Earnings Labs

Millicom International Cellular S.A. (TIGO)

Q1 2023 Earnings Call· Sat, Apr 29, 2023

$81.67

-1.40%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Hello, everyone. Thanks for taking the time to connect to our First Quarter 2023 Results Conference Call. This event is being recorded. Our speakers today will be our CEO, Mauricio Ramos; and our CFO, Sheldon Bruha. Following their prepared remarks, we will have a Q&A session. By now, you should have received a copy of our earnings release, which is available on our website, along with the slides that we will be referencing during today's presentation. If you please turn to slide 2, you can see our safe harbor disclosure. We will be making forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties and could have a material impact on our results. We will also be referring to non-IFRS metrics throughout this presentation. We define these metrics on slide 3, and you can find a reconciliation of these in the back of our earnings release and on our website. With those disclaimers out of the way, let me turn the call over to our CEO, Mauricio.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

Good morning, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Today is the International Day for Girls in Communications and Technology. As a member of the ITU, UNESCO Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, I would like to celebrate this day and highlight the importance of empowering young women to pursue careers in ICT. In that spirit, we're also celebrating today the anniversary of our own Conectadas digital platform. As we just saw in the short video, this program offers free training for women who want to acquire digital skills and apply those skills to their lives, their businesses and in their communities. To-date more than 745,000 women have been trained since the launch of this program back in 2017. And as you know, we're a purpose-driven company. So we also make sure our success by how well we'll lead that to our purpose of building digital highways that connect people, develop communities and improve lives in the countries where we operate. With that, let's focus on the highlights for the quarter on slide 5. Let's start with the obvious we're navigating through challenging macro and political environment in the countries we operate in, particularly Bolivia and Colombia. But we continue to execute very well during the quarter. Service revenue grew 2.2% during the quarter with a number of bright spots that position us for faster growth as economic and competitive conditions will improve. Two of those very bright spots are B2B, which continues to accelerate and postpaid mobile, which continues to show strong momentum. I will talk about both of these businesses later. And finally, during the quarter, we made important strides in improving our operational efficiency as we began implemented Project Everest, our new cost savings and operational efficiency program. As you know, Project Everest is an important…

Sheldon Bruha

Management

Thank you, Mauricio. Before we review the financials, let me recap the macro context on slide 16. We continue to monitor the macroeconomic situation in our countries. On the left, you can see how inflation has been tracking over the past quarter, falling to 6.9% in March from 8% in December. All countries are declining, except for Colombia, where inflation increased slightly to over 13% at the end of March. On the right, you can see the GDP growth expectations, which compares to the IMF April GDP forecasts to the April 2022 estimates. Overall, GDP growth expectations remain broadly stable and on average, our markets are expected to grow about 3%. The IMF is expecting a decline in growth in Colombia and Bolivia. And we are monitoring the macroeconomic situation in these countries closely and are calibrating our CapEx spend there accordingly which I will touch on shortly. Now let's look at our Q1 performance, beginning on slide 17. Our service revenue was negatively impacted by adverse FX trends this quarter, primarily due to the Colombian peso, which depreciated 17% on average during the quarter compared to a year ago as well as the Paraguayan Guarani which depreciated about 4%. Excluding the impact of FX, organic growth was 2.2%. Our mobile business grew 2.4% and contributed about two-thirds of the overall growth in the quarter. And for the third consecutive quarter, all of this mobile road came from postpaid, which grew at 8.8%. The investments we made in some of our mobile businesses and the networks in recent years, especially in Colombia continued to yield positive results for us. Drilling down further on slide 18 to the service revenue by country, Mauricio has already talked about Guatemala, Colombia and Panama, so I won't cover those again. Elsewhere, our performance in…

