Operator
Hello, and welcome to Kyivstar's 1Q26 results presentation. For those of you who have joined the Zoom webinar, if you would like to ask a question, you can use the raise hand button, which can be found on the black bar at the bottom of your screen at any time to join the queue to ask a question, and you will be called upon during the Q&A session. For those of you watching on the webcast, if you would like to submit a written question, please use the ask a question tab at the top right of your screen. These questions can also be sent in at any time during the presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. Cole Aikison, you may begin.
Thank you. Good afternoon and good morning. Thank you all for joining us to discuss Keystar Groups or Keystar's first quarter results. I am Cole Aikison, Group Director for Keystar Investor Relations. Joining me today are Khan Terzioglu, Chairman of the Board, Oleksandr Kamarov, the CEO, Baris Dalgushin, our CFO, and Anand Ramachandran, Chief Corporate Development Officer for Eon. Oleksandr will begin with strategic and operational highlights, followed by Boris with a review of our financial performance. We will then open the line for questions. Before we begin, please note that today's presentation contains forward-looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties. Further details are available in our FCC files, including our Form 20F filed March 16, 2026. Our earnings release and presentation are available on our Investor Relations website. With that, I'll hand over to Alexander.
Thank you, Cole. Hello, everyone. We started 2026 with strong execution. Our telecom core is resilient, our digital ecosystem is scaling, the two businesses fit each other. Let me start with the numbers. Revenue reached $323 million. This is an increase of nearly 27% year over year. EBDA grew more than 23% to $173 million. We focus on cash generation. Equity-free cash flow grew almost 32% to $87 million for the quarter. Second, our digital transformation. Digital revenue more than tripled year-on-year, reaching almost 21% of our total revenue in first quarter of 2026. This is an increase of more than 5 percentage points quarter-on-quarter and more than 13 percentage points from a year ago. Our platforms have scaled. We now serve more than 28 million non-unique digital customers, a number now larger than our mobile subscriber We also streamlined our report in this quarter, integrating identity services into our digital enterprise vertical to provide a clearer and more consistent view of performance. Identity services are undergoing a transition away from traditional A2P messaging to more varied API-based platforms, becoming more digital than traditional analog mobile. We also moved to reporting customers across service line on a three-month active basis to provide better comparability between lines and overtime. Accordingly, we provide reclassified numbers for past periods to ensure comparability and maximum visibility. Sir, our Multiplay strategy. Multiplay customers use voice, data, and at least one of our apps. They generate more revenue individually and are less likely to chort. Multiplay customers grew 31.6% to $8.1 million. They now make up nearly 40% of our active mobile base. This engagement drives the top line. Mobile IRPU rose 14.1% year-on-year to $3.80. Finally, our strategic investments. In February, we consolidated Tabletki. Tabletki is Ukraine's leading online healthcare marketplace. It processed $258 million in gross merchandise value over the two months of consolidation for the quarter. We expanded our cooperation with SpaceX to resell Starlink Internet to enterprise customers. Over 5 million customers already use our direct-to-sell messaging services, and we will launch live data later this year. As for our first quarter financials, telecom revenue grew 8% to $256 million. Customers are moving to 4G and using more data. Digital revenue grew 257% to $67 million. The consolidations of Uclone and Tableti drove this surge. Our other digital products also grew organically. Starting from this quarter, we are splitting our EBDA disclosure to show digital separately from telco and infrastructure. This better clarifies the development of the respective verticals. Total EBDA rose more than 23% to $173 million. Our telecom and infrastructure core generated $144 million in EBDA, resulting in a 56% margin. Our digital platforms generated $29 million in EBDA, producing a nearly 43% margin. Net profit reached $85 million. dollars earnings per share was 37 cents we invested 67 million dollars in capital expenditure our capex intensity was 20.9 percent for the quarter we generated 161 million dollars in operating cash flow equity free cash flow grew 32 percent to 87 million dollars cash generation funds our growth. Our cash position remains strong at $353 million. Now, let's look at the mobile business where we serve 22 million customers. Our annualized churn rate was 16% for the quarter. We remain the country's clear market leader. Mobile IRPU grew 14% to $3.80. Customers are moving to 4G and using more data. Data consumption grew 31% to almost 15 gigabytes per user monthly. Nearly 70% of our mobile base is now on 4G. Our fixed broadband base grew almost 12% to move to the 1.2 million customers. This includes 52,000 new users from our recent STORM acquisition. Broadband and digital entertainment work closely together. Today, nearly 46% of our broadband users also subscribe to Kyivstar TV. Cross sales and synergies bring us back to the core of our digital growth strategy, Multiplay. Multiplay customers grew almost 32% year over year to 8.1 million. They now make up nearly 40% of our active mobile customer base. They also generate higher revenue. The average multiplayer customer generates $5.30 in a monthly IRPU. That is nearly 40% more than the average mobile customer. They spend