Thank you very much. A very good afternoon, good morning to everyone, and welcome to the call.

Thank you all for joining us on the call today. I am joined on the line by Kamal Dua, our CFO, and Alastair Jones, our Head of Investor Relations.

We will shortly be answering your questions, but first I would like to provide you with a brief overview of the quarter's performance. I am very pleased to report another strong quarterly performance, which reflects the continued underlying demand across our business and the sustained focused execution enabling us to capture the opportunity.

Key to this performance has been our focus on providing a best-in-class customer experience, and the results reflect the benefits of our long-term investment strategy, which continues to deliver value to all our stakeholders. We delivered strong growth across voice, data, and mobile money, supported by an acceleration in the customer base growth across all segments as adoption of digital and financial services continues to gather momentum.

At the same time, we have accelerated investment in our network to strengthen coverage and capacity, ensuring we remain well positioned to capture the significant growth opportunities across all of our markets. Group revenues reached $1.85 billion, growing by over 21% in constant currency despite no longer benefiting from the Nigerian tariff adjustments, which underscores the breadth of growth opportunities across our markets.

With a more stable macroeconomic environment supporting an appreciation in most of our currencies, this translated into reported currency growth of 31%. This level of growth is not specific to just one segment.

This is a broad-based trend reflected in the strong performance of both the mobile services and mobile money segments. The mobile services segment recorded constant currency revenue growth of 19.1% as our customer base increased by 11.6%, an acceleration from the prior quarter.

The ability to grow our customer base by this amount showcases the sustained demand and low levels of SIM penetration across our markets. Key to our strategy is driving increased digital adoption, and one metric we constantly track is smartphone penetration.

We have seen smartphones on our network increase by over 24%, with penetration increasing by over 5% to 51%. This increased adoption of these smart devices continues to translate into strong data traffic growth across our network, driving data ARPU up by 10.3% in constant currencies and data revenue increasing by 27.2% in the period.

The mobile money business remains a key pillar of group's existing and future growth potential. The quarter's performance was another example of the scale of the opportunity before us and of our team's ability to continue capturing this opportunity through strong execution, ongoing innovation, and a relentless focus on the customer experience.

In reported currency, annualized TPV exceeded $245 billion, increasing over 51% in reported currency. As we continue to expand the ecosystem to drive more use cases, increased customer engagement, and expansion of our digital offerings, mobile money revenues grew by 25.8% in constant currency despite the ongoing impact arising from the intra-group agreement changes.

On a regional basis, the growth rates also read well. In Nigeria, revenues increased by 29.8% in constant currency and over 50% in reported currency.

This quarter, the growth rates do not incorporate any benefit arising from the tariff adjustments, reinforcing our confidence in the long-term growth potential of the Nigerian business. East Africa revenues increased by 17.8%, with robust trends across all segments, and Francophone Africa growth of 18% continues to reflect the step-up in investment over the last few years and the strategic focus, which has helped sustain this high level of growth.

While our strong revenue growth demonstrates the demand for our services, it is equally important to highlight how this growth is transmitting into profitability. Let me now turn to our EBITDA performance and the factors impacting it during the quarter.

In the quarter, we have maintained EBITDA margins of over 50%, with EBITDA of $928 million, growing 24.4% in constant currency and 36.6% in reported currency. EBITDA margins increased by over 200 basis points over the prior year, which again reflects the strong revenue growth and the sustained focus on our cost optimization initiatives, which is transmitting into real savings across the group while not compromising on our ability to capture the revenue opportunity.

Our quarter one EBITDA margin of 51.1% was marginally below the 50.3% margin reported in quarter four of last financial year, but clearly showcases our ability to offset a large portion of the rising fuel costs through a continued focus on cost initiatives. As we noted at the time of earlier results, the developments in the Middle East have resulted in a steep increase in fuel costs, which has impacted the margins during the quarter.

However, we will expect to see a further increase in margin pressure as the higher energy costs are captured into many of our tower contracts in quarter two. While there may be some pressure on margins in the near term, we retain our relentless focus on further cost efficiencies, supported by continued revenue growth that should help moderate this effect.