Mauricio Ramos

Management

Thank you, Sheldon. At our Investor Day, just over one year ago, we outlined the value creation strategy centered around our clear purpose to build digital highways. The two key financial targets of that strategy are: one, to drive organic operating cash flow growth of around 10% on average between 2022 and 2024; and two, to generate cumulative equity free cash flow all in, in dollars of $800 million to $1 billion during that same period. Macro conditions should remain challenging today, but one, we're harnessing the benefits of investments that we've made in recent years to strengthening our networks and our brand. Two, we're implementing project efforts to increase operational efficiency; three, we're putting through price increases to mitigate the effects of higher-than-expected inflation. And four, we're adjusting investments to a slower short-term demand for our home products. As a result, we remain on track, and reconfirm those midterm financial targets. We also remain focused on unlocking shareholder value from our valuable infrastructure and fintech assets. As you heard earlier today, we're seeing strong operation on the financial momentum on Tigo Money, while our TowerCo is on track for a potential transaction later this year. Finally, we're also on track to meet the important external ESG commitments that we have made. Today, we're pleased to report that we have maintained our MSCI ESG rating of AA. This rating continues to place us above the industry average. With that, we're ready for your questions.

Operator

Operator

Thank you, Mauricio and Sheldon for your remarks. We will now begin the Q&A session. As you are aware, we published a press release on January 25, in which we confirmed that we are having discussions with Apollo Global Management and the Claure Group about a potential acquisition of all outstanding shares in Millicom and that there is no certainty that a transaction will materialize nor as to the terms, timing or form of any potential transaction. We have no new updates on this topic and for legal reasons we cannot and will not take any questions on this topic today. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please let us know by e-mailing us at investors@millicom.com, and we will add you to the queue. Our first question today will come from Andres Coello at Scotiabank. Andres, the floor is yours.

Andres Coello

Analyst

Thank you. Good morning everyone. Thank you for letting me make – quote the first question. It is clearly my opinion that the one market where you are facing most challenges is Colombia, right? You have a macro challenge. Your competition is difficult. You face a very dominant incumbent, which is America Movil. I'm wondering if it's not a good time to start thinking about possible strategic alternatives for Colombia, perhaps including market consolidation in Colombia. And so I'm just wondering if this is something that the company is currently reviewing if there are on-going possible discussions with Telefonica or other players or any other possibilities for improving profitability in Colombia and also for making it a more rational market where you can actually earn free cash flow. Thank you very much.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

Well Andres, thank you for the question. Good seeing you. Before I kind of address the inorganic part of it, Colombia is a market in which we think organically, we've made all the right moves. You're very well aware of those, the spectrum built the network, increase the commercial distribution, put in place a postpaid strategy, gaining a lot of traction, and it is the one market where we're clearly making headway organically, particularly on mobile, fixed, it's a little slower than it had been in the past. Obviously, normally, we wouldn't comment on any specific M&A transaction. And I'm not going to do that. So my comments are going to be very generic more to the market. I think we've often said that the Colombia mobile market, in particular, requires not just the organic wins that we'll be having but inorganic solutions where it really -- networks that come together and become more efficient, be that be mobile or fixed or whether it be actual industry consolidation with players [Ph] coming together because today, effectively, the market is market of one and all the other smaller operators, including ourselves, we started to make a return to be very clear on that. And as a result of that there is indeed a need for reconstruction of the industry, whether it be the consolidation or whether it the super consolidation of fixed or mobile networks. And you're right. I read your report by the way, that the time is about now because in the next year or two, as you would know, the entire industry is renewing spectrum licenses. So there's a lot of pressure on the cash flows from those renewal of the spectrum licenses. And that is applicable to everyone. So something's got to change and it's got to change soon because it doesn't work for all the players, but one. So if your question is, is market ready now for inorganic solutions, whatever the spectrum of those are, and I'm not now pointing to a single one because there are multiple ways in which those inorganic solutions could come about. The answer is yes. I mean the answer is not only yes, but it is now. Part of your question was whether we're actively working on all such possible improvements and solutions, yes, not only now we've been working on that for a little while. Do we think something may happen possibly? It should, it needs to. Can we handicap or suggest exactly which one of the options or guarantee that any of them will come about? No. But quite clearly, if there was a market in which the opportunity exists is this -- clearly the opportunity is now. How about that for not answering an M&A question.

Andres Coello

Analyst

That was very useful. Thank you very much Mauricio. That’s good guidance.

