Tom Greenwood
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Helios Towers FY 2025 earnings call. I hope you and your families are doing well and staying safe, and I extend my sincere thoughts to all of you caught up in the Iranian conflict.
I'm Tom Greenwood, CEO of Helios Towers, and joining me today is Manjit Dhillon, our CFO, and Chris Baker-Sams, who leads our investor relations. We're really pleased to be here discussing our 2025 performance with you: a year of record operational delivery, expanding returns, accelerating recurring free cash flow, strengthening of our capital structure, and launching shareholder distributions.
We're even more excited to also be laying out our FY 2026 execution strategy. This marks another important step forward in our Impact 2030 strategy, our five-year framework designed to deliver disciplined and efficient capital allocation leading to compounding return on capital and recurring free cash flow.
Impact 2030 is built around five clear pillars: one, capital-efficient organic growth; two, expanding tenancy ratio and ROIC; three, accelerating recurring free cash flow; four, maintaining our balance sheet strength; and five, increasing shareholder distributions. Our Helios Towers business model is simple: we invest our capital in high-return growth projects; that growth expands EBITDA; that EBITDA converts into recurring free cash flow; we delever; and we return surplus capital to shareholders.
2025 was a milestone year, such that this model is now operating at scale, such that we can distribute surplus free cash flow to shareholders whilst maintaining the long runway of growth in our addressable markets. Page 3, I'll begin with the highlights and strategic progress, Manjit will then take you through the financials, and we'll open up for the usual Q&A at the end.
Before diving into it, I want to frame what we're seeing structurally across our markets, because it's important context for everything that follows. We shared a slide at our Capital Markets Day in November that showed our total addressable market growth pathway to 2030 and line of sight to 2050.
An extraordinary forecast period. This is because growth in demand is predictable as well as structural.
We'll unpack that 2030 growth in a latter slide. Today, our portfolio provides the critical connectivity for almost 160 million people.
By the end of this decade, that will grow towards 200 million people with cheaper smartphones and increasing demand for data. Across our Africa and Middle East footprint, subscriber growth remains approximately 5% per annum, the highest in the world.
Mobile penetration is at around 50% and still well below that of the 90% we see in developed markets. Population growth continues at structurally higher levels of around 3% annually, so that means the population in our markets will be almost double by 2050.
The most powerful driver is data growth, and data consumption is forecast to grow by four times, quadrupling by 2030. This is transformational.
This growth is being driven by 4G densification, accelerating 5G rollout, streaming and digital media, fintech and digital banking penetration, enterprise digitalization, and, of course, increasingly in AI-enabled applications. Mobile connectivity in our markets is not discretionary; it's foundational and critical infrastructure, and in most regions the only infrastructure available for communications.
As data demand scales, network investment must keep up. We are seeing that investment materialize through sustained mobile industry CapEx programs across our footprint.
This structural demand backdrop gives us multi-decade growth ahead. Turning now to the highlights on page 5.
2025 was a year of continued strong growth, expanding returns, and accelerating shareholder distributions. Let me break that down for you in how that unfolded in 2025.
Operationally, we delivered record 2,538 tenancy additions, that's up 9% year-over-year, of which 421 were site additions, deployed selectively based on our returns criteria; tenancy ratio expansion of 0.1x to 2.2 tenancies per site. Importantly, we achieved our 2.2 tenancy target over a year ahead of plan, due to our team's relentlessly disciplined execution and the structural growth and telecoms sector investment that exists in our markets for decades ahead.
This matters because tenancy ratio is the core driver of ROIC expansion and free cash flow generation. Financially, the operational growth translated directly into financial performance.
EBITDA increased 12% to $471 million, recurring free cash flow increased 40% to $208 million, free cash flow, bottom line, more than tripled to $66 million, and, of course, Group ROIC expanded up to 14%. This demonstrates the operating leverage inherent in our model.