more on our digital suit, but they also spend more on connectivity. Let's look closer to our digital revenue. Digital revenue grew by 2.6 times to $67 million. It now makes up almost 21% of total revenue. Three points about this performance. First, strategic acquisitions enhance our scale. The consolidations of uklon and tabletki drove the bulk of this quarter's surge. That said, the growth is also broad-based. We see momentum across all verticals – Uklon, Health, Tabletki, Kyivstar TV, and the digital enterprise business. Third, we have a structural cost advantage. Our telecom customer base provides low acquisition costs. Our multi-plate bundles act as an optimized distribution model. This synergy allows us to scale platforms, profitability, and maintain strong unit economics. Moving to Uklon, our mobility platform. In the first quarter, Uklon generated nearly $33 million in revenue and more than $12 million in EBITDA. This reflects both a scaled business in Ukraine and a growing business in Uzbekistan. The platform processed nearly 44 million rides and 1.5 million deliveries, the latter reflecting an almost 10% rise quarter on quarter. Active customers rose to more than $5 million for the quarter. We are expanding the product range. Customers can now book intercity bus tickets directly in the new Uklon travel. We continue to explore new ways to develop Uklon further at a comprehensive one-stop mobility platform. Our digital enterprise business is gaining scale with more than $16 million in revenue and 9% increase year over year. We managed 2.2,000 active B2B contracts, up 31% year on year. Big data and AI drove the majority of this quarter's growth. The segment's revenue grew 75% to $4.4 million. dollars. Cloud revenue grew 42 percent to 2.3 million dollars. Advisor, our self-service advertising platform, primarily focused on small and medium-sized businesses, expanded to over 4,000 registered clients. The division also contains Kyiv StarTech, which binds our ecosystem together and is responsible for some of our most cutting-edge work. An example is our work in cooperation with the Ukrainian government and leading international partners to produce our sovereign LLF, which is trained exclusively on Ukrainian language data to meet the unique needs of Ukrainian clients. Moving to entertainment, Kyivstar TV remains the largest media streaming service in Ukraine. Revenue grew 390% year over year to $10.5 million. Last year's shift to gross revenue recognition is complemented by strong organic momentum spurred by two factors. First, customer expansion and engagement. Our customer base reached a new record at more than 3 million. As I mentioned earlier, more than 46% of our fixed broadband base now subscribes to our TV platform. Second, our original content continues to inspire engagement. New crime drama, Tykhanava is the most watched title in the platform's history. Exclusive Ukrainian content attracts new customers and strengthens our ecosystem. We are looking forward to soon being exclusive Ukrainian broadcaster of an upcoming boxing match featuring world heavyweight champion and proud Ukrainian Oleksandr Usik. On the healthcare, Healthy is Ukraine's leading health stage platform. We served 4.9 million active digital customers in Q1. Patients booked 2.4 million appointments through the platform. We are scaling the platform paid services. Customer paying, the premium offerings increased by more than half quarter on quarter to reach more than $87,000. Revenue grew nearly 32% year over year to more than $2 million. Healthy powers appointment scheduling, prescriptions, and health records, including integration with Ukraine's state health system. The platform makes care easier and faster to assess, a win-win for patients and doctors alike. Customers are upgrading for a range of advanced health insights. Our healthy superpower telecom bundle helps drive these conversions. Healthy highlights our commitment to corporate social responsibilities and ESG. We are expanding access to digital healthcare for Ukrainians during the war time. Then we have Tabletki, the leading online healthcare marketplace. We consolidated this business in February. In just two months, the platform contributed more than $5 million in revenue and more than $4 million in EBD. Customer volume is strong. The platform facilitated 15.3 million average monthly bookings in the first two months of the year. For the same period, gross merchandise value reached $258 million. We continue work on integrating Tabletki with Healthy and ultimately with Uklon's delivery network. We expect these synergies to drive deeper engagement across our digital customer base. all these parts come together in our growth strategy we intend our core connectivity business to maintain market leadership we focus on retaining a high quality customer base and driving technological innovation for example over 5 million customers use our direct to sell satellite messaging and we expect to launch light data later this year in fixed broadband we aim to expand market share we plan to drive this expansion through both organic growth and targeted acquisitions this market brings entire household into our ecosystem mutually reinforcing the mobile and digital businesses third our digital ecosystem we anticipate scaling our digital platforms through organic momentum and strategic acquisitions our core strategy is to increase multi-play adoption, and deepen daily engagement across our customer base. We continue to progress our strategies through both organic and inorganic growth. Most recently, we announced the expansion of our cooperation with SpaceX to include selling high-speed internet services to Ukrainian businesses and public institutions, allowing us to provide B2C and B2C customers a full-featured connectivity stack within Kyivstar packages. Now, Boris will tell us more about the financials.