Despite a strong balance sheet and very modest leverage of 0.5x, we have continued to actively optimize our debt portfolio. Coupled with a more favorable interest rate environment and an improved currency mix of borrowings, our effective interest rate declined by 282 basis points to 10.1% at the end of the quarter, lowering our overall cost of debt and further strengthening our financial position.

Excluding exceptional items, our earning per share came in at 5.4 cents, up 57% over the year, which reflects the success I've been discussing, with basic EPS of 4.4 cents in the period, a growth of 27.3%. One of the most important aspects of this set of results is our capex spend.

We have reported capex of $389 million in quarter one, a substantial increase from the $121 million in the previous year, and reflects our increased capex guidance, which we set out at the beginning of the year. This accelerated capex spend is a very clear part of our strategy where we continue to see a substantial opportunity for growth, and it is right that we accelerate spend in order to capture this growth.

We have therefore purposely brought forward investments into quarter one as we proactively invest ahead of demand. This capex is actively focused on the quality of network experience for customers, with coverage and capacity remaining key components of the spend.

Furthermore, new and emerging opportunities in enterprise, HBB, and data centers continues to be a focus as well. We remain compelled by the opportunity to continue investing across our markets as we continue to see benefits accruing to our business.

Importantly, despite the significantly higher capex spend over the year, we have maintained a similar level of operating free cash flow in the quarter compared with the previous period, reflecting the strong trends in both operating and financial trends. I know many of you are interested in our IPO of the Airtel Money business, and so before handing over to the Q&A, let me give you a brief overview of where we are with the IPO.

The first thing to say is we are progressing very well with our preparations, and our intention remains to undertake the IPO during 2026, subject to market conditions. Following an extensive review of the major listing venues, we can confirm that London is our preferred listing location.

As many of London provides access to a very broad international investor base with a strong experience of investing in emerging market assets, but also a strong understanding of the fintech and payment sector, providing a suitable platform for Airtel Money to be valued appropriately. Over the next few months, we will be updating the market at the appropriate time of the expected timeline and structure of the IPO in accordance with our regulatory and disclosure obligations.

Before I handed over the Q&A, just to summarize a few key points. Firstly, these were strong results, with constant currency revenue and EBITDA growing by over 21% and 24% respectively, translating into 31% and 36.6% reported currency revenue and EBITDA growth.

The structural demand for digital connectivity and financial inclusion remains very compelling. The foundation is expected to continue supporting the financial and operating momentum in the near to mid-term.

Airtel Money continues to scale, with strong results reflecting the truly unique business opportunity, and we look forward to providing more detail on the upcoming IPO of Airtel Money later this year. Finally, we have accelerated our investment to capture the significant growth opportunity that is available to us, and we believe this will put us in a much stronger position to showcase our ability to capture the structural growth potential.

We are excited by the future, and we see a unique opportunity to sustain strong levels of growth going forward through the continued and consistent deployment of our strategy. We look forward to reporting on our successes in the future and continuing to generate value for all our stakeholders.

With that, I would now like to open the line for questions, for which I'm joined by Kamal. Operator, I now hand over to you to facilitate the Q&A session, please.

Hi. Thank you for taking my questions, and congratulations on strong set of results.

I have couple, please. Firstly, Nigeria growth.

Now that you're already lapped completely the price increases from last year and kind of a 29% or 30% growth that you have reported, is this the kind of run rate that you're expecting for rest of the quarter, which is pretty much similar to what you had before the price increase? Is this kind of trajectory that you see for rest of the year?

Then I believe there might be some impact coming from the ban on airtime advances, if you can just give a color around that, how much that impact was on the top line. Second question is basically the impact from diesel cost.

You flagged it last quarter given Nigeria diesel prices doubled in few months, oil prices remain still high. How much impact have you seen from diesel in this quarter, and what kind of margin dilution that we can expect if the diesel remains at the same level right now for next few quarters?

Lastly, sorry coming back again from a last quarter's question on capital allocation policy. Understand your leverage is 0.5 now, and your dividend policy is quite growth, but then are you looking at any other investment opportunities beyond the capex envelope?