Colocations deliver higher EBITDA margins and higher incremental ROIC, which now converts into high levels of cash flow generation. On our capital structure, we further strengthened the balance sheet.
Net leverage reduced to 3.4x, our credit ratings were upgraded to Ba3/BB-, and you'll see in one of Manjit's slides later, the average credit spread we pay has collapsed from 620 basis points at the time of our IPO to 290 basis points today, a testament to Manjit's team and also the recognition the debt markets have for the strength of our business model. We also completed a $120 million convertible tender early, removing 41 million potentially dilutive shares, maximizing shareholder value.
By the end of 2025, we'd repurchased 11 million shares for $24 million at an average price of £1.58. This is disciplined capital allocation in action.
Now, FY 2026 guidance. Looking ahead, our guidance remains fully aligned with Impact 2030: 2,000 to 2,500 tenancy additions, $510 million to $525 million EBITDA, $210 million to $225 million recurring free cash flow, approximately $50 million in share buyback as part of our multi-year program, and, of course, $25 million our inaugural dividend with a progressive dividend policy.
Of course, all of this is underpinned by $5.3 billion of contracted future revenues with an average remaining life of 6.6 years. We're now scaling at growth, generating cash flow, deleveraging, and providing shareholder returns simultaneously.
Now slide 6 shows what I would describe as metronomic delivery. This is a great description of our business model.
10 consecutive years of EBITDA growth at 24% CAGR. That EBITDA growth is unbroken.
As we enter yet another year of uncertainty with the oil price and the Iranian conflict, we can reflect on that decade of track record despite upheavals such as Brexit, COVID, Ukraine, etc., really truly metronomic. We've taken Group EBITDA from $54 million in FY 2015 to $471 million in 2025, and guiding to $510 million to $525 million in 2026.
This consistency reflects three things: one, structural market growth; two, our business model, the long-term contracted revenues with CPI and power escalators; and of course, three, our operational excellence from our teams all across the business and disciplined capital allocation. This is a truly compounding infrastructure platform business.
Turning now to page 7. We exceeded FY 2025 guidance across all key metrics, which was driven by our disciplined operational execution by all of our teams and people across the business, our disciplined capital allocation framework, and the structural growth and ongoing telecoms industry investment in our markets.
Tenancies above target, EBITDA ahead of guidance, free cash flow ahead of expectations, and leverage below our stated level. Our teams have been focusing on execution discipline, which is very strong across the organization.
Page 8, we look at the long runway of growth ahead. Points of service across our markets continue expanding materially towards 2030 and, of course, beyond.
We retain and work closely with our customers, and in our planning and discussions, we see plans for the future around accelerated network investment, 5G rollout coming in this new five-year cycle, rising ARPUs, increasing digital adoption. This is truly structural usage and network expansion.
Helios Towers is positioned at the center of that demand, with leading positions across nine markets and strong multinational customer relationships. Turning now to slide 9: execution matters.
Our customer experience excellence offering is a key competitive differentiator. We deliver 99.99% power uptime, faster build-to-suit and colocation delivery, and lower carbon emissions per tenant.
We provide global quality standards at approximately 30% lower total cost of ownership for our customers. That drives trust, growth, and returns.
This operational discipline underpins our financial performance. Now slide 10 brings it all together.
We're making meaningful progress towards our 2030 targets. By 2030, we're targeting adding over 10,000 new tenancies to reach over 42,000 tenancies in total by 2030, at least 9% compound annual growth in EBITDA, at least $1.3 billion cumulative recurring free cash flow, and at least $400 million cumulative shareholder distributions.
Importantly, the growth CapEx we deploy each year consistently delivers around 35% incremental ROIC, driven by high-margin colocations, selective new builds meeting strict return thresholds. That is a really powerful compounding engine: high-return growth, expanding EBITDA, accelerating recurring free cash flow, declining financial leverage, and rising shareholder distributions.
