initiatives had elevated overall experience and engagement on our network, resulting in 15.2% year-on-year growth in 4G data users this quarter. [indiscernible] to build a digital infrastructure to transform from telco to telco tech company. And in the process, we are digitally and diligently building digital assets and making strategic partnerships with different digital players within country and global partners. 136% higher data usage has been reported this quarter from digitally engaged customers with more than 24% DSTR contribution from digital channels. Grameenphone has received unified license this quarter, which is a big milestone for us and for the industry, which amalgamates existing licenses, 2G, 3G and 4G and includes a scope for 5G and beyond services. We over heartedly --…

Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Yes. Sorry for -- I was muted. So I -- so welcome to everybody on this call and pleased to see that so many are connected. So let me start the presentation of the financial part. I'm very pleased to report a strong start of 2024. Before I comment on the first quarter, let me recap the main trends and the macro environment at the beginning of the first quarter in '24. In Q4 '23, as you may recall, we delivered the best quarter of 2023 with 6.9% subs and traffic growth and solid financials. Towards the turn of the year, however, we saw a significant cooling of the economy due to a series of factors, including inflation and global tensions impacting energy and currencies. And that was leading to an industry-wide drop in data consumption in the last quarter of the year and a slow start of this quarter. I'm now pleased to see that the economy is picking up and that the business momentum has improved steadily during the first quarter this year. Our first quarter financial results reflect the positive momentum and Grameenphone continued to deliver a solid financial performance in the first quarter this year. This was the 12th consecutive quarter of growth and top line growth and EBITDA growth. If I look at some of the key metrics this year to give you the highlight, the S&T revenue this quarter grew at a solid 5.2% and thanks to our relentless focus on operational excellence and strict financial discipline, EBITDA margin stood at a strong 60.8%, industry-leading margins in Bangladesh and even globally. Our robust balance sheet, with no debt and strong cash flows, enabled us to continue to invest in growth and innovation and provides a solid basis for attractive and predictable…

Thank you, Otto. Now let's hear it from our CEO, Mr. Yasir Azman, on the summary for this year's Quarter 1,, 2024 earnings call.

Thank you, Otto and Tazrian. Coming back on the summary of the 2024, Quarter 1 earnings calls with a strong financial performance. We see, although the macroeconomic headwinds continued to challenge us, we remain focused on our strategy and forged ahead with our investment plans to support our growth opportunities, strengthen our partnerships and improve our operations, all of which contributed to the great results we see today. We are building new data centers and taking our technology excellence near to the customers to continue to be the most reliable connectivity partner in Bangladesh. On top of connectivity, customer-centric innovation remains at the core of our initiatives. From the industry-fast offering to IoT solutions, strategic partnerships with content providers to home broadband services, we provide a spark of innovation that connects people to greater possibilities and build new business opportunities for Grameenphone and create opportunities for our shareholders and with the guidance of [indiscernible] and regulators. Our delivery and focus enforce towards nurturing diversity in our workplace and promoting inclusivity have greatly contributed to create a more dynamic work environment. As of the first quarter of 2024, the percentage of women in the total workforce reached up to 19.8%. Privacy is one of the biggest concern in this age of machines and rapidly growing era of sophisticated technologies. We understand the need for robust cybersecurity defenses across the company for which we continue fortifying our defenses, building resilience and remain resilient against evolving cyber threat. Grameenphone, as we reported earlier, in the same quarter, we built and strengthened our core services. We brought in innovative product and service to the market and preparing for the future. On the other hand, we continued our effort to deliver on our social commitment through strong social impact projects. With that, I thank you again, everyone, and we'll turn it to Tazrian for a Q&A session. Tazrian?

Thank you. Thanks to both of you for the wonderful presentation. We'll now be moving on to the Q&A part of the call. [Operator Instructions] We have a question. The first one is why GP is not getting back its subscriber market share? Azman, would you like to take that?

Yes. Yes, let me take it. We are actually growing. We are growing in subscriber base. We are growing in quality subscribers, and we are growing our 4G subscriber base in a very robust way. And at the same time, others only focusing on aggressive subscriber acquisition, GP obviously, is focusing more on improving the network experience, increasing ARPU with the existing subscribers, bringing in new services to the existing subscriber along with consistency for to simplify the products and improve the digital experience so that we can ensure that offerings are more focused and effective in meeting our customers' evolving needs. We don't need to forget that we have a large customer base that demand new product and services. As a result, GP delivered improved top line growth in Q1 2024 compared with last year Q1 growth. And as I mentioned at the beginning, we are growing in our subscriber base. Thank you.

Thank you. We are waiting for questions. There is another question. What leads to the year-on-year 8% OpEx growth? Otto, can you take that?

Yes. Okay. Yes. So the growth in OpEx is driven by certain -- primarily by energy cost and by the volume, the growth -- the top line growth. So if I take the energy costs, as you know, the electricity price was increased in February this year. And additionally, we are constantly building out our network, leading to higher consumption. So energy is one of the 3 major drivers. We also had higher cost in sales and marketing, primarily driven by the growth that Azman was referring to. And finally, revenue share, that is a pure mathematical thing that when we have top line growth, we also have a higher revenue share. So basically, these are the 3 main elements of the OpEx growth. We have, at the same time, done a series of measure to mitigate the costs. So that I'm very pleased to see actually the result of 7.9% growth.

Thank you. There is another question on our portal. Any explanation regarding previous year's tax adjustments? Otto, over to you.

Yes. So the tax adjustment is relating to the new Income Tax Act in 2023. As you may recall, on the 22nd of June last year, the new income tax asset was introduced in Bangladesh, replacing the previous Income Tax Ordinance of 1994. And due to some ambiguity in some of the new provisions in the new tax act, GP, we decided to make certain provisions in 2023 related to this and in line with IFRS. And then upon receiving a further clarification on the act now in this quarter, we were able to reverse this provision. So these provisions was made based on our conservative application of IFRS, and we don't -- we see that now we can reverse it.

Thank you. We don't have any other questions at the moment, but let's just wait for a minute, if we have any. Okay. I think we have another question here. How do you see the potential of 5G rollout in Bangladesh and GP's priority in this regard? I would request Azman bhai to answer it.

Would you please repeat the question, please?

How do you see potential of 5G rollout in Bangladesh and GP's priority in this regard?

We don't give any forward looking statement as far as any development, any investment. However, what we see, is like the network we are building today is basically 5G-ready. As I mentioned earlier that we have doubled our fiber connectivity in the country, which is now -- within the last 2 years, which is now -- which has crossed 40%, 41.8% level, which is an -- also is a readiness for future and for 5G. In case of -- obviously, when you talk about 5G in Bangladesh, we really need to be very precise on that one. That we need to find out the use cases for 5G, for our general customers, we need a very strong 4G network. But in case of airport, ports like some industrial solutions, we need to build use cases and those will be delivered through 5G in time. We have very good network of different business units in the advanced market, in the European markets. There are certain use cases has already been implemented and going to test and trial. And we are constant in learning and preparing ourselves when the time will come to bring this out to our customer or more specifically to our enterprise clients.

Thank you, Azman bhai. And with that, we would be ending the call for Quarter 1. If there are any other questions from your end, please reach out to me via text or e-mail, and we'll get back to you on them shortly. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.

Thank you.