Operator

Operator

Great. Thanks Andres. We'll take the next question now from Marcelo Santos at JPMorgan.

Marcelo Santos

Analyst

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to understand a bit better, which of the unusual items and the investments that you discussed such as Project Everest, which of them should persist in the coming quarters? Like how should we see these items affecting? Is this more related to only to the first or should we expect some spillovers? This is my first question.

A - Mauricio Ramos

Analyst

Do you want to have a crack at that one Sheldon?

Sheldon Bruha

Management

Sure, sure. Thanks, and good morning. Yes, look, I think if you -- in my prepared remarks, I kind of addressed a few of these. I mean, but let me pick them kind of sequentially, but we had some large -- largely there are one-off items this quarter or unusual items related to the Project Everest implementation. This is only the heaviest quarter for us on that. I would expect some additional implementation costs here in Q2. And then largely, those are going to be behind us. Undoubtedly there'll be some, but those are largely behind us. The next item, I mentioned is kind of the share-based comp implications. That's a bit higher for us largely because sort of what happened to our stock price here in Q1 is the time that we were essentially doing our awards to employees. That's essentially going to be accrued kind of over the quarter. So that will be kind of flat and expect to see a similar impact there in future quarters this year as we saw this quarter. Then I think I mentioned some of the investments that we're making, perhaps some of the content investments in Vix and otherwise. Look, those should be more pronounced here in the early half of this year. But once we sort of ramp up our activities in those levels, the negative impact of those start-up costs are going to be behind us. So it's more of a first half this year impact. Second half of this year, we should be seeing some of the drag from that. And then, of course, I think the last item I called out kind of a bit unpredictable about how it will continue to impact as some of the costs we're incurring on the discussions with regard to sort of the take private. So there's a bit of an overhang on that depending on how that goes, there could be some continuing cost we're incurring there.

Marcelo Santos

Analyst

Good, perfect thank you. If there's time just for a new question. Could you please comment on the fixed market in Panama, like the home is a bit tough? So any comment would be good.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

Yes, sure, for sure. So as I alluded to on the prepared remarks, our strategy in Panama, if you were to look at our acquisition plan Marcelo, it is one of those cases in which everything other than the pandemic, of course, that was not in the acquisition plan has happened as we expected and very much as a playbook or the acquisition plan indicated. And that largely was in summary, sustain and hold on the home part of the business because when we bought the asset, we had 70% mobile, sorry, home market share, which we still do. So that was never for us to be the source of growth. But that was the basis upon which we could sell a lot of mobile by cross-selling to that home base. And that's exactly what you have seen we've been selling basically mobile to that home base. Today, our mobile market share is in the high 40s. When we started out, it was in the mid-30s, so that was the acquisition plan. My point being that the fixed market in Panama for us was always meant to be simply a steady cash producer, which is what it has been. You're not supposed to see a lot of net gains coming from Panama. You're not supposed to see a lot of ARPU pick up coming from Panama because it's mean to be just basically the steady cash flow producer that it has been. And it remains that way. Interestingly, I was in Panama just last week, and I walked the fixed networks, both the fiber that we're deploying in some areas in Panama and the lowest economic areas where we use -- still have a lot of MDS [Ph]. And I was surprised at the demand for our products still on home in Panama, particularly in the areas where we are upgrading all the MDS [Ph] network to fiber. And I was surprised for the pull of the product, and I was also surprised by the impact of the content that we've been buying and its relevance to the subscriber base there. All of that simply to say pretty steady. There's some room there for improvement as we build a little bit more footprint, but it's not meant to be the source of our growth. The source of our growth in Panama is to continue to be mobile pickup. Tigo Business in Panama while we're on Panama is really making what it should be doing. It's a new brand, but it's beginning to really pick up speed in Panama and obviously, Tigo Money, which we will be launching later this year in Panama. So those are the things in the playbook that are still coming in Panama, B2B, much more and the Tigo Business part and Tigo Money

Marcelo Santos

Analyst

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Great. Thank you Marcelo. Our next question today will be coming from Soomit Datta at New Street Research.