Maybe in other markets or other segments. If you can give any color around that would be great.

Thank you.

Thanks, Rohit. Thank you for your questions and your comments.

Let me talk about the Nigeria growth. Nigeria is the largest market in our portfolio and offers significant opportunities for growth.

We see both opportunities. There is still a very large penetration opportunity in Nigeria, and also an upgrade opportunity in Nigeria, and that seems to be driving growth.

We also see opportunities with respect to home broadband is a significantly large opportunity. B2B is another opportunity.

We have also announced a large data center, where the construction at this point in time is currently on. From a opportunity point of view, we see a large opportunity in Nigeria, and we continue to invest very, very aggressively in Nigeria.

While we don't comment on future guidance, but our efforts are in making sure that we continue to maintain our investments to capture the big growth opportunity that Nigeria has to offer. We should continue to see a strong growth in Nigeria.

Specific to your question on ACS, as last quarter as per the guidance from the regulator, which was applicable industry-wide, there were a certain selected set of vendors who provide airtime credit service, which are basically microloan products, were permitted. As a result, we had to disengage with a few vendors which were not permitted by the regulator to provide these services.

The revenue impact for the overall group at Airtel Africa was very minimal. Now what we've done is in the last quarter, as per the regulator's guidance, they've onboarded the approved vendors, and the services are back on track.

Therefore, there is no impact that we expect in quarter two because of this slight disturbance that we had in the first quarter in Nigeria. With respect to your question on capital allocation and other opportunities, we continue to explore inorganic growth opportunities.

Right now, what we have identified is a big investment opportunity around home broadband where we are scaling up investments in Nigeria and across the group. The second is B2B.

Data centers is another opportunity. A significant opportunity remains, as you kind of alluded to, on expanding coverage and adding capacity.

One area where we're investing very aggressively is deployment of 5G sites, primarily to support our FWA ambitions in Nigeria and across the group. Kamal, would you address the fuel cost?

Yeah.

Thank you, Sunil. Hi, Rohit.

As was been disclosed in the last quarter, the impact on the margin on the fuel price basis the run rate at that time was roughly 2.5%, 3% of our EBITDA margins, of which roughly half of the impact has flown in in this quarter and the rest will follow in the next quarter subsequent quarter two. You have seen large portion of that impact has been mitigated through our War Room Wings program and the scale which we are getting in.

Now in quarter two, how much we would be able to mitigate it further is is yet to be seen, but definitely our endeavor will be to mitigate to an extent possible the impact which will be coming up. To answer your question on like if the fuel price continues at the current level, what would be the incremental impact?

See, all are as per the contracts. The quarter two rates have already been locked basis the fuel price which has already been recorded.

We have seen some slight softening of the fuel price in Nigeria, and if it continues the way it is, we'll see some marginal respite, which will be coming in in quarter three, not in quarter two, because of the way we have structured our contracts. I hope I have answered your question.

Thank you.

Very clear. Thank you.

Hi. Thank you for taking my questions.

Firstly, sorry to just come back on capex. Obviously, you've front-end loaded your capex, and understand that you're reiterating guidance at present, but is there any scenario where later in the year stronger demand or competitive investment could push guidance out of guidance range?

Just a little bit of color on how you're thinking about that, especially against the backdrop of the diesel prices and the macro challenges that you're experiencing. Then secondly, and apologies if I missed it just to come back to Rohit's question, apologies if I missed the answer, I didn't hear if you said anything about exploring potential M&A options given the strength of your balance sheet and the current leverage.

Thanks.

Thank you very much. Our capex guidance for the year continues to remain $1.1 billion.

This is something that we highlighted last quarter. What we've done this year is we have actually front-loaded our capex, and about $389 million of capex in quarter one so that we continue to get the benefit of these investments over the next three quarters.

It's really a phasing more than anything else as we see it, but our guidance for the year remains at $1.1 billion. On the other question that you asked, which is on other M&A opportunities, we have the strength of the balance sheet, which is there, and we continue to explore opportunities across other markets as well.