Thank you, Alexander. Total revenue reached $323 million in the first quarter, an increase of nearly 27% year-over-year. This reflects 14 billion Fidna in revenue, a 31% increase. EBDA grew more than 23% to $173 million, based on a 29% gain to $7.5 billion. As discussed, our telecom margin expanded to more than 56%, while our digital platforms operated nearly 43% margin. This split reflects our strategy, which generates strong cash flow from our core network that partially goes to fund the rapid scaling of our digital ecosystem. Capital allocation remained disciplined. CapEx totaled $67 million, reaching nearly 21% of revenue. A significant portion of this capital goes toward network resilience during the war. Despite these critical investments, our cash conversion remains strong. Equity-free cash flow after leases and licenses grew 32% to $87 million. Turning now to the balance sheet. We ended the first quarter with $353 million in cash and deposits. The sequential decrease reflects our capital location to fund Tabletki and Sturm acquisitions. Growth debt, excluding leases, is $94 million. dollars. We carry immaterial external debt, mostly all the parent company bill. List liabilities total 393 million dollars. This arises from our tower agreements with Ukrainian Tower Company and a fully recognized under ECRS-60. Excluding these list liabilities, our net cash position is 259 million dollars. Let me now hand the call back to Alexandre. Thank you, Boris.
Looking further ahead, we raise our full-year outlook for 2026 on a mix of the ongoing strong execution and external influences that have been less turbulent than assumed in our base case. In Grimna, we expect revenue to grow 18% to 21% and EBDA to grow 14% to 17%. On our average exchange rate, assumption of 45.5 Grimna to the dollar, we expect revenue to grow 11% to 14% in U.S. dollars and EBDA 7% to 10%. While this is an upgrade to our previous guidance, it represents moderation from our first quarter growth rates. due largely to base effects. This anticipates a comparison base that will no longer include the immediate aftermath of the 2023 cyber attack, a weaker spot exchange rate, and the lapping of the Uklund consolidation. We plan to allocate capital efficiently, with CAPEX intensity at a range of 21% to 24% of revenue for the year. We intend to continue targeted investments in network quality and energy resilience while normalizing from our elevated 2025 investment cycle. The wrap-up, we are delivering double-digit growth across segments driven by our digital momentum and strong execution. Despite external volatility, our business remains resilient and our strong cash generation continues to fund our expansion. We think these trends would look impressive for any company let alone one operating in a war zone and hope you agree with us. Thank you for your support. We can now open for the line for Q&A.
Operator
Thank you. At this time if you would like to ask a question please click on the raise hand button which can be found on the black bar at the bottom of your screen. When it is your turn to ask a question you will receive a prompt to be promoted as a panelist. Please accept, wait a moment and once you have been introduced you may unmute yourself, turn your video on and ask your question. Written questions can be submitted on the webcast by using the ask a question tab at the top right of your screen. As a reminder we are allowing analysts one question and one related follow-up today. If you wish to ask more questions please raise your hand again to rejoin the queue. We will pause a moment to allow the question is to enter the queue. Our first question comes from Max Findlay with Rothschild & Co. You may now unmute your line, turn your video on and ask your question.