We are now firmly entering what I would describe as the cash compounding sweet spot of the business. Helios Towers today is a structurally growing digital infrastructure platform with high incremental returns, strong cash flow visibility, improving credit quality, and increasing shareholder returns.
That is our compelling long-term infrastructure equity story to you, our shareholders. With that, I'll hand over to Manjit to take you through the financials in more detail and look forward to talking with you at the end for the Q&A.
Thank you.
Manjit Dhillon
Thanks, Tom. Hello, everyone.
Thank you for being here today and online. Starting on slide number 12, I'll be going through the financial results in more detail.
2025 was another year of Helios Towers outperformance where we exceeded expectations. As you'll see on the left-hand chart, we delivered another strong year of tenancy growth, beating our updated guidance with a record year of tenancy additions.
This has really been the key driver of our 12% year-on-year EBITDA growth. I'll go through the usual bridge which sets out the underlying movements in a few slides' time.
We spoke to you at our Capital Markets Day about our clear growth algorithm: strong mobile market growth drives our tenancy growth, which drives our dollar EBITDA, which drives our recurring free cash flow. We saw this in practice again in 2025, contributing to a 40% increase in recurring free cash flow to $208 million.
As presented at the CMD and set out by Tom, we've entered our cash compounding sweet spot, which has enabled us to generate excess capital after investing in the really attractive, high-returning organic investments to now commence shareholder distributions, which we began last year with share buybacks, which we have continued during this year and will continue to execute. Looking ahead to 2026, we have committed to delivering discretionary CapEx of $110 million to $140 million, share buybacks of $51 million, and our inaugural dividend of $25 million.
Now let's jump into some of the detail and moving on to page 13. On this slide, you can get a clear sense of the growth we're seeing in both the number of sites and tenancies.
We continue to see clear progress underpinned by our leading market positions and focus on customer experience excellence. Starting on the left, we added 421 more sites, that's 3% up year-on-year, to just shy of 15,000 at 14,746.
New organic builds are an important element of our strategy and ultimately adds to the hopper to which we can then drive further colocation lease-up. We are very selective in our approach to new site rollout, using our analytics from our proprietary GIS platform to ensure the sites that we have have strong Day 1 ROICs and, importantly, clear potential for lease-up.
We achieved record tenancy additions in the year, increasing by 2,538 in-year, equating to 9% year-on-year growth. We're seeing growth across all our markets, with particular large increases across DRC, Tanzania, and Oman, our three biggest markets, two of which are dollarized or dollar-pegged.
As Tom mentioned previously, we were also delighted to achieve our 2.2 tenancy ratio target one year ahead of plan, underlining the growth of our markets through our focus on customer experience excellence and our capacity to capture that growth. Now moving on to slide 14: our revenue growth.
We've seen revenue growth across all three of our geographic regions. Taken together, they were up 8% year-on-year to $854 million.
We have a strong hard currency profile, with 68% of our revenues being in hard currencies, which translates to 71% of our adjusted EBITDA being in hard currency. As a reminder, four of our markets are innately hard currency, including Oman, DRC, Senegal, and Congo Brazzaville.
These are either dollarized or pegged to the euro, meaning that the revenues our customers receive are hard currencies and that's also what they pay to us. In our remaining markets, we also have a portion of our revenues linked to hard currencies, adding further to the overall mix.
Our earnings are further protected by contractual protections, including annual CPI escalators and annual and quarterly power escalators and de-escalators. Additionally, 70% of our revenue comes from investment-grade customers and 99% coming from blue-chip mobile network operators.
Finally, we sign long-term agreements with our customer partners with initial terms of 10 to 15 years, and they are largely non-cancellable. Today, our contracted revenue of $5.3 billion has an average remaining life of 6.6 years, which excludes auto-renewals, which would increase this further.
Ultimately, we have secured minimum revenues of $5.3 billion without pursuing any new business, providing a strong underlying earning stream that we layer on top to the further growth driven by tenancy rollout. Now moving on to slide 15.