As and when we see something which is very attractive and the right one for us, we will surely evaluate that and look at those, but it has to be a sizable opportunity for us. Other than that, as I said, we continue to invest behind the growth opportunity that Africa has to offer, which is across, as I said, B2C, whether it is in the mobile business or in the money business, B2B, data centers, and there are other opportunities on B2B, and most importantly, on home broadband.

We continue to explore M&A opportunities. As and when anything appears, we'll surely look at that.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thanks for taking my questions.

Also, thank you for the additional disclosure of mobile money customer mix. I just wanted to ask you one question about satellite operators.

You've addressed this a number of times in previous conversations, but the recent IPO has sort of rekindled investor concerns about the satellite operators potentially becoming rivals to network operators, such as yourselves. Would it be possible, please, to advance what you've told us to date and maybe specifically address key asymmetries in things like network capacity, also network economics, device economics, and distribution muscle?

Thank you. Yeah.

Thank you very much for your question. We see satellite as a complementary technology, which especially in a continent like Africa and the market that we operate in can be a greater when it comes to delivering a customer experience, acquiring new customers, and by expanding our coverage.

That is the reason why we've formed this view after doing a full assessment of the entire technology and also after talking to our technology partners. In our view, this technology is, as I said, complementary in nature.

That is the reason why we signed two agreements, and I'm sure you're aware of the nature of the agreement that we signed with satellite. It's actually a three-part agreement.

One is to provide enterprise connectivity to our customers in areas where it is economically either unviable or difficult to lay down fiber. It allows us to offer enterprise connectivity to especially the SME segment.

That's something, as we started offering the services, the customers have responded very positively. Second is for Africa, this technology allows us to address our backhauling concerns or issues that we have, especially in remote areas where we are not able to carry traffic.

Now this is something that we have now started backhauling using satellite technology, especially SpaceX, at a significantly lower cost. That is helping us to solve a big problem that we had in the past, and you will hear more about this as we start to roll out backhauling across more of our markets.

The third was with respect to direct-to-device. There are two or three things that I want to highlight here.

First and foremost, we've signed a contract with SpaceX, which covers all our 14 markets. Airtel customers in these 14 markets, once we launch the service, and this is subject to regulatory approvals, using their existing 4G or 5G devices, once they leave the terrestrial coverage, they will connect to the satellite coverage.

Once they come back from the satellite into the terrestrial coverage, they will come back on our network. That's how the technology works.

The customers will be able to use their existing devices, 4G or 5G devices. The service that they will get, which is the Gen 1 service that once we launch at this point in time, which is available from SpaceX, is text messages and OTT calling on certain apps on the satellite coverage.

Customers will remain connected. It's a Gen 2, which will happen in 2028 and beyond, the current timelines are in 2028, is when customers will be able to do calling.

Now so that's how we see this. Obviously, for the spectrum, the satellite operator kind of relies on our spectrum.

The entire customer experience, the onboarding of the customer, end-to-end process is managed by the mobile operator. That's how the technology works, and as I said, that we see this as a complementary technology to enhance customer experience, and that is the reason we've signed this agreement to offer this service to all our customers across our 14 markets.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you, operator. Thank you, guys, and congrats on the results, Sunil and team.

I've just got three questions. First, just focusing on Nigeria.

We'll only know MTN's numbers next week, but just looking two quarters back, your effective data pricing seems quite attractive, yet your growth rates in Nigeria is still lagging that of MTN. Is there anything that you guys are doing to actively try and close that gap and what levers are you trying to pull and how successful has that been?

The second question is around the oil prices. You mentioned the impact on diesel for your tower costs, but in the markets that you guys are operating, is the higher oil price not coming through in inflation that's impacting the demand for telco services?

Basically, how has your top line been affected from the consumer given that oil prices are up and inflation is probably up? Then your last question is, I don't know if you can share with us what percentage of your network uses IHS as a tower provider, and does the deal with MTN in any way affect your capex expansion plans given your capex envelope that you have for this year?

Thanks.

Thank you very much for these questions. I will not comment on MTN's performance.

We will surely talk about our own performance. If you look at our performance, we are very pleased with the way the business is tracking.