Hello all, congratulations on an impressive set of results and the upgrades. In mobile, there were 400,000 subscription losses in Q1 which was higher than Q1 last year. It's sometimes hard to discern what contributes to net losses and it'd be useful to understand how much of this is secondary sims dropping off versus primary sim loss and what site do you have of how net ads will develop throughout the year and then secondly sticking to mobile mobile arpu growth was was very impressive in q1 i guess there are a few things going on here with the loss of roaming revenues and the drop off low arpu secondary sim subs so if you're able to kind quantify what is driving mobile arpu growth that'd be very useful thank you okay let me start with
the first question so this key start customer based decline is actually the reflection of the overall market trend so this trend is very much driven by few factors the first factor is a decline in the number of double-seamers across the market. The second factor is the decline in the new growth ads because of a certain shelf price increase. And the third factor is overall demographic situation in Ukraine. It's a bit difficult to quantify, but the biggest factor is actually double-seamers that is very much situational and driven by very heavy blackouts we faced during the December, January this year. okay let me also draw your attention to one simple fact that according to the national regulation statistic okay so key star is maintaining subscriber market share year on year we grew 0.1 percent in 2025 versus 2024 okay and we are relatively stable for the last years with around 47 plus percent subscriber market share okay and your second question is could you please remind me because it was for mobile okay and the drivers for mobile rpu there are two main drivers for mobile rpu the first one is growing data consumption despite the war despite the overall decline in an active number of the sim cards okay so we are our customers are consuming more and more data we observed a 30 increase year on year and the second one is actually disciplined pricing that is actually focused to address inflation in ukraine okay so and potential gdp growth so we already declared that our kind of objective to maintain the mobile telco business growth and a low double digit that is very much driven by inflation and growing consumption of data services.
Brilliant, thank you very much.
Operator
Our next question comes from Ganesh Nagesha with Barclays. You may now unmute your line, turn your video on and ask your question.
Yeah, hi. Congratulations on the results and a question from me on the digital segment. So you had a very strong growth in the quarter. So just trying to understand on the Keystar TV and Euclone. So the numbers were quite strong, similar to the 4Q. So what are the factors that are driving this? So just trying to understand, are there any seasonality in them? Or like, how should we think of the growth for these two segments in the coming quarters? Thank you.
Let me take it one by one. So the Euclone growth is actually driven by three major factors. The first one is a growing number of riders. The second one is a growing number of rides per one rider. And the third one is actually pricing, which was very much driven by energy crisis, global energy crisis, and the growing prices for the fuel and gas. These are three major factors that are affecting Auckland performance. OK, we also observe a certain market share increase in the ride hailing business, but it was also supported by the growing, you know, much faster growing delivery business. In Kyivstar TV, we observe a certain, let's say, non-organic growth, very much driven by the 3P penetration. okay so our 3p offer is growing quite significantly which is driving our chief start tv business growth which was extremely successfully supported by origins at the beginning of the year you're right it is a certain seasonality incorporated into q1 result okay because normally this winter time and new year eve time is actually a high season for the entertainment business okay but But the main growth was very much driven by the overall growing number of active customers and originals. Tyha Nava is our own, let's say originals, demonstrated the record high numbers of unique watchers, okay, since the launch of the platform. And we do hope and expect that the boxing match, U6-5, will be another stimulus for the further growth.
Yeah, very clear. Thank you.
Operator
Our next question comes from Jesse Sulberson with BTIG. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my question here. Can you help us think about the Starlink and direct-to-sell service? Is it a defensive coverage and resilience feature that protects users in ARPU, or a standalone revenue line that could enable further monetization? I see the five million users here, but I'm very curious on exactly how to think about that part of your business.
Let me start with a kind of segmentation. So right now, we provide only one service based on direct-to-cell technology services, SMS. Okay, we decided for ourselves that taking into account the war situation and the overall humanitarian risk and loss of connectivity risk, we will provide this for every Ukrainian with a Kyivstar SIM card for free. Okay, and this what you see as a reflection in our statistics. So more than 5 million Kevstar customers use this service since the launch in November 2025, and they send and receive more than 8 million messages through the satellite technology. in the middle of the year we are going to actually second half of the year we are going to introduce a light data services based on the direct-to-cell technology and this light data will let us to use certain applications that will be adapted to the satellite technology across the whole territory of Ukraine and our main focus to provide this feature to the messengers to the financial applications and to the state-owned applications like DIA. And since this, we are planning a direct monetization of the direct-to-sell services. And we just recently signed a resell agreement for the Starlink services. Kivestar will be the first reseller of the Starlink services in Ukraine, taking in mind that Ukraine is one of the biggest markets for the Starlink services across the globe.