Soomit Datta

Analyst

Hi guys thanks very much for letting me ask a couple of questions. The first one, please, on CapEx. So you've talked about easing up on some of the investments this year and CapEx coming in perhaps $100 million lower. Should we sort of be thinking about this as a new run rate going forward, other things equal or is this really quite temporary given some of the softer macro conditions in a couple of other markets? And I guess, particularly thinking through the equity free cash flow guidance period. So through to the end of 2024, is that a $100 million saved, is that $200 million saved would be interesting? Thank you. And then the second one, please, on Guatemala -- would just like -- it would be great if you could maybe, Mauricio just kind of remind us of the cadence as to how everything has played out there, and it sounds like pricing has stabilized, but there are some more commercial kind of efforts been going in. So should we be thinking of stable revenues? Are we at a lower margin level? Any kind of great discussion around that would be helpful. It would be great to know a bit more about what AMX is doing right now. Thanks.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

So let me start with Guatemala, and I'll give Sheldon a little bit of time to figure out how to answer the math question that you are so very actually putting in front of him. So Guatemala, as you saw from this chart, is delivering quite well on the home part of the business, which is growing. It's actually one of the countries where home has got a lot of potential going forward. Tigo Business in Guatemala, as I've said often, is also an area in which we now -- with us owning 100%, it's easier to deploy the entire strategy, including Guatemala given the relative size of Guatemala in Central America. That's an area that is growing quite well and we expect to continue to grow well. And so is postpaid. And we've already talked about Tigo Money being relaunched in Guatemala. So the challenge has been concentrated in prepaid as all the other subscription businesses continue to grow. And as you recall, maybe about a year or so ago, there was a pickup in prepaid competition basically our competitor significantly draw prices. And we responded if you recall with a strategy that we believe has paid off handsomely, which is to defend by strengthening the network, which we have done. We also were able to pay the 700 megahertz spectrum early this year. And I can tell you, because I was in Guatemala earlier this month that it makes a big difference to consumers. And mostly we responded by strengthening the commercial distribution channels. That's what we mean by investments in the commercial distribution, and that's why you see it hitting on EBITDA. And that has worked extremely well because it has been -- allowed us to defend the long-term health of the business, the pricing levels, if…

Sheldon Bruha

Management

Hey Soomit good morning or good afternoon to you. Yes, on the CapEx side I think we're trying to talk about -- we do have flexibility on how we can adjust CapEx sort of as needed in the business. I think we've demonstrated that kind of historically as a company. But if I kind of want to unpick the $100 million sort of reduction that I pointed towards in my prepared remarks, it's kind of really three buckets. The first bucket is kind of we're recalibrating our home builds predominantly in Bolivia and Colombia. And that's really sort of macroeconomic driven and sort of competitive, what we're seeing from a competitive perspective driven, that's discretionary, right? So that's something we'll continue to evaluate next year and in the following years. And if we see things differently than what we see them today, that can come back. The second bucket, I would say it's about a third of that total reduction again is more -- it's really activity-based. It's sort of some of the lower activity on home -- the home connections. Now that's largely market-driven. But some of that is self-imposed and I would say kind of discretionary as well. I mean we're being a bit more kind of selective around additions right now given the current environment. We're keeping -- maintaining connectivity costs for customers on home just to make sure we're kind of managing the customer base that we're bringing in. So that's going to be a bit variable, and we can kind of pull some levers there, but it's going to depend on sort of how the market evolves going forward. And then the last bucket, once again, these are all about a third each in terms of contribution to this reduction. It's really pricing and pricing that we've been able to kind of negotiate given some multiyear agreements with our largest mobile vendors. And that's going to benefit we're going to see in future periods as well. So I kind of break it down sort of in that fashion, you can understand a little bit how that could evolve in future periods.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

I'm going to add a couple of things to those. One is a reiteration of the last point that Sheldon made, which is not small. Earlier this year, we went to all of our vendors with three-year plans and three-year capacity needs. And we renegotiated deals for the long term, allowing us then to get pretty decent pricing, which is part of the savings that you're seeing in CapEx. So we're being able to do the same or more with less dollars. And the second point is simply to highlight the notion that we've consistently talked about our long-term CapEx intensity ratios to be around 15%. So it shouldn't surprise anybody that although there may be some ups and downs in the quarters and even years, that's where we think the business will trend towards.