While there is a big opportunity that Nigeria has to offer, our current data revenue growth of about 38% in Nigeria is very, very satisfying. Voice revenue continues to grow in very strong numbers at 23%.

We're seeing data consumption per sub also continues to grow. There are efforts being made to capture more demand by very strong investments in network that we're doing in Nigeria at this point in time, both in terms of adding capacity to support this very strong data consumption growth that we're seeing.

Business will continue to track as per expected lines is what we're seeing right now. On your question on oil prices kind of impacting customer demand, it is actually evident if you look at the voice usage per customer.

While there is a marginal decline, but voice usage per customer continues to remain very strong. Data consumption per customer continues to remain very, very strong.

We're seeing very strong upgrades, which is reflected in our smartphone customer base growth. Smartphone penetration has increased.

At this point in time, while we are seeing oil prices-driven inflation, overall we have not seen any softening in the demand. I'm alluding more to the consumption across services, including our transaction value per customer on the money side.

At this point in time, we're not seeing. We continue to see and there was a question last quarter if I remember, on whether we will see softening on upgrades.

We're not seeing. We continue to see upgrades, and that seems to be fueling demand.

That's where we are right now from a customer demand point of view. On the IHS, we continue to engage with MTN on, the first and foremost important thing is make sure that our services remain uninterrupted.

MTN is right now in the process of completing this transaction. At the same time, the way we see it is we see no reason to believe that owning and running their own infrastructure by MTN will have an adverse impact either on the performance of our network or on overall capital allocation from our side, because I think what you're alluding to is primarily on sharing of sites.

Because if sites are available, whether it is MTN or IHS, sharing sites should be available to us because our understanding is if they've acquired this business to make sure that this business independently remains profitable, and no tower company, whether IHS or any other tower company, will be able to run a profitable towerco business on single tenancy. Most markets have either two or three operators at least on our footprint.

We will continue to see interdependencies across each other, and therefore, we're less concerned about either any impact on our service levels or on costs or capital allocation at this point in time.

Sorry, Sunil, just a follow-up on that. Are you able to share what percentage of your network is shared among the various tower operators?

We don't share that information, our share of towers across tower companies.

Cool. No, thanks.

Thanks very much, and congrats again, Sunil.

Thank you very much.

Madhi, you can go ahead.

Me? Hello?

Hi,

Madhi.

I think so. Carry on.

Yep.

Sorry about that. Thanks for taking my question and congrats on strong numbers.

I have a couple of follow-ups and few points where I need some clarity. Follow-ups are very simple: on mobile money IPO, have you suggested any timing update?

What's the timeline as of now? Then second one, on the airtime advance impact in Nigeria, you said that it is immaterial at the group level, but if you could also quantify at Nigeria level, that will be helpful.

Then, a follow-up on the M&A question: would you be willing to participate in any in-market consolidation efforts in Nigeria fintech space, especially? If you could give any comments there.

Then couple of questions where I want your inputs: on the capex side, very interesting to see the front-loading of capex, but I was wondering whether this decision is also driven by let's say, your demand actually running ahead of capacity. If you could comment on, have you seen strong demand growth, but capacity not available to monetize that?

Is that what is driving this front-loading of the capex in Q1? Then second one is, we have seen that news about Indus Tower looking to get into Africa.

Your incremental capex and site rollouts, have you already factored that into your strategy that some part of that probably you will do with Indus Tower, or it is primarily going to be with the existing strategy? Any comments on the Indus Tower coming into Africa and any change in your strategy around that?

Thank you.

Thank you very much for your questions. Let me just respond to your first question, which is on mobile money IPO timing.

Subject to market conditions, we are committed to IPO Airtel Money in 2026. In the second half of this year, we are committed to doing the IPO.

As I said, this remains subject to market conditions. On the ACS impact in Nigeria, the impact was mitigated and therefore, we don't expect to see this continuing in the second quarter.

As I said, it was a temporary kind of a disturbance that we had in the business, and we've onboarded the new partners, and the services are on. On the in-market, you asked about in Nigeria are we open to looking at, say for example, in fintech opportunity.