Great, thank you for the detail there. Also, I'd love to just follow up real quick on the M&A front and the environment there with the cash that you have. Can you just elaborate on maybe where valuations are in the space, and if there's any particular verticals within Ukraine that you're currently focused on researching for further expansion?
Thank you for taking my questions. we have we are quite open with our non-organic development strategy we have three main priorities okay to invest non-organically in our core business and this is mainly infrastructure and fixed broadband providers and you already saw a couple of example of acquisition of storm 50 000 customers our second priority is to facilitate and accelerate our transformation from the telco service provider to the digital service provider with a telco license through organic development like Kyivstar TV and non-organic acquisitions like Uklon. And the third priority is alternative energy. So it is very much driven by the current energy situation in Ukraine and the growing electricity pricing. We see this as a well-sought investment that will let us not only diversify the supply of the energy to our infrastructure, but also to ensure a certain hedge of the growing energy prices, okay, so in our core business. These are three main priorities for non-organic M&A strategy.
Operator
Our next question comes from Matthew Harrigan with Benchmark StoneX. Please unmute your line, turn your video on, and ask your question.
Oh, thank you. You can hear me, of course, right? Yes. Great. I have one down in the weeds question and then one broad conceptual question. On the cybersecurity side, you know, clearly, you know, Russian military intelligence, fancy bear, cozy bear haven't gotten any less active. You know, the attack last year was massively disruptive. I mean, do you feel like you've made incredible progress in the vulnerabilities or the Russians laying off? And are you doing very much of AI and cybersecurity in your enterprise offerings as well? Because clearly you have some necessary competencies in-house.
Let me start with a very brief description. What we faced at the end of 2023 was not a kind of hacker's attack. It was one of the biggest acts of the cybersecurity war and terrorism in the world. And yes, you are right, we are one of the probably primary targets from the Russian perspective. But at the same time, I feel ourselves really confident in our ability to protect Kyivstar, Kyivstar infrastructure, Kyivstar customers from the cybersecurity threats. We invested a lot since the incident. We have hired the biggest global consultants. And right now, I think that we are much better protected than we used to be in 2023, 2023. Okay, with the support of the global companies like Microsoft, Cisco, and others. Okay, we are using probably one of the most advanced CM system in the world, very heavily supported by AI monitoring and threat recognition system. So these are two major factors of our investments.
Instead of one perimeter, create multiple perimeters inside our infrastructure and automate this perimeter with the CM and AI platforms as much as possible in order to ensure early recognition of any potential threats. and i guess the second question you know i think it's instructive to look at your mobile and digital pricing you know relative to some of the eastern european markets and even africa and certainly you've got more growth potential than just about any market maybe outside of outside of africa and you're at some pretty substantial discounts you know i can remember years ago people you know the holy grail for mexico was getting mexican advertising cpms at the level of Brazil and it finally happened, but it took about 50 years. And, you know, I think consumers just kind of get acclimated to a certain pricing level and it's hard to, you know, get things level on a global market scale. But what are your strategies for, you know, pushing the pricing, you know, forward when you get a more normal environment, maybe getting close to some comparable markets in Europe and other areas?
I think we are doing a very good job in disciplined pricing right now okay so i joined key store in 2018 and it was a market with the average below one us dollar okay and despite the war despite quite difficult economic situation we from my perspective we're able to demonstrate our ability to grow irpu year on year not only in a local currency but also in the report currency and this is our vision so right now ukraine has one of the lowest actually lowest eastern european art pool which is not in line with the size of the ukrainian economy okay and my own perspective that in the reasonable future ukraine should reach at least the lowest eastern european art pool that is for the time being for for example, in Romania, is a bit above US$7 per month.
Great. Thank you so much.
Operator
Our next question comes from Ali Zaidi with Inam. Please unmute your line, turn your video on, and ask your question.
Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for taking our questions. So I just had one question. We saw this quarter that Tabletki had an exceptionally high EBITDA margin of approximately 85%. Do you think this margin is sustainable in the longer run?
