Earnings Call Transcript - TIGO Q4 2022

Operator, Operator

Hello, everyone and welcome to our Fourth Quarter 2022 Results Conference Call. Before we begin, please take a moment to review the Safe Harbor disclosure on Slide 2 of the presentation which is available on our website, along with the earnings release. Now during the presentation, we will be referencing non-IFRS measures and we define these on Slide 3 and we provide reconciliation tables to the nearest IFRS metric in the earnings release and on our website. I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Mauricio Ramos.

Mauricio Ramos, CEO

Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Let's go straight to the highlights for the year, starting on Slide 5. On the left, you will recognize the value creation framework that we presented at our Investor Day almost one year ago today. Back then, the global economy was bouncing back strongly from the pandemic and the economic outlook was quite positive. That changed quickly after Russia invaded Ukraine, energy prices spiked and inflation and interest rates moved up sharply. Despite this abrupt change, we have stayed the course and continue to execute on our plans. We're actually quite used to executing and delivering through uncertain times. And that's what we did in 2022. We delivered on our objectives with a good outturn for the year, as you will see during today's presentation. Operationally, we focused even more on our customers and we invested further in our networks and into our people. All of this produced strong financial results. Organic OCF growth was a strong 8.4% and equity free cash flow all in was $171 million. All of this is consistent with our plans. As we said we would, we used that cash flow to reduce leverage. Our leverage was down to 3x at year-end. We also made very significant progress in our plans to carve out our Towerco portfolio and remain on track for a transaction later this year. Tigo Money continued to execute on its own plans to accelerate growth which we expect will generate interest among potential investors who can bring expertise and capital to help the business flourish and get to the next level on its own. And finally, 2022 was a big year for us on ESG. Our science-based targets were validated formally and we also made important commitments towards diversity and inclusion. These and many other actions have further strengthened our Tigo culture and are helping us cement our position as an employer of choice in the region. In 2022, we ranked number two in Latin America and number five in the world in the Great Place to Work survey, alongside other global household names like DHL, Hilton, Cisco and Salesforce. So we're entering 2023 from a position of strength and with great confidence on the strategic plans we laid out a year ago. So let's get to some detail. Please turn to Slide 6 for a look at service revenue in 2022. Service revenue grew 2.3% during the fourth quarter and 3.5% for the full year. As expected, growth slowed in the second half with the change in macroeconomic conditions. When you look at the full year picture on this page, you can appreciate how strong our business is with every business line and almost every country growing despite a much more challenging macro environment. As I mentioned last quarter, there are some shifts in the way we're achieving our growth and this is consistent with the general trends in our markets with slower growth in home, offset by stronger growth in mobile. And we believe that this is at least partly related to increased mobility and less dependence on home broadband as kids have gone back to in-person learning and parents have returned to their offices. And this is happening in the context of a weaker economy where consumers are having to cut some of their spending. And yet, meanwhile, B2B continues to perform very, very well, as you can see in more detail on the next slide. Service revenue from our B2B business grew more than 5% in 2022, accelerating from only 1% in 2021. As a reminder, we revamped our B2B team, our strategy and refocused our product offering for Tigo businesses just a few years ago. And with the pandemic now behind us, this is paying off with stronger customer growth, especially in the SME area and very rapid revenue growth, with about 40% coming from high-end digital services that make up close to 20% of our overall B2B business now. This part of our business has continued to perform strongly in the second half of the year. We have created a strong pipeline of new projects which gives me a lot of confidence that we can continue to drive solid growth in B2B going forward. Now let's look at our mobile business on Slide 8. As I mentioned earlier, our consumer mobile business grew more than 3% for the year and postpaid has been the main driver of this growth. We added 0.25 million new postpaid subscribers during last year and this drove 9% service revenue growth for the year. About half of these customers are migrations from our prepaid base. We do this with selective segmentation and based on consumption relocations and payment histories and we will continue to increasingly use data to drive our personalized offerings to drive our postpaid penetration. Note that postpaid still accounts for only 16% of our overall mobile customer base but it now contributes 35% to our mobile service revenue and 20% to our overall total service revenue. The final point I want to make on mobile is that we continue to implement price increases in most of our markets to catch up with inflation and we're encouraged by the competitive response so far. We're starting to see this translate into our improvements in some countries. ARPU improvements indeed will be a very important area for our focus in 2023. Now let's talk a bit more about home on Slide 9. As I said earlier, the softer net adds that we saw in Q3 continued in Q4. This was caused by: one, the post-pandemic shift in demand from home back to the office, as I described earlier; two, the more difficult macroeconomic environment, importantly, including civil strikes in Bolivia during the quarter and throughout the year; and three, we're choosing to remain disciplined on price. We continue to implement price increases and to charge