Here you can see the key drivers of revenue and EBITDA in more detail. As with previous quarters, the key driver of our growth is tenancy additions, with our escalators working effectively to offset macro movements to protect our EBITDA on a dollar basis.
You'll see a small decrease in power-related revenues across the year, and this is due to decreasing fuel prices in DRC and Tanzania, which we pass on to our customers. However, this also resulted in our own cost base reducing.
When combined with our upsides from opex-reducing capital investments we made during the year, we saw some upsides from power when it comes to EBITDA, which you can see on the right-hand side. Also on that bridge, you can see that the key driver of growth is through tenancy additions and operational leverage from lease-up, with 9% growth from organic rollouts predominantly driving the 12% overall year-on-year growth in EBITDA.
We demonstrate once again that our business structure continues to be robust, resilient, and operating exactly as we designed it to. Now moving on to slide 16.
On this bridge, we detail how our growth in EBITDA flows through to recurring free cash flow. The key driver is that our EBITDA is growing faster than our cost base, resulting in a high cash flow through.
We're particularly pleased that across the year we achieved recurring free cash flow ahead of expectations, growing by $60 million off the back of $50 million EBITDA growth. Non-discretionary CapEx, lease liabilities, taxes, and interest were all broadly stable / increased marginally year-on-year, which means that that incremental EBITDA has a high flow-through to the bottom line.
This was further assisted by working capital being ahead of expectations, supported by the timing of customer payments. All of this resulted in our free cash flow tripling year-on-year to $66 million, demonstrating the cash compounding effect of our tenancy growth.
Finally on this slide, following the launch of our new five-year strategy, we also began our shareholder distributions, with $24 million of buybacks completed last year, and we're continuing that program well this year. On to slide number 17.
Here we show an overview of how our well-invested platform supports our high incremental returns through disciplined CapEx deployment. Fundamentally, we are focused on disciplined capital allocation and ensuring we make the best investments possible.
On the left-hand side, you can see how over the past three years our investment in growth CapEx has led to high returns. The dark blue bar shows our growth CapEx incurred, the orange bar our incremental EBITDA, and the green bar shows incremental portfolio free cash flow, i.e., the cash generated from our tower assets, and that's the numerator for our return on invested capital calculation.
Here we can see that our strategy over the last three years has consistently delivered incremental 30% plus return on invested capital on our investments, which shows that we are allocating capital to really compelling investments. We will always ensure we fuel the compounding engine of our business, which are these types of investments.
With that in mind, we are guiding to between $110 million to $140 million of discretionary growth CapEx during the course of 2026, which is really exciting because they will drive returns, and the overall pipeline of opportunities is looking incredibly strong. Now on to slide 18.
Looking at our balance sheet and credit profile. I'm pleased to say that we've seen further improvements in our credit ratings this year.
Fitch, S&P, and Moody's all upgrading their ratings, most recently Moody's upgraded us to Ba3. This really is testament to the strength of our business.
Through our diversification efforts, our consistent delivery, we've also materially improved our spreads, which is now half of what it was at the time of the IPO. All of this reflects the work we've done to drive cash flows and reduce our net leverage, which now stands at 3.4x.
We delever fairly quickly, and where we are today is down by 0.6x year-on-year and down by 1.7x since our temporary high in 2022 following our acquisitions. Finally, I wanted to mention that on average, our average remaining life of our facilities is roughly three years, with $337 million of available funds through a combination of cash on balance sheet and undrawn debt lines.
We are in a very good position to deliver on our strategy. Which takes us to slide 19 and our guidance we have issued to the market today.
Our 2026 guidance demonstrates meaningful progress towards our Impact 2030 targets, with continued strong growth, cash flow evolution, and shareholder distributions. We are targeting to between 2,000 to 2,500 more tenancy additions for the year, this represents a 6% to 8% year-on-year growth; for adjusted EBITDA, we are targeting a range of $510 million to $525 million, which represents an 8% to 11% year-on-year growth; recurring free cash flow, we expect to be between $210 million to $225 million, this represents between a 1% to 8% year-on-year growth; and for discretionary CapEx, as I mentioned, we're targeting between $110 million to $140 million.