So Ali, thank you for the question. So let me take this. So we have, as an operator, demonstrated, I think, one of the best marginalities worldwide based on the GSMA analytics. So definitely, as you know, we are moving more and more towards digital business. So this, for the first time, I think we disclosed the margin of the digital business, which we see quite decent. So we try to protect our marginality of the core business, despite all the externalities that impact our performance. At the same time, you need to assume that the more we penetrate into the digital business, so while the percentage marginality may be lower, so it adds to the absolute margin and the absolute net income. And this business is incomparable in terms of capex intensity. So basically, the ethics there is just capitalization of the labor of the development stuff. And in terms of cash conversion, it may result in even better cash conversion. So I would propose you both at the marginality, but also at our cash conversion dynamics.
Let me add a bit. I'm considering our digital margin not as decent, but as impressive. I think that we are running a big digital business, fast growing, with the marginality higher than 40%, and I think this is to some extent unprecedented.
Thank you for your question. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Operator
Our next question comes from Vincent Fernando with Zero One. Please unmute your line, turn your video on, and ask your question.
Thank you. I want to touch on the cloud and big data side of your digital enterprise business. So obviously with the conflict, I imagine it structurally changes what a data center means in Ukraine. You probably want to be distributed. We have Brazilian architecture. That's probably more valuable than being like a centralized large hyperscaler. So how does Keep Start thinking about the data center opportunity, given you have that nationwide network footprint, you have some energy independence assets like Sunvin and the Sovereign Cloud positioning? you know so what comes with being a you know ukraine domicile provider what does adjustable market look like and how might it be different than other markets because like again that there's kind of risk of being too centralized thank you um we see that cloud cloud business is quite promising so far our main business is resale of microsoft primarily and a bit of amazon but our own consideration that we in order to be competitive cloud service provider we need to be
a multi-service provider multi-cloud service provider we just recently launched our own cloud business in ukraine our own data center we start to commercialize it at the end of 2025 okay but we are looking for a way how to accelerate it in organic and non-organic way to some extent i am absolutely sure that especially after the war and with a certain recovery okay and with a certain let's say return to a sovereignty okay it will be a very very fast growing business stream and we want to be prepared we want to be prepared from the list of service perspective from the market share perspective and available competencies in place. So this is quite essential part of our business development.
Operator
Our next question comes from Adrian Cundy with Emerging and Frontier Capital LLP. Please unmute your line, turn your video on and ask your question.
Good afternoon, gentlemen. Thank you for making the time available. My question evolves, my first question revolves around digital top line. If I back out Tbiliki and Uklan, and I look at this sort of organic growth basis year on year, it looks to be very, very high, the growth rate. I'm just wondering if you might sort of compare and contrast the organic growth opportunity in your digital portfolio versus the new acquisitions. Do you think, and it would be great if there's some sort of pro forma view on how Uklan is growing and Tbiliki is growing year on year? That's my first question. My follow-on question comes back to the capital expenditure of 66, I would assume that's overwhelmingly in the telecom business and relative to telecom revenues, that's obviously sustainably remains quite high, well above sort of 21%. How much of that is really network resilience? How much of that is things like the 5G testbed? And given that really sort of 5G subs are now about 70% of your total, sorry 4g sub sorry or 70 of your sub base uh penetration uh what is sort of the you know given that you know older people tend not to be on data as much what is sort of the the roadmap for for for boosting data through and how much do you think you're eventually in a year or two out will your network be in 5g given that the government has a testing a test policy there okay i will ask boris to answer the first question and then i will take a second one so boris please could you please address this organic growth versus non-organic of the digital revenue stream yeah
adrian thank you for the question so as we discussed in the previous call so even if you exclude um and the black impact so we are growing about 60 percent a year yeah this growth is supported kind of primarily by the existing streams kind of our uh digital enterprise solution and the TV, which, as Alexandre explained, is growing due to the unique content quite aggressively. So it's in line with our promise to grow the digital business at the high double digits, triple digits level. And we are executing this.
How long do you think that's sustainable for? That sort of supernormal growth rate?
It will be a kind of forward-looking statement, to be honest. you know so we are a bit careful and limited by the current rules imposed on us so but you can make this trend by yourself we were declaring our let's say organic growth rate uh uh you know 2025 organic growth rate in uh in our presentation you know boris just said you where we are at the beginning of 2026. And I think that you can make your simulation quite easy.
Adrian, if I may, make our legal team slightly more comfortable. The raw numbers are, of course, slide seven.