Soomit Datta

Analyst

Great.

Operator

Operator

Thanks Soomit. Our next question will come from Lucas Chaves at UBS.

Lucas Chaves

Analyst

Hey thanks for having my question. So continuing on the previous question, I have the two on my side here. So I would like to know on the free cash flow but to equity now. So what do we expect to the remaining of the year and considering out the cumulative target that you have for the next three years, what you expect to achieve there in 2023? And finally, the same thing about leverage, how should we look at leverage at the end of the year, considering now the new calculation that you were doing changed -- should we compare the 2.0 target that you have in the long term? Thank you very much.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

So I'll start a little bit on the equity free cash flow and then hand over to Sheldon for those. The two financial targets that we've set out for this three-year period are quite interrelated. Our operating cash flow growth, it's also related to the CapEx question is on track for an average of around 10% organic per year for this multi-period and that's the driver behind getting to that equity free cash flow number, which, as we've said repeatedly, it's back ended. So you can expect that next year, there's going to be an increased pickup on our equity free cash flow. And our long-term targets for leverage remain the same, 2.5% by 2025. So I'm basically reiterating what we have consistently said, reiterating the notion we're on our way there. Any color, Sheldon, do you want to add to any of that?

Sheldon Bruha

Management

Sure. Let me just add a little bit. Just on the leverage point, I mean, we don't - we're not giving guidance sort of on that from a specific year. But if I could take a little bit of what happens for this quarter. I mean our leverage increased a bit here, but it's a combination of a number of factors. One is kind of the seasonality of our cash flows, which I think we've been pretty clear about that. I think and what you've probably seen and the way we report it. So there's a bit of a cash outflow here in Q1, which has led to what led to the uptick in leverage. And we had some FX translation issues this quarter. The Colombian peso appreciated about 5% from year-end levels, which meant negatively impacted sort of the lot of debt we booked on a dollar basis. But then on the same time, the average rate depreciated year-over-year about 17%, which meant it inevitably impacted our LTM EBITDA, kind of an unusual combination for, I think, that you normally see the movements kind of move in similar directions here that kind of moved in opposite directions. And also, I think there are some unusual items, as I talked about hitting EBITDA. The average implementation costs and some of the higher share-based comp, we'll eventually lap those in our LTM EBITDA calculation. So look, several of the factors I've been highlighting here are kind of short term in nature and already part of our planning. So I might think through it all, I remain sort of confident in terms of where we can get leverage in the medium term, but there will be some items here that we're going to have to sort of work our way through and kind of go through the system here kind of in the short term from our overall leverage ratio.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

Just going to add a little bit there. Hopefully, it helps -- I know that the Q1 EBITDA may be spooking some. But the way we look at it and regardless of the geography of accounting, we look at those as all of those being good investments into the short term and the medium term and the long-term. So the Everest they're hitting to one, but the payback on that is well within the year and certain to the future years. So squarely for us, there are investments -- investments in content and Tigo Money and Lati, they're also very good investments regardless of the fact that geographically, they hit EBITDA. And as I was responding earlier to the question by Soomit, even investing in the commercial distribution network in Guatemala, we see as investment into the long-term sustainability and profitability of that business. So I'm just adding that to the conversation so that you get a feel for how we see this Q1 as being really an investment in the long-term health part of the business.

Lucas Chaves

Analyst

That was very clear. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Thank you Lucas. Our next question today will come from Fredrik Lithell at Handelsbanken.