In terms of shareholder distributions, we expect roughly $76 million, which consists of a $51 million share buyback and $25 million of dividend payments. Looking ahead to 2026, we do so with momentum and confidence, with a strong balance sheet and a robust and resilient business model which has proven time and time again that our platform has the ability to capture the phenomenal growth drivers in our markets.
I'm really excited to deliver again this year. With that, I'll pass back to Tom to wrap up.
Tom Greenwood
Thank you very much, Manjit. In summary, 2025, we're very pleased with our progress there, delivering on all the key metrics ahead of market expectations.
Most importantly, our teams across the business are focused on customer experience excellence, and that keeps getting better day by day, week by week. That gives us really strong momentum coming into this year.
Most importantly, we're excited about 2026 and the following years after that. We've talked about the long runway of growth ahead, not just a few years, but decades ahead, driven by all of the megatrends that we've talked about.
Our business is optimally positioned across our nine markets to deliver on this. We've got a strong sales pipeline coming into this year, and we're really looking forward to updating everyone as we go through the quarters this year on the progress of the business and our delivery towards our Impact 2030 strategy over the next five years.
Thank you very much, everyone, and we'll now move to the Q&A.
Chris Baker-Sams
Thanks, Tom and Manjit, for the prepared remarks. The way we'll structure this is we'll do Q&A in the room first of all, then go to the conference call, and thereafter do questions posed on the webcast.
Given John's taken the front row seat, we'll go to you first.
John Karidis
Thank you very much. Good morning.
Congratulations to the entire team for these results. It's John Karidis from Deutsche Numis.
I have three quick questions. Number one, when will share buyback resume?
Number two, I think you're about touching distance to the end of the first quarter. How does it compare versus a year ago, particularly in terms of tenancies?
Number three, I know it's ridiculous to be asking you this question about the Middle East given that the war started only 12 days ago and the person that started it is unpredictable, also to himself. Is there any indication that some of your customers are seeing increased power prices and that's sort of causing them to sort of rethink the rate with which they plan to roll out tenancies?
That's it. Thank you.
Tom Greenwood
Thanks very much, John. Manjit, why don't you do the buyback one, and I'll cover the other two?
Manjit Dhillon
Sure. On buybacks, we've started during the beginning of the year.
Every single day you've seen consistent buybacks, and that will continue during the course of the year as well. We haven't paused; it's just been a continuation.
Should I pick up Q1, or would you like to?
John Karidis
Sorry to interrupt. You stopped it about two or three days ago.
Sorry, I'm being really pedantic here.
Manjit Dhillon
No, sorry, that was on the RNSs. Sorry.
On that piece, it's just that we're now amalgamating the RNSs to be on a weekly basis, I think, rather than on a daily. The buyback has continued.
It's just been a change in the reporting. Apologies, yeah.
Okay.
Tom Greenwood
Good spot.
Manjit Dhillon
Good spot.
Tom Greenwood
Look, in terms of sales pipeline for this year, we're seeing good strength in it at this point of the year. We actually have our Chief Commercial Officer in the room, Sonesh, and Alan, our delivery director as well.
You might be able to catch them afterwards. You've probably seen in general across the industry, there is acceleration in overall investment.
A lot of this is directed at new coverage, new capacity, and technological upgrades. As a lot of our markets are operating under sort of 2G, 3G, and 4G.
At the moment, 4G has had a big push over the last couple of years. Some of the markets have now started 5G, and the ones that haven't, we expect to probably in the next two years.
As we look at this five-year 2030, Impact 2030 strategy, a big part of that is the 5G cycle for most of our markets, which we're really excited about, and we're already working with our key customers in terms of planning that and really supporting them in terms of the densification required for that. We're feeling very good about ourselves at this point in the year in terms of pipeline for the year.