Coming back to CAPEX. Of course, we do not consider CAPEX higher than 20% as a normal one. So it is definitely elevated by necessity to invest in resilience. And around 15% of our CAPEX is actually streamlined into the different resilience projects. But still, let me emphasize that quite a big share of our CAPEX is focused on the modernization and strengthening our healthy network. We have accelerated 3G sunset. This year is the last year of 3G technology for Keystar in Ukraine. okay we want to we want to strengthen our technological leadership versus the competition okay we are very close to finalize our license 4g driven license obligation with population coverage almost 97 percent with all the major roads covered by the lte technologies okay and my own perspective that this will be the main technological wiggle of mobile telecom for the 90 for the next probably five, seven years. We do not expect 5G to be really introduced in Ukraine until end of the war. So the most probable scenario is something like 12 months after the war. And that's why we are considering our investments in LTE technology as a strategic part. And by the way, this is very much confirmed by the Okla, you know, this external monitoring company that actually awarded key start with all three available awards the biggest network by coverage the fastest network by speed and the best one from the customer experience perspective this is one final question on i wasn't aware of the sunset on 3g but is that going what if 30 of your base that's not on 4g right now i mean is there a device limitation there you know are these old folks with a without a smartphone and is that gonna happen you know when you migrate them off is that going to have an impact it's a good question but to be fair 4g smartphones penetration is not an issue in ukraine okay okay so as as i mentioned at the beginning ukraine market still has a relatively high penetration of double simmers okay so people using different sim cards for the different purposes okay so and somehow you know i think that the 70 lte penetration according to the global benchmarks, is a very healthy level, despite the fact that 4G was introduced in Ukraine with a certain delay.
Okay, thank you. Congratulations again on what was a pretty exceptional quarter on execution. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you very much.
Operator
Our next question comes from Tim Savageow with Northland Capital Markets. Please unmute your Turn your video on and ask your question.
Team, we don't hear you. Maybe you're on mute.
I see. Maybe there I am. Can you hear me?
Sorry about that. And yeah, congrats on the Tableki deal as well. Looks like based on those financials, we should be looking for more of those. And my question is on organic growth as well, except sort of with an EBITDA focus. And I don't know to what extent you contemplated in your previous guidance increase last quarter for 26 or this one, but it seems like there's some offsets on the cost side where we might expect a greater increase. You talked about energy costs before. It does look like the organic EBITDA growth rate for the company is kind of low single digit implied in 26. Am I getting that right?
And is there some offset on the cost factor or on the cost front that's kind of a headwind to your strategic growth, your inorganic growth? uh tim i will ask boris to answer this question okay so boris please yeah thank you for the question i think when you look at the q1 so it shouldn't be organic growth without as you said kind of tablet and we're on acquisition because we didn't have to clone uh consolidated in 2025 so if you look at this we are at 16 i'm talking organic terms i'm not putting dollars here because you also have definitely a deep translation impact on our numbers. So we are about 16% in terms of close revenue in EBDA growth year on year. So we are continuing this trend for the rest of 2026. So we gave the guidance of 18% to 21% in revenue, 14.17% in EBDA, which is in line with this guidance. And despite the fact that we do have some factors pressing negatively our performance, such as definitely utilities prices you mentioned or the euro regulation in production which is quite a significant impact for 2026 as you can see we are trying to offset them both in terms of the telco growth and in terms of the digital growth that we just discussed okay great and then to follow up you know i think you've seen a pretty notable uptick in multi-play subscribers really the last two quarters in particular, I mean, would you attribute that to bringing in some of the new digital services in terms of acquisition and in terms of maybe those subscribers already
having that service? And I know this might be a tough one, but whether you expect that multi-play trend to continue or what exactly you would attribute this uptick we've seen really in the last couple of quarters in multi-play?
I will not answer on trend, but this is one of our ultimate objectives, to grow a number of multi-play and multi-play penetration into our customer base. What you see as a result of three major factors. The first one is organic growth of the multi-play penetration. Every new gross ad with a certain probability being converted into the multi-play. On the shelf right now, we do not proposed mobile standalone, our basic value proposition consists of mobile, fixed, and key start TV, plus extra services provided in a form of superpowers, you know, how customers can customize their own value proposition, you know, with the certain services provided by the ecosystem. As one of the example, healthy subscription, OK? And at the same time, of course, the second major factor is non-organic. Driven by the acquisitions of the business like Tabletki. And the third one is actually seasonality. It's a certain seasonality in multiplayer, mainly driven by the entertainment business. And a certain period of activity, for example, Uklon has certain seasonality. Keepstar TV has certain seasonality. So these are three major factors that are actually affecting our quarterly results with the overall trend to grow a number of multi-play customers.