installation fees even if some competitors do not. This dampens net adds in the short term but builds a much better and stronger business for the long run which is what we're all about because we remain very optimistic about the long-term growth potential for residential broadband in our markets. And that's why we continue to invest to expand our network and to strengthen our content offering. As you can see on this page, this year, we accelerated our home build to add more than 800,000 homes passed and about 40% of those were FTTH. On the content side, we told you last quarter about a deal with ViX which gives us access to Spanish LaLiga sports content. We're very satisfied by the early results we're seeing, particularly now that the World Cup is over and our customers' focus has shifted back to the local and international soccer leagues. Now let's look at two of our largest markets. Starting with Guatemala on the left, we continue to invest in sales, marketing, content and our network to maintain our market share, especially in the prepaid market, where competition picked up some intensity last year. We're very pleased with our results. Our prepaid market share remained unchanged from a quarter ago. And meanwhile, all of our subscription businesses, postpaid, home, and B2B continued to perform very well, showing acceleration in the quarter compared to Q3, and we also had some positive help from the World Cup this quarter. So overall, another year of solid performance from our largest operation with very robust and sustained market share positions and strong free cash flow generation. In Colombia, the story hasn't changed much since Q3. We continued to gain share in mobile, especially in postpaid. The shift in mix to postpaid is driving ARPU higher. And the good news is that ARPU for our prepaid segment is now also growing nicely and contributing to the 15% mobile service revenue growth we're now seeing in Colombia. As we saw in Q3, the growth in mobile more than offset the softer trends in home, as we discussed previously. And overall, service revenue growth was almost 7% for the year in Colombia, a strong performance considering the challenging macro environment we have been facing. Now please turn to Slide 11 for a summary of our network investment in 2022 and the recent years. On the left, you can see that we have now upgraded and modernized all of our mobile networks that all of our markets are now 5G and SA ready. In fact, we already launched 5G in Guatemala during the year. Because of this, as we have said before, launching 5G SA in our markets whenever that happens, will be within our existing CapEx envelope, as we did in Guatemala over the past year. On the fixed side, our network is very new and fiber deep and increasingly so. We now have over 12 million home passes with HFC, including 730,000 of which we passed with FTTH across six of our markets. Last week, we announced the completion of a new fiber network that connects Paraguay and Bolivia. Importantly, this provides a new key fiber route linking the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. All of this investment has been undertaken within our stated CapEx envelope of about $1 billion per year which translates into a healthy CapEx to sales ratio of around 18% on average over the last three years. Now look at TigoMoney on Slide 12. 2022 was a breakthrough year for this business. Over the past two years, we've invested in the business, first, by building a strong team and bringing in new and expert tech talent. During the past year, the team was very busy redesigning and rebuilding a new, more robust digital platform. We launched a new app and have been rolling it out across the footprint to drive adoption and we're now starting to see the results. Digital users, that is those people who transact online using the new app almost tripled and we're monetizing that growth. Revenue from these digital users more than doubled. It is still early days and our digital user base is still small, but we're very satisfied by the early take. Meanwhile, we're also working on driving increased engagement with our digital user base, rolling out our new merchant platform. In the last several months, we have signed up about 45,000 new merchants. That's up from close to zero one year ago and we expect to add a lot more merchants in 2023, leveraging our Tigo business relationships. Over the last several months, we have been piloting our new lending business, originating more than $100,000 in annual loans. The average loan size is about $40 to $50 and the average maturity is only about 20 days. Clearly, there's a big opportunity for us in this area and we're using this pilot to fine-tune our algorithms before rolling this out more broadly later this year. Finally, we also signed an alliance with Visa, giving TigoMoney customers access to the Tigo Money Visa card, allowing them to use their TigoMoney wallet balances anywhere Visa is accepted. Now please turn to Slide 13 to review the progress of our Tower company carve-out. By now, you all know the reasons why we are doing this: it can create a lot of shareholder value. We've made substantial progress over the past year and the key message here is that we're on track with the timetable we shared with you one year ago. We continue to expect the transaction towards the end of this year. The project and the company now has a name as it's coming to life. It's called late Telecom, which will see the light of day very soon. Last but not least, I want to take a moment to comment on the important progress we made on the ESG front during 2022, as you can see on Slide 14. On societal programs, we continue to focus on providing tools for employment in the digital economy, training key socioeconomic sectors such as women, children, and teachers. On the environmental side, we validated and announced our science-based targets, committing to reducing Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030 and to achieve net zero over the long term. Our achievements in 2022 were made possible by the dedication and effort of our 20,000 employees, and I have no doubt that the continued hard work will contribute to even more success for our business in 2023. And with that, I will turn it over to Sheldon.