Actually, pipeline for the next year and the next year is actually growing as well, because it's not always just the immediate year that we plan with our customers. We're feeling good, yeah, for sure.
Your last question, Middle East, yeah, obviously it's something we're monitoring and, to the extent needed, ensuring our people are safe. That's always the immediate focus for our business.
From an operational standpoint, no impact on operations. The business is very robust and resilient.
Your points on the power prices, obviously something we're mentoring. You understand the way that our contracts operate with respect to that.
Our primary focus always is to provide power at virtually 100% power uptime. We've got the resilience across our supply chain, whether that's diesel fuel or equipment, such that we feel very resilient on that, like we did in COVID a few years ago, to be honest, where we didn't miss a beat.
We're feeling very strong in that respect. Okay.
John Karidis
Airtel Africa last time round got hammered in terms of its profitability because of the sort of power prices going up. Do you sort of sense from any of your customers, given that the power prices are on the rise, them thinking maybe I should roll out less fast or move to 5G less fast?
It's only a couple of weeks since the start of the war, but anything you can say, maybe extrapolate from your experience post Russia-Ukraine effects?
Tom Greenwood
We're not seeing that at all. Actually, the last three years, we've seen our record tenancy additions each year.
We're seeing a very strong pipeline for this year as well. The power cost is a cost, but it's in the grand scheme of things, it's a relatively smaller cost in the entire ecosystem.
Obviously, the majority of our power comes from grid power, some from solar and hybrid batteries, and then some from fuel as well. To give you a picture of a typical 24-hour period across our entire portfolio, about 17 hours comes from the grid anyway, and then of the balance of the other 7 hours, roughly half and half is diesel and then solar and hybrid batteries.
That gives you a kind of flavor of the entire ecosystem, hopefully. Thank you.
Graham Hunt
Thanks very much. Graham Hunt from Jefferies.
Just two questions on 2026 guidance. Going back to the 2,000 to 2,500 tenancies you're expecting, could you just give us a sense of the split between sites and colos?
In 2025, your site additions increased meaningfully. Just in terms of how that trends for '26, and what's driving that increase from your customers in terms of a bit more on the site additions?
Then as we think about that in the discretionary CapEx for '26, how do you think about making that decision with your customer to invest and build a new site in terms of you mentioned internal return requirements, but how does that break down in terms of a new site? What is the business case that you have to approve there when you put a new one on the ground?
Thanks.
Chris Baker-Sams
Manjit, do you want to take all that?
Manjit Dhillon
I can take those. Currently on the basis of the guidance we have today, it's going to be roughly around 500, a minimum of 500 we expect, but that, we'll see how that kind of progresses during the course of the year.
These are really good investments, by the way. Whenever we have any new sites, we go through the same process internally, which is GIS marketing.
We look at where that site is going to be located, we look at the population demographics, look at where other towers are, we get a bit of a sense as to the probability of lease-up, and then we're able to kind of progress on that basis. These are effectively investments that Day 1 go about 12% return on invested capital, but that's not why we make the investment; we're making because of that probability, where we think that kind of lease-up will come.
We've become very, very good at it, or a lot better certainly. We're now getting average lease-up within two to three years, which is fantastic, and from that point on, you've got cash compounding growth for pretty much a lifetime.
When we're going through those conversations with the customers, we're trying to get early visibility of where they're looking to go. Now, sometimes it's going to be expansion of the network, sometimes it'll be densification of the network, and more often than not, it's a bit of both.
We're working on that basis. We have also pretty good visibility of where the different customers' hot spots are and where they might need to kind of improve as well, we're also doing proactive marketing.
Every time we know where a site's going to go, we'll be proactively making sure that we're trying to get that lease-up as quick as possible. Once we get that, and once we start to get that data come through, it goes to the capital allocation committee, to which Tom and I are members and everyone there as well, and we go through that kind of layers of analysis to make sure we're making the best investment possible on that piece.
