Hello, everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter 2024 results call. This event is being recorded. Our speakers today will be our CEO, Marcelo Benitez; and our CFO, Bart Vanhaeren. The slides for today's presentation are available on our website, along with the earnings release and our financial statements. Now please turn to Slide 2 for the Safe Harbor disclosure. We will be making forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties and these could have a material impact on our results. And then on Slide 3, you can see that we define the non-IFRS metrics that we will be referencing throughout the presentation, and you can find reconciliation tables in the back of our earnings release as well as on our website. With those disclaimers out of the way, let me turn the call over to our CEO, Marcelo Benitez.

Thanks, Michel, and hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us to review the company's performance in our fourth quarter. Please turn to Slide 5 for the highlights of the quarter. As you all know by now, 2024 was a transformational year for Millicom. And as you can see on this slide, we ended the year with a very strong note with equity-free cash flow of $236 million in the quarter. For the full year equity-free cash flow excluding tower sales was $728 million, a new record. This is the result of our efficiency program which drove our OCF margin up 8 percentage points to almost 31%, also a new record. I want to express my profound gratitude to the exceptional DOT members who made this transformation possible. As promised, we used the cash flow to reduce our debt and we managed to bring the leverage down below 2.5x, which was one of our key priorities for the year. At the same time we took key steps to sustain and accelerate revenue growth which is our key objective in 2025. In Q4 we added 274,000 postpaid customers and 49,000 home subscribers while maintaining a strong momentum in B2B. This provides a solid foundation for another excellent year in 2025. Now let's dive deeper into these key highlights starting with our Mobile business on the next slide. Our Mobile business delivered another solid quarter in Q4 with organic service revenue growing more than 4% in line with Q3. For the full year, Mobile service revenue growth accelerated to 4.6% compared to 2.4% in 2023. This improved performance is the result of the four key strategies we focus on throughout the year. First, we've expanded our mobile network capacity laying the foundation to drive data consumption and monetize growth through strategic price increases which…

Thank you, Marcelo. Now let's look at our financial performance beginning on Slide 15. Service revenue was $1.34 billion in the quarter which is 2.9% down from $1.38 billion a year ago. Operationally this is not what we see. In fact the P times Q is growing quarter-over-quarter but there are two elements to consider in analyzing this quarter. One, Panama B2B project which we have consistently referred to, that had a peak revenue recognition in Q4 of last year and in Q1 of this year. This creates a year-on-year difference for Q4 of about $25 million. And two, FX mainly in Colombia where Q4 average exchange rate was about 5.8% weaker in Q4 than in Q3 or 9.5% year-on-year. This represents approximately $30 million. Now on a good note, that trend is curbed in Q1 as we see the COP appreciating now. So to conclude, we report 2.9% revenue decrease. Excluding FX in Panama projects, we see operationally a growth of about 1.3%. EBITDA was up 11% year-on-year to $618 million. This included $30 million of restructuring and other one-off charges. We have now significantly completed our restructuring program spending a total of about $150 million which again is all included within the reported numbers. We will obviously continue to focus on efficiencies across the grid but going forward we'll consider associated costs to be baser than usual. Equity free cash flow excluding net proceeds, tower disposals was $236 million up almost $200 million compared to $39 million in Q4 of last year. Equity free cash flow for the full year was $728 million, again excluding the $49 million in tower monetization, which was well ahead of our most recent guidance of around $650. On the next slide let's drill down further on service revenue by country. Marcelo has…

Thank you, Bart. We will now begin the Q&A session. So as a reminder if you would like to ask a question please send an email to investors at millicom.com. We will be taking our first question from Marcelo Santos at JP Morgan. I think we need to bring Marcelo into as a panelist, so let's give him a second. Okay, Marcelo, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Sorry it took me a while to reconnect to the panelist. Thank you very much for the opportunity to ask questions. I wanted to go back to something that was discussed in the beginning. You mentioned that accelerating growth is a key priority for 2025. Could you please be a bit more explicit on which markets and segments should see the main improvement as per your expectations? And the second question is a bit related to the first. What will be the cost of these re-acceleration efforts in terms of OpEx and CapEx? Could we expect some pressure in margins, a bit higher CapEx? These are the questions.