Sheldon Bruha, CFO

Thank you, Mauricio. Before we review the financials, let's recap the macro context on Slide 16. We continue to closely monitor the macroeconomic situation in our countries. On the left, you can see how inflation has been tracking over the past year or so. It peaked at 8.5% in July and has fallen to about 8% in December. On the right, you can see the latest GDP growth forecast from the World Bank. Our markets on average are expected to grow about 3%, with all of our largest cash-generative markets in excess of 3%. This is faster than regional peers like Mexico and Brazil, which are expected to grow less than 1%, which I think speaks to the resiliency of our markets in the face of a potential global recession. Now, let's look at our Q4 performance, beginning on Slide 17. Service revenue was $1.3 billion in the quarter. That's up nearly 11% year-on-year due to the Guatemala acquisition. Excluding the acquisition and the impact of FX, organic growth was 2.3%. Our mobile business grew just over 2.5% and contributed about two-thirds of the overall growth in the quarter. For a second consecutive quarter, all of the mobile growth came from postpaid which had its best performance of the year, growing at 9.6%. Investments we've made to some of our mobile businesses and networks in recent years, especially in Colombia continued to yield positive results. Adverse FX trends impacted our revenue growth negatively this quarter, largely due to the Colombian peso which depreciated 18% on average during the quarter compared to a year ago as well as the Paraguayan Guarani which depreciated about 5%. Drilling down further on Slide 18 to service revenue by country. Mauricio already talked about Colombia and Guatemala, so I won't cover those again. Elsewhere, our performance in most of our other markets was solid. El Salvador continued its strong performance during 2022 and was up 7.5% in the quarter, with every business line contributing to this growth. Nicaragua also maintained their strong momentum with growth of about 5%. Paraguay grew for a seventh consecutive quarter and was up 4% with solid performance in mobile and B2B. Panama had flat growth against a tough comparison due to some large B2B contracts in Q4 of last year. Bolivia was down 4.5% as we felt the impact of a change in regulation on mobile overage rates that went into effect in August as well as a strike in Santa Cruz region which impacted economic activity and our install capabilities during the quarter. Honduras, which we don't consolidate, had its strongest quarter of the year, growing almost 5% with growth across all business units. Okay. Turning to EBITDA on Slide 19. EBITDA of $548 million was up 19% year-on-year due to the consolidation of Guatemala. Organically, EBITDA was up 1.8% as revenue growth was partially offset by the net effect of higher direct costs and lower OpEx. Direct costs increased due to the higher content costs related to items such as soccer rights, both our new agreements with ViX and the World Cup. We also saw our bad debt expense increase over the past year as this largely reflects growth in our postpaid and B2B subscription businesses. Operating expenses declined due to lower selling and marketing spend, which offset the impact of inflation on our energy and labor costs. Now looking more closely at EBITDA performance by country on Slide 20. El Salvador and Nicaragua both had very strong EBITDA growth from operating leverage and we saw margins expand roughly 200 basis points over the past year. Paraguay returned to positive growth this quarter, posting an almost 7% growth. As Mauricio mentioned previously, Guatemala had a stronger Q4 with EBITDA growth of 2.6%, although revenue from the World Cup contributed to some of the sequential improvement. Colombia was up 4% and margins were just shy of 31%, which is our highest level since the entrance of the new competitor in Q2 of 2021. We remain very focused on improving profitability in our second largest market. We continue to gain scale in mobile and we are also taking steps to adjust to our cost structure and mitigate the effect of the 16% increase in minimum wage that went into effect in January in that country. Panama EBITDA was down slightly in Q4. Again, this is because of some large B2B contracts in Q4 of 2021. Our full year performance is more representative of the trends we are seeing there. On a full year basis, Panama EBITDA was up more than 6%, which was a good result in a year where our main competitor was not allowed to raise prices under the terms of their merger approval and our OCF increased over 20% during the year in a dollar-raise market. Bolivia EBITDA declined almost 12% as we saw the full quarter impact of the regulatory change from last quarter which dropped straight to the EBITDA line. Additionally, results were impacted by the strike in the Santa Cruz region, with slow commercial activity during the quarter. Honduras, which we do not consolidate, had impressive growth of 13%, reflecting both improved revenue trends in Q4 of 2022 and an easy comparison against a muted performance in Q4 of 2021. Honduras is the one country where we recently upgraded our mobile network, as Mauricio outlined earlier, and we have seen revenue growth accelerate nicely in the second half of the year in this market. Looking at EBITDA margins on Slide 21. Margins were broadly stable and even improved compared