Good afternoon and good morning to everyone. And thank you for joining us today for VEON's first quarter results presentation for the period ending March 31, 2024. I'm Faisal Ghori, Head of Investor Relations. I'm pleased to be joined in the room today by Kaan Terzioglu, our Group CEO, along with Joop Brakenhoff, our Group CFO. Today's presentation will begin as usual with the key business highlights and business updates from Kaan, following discussion of detailed financial results by Joop, we will then open up the line for Q&A. Before getting started, I would like to remind you that we may make forward-looking statements during today's presentation, which involve certain risks and uncertainties. These statements relating, partly to the company's anticipated performance and guidance for 2024, future market developments and trends, operational network developments, and network investment, and the company's ability to realize its targets and commercial strategic initiatives, including current and future events. Certain factors may cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements, including the risk detailed in the company's annual report on the Form 20-F and the other recent public filings made by the company with the SEC. The earnings release and the earnings presentation, each of which include reconciliation of non-IFRS measures presented today, can be downloaded from our website. We also note that today's presentation will include ratings from credit rating agencies. A rating is not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold securities and may be subject to revision or withdrawal at any time. With that let me hand it over to Kaan.

Thank you Faisal. Good morning, good afternoon and welcome to everyone. I appreciate you joining us today on May 16, 4 p.m. Dubai time for our first quarter results for 2024. Today I'm excited to highlight the robust growth in U.S. Dollar revenue growth. In the first quarter of 2024, we report a 6.6% year-over-year growth in US dollars revenue. This figure is particularly notable when considering the impacts of a significant network cyberattack in Ukraine. Other than Ukraine, our organic US dollar revenue growth across all operations increased to 15% year-over-year, a mid-teens hard currency growth rate. In local currency, Ukraine declined 14% in Q1, and the rest of the operations growth accelerated to 20.5% in Q1 from an already high local currency growth rate of 19.2% year-over-year in 2023. This exceptional performance not only underscores our leader position in the telecom business, but also highlights our performance in digital platforms and mobile financial services. Let's delve into the strategies that have driven this remarkable growth. During our presentation, I will concentrate on local currency growth rates that more accurately reflect the true underlying growth trends and operational achievements across our operating companies. Please note, local currency growth rates include the impact of recent cyberattack in Ukraine. In Q1 2024, we achieved double-digit growth at 12% year-over-year in local currency terms. Service revenues rose at a similar rate of 10% year-on-year in local currency. Other than Ukraine, revenue grew 15% year-on-year in dollars and local currency growth expanded to 20.5%. Local currency, EBITDA, expanded in Q1 2024 at a rate of 5% year-on-year. If we isolate the Ukraine operation, EBITDA grew 16% year-on-year in US dollar terms. This is indicative of positive operating leverage and sound execution of cost management programs. Our balance sheet remains robust as well. We…

Thanks Kaan. For the first quarter, we've achieved double-digit year-on-year growth in local currency revenues across our six markets. The total revenue growing 12% year-on-year and service revenue growing at a 10% year-on-year growth rate, culminating in reported revenue of $942 million. Our reported revenue on a dollar basis increased 7% year-on-year. This performance is despite the cyberattack in Ukraine. [ If you were ] to adjust for this incident, our organic US dollar revenue growth across all operations rose to 50% year-on-year. The driving forces behind our revenue growth include gains in market share and the expansion of our digital platforms across all operations, coupled with the implementation of disciplined inflation pricing strategies. We are also seeing a positive microeconomic environment in our markets, which is assisting in our growth. Now turn our attention to our EBITDA and EBITDA margin. In the first quarter, Group EBITDA was [ flattish ], increasing by 0.3% year-on-year in reported currency and by 5.3% in local currency terms. Our EBITDA margin decreased by 2.5 percentage points at 41%. Our margin was impacted probably by three factors. First, the customer retention measures already discussed in Ukraine. These measures had a significant financial impact of approximately $46 million on revenue and around $47 million on EBITDA. Second, we incurred a one-off charge in Bangladesh related to our tower sales. And lastly, in Uzbekistan, our AdTech business is located. We [ saw an uptick ] in investments and also an increase in electricity tariffs in the market. Other than Ukraine, VEON's first quarter EBITDA grew 50% year-on-year in US dollar terms. Shifting our focus to key balance sheet figures. As we close the first quarter, the Group maintained a healthy liquidity position with a cash reserve of $632 million, excluding our banking activities in Pakistan. Of this amount, $261 million is held at headquarters. At the operating level, each of our operating countries are self-funding. In March this year, we announced the full repayment of the remaining outstanding balance of [ $805 ] million on our revolving credit facility. Concurrently, the RCF has been cancelled. This will reduce the VEON's interest expenses, reflecting our commitment to efficient cash management and balance sheet optimization. Turning now to our debt profile. Our average cost of debt is now 8% and reflects the blended rate of borrowing in our market [ currencies ]. Pakistani rupee debt remains the highest cost and is about 20% of total group debt. Interest costs were repaid with [ large ] and stable. Our average debt maturity is now 2.8 years, and it's 3.4 years if we include our lease liabilities. Let me hand back to Kaan.