We'll always have capital for really, really good build-to-suits. It's the lifeblood of what we're trying to do and then leasing up there afterwards.
Chris Baker-Sams
Any other questions in the room? Okay.
If not, one more from Graham.
Graham Hunt
I just have a follow-up on that. Is there anything notable about the split of those 500 sites between rural, urban, just anything that you would call out in terms of how that's trending?
Manjit Dhillon
I'd say typically our portfolio is more urban-dominated, it's normally kind of just over 50% is urban / semi-urban. The semi-urbans still have a very, very good population density.
I'd say it's probably a little bit more on that kind of urban, suburban kind of mix, and definitely coming from markets like DRC, Tanzania, they seem to be doing a good amount, supplemented by markets like Madagascar, Senegal, and Malawi.
Graham Hunt
Thanks.
Chris Baker-Sams
I think we'll now then go to the conference call and the questions on there as well, too. Ben, over to you.
Operator
Please press *1 now on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press *2.
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Seems that we don't have any questions, I will hand back to you.
Chris Baker-Sams
Thanks, Ben. A few questions on the webcast as well, too.
One from Michael Brown at Lombard Odier: "Does the 10,000 tenancy requirement up to 2030, does that include M&A in that assumption, and what does it mean for the CapEx requirements as we look forward from 2026 up to 2030?"
Tom Greenwood
Short answer is no, it does not. It's purely organic, and that's the primary focus of our Impact 2030 strategy as we think about our capital allocation.
That's driven by the demand and the financial returns available from that.
Chris Baker-Sams
Thanks, Tom. One more question on the webcast as well, it's from Vinod Seerungam from AllianceBernstein: "Funding plans.
Are any plan to issue USD eurobonds this year to refinance your term loans?" Question number two is, "What are your strategic priorities in the medium term: target net leverage, or shareholder returns, or M&A?"
Manjit Dhillon
I can take both of those. On the financing, look, we have a very, very strong balance sheet as it stands to date.
Average remaining life is three years. As always, we keep ourselves very, very active and ready should opportunities appear.
We'll be proactive about managing our balance sheet as we always have done, it's certainly something that we'll be monitoring actively. In terms of priority rankings, the reality is we can do everything, and that was effectively the message from the Capital Markets Day.
We'll be able to do organic growth, which is always going to be our primary focus in terms of where we allocate capital because of the slide I went through a few slides' time, which shows the high returns on that. We're going to be generating excess capital because of the cash compounding engine of our business, we have excess now to give out to shareholders.
We'll see that come through and all the while reducing our net leverage. We're, in short, able to do all.
I think to Tom's answer just a minute ago, M&A is lower down in the priority rankings. We don't need to do M&A to get growth.
We have more than enough of it in our markets. We're able to get the best returns from those markets as well.
We're very, very well-structured to capture all those opportunities over the next few years.
Chris Baker-Sams
Thanks, Manjit. No more questions on the webcast, now handing back to you, Tom, for closing remarks.
Tom Greenwood
Great. Thank you, everyone.
This is the first time we've done this in person, thank you for everyone coming, and thanks for all the questions. Look, we're really excited about the business.
You've seen the numbers in terms of what we've released today. '25 was a very strong year.
In our minds, '25 is done now. We're really excited about the future.
We've got a strong and very much growing pipeline for new tenancy rollout. We're already executing.
You'll see our Q1 numbers actually in more like a matter of weeks, very much already looking forward to that. We've got a very strong line of sight ahead, both in terms of the top-down structural demand, which I think everyone knows about, but also the more granular localized customer interactions as well.
We're feeling really good about the business, we're feeling really excited. We can't wait to get the Q1 out and then the others after that.
Really looking forward to keeping everyone updated as we move through this year. Thanks very much, everyone, and we'll look forward to talking with you soon.
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