Fredrik Lithell

Analyst

Thank you very much. Thank you for taking my questions as well. I have maybe two if you could come back to Colombia a little bit. In 2022, you partnered up with a third party to be able to access more homes passed then I was curious to see how you're progressing with that. If you're connecting anything or if it's early on and the status of that? And maybe also if you could on your broader geographical scope, talk about homes connected. I can see that you talked about Homes Passed coming down. How do you work with Homes Connected? And how do you see that that is progressing as well in more general terms? And then if we stay with Colombia, the spectrum auction, there is a spectrum auction coming up, right? So it would be interesting to hear the timeline. And also, if you would use the last spectrum auction you had in Colombia as a blueprint how would payments for the upcoming look like? I'm not sure if it's similar -- if the rules are already set or something like that would be interesting to hear. Thank you.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

Thank you for the very good questions. So the first one, I'll kind of bundle the Colombia with the rest. So on our Home business, as we said earlier, we're seeing softer demand than we had seen before. Part of it is basically the ebb coming out of the pandemic, the aftermath of the pandemic, there was a lot of demand during the pandemic. People are back into the offices, residential broadband demand is slowing down and as a result of that, there is a natural ebb. It doesn't change our long-term outlook for the business but we're cognizant of the fact that it is lower. And there's also the macroeconomics that are weighing down on demand. And those are related to the two countries, and this is where I answer the Colombia, as we said, where we're seeing softer demand, and those are really Bolivia and Colombia. The rest of the geographies in terms of homes connected and demand remain pretty healthy. So Central America continues to grow. And even Paraguay, as you have seen from the result is back to growth, both on mobile and even on fixed, and you can expect fixed to even get better as we go into the year. So it's really all about Colombia and Bolivia, which has that effect of softer demand and a lot of macroeconomic turmoil and uncertainty associated with that demand. And that explains to you where we are softly -- only softly selling in Bogota. Sticking with Colombia, then on the spectrum, I should clarify that there is no option in Colombia currently under way. What we have in Colombia is the renewal of our license. We've begun and are kind of on the end part of the process of renewing our 1,900 megahertz license, that's for renewal.…

Sheldon Bruha

Management

If I could add maybe just a little bit on the Columbia spectrum, you would have seen or you may see in our results that we actually did put that onto that renewal onto our balance sheet this quarter, about a $250 million in aggregate. Now what Mauricio sort of highlighted is we're still kind of undetermined the payment terms related to that, how much will be cash, how much could be under coverage commitments and then sort of what the payment -- what the distribution of those attached payments over time could be? And then any sort of associated interest charges that may be tagging on to those. So those are still the items that are still being discussed and are unstill unfinalized.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

That's for a 20-year license.

Fredrik Lithell

Analyst

Alright. That’s very clear. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Great. Thank you so much Fredrik. We will hand over the last question to Phani Kanumuri from HSBC.

Phani Kanumuri

Analyst

Thank you for taking my question. So the first one is related to the Project Everest. You have said that there would be about $100 million in cost savings by end of 2024 annually. So where can we expect the cost savings coming geographically? Is it something similar to the restructuring cost that we've seen with majority of the costs coming from -- majority of the cost savings coming from Colombia? That would be my first question. My second question is in B2B. You've seen a strong growth from B2B. Again, which markets are you seeing the highest growth? And what are segments that you're seeing, I mean, in terms of connectivity versus cloud versus -- how are you seeing the growth coming back? And the third one is more of a clarification question. So you said the CapEx would be 100% lower. Is it per annum, and that would mean that you're expecting an average run rate of 900 million per year. Is that the right assumption? Thank you.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

All right. I'll take the easy one, the B2B and then let Sheldon crunch the math there and all the math questions. So if you recall from my prepared remarks, we have revamped our Tigo Business or B2B strategy just before the pandemic, during the pandemic the business was basically on ice. But all that strategy is paying off as we come out of the pandemic. And it's, as I said in my prepared remarks, a very holistic strategy that includes partnerships, very well trained forces, careful selection of a streamlined product suite, very, very clear distribution channels and a lot of work with our partners. Not surprisingly then on either the areas that are having the most growth are what we call digital services, cloud services, service security, SD-WANs, right, that basically give perfect connection to our connectivity products. So we provide the digital services, the connectivity, and we have great partners. That coupled with good distribution, well-trained sales forces, is giving basically what we call digital services, the ability to become the engine of growth. And that's why we see a very, very sustained growth to that B2B business. In terms of geographies, it's very broad-based, very broad-based. And you can imagine that the countries in which our B2B businesses were bigger in relative terms like Colombia and Panama, is where we're seeing quite a bit of traction as well. But also given our size Guatemala and I also believe that Paraguay is right in line to start showing some growth there on B2B. So those are the answers on B2B. It's paying off. Our strategy is now paying off, and we're very, very happy to see. As I said often on B2B, as a telco, we were underweight on B2B. And in our markets, there was a clear opportunity to put connectivity, partnerships, product segmentation, digital services, the data centers that we have been building all together into a product that caters to the business community. That's the long and short of Tigo Business.