Hello Marcelo. Good to see you. Thanks for the questions. Well on the first one, as you can see our Mobile business that is more than 50% of our revenues is growing nicely. I mean year-over- year it grew 4.6% on the back of postpaid 8% and prepaid 3%. We believe that this trend is going to be repeated in 2025 basically because our postpaid base is still too low as a percentage of the total base. We believe that should be around 30%. That's our target. And today we are at 12%. So we have enough room to grow. In the case of prepaid, what we are doing there is since the traffic is increasing year over year, 16% in 2024, we are also increasing the allowances and the tickets in prepaid. So with that, we got to grow 3% in 2024 and we plan to do the same in 2025. On top of that, you will see Home recovering from a couple of quarters of negative growth after we started adding positive net-adds since October of last year. We believe we are going to be in positive territory in Q2, somewhere in Q2 of this year. And B2B, we do expect the same rate of growth of ’24 around 3%. So I believe with that you can play with the numbers Marcelo and do the math. Regarding the pressure on margins, we do believe we can sustain the same level of CapEx. We've been very, very focused on how we spend CapEx. As an example, we take a granular view on where to invest. In Mobile, 27% of the municipalities represents 80% of the revenues. So instead of investing in average to the whole network, we are investing where the demand is. And it's the same concept we are applying to Home. So with this new framework, we've been able to keep the same level of CapEx of ’24. So we don't see any pressure on margins there. And to your questions about countries, it's easier to answer. I mean, because this is a very, this is a playbook that we are implementing in all the countries. But it's easier to tell you which ones are going to be more challenging. And it's going to be, one, Costa Rica, because basically the operators, the two largest operators, they are very aggressive. They became very aggressive commercially on convergence offers. And that is something that impacts directly to our customer base and to our ARPU, and in Bolivia, because of the currency devaluation. So you will see nice, very nice growth in local currency, but it's going to be affected by the devaluation.

Perfect. Very clear. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Marcelo. So next, we're going to go to Stefan Gauffin at DNB. Stefan, the line is yours.

Yes. Hello. Can you hear me?

We can. We can't see you, but we can hear you.

Yeah. Not sure why. Let's see if I can fix the camera.

But that's okay. Go ahead.

We remember you, Stefan.

There we go. So I'll follow up on CapEx questions. So you said that CapEx could be in the same range, but there's quite a big difference on cash CapEx and booked CapEx in 2024. So could you comment a bit on what you see, how this will develop in ’25, so that we don't have a backlash on cash CapEx? Secondly, a clarification, you made a provision for, and you also, in the cash flow guidance, you highlight risk of adverse legal rulings. So can you please comment on what that is all about? And then perhaps finally, given the change in reporting, in Bolivia, what kind of spot rates are you looking at using for that market? Thank you.

Yeah, I will take those. So on CapEx, CapEx booked has come down from ’23 to ’24 from $809 million to $677 million. For ’25, we'll see that stabilizing around that number. We believe that's a good wallet, let's say, to spend in our markets. In terms of cash CapEx, indeed, it went stronger down from $931 million to $575 million. I think that the ’23 number had really some payables from ’22. So that cash CapEx in ’23 was a bit artificially high. And the $575 million is a little bit low, if you ask me. And that is because there was a lot of Q4 delivered CapEx or executed CapEx in Q4, which that will be paid in Q1. If you look, we didn't give guidance for ’25 on CapEx level, but you can expect those two numbers to convert in the future. Over time, those numbers need to be the same, right? So ultimately you pay what you book. And so as our CapEx booked, will start to stabilize our cash CapEx should stabilize around that same number. On your second question regarding legal rulings, you might see in our disclosures, I mean, I think it was published as well. One was a negative ruling on Costa Rica case with Telefonica. And both parties appealed, so that's not yet in final form. But because there was a negative ruling, we took a provision for that in the $80 million zone. And then generally, it is LATAM, you may have negative rulings. In other cases across countries, there's not a single big one to flag out, but it comes and goes depending on the year, similar for tax claims that may come and go. On Bolivia, in Q3, we have paid as high as 60 something percentage of…

That's perfect. Very clear, thank you.

Thank you, Stefan. [Operator Instructions] Our next question is going to come from Phani at HSBC. Phani, the floor is yours.

Yeah, thank you for taking my questions. The first one is regarding your pricing power in Guatemala, Colombia and Panama. I mean, you're expecting to react to the rate growth but is it driven more by volume or do you have some pricing power in this market? The second one is regarding the ability to reinstate dividends this year. So why did you feel that the 2.5x net leverage target is good? Or why did you prefer dividends over debt reduction at this point of time?

I’ll take the first one and you take the second. So to the first question, Phani, we believe that this is a very consumer-driven market. What we do see is that the demand for data is increasing every year, and what we do is to monetize that increase. So the way we do it is increasing the allowances by, and at the same time, increasing the ticket. So it's a more for more equation. That will be the case not only in Colombia and Guatemala, but in all other operations in all the countries where we have mobile, all except Costa Rica. And that is a trend that I believe is going to be for sure in 2025, but also in the next following years.