Thank you, Joop. Let me reiterate our guidance for 2024. Our actual Q1 numbers are reflective of local currency growth rates, including Ukraine and its cyberattack. On a normalized, excluding this impact from Ukraine, our normalized growth rates for both revenue and EBITDA were up 17% year-on-year. Please note our guidance is based on a normalized growth rates. I would like to reiterate our guidance for 2024 as it is, which is 16% to 18% revenue growth, 18% to 20% EBITDA growth, and the last 12-month basis, CapEx intensity of 18% to 19%. Thank you for listening to us, and now let's move to the questions.

Thank you. Thank you everybody. We don't have a lot of questions on the Zoom, so if anybody has questions please ask, but as a result of that I'll turn to the retail platform. Our first question comes from Joseph M. Can you elaborate on long-term strategy for your digital services? It seems that potential to be extremely valuable, particularly video and financial platforms. How do you think the value of these businesses will eventually be reflected in VEON?

Joseph, thank you very much for the question. To give you an overall understanding why we are so passionate about this, in the five markets that we operate, I'm excluding Kyrgyzstan for simplicity purposes, 500 million people live. One out of three is our telecom subscribers. And as I have reported in Q1, almost 111 million people are consuming our digital services. These markets are heavily underserved from a financial services perspective, entertainment perspective, education and healthcare perspective. All these four lateral adjacent markets that I mentioned actually are as big as the telecom itself. We have a unique advantage of being a very low cost customer acquisition engine and a very effective distribution platform. We believe in being asset-light, and we focus on what matters for the customer. Therefore, all these adjacent markets, we consider as our core areas for capturing wallet share. And in the last three years, by deploying 4G networks across our countries, we created the platform for our digital applications to be successful. Therefore, entertainment platforms, such as BeeTV, Tamasha, Toffee, or [ Kinex ], or financial services offerings such as JazzCash, or Simply, or Beepul are for core businesses that we expect to grow. In the current financial model we have, these businesses have a direct impact on our retention rates and accretive to ARPU. As we build strong user bases, all these digital services will have their feet on the ground as sustainable standalone businesses as well. I would like to highlight that our strategy is at certain point to not only monetize through retention and higher ARPU but also to focus on the value creation of these digital services by themselves. The time will come and we will brief you more about that over our upcoming Capital Markets Day in June 6.

Excellent. Our next question comes from Mitchell Aulds-Stier at DG Capital. Can you please explain in more detail why January was impacted by a cyber-attack, which was resolved in December?

The cyberattack, if you remember, happened kind of third week of December. And actually, it was very immediately and very resiliently addressed by the team. But of course, post cyberattack, we thought that it is the right time for us being generous towards our customer base. And we have implemented a customer retention program which practically provided a free service to our customers for an extended period of time covering January and a reduction of service levels for the next three months. These periods have resulted and ended with 100% success in retaining our customer base and going back to activity levels before the cyberattack. So it was money well spent and I'm very happy that our customers returned our generosity with their indication of loyalty.

Our next question comes from Rahul Shah from [indiscernible]. Can you walk us through the BDT 730 million charge on the sale of towers? Should we expect similar charges for future tower sales?

No, you should not expect similar charges except for the sales in Bangladesh. But in Bangladesh, the regulations require a sales tax over these type of transactions and this is a unique thing for the Bangladeshi environment where we will see almost 6% over the total figures and it was expected but of course it [ didn't ] in Q1.

Our next question is from Chris Hoare from New Street Research. Can you help explain what drove the strong EBITDA from digital financial services in Pakistan?

Actually our financial services business in Pakistan has two important pillars. One is our microfinance bank, MMBL bank, and the second one is JazzCash. Both of these operations are growing in high-teens, meaning in 80% and 90% year-on-year. And from an economic unit cost perspective, we have the right model in place now and they are accretive generating EBITDA and also generating cash flow.

The next question is from Anjali Doshi from Nuveen. Given the recent announced changes in Ukraine from the [ NBU ] regarding easing of capital controls, will you see opportunities to upstream more cash today?

We have actually pleasantly listened to changes in the capital controls in Ukraine. And yes, for 2025, it shows that there are possibilities of upstreaming certain funds from the country.

There's an anonymous question. Congratulations on the recent Sukuk issuance in Pakistan. Can we expect further progress to shift that to operating companies?

Well, we are actually looking to all sorts of innovative and localized means of tapping into local financial markets. So Sukuk was one good example. If there are other markets with similar potential, we will of course explore those.

Okay, maybe one or two more minutes for kind of any additional questions, but I think we've kind of exhausted most of them.

I would like to again highlight that on June 6th we're going to be having a Capital Markets Day in Dubai. Please check our website in terms of how to attend physically and you're more than welcome to join us or online through our broadcast and I would like to thank you again for your time and attendance and questions up until the next time we see each other. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.