Sheldon Bruha

Management

I'll pick up some of the other questions I think you raised as well. First on Everest; look, first of all, I just want to say -- I'm very pleased on the progress we've made on that this quarter in terms of how we're launching that and how we're implementing that across the business. I mentioned in my prepared remarks, I mentioned last quarter, this is a very broad-based program sort of across our -- all of our operations, including our headquarters. And it's not just cost cutting, right? It's sort of changing sort of our approach in terms of how we're managing the business, centralizing activities that make sense to do so across the organization and improving our kind of our operational efficiencies and how we manage businesses locally. So it's going to be impacting sort of all countries. I think what you're kind of seeing so far is some of -- mostly the organizational impacts, and that's probably where there was a bigger sort of front-end costs related to that. And you can probably see us a few of that where it's hitting by country. But look, I'm not going to kind of guide how that $100 million is going to be spread across the countries. It's going to be very, very broad-based. But once again, just looking at the progress of what we're making this year, I did indicate that we're on target to exceed the $100 million of savings by the end of 2024. We're on target to exceed 50% of that or $50 million of run rate savings by the end of 2023. And I mentioned we're incurred bulk of our implementation costs here in Q1. There'll be a bit more to come. But 2023 in aggregate is going to see a materially positive sort of net impact sort of within the year even taking into account those one-off costs. So some really good progress on Everest and we're well on our track delivering that. It's what we're seeing benefits, particularly in the second half and then really into 2024. I think your other question is just around CapEx, which I think we largely addressed in my comments to Soomit, just a second ago in terms of we're seeing about $100 million CapEx lower this year than last year. It's really kind of across those kinds of three buckets. And how that plays out in future years, I think as some of it's in our control, some of this will be sort of just managing as we sort of see the activity base and then when we see the environment. But some of that's going to be much more sort of longer-term requirement as we talked about some of the pricing benefits we're able to achieve with our key vendors.

Phani Kanumuri

Analyst

Perfect. Very clear. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Great. Thanks Phani. I'll hand the call back over to Mauricio for some closing remarks.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

Well, thanks, everybody, for joining today and for the great session and questions. Just to finish off, I'll repeat, number one, we realized that Q1 may spook a little bit on the EBITDA. But don't be. Those are all largely, if not all of them, investments that we've decided to make and that we're very happy to make, whether they are severance for Everest and operational efficiency or investments in Lati or investments in Tigo Money or investments in maintaining the growth that we've seen in Guatemala before. Those are all conscious decisions that we've been very, very happy to make, and they all have payback which is why I urge you keep the focus on what we think are the value drivers, the things that you should keep your eye out on as we do, which are number one. These are all helping us drive that equity free cash flow commitment of $800 million to $1 billion for the 2022 to 2024 period, which we remain on track for and have just reconfirmed here. As you all know, it's back ended. We've always said that. So look out for 2022 -- sorry, for 2024 to be the year when that really takes off. Number two, in terms of value drivers and things to keep an eye out on. By year-end, we will be unlocking the value of our tower infrastructure. That is meaningful at all levels. You know the math on that and how that will help create shareholder value and make the business a more focused business. Number three, there's also hidden value in our data center portfolios and outside of our fintech business. As I said earlier, we're very happy with the way Tigo Money is playing out. It's delivering on all of my expectations and the possibility of future value. And number four, which I have just added, given the question earlier on, there is upside here in some inorganic improvement to Colombia, whatever the flavor of that may turn out to be. So hopefully with that you get a clear picture of what we're focused on and where we see the value levers for the business coming from. Thank you for joining today.