On the leverage and dividends, so we generate about $750 million equity-free cash flow. So we decided or recommended to distribute two-thirds of that to shareholders, $500 million, which is $3 per share, which is under $0.75 per quarter. And then keep one third for either deleveraging or strategic projects such as the acquisition of Telefonica in Colombia, and will be a good step in the direction of financing those acquisitions. So it's a bit of a balanced approach. The 2.5 times leverage, we always said we would start or only consider starting shareholder distribution once we reach the 2.5 times or go below 2.5 times, which happened in November, we went to the Board and then started the distribution. We expect at the end of the year to be significantly below the 2.5 times. Just a bit of a cautionary statement there, you know that cyclically Q1 is always a little bit weaker in our industry. So including the first dividend, $170 million plus $150 million share buyback, $320 million goes out of the door with the last 12 months EBITDA that may be a little bit weaker just on the cyclicality and a very good Q1 last year with the B2B projects. The leverage may go up a little bit again in Q1 before then it comes down again Q2, Q3, Q4. So we'll end the year significantly below the 2.5 times, but we might go up a little bit in Q1.

Yeah, perfect. Thank you.

Thanks, Phani. So our next question is going to come from Gustavo Farias at UBS. Gustavo?

Hi everyone. Thanks for the time and taking my questions. First, congrats on the results, so, two questions from my end. The first one regarding the ’25 guidance, if you could comment on what are the main assumptions embedded on the guidance, you comment on some downside risks for macro FX from the countries you operate, especially Bolivia, Colombia, and Paraguay. So if you could comment on, not only this downside risks but also on potential upsides and how much of that are you embedding on the guidance. And my second question, if you could comment on how's been the competition in Colombia, especially after we saw WOM's acquisition, how are you thinking around that theme? Any color would be really appreciated. Thank you.

I'll take the first one. You take the second?

Yeah, yeah.

So assumptions of the guidance. So one, I think the $750 million on itself, it's a 3% year-on-year increase and 7% above consensus. So all things considered at the beginning of the year, I think it's a solid outlook or guidance as you will. And as well, if you look at it, this is a 16% equity free cash flow to equity yield at yesterday's price. So there, we're very comfortable that that's a decent number. If you look at it, you might indeed indicate that, considering where we are already this year and considering the amount of one-offs, it could be a bit on the low end. But then again, as we said, with some legal costs and then FX costs that might come in into 2025. So as those materialize, we wanted to embed that into our guides. If you look at the underlying assumptions, we would expect that revenues to continue to perform well on the P times Q underlying business, but then the top line in US dollar will decline more likely than not because of the accounting of Bolivia. Right? So that's just an immediate hit to the P&L. EBITDA on the other side is likely to go up. As I mentioned, the CapEx stable, which then doing the math, coming to our equity free cash flow, which is this 3% up year-on-year.

Yeah. So, Gustavo, Colombia remains a very competitive market. WOM is still operating and competing. They are also in the process of being recapitalized. There is also an aggressive, I would say the market is being very aggressive in fixed broadband. So we are having some pressures there. But despite this, we are growing very nicely in Mobile. In the year we grew 8%, mainly driven by postpaid. And in Home, we are recovering the negative trend. And that will end, and that recovery will end during the half or on the half of this year. So that is in Colombia.

Thanks for the answers and congrats on the results once again. Bye-bye.

Thank you, Gustavo.

Thank you, Gustavo. So next we received a question via email and perhaps this is for you Bart, it's regarding our M&A projects in Colombia and Costa Rica, if we can provide a bit of an update on the regulatory process there and the approvals.

Yeah. So we announced a few months ago the agreement with Telefonica, on our term sheets about the acquisition. Subsequently, we did two things. We did the filing for the merger in Colombia that is progressing well. There's some questions that come from the regulator and that we are addressing, but so far, moving ahead as planned. On the long form negotiations, the discussions with Telefonica are ongoing and going well. We hope to land this in the coming weeks. And I don't think we will announce this particularly as it doesn't change the progress of the project. We at this moment still expect to have a closing later in this year, at the second half of the year. Costa Rica, nothing really to announce, it follows the regulatory path. We believe at the year end, around year end, to have regulatory approvals, but this can come a little bit earlier or a little bit later. We're not really in control of that process.

Okay, thanks Bart. So that was the last of our questions. Maybe Marcelo, I turn it back to you for any closing remarks.

Thank you, Michel. Well, we are very pleased with the results. It's been a transformational year for us. We're very happy. But as I said in the call that was last year now we're working to replicate the same this year. So rest assured that we are very focused on that. So thanks. Thanks everybody for joining the call and thanks Michel.

Thank you, every one.