As I responded to the question earlier that was asked to me, we are absolutely looking at acquisition opportunity or inorganic growth opportunity across mobile money and GSM both. As and when we have an attractive opportunity where we think it is synergistic to our business, there is no reason why we would not go after that, especially our balance sheet today supporting us, absolutely.

We have a strong balance sheet today. Then your question on this capex.

The capex really is, as I said, it was if you look at the nature of our business, if you deploy capex up front, there is a significant amount of work that went behind to make sure that we have a good start to the year, and that's the reason why we front-loaded the capex. There is nowhere that our network is actually chasing demand.

It's a very strong process that we run to assess where the demand will come from given the long lead times that we have in terms of capex deployment. It's very rare, very, very rare that it happens where your capacity comes in a constraint.

It is not a situation of actually demand ahead of our capacity. What we are actually doing is we're proactively investing in capacity to be able to service demand going forward, because when you look at at an aggregate level 50% plus growth in overall data that we're carrying, that actually necessitates us to invest ahead of demand, and that's something that we're doing.

As we're investing, the market is responding and the customers are responding because we are also able to expand coverage, add capacity, and deliver great experience. On Indus Towers, just to give the full context, Indus Towers announced entry into three markets, which is Nigeria, Uganda, and Zambia.

We are currently starting operations in Zambia, and operations in Indus Towers will soon start in the other two markets. What we've said is subject to overall commercials, we would be the anchor customer for Indus Towers, and with respect to the capital outlay, I don't see there is any difference, because eventually Indus Towers will be another tower company, which will meet our requirements.

Capital allocation will be a function of our need for expanding our coverage or investing in our capacity in the networks. That's the way I see it, but the way we see is Indus might bring in, say for example, some new solutions given their expertise in a very large market that they come from, that is India, and we see some operational efficiencies to accrue to us.

From a capital allocation point of view, it should primarily be a need base depending on the need for us to expand coverage or our capacity.

Hello, and thank you for taking my questions. Actually, I've just one on your home broadband strategy.

I was wondering if you could comment on maybe the proportion between FTTH and fixed wireless access. On fixed wireless access, it would be helpful if you could comment on how is the price of the equipment going.

Is the price of the CPE box going down, or is it going up given some chipsets shortages? Any color on that.

Or maybe what's the cost of the equipment? That's more direct question.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. Let me just give you a little bit of perspective on the home broadband business.

It's a very large opportunity on our footprint. It is the current penetration of home broadband is is just about 2% or so, and there's there's a large, customer base or high-value base, which is the addressable base for this opportunity.

When we explored all options to offer the service to our to our customers, FWA given the topology of, in Africa and the current usage patterns, FWA is the right solution for us to offer is the right technology to, to offer the service to our to our customers, for home broadband. For that, what we're doing is we're investing very aggressively on 5G network in in our markets, and we've started the service offering the service in in most of our markets and we're getting very good response.

We see this opportunity across both B2B as well as B2C. B2B predominantly in the, SME segment.

For, some very very selected clusters where we see high demand and high usage, what we're also doing is we're deploying fiber, but that number remains relatively much smaller. Primarily, the demand is being serviced through FWA, which is where we are right now, and we're, as I said, we are rolling out 5G sites to to support FWA and meet this demand.

With respect to the the the device, the the cost of the device, I'll not be able to share the cost of the device, but, the other question that you asked, yes, the global chipset pricing is is putting pressure on the cost. For this year, we are we are by and large covered, the inventory and the the contracts that we have, but over a period of time this, the cost, as it is going up across across the market, across the world, will also be impacted by that.

Given, the the nature of the of the business, this is something that we factored in the business plan and, it meets our payback period requirements, therefore we continue to push, behind this particular opportunity, and we remain very, very optimistic about the home broadband opportunity in Africa, especially on our footprint.

Very clear. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, or good day, everyone. Sir, during the presentation, I heard something about an IPO, I wanted to ask what it's about, if I can get details about it.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. The IPO that I was talking about is the IPO for our Airtel Money business, which is something that we said that our preferred location is London, and timing is about before the end of this year, subject to market conditions.

I would like to thank you all for joining this call, and I look forward to speaking to you again at the time of our half-yearly results. Thank you once again.