Thanks very much. Appreciate it.
Operator
Our next question comes from Nicholas Payton with Edison Group. Please unmute your line, turn your video on and ask your question.
Hello, everybody. Thank you very much for all the additional information on the digital business. I think it's actually very, very useful to see the granularity. We had a very interesting and instructive conversation on the full-year Vion call regarding capital returns for the various businesses. And I'm interested in the difference between your various digital businesses because clearly some of them are pure digital, whereas UCLON, which is half of your revenues in digital, is actually a relatively physical business with a sophisticated digital front end. So when you look at the capital returns going forwards, how do you place UCLON versus the other digital businesses and versus the traditional telecoms business?
I'm not sure that you have a right approach to our Uklon business. So what we are running in Ukraine is a right-handing platform. Platform that led riders to find driver for the transportation. So for the time being, Uklon is a pure light asset business, and it's a pure digital service. okay so so from this perspective so it's i think that all the businesses are actually demonstrating a quite healthy marginality okay with the top one demonstrated by tablet and with an excellent marginality demonstrated by uclone which is actually at the lower end but close to we can't respond okay but which is close to 40 sorry i'm sorry uh nicholas if you're asking about like return on capital employee definitely with the digital businesses such as upland without
having any kind of heavy assets yeah so this will be way higher versus what you see in our traditional telecom business but maybe nicolas for the future if you think about the ride-hailing business and if you think about driverless cars or kickstart businesses you know which are not having a driver i think the future of this business will become more i think asset heavy as we see but it's not the issue of today of course but three years out i think driverless car will be actually a capex heavy business more capex heavy business interesting okay thanks for that uh if you take a look at what uclone is directly announcing some of the tech pairs they
are doing some very interesting work on the expertise they're building okay thank you for that our next question comes from vincent fernando with zero one please unmute your line turn your video on and ask your question i just want to touch back on the starlink reseller agreement um that's for ukrainian businesses and public institutions is that correct and is that is it exclusive to kivstar in ukraine and how should we think about the revenue model uh pure margin on resales a bundled into b2b connectivity um just curious uh yeah what's the structure of that you're absolutely right so we will be focused on the b2b and b2g market with the resale okay
the income model is structured around certain markup on equipment and traffic with the potential to convert this model into the data pool model that will open new opportunities okay based on on the wholesale relationship with Starlink.
Got it. Is there any exclusivity in the agreement?
No, there's no exclusivity. Okay, but so far, we are the only one reseller, official reseller of Starlink services in Ukraine.
Got it. I know it's maybe only been about a week. Are you already seeing what kind of customer, you know, ramp are you seeing already?
Maybe in the early phase, I don't know. is it already started being marketing or marketed or early stage market is b2b market is relatively developed but being a b2b organization right now you should order you know the starting device through your employee and to compensate okay through the through the salary okay you are not able like a b2b organization okay to order this service directly from the starting so we will be the first only one official representative of starting in ukraine great thank you please go ahead our last question comes from ahmed mustafa with inam
please unmute your line turn your video on and ask your question uh hello everyone thanks for the opportunity uh one question from me uh you have made several opposition within roughly 18 months So what synergies are you seeing and how do you think about integration complexity across the portfolio?
We have two types of synergies. The first one is operational synergies that are to some extent already extracted and reflected in a high marginality of our digital business tree. The second layer of synergies is a kind of customer synergies. And they are very much reflected into the growing penetration of multi-place services. combination of telecom services with the different digital services in a unique competitive value proposition in a form of bundles. But on the top of this, we are right now focused on developing our vision of the holistic ecosystem over all KGL group assets in Ukraine. So these are three major synergies that we are trying to extract and to convert into the customers' and shareholders' value. Yes, you know, what we are doing right now, we are focused on some kind of, let's say, non-regrets moves. One of them is a single ID across the whole KGL ecosystem, okay, in order to have proper identification mechanism, in order to streamline customer journey and to have better visibility of the customer base.
Operator
We have no further questions at this time. I will now hand back to Cole Aikerson for closing remarks.
Well, we'll keep this very brief. Thank you, as always, for your interest in Keefstar. We are proud to have presented another strong quarter, and we look forward to speaking to you in the following quarter. Thank you again.