to last year's Christmas selling season of Q4 of 2021. We achieved this despite the investments in our carve-outs and the tougher macro situation. Energy costs were up almost 11% on average during the quarter. We have seen higher minimum wage increases in our footprint given the inflationary environment. We continue to invest in preparing the carve-outs of our Tigo Money and Tower call businesses, although this impact moderated somewhat in Q4 as we begin to lap some of the earlier investments in Tigo Money in particular. Meanwhile, we continue to implement price increases across our businesses in Q4 and we will continue to focus on price increases in 2023. Finally, we are starting to implement our efficiency program, Project Everest, which we expect will help us achieve our financial targets. Let me spend a moment providing more details on Everest. This is a very broad-based efficiency program that will touch every part of the business in every country, including our headquarters. This will include revenue initiatives around convergence, commercial OpEx savings from improved churn and customer base management and truck roll costs, network OpEx savings from energy optimization and network consolidation, IT savings from simplifying platforms and CapEx avoidance with improved reverse logistics. So this is not simply a cost-cutting exercise but improving the way in which we operate. We have been working on this for the past several months and the program is the result of a very detailed bottom-up assessment of all of our operations and we are now implementing Phase 1. We expect savings from Project Everest to ramp up to an annual run rate of more than $100 million by the end of 2024. So it will be a key pillar of our EBITDA and OCF growth over the next couple of years as we focus on delivering our equity free cash flow targets. Moving to Slide 23. You can see our operating cash flow, that is EBITDA less CapEx performed in 2022 compared to 2021. OCF more than doubled during the year to $1.264 billion mainly due to the consolidation of Guatemala. Organic OCF growth was 8.4%, which adjusts for both the acquisition of Guatemala as well as for the OCF that we spent in Africa prior to exiting in April 2022. Excluding the one-offs we called out in the previous quarters in both '21 and '22, organic OCF growth would have been 8.6%. This organic growth was due to organic EBITDA during the year as well as lower CapEx as we completed some key investment projects that began during the pandemic. Slower home customer growth also means that we spent less than expected on installs and customer premise equipment, which typically is one of the biggest components of our annual CapEx spend. Now let's look at equity free cash flow on Slide 24. As Mauricio outlined, we generated $171 million during the year, in line with the guidance that we gave you during our third quarter call. This was the first year that we provided guidance on the metric. So I wanted to provide you a bit more visibility on all the main line items that go into our equity free cash flow. Starting with EBITDA of $2.25 billion. We then deduct cash CapEx of about $960 million. This was a bit below our guidance of around $1 billion, which reflects the variable nature of a portion of our CapEx related to CPEs for customer home additions. There was about $1 billion of fixed charges for financing, leases and taxes. There's another $200 million for working capital and spectrum and these items can vary somewhat from year to year. Finally, we add back repatriations from our Honduras joint venture, which was just north of $80 million in 2022. I should point out that we owned Tanzania through early April, so all the numbers above include about three months of Africa. So we removed the net effect of that down at the bottom to give you equity free cash flow from our current footprint. Now please turn to Slide 25 for our usual debt bridge. Net debt is down $1 billion in 2022, with a reduction of more than $200 million in Q4 due to the very strong equity free cash flow generation during the quarter. We ended 2022 with $5.8 billion of net debt and net debt to EBITDA after leases of 2.94x. This is down more than 30 basis points from 3.28x at the end of 2021. If we include lease obligations of just over $1 billion, our leverage was 3.04x at the end of Q4, well aligned with our deleveraging targets. With that, we are now ready for your questions.

Operator, Operator

Thanks, Sheldon. We'll now move to the Q&A portion of the call. As most of you are aware, we published a press release on January 25, in which we confirm that we are having discussions with Apollo Global Management and Cloud Group about a possible or potential acquisition of all outstanding shares in Millicom and that there is no certainty that a transaction will materialize nor as to the terms, timing, or form of any potential transaction. And we have no new updates on this topic today. For legal reasons, that should be clear to most of you, we cannot and will not be taking any questions on this topic. So with that, we'll take the first question today from Froylan Mendez of JPMorgan.

Froylan Mendez, Analyst

So you mentioned the Everest project efforts to increase prices across the regions. We wanted to understand what are the key levers for further free cash flow acceleration into next year? What is the main source of that acceleration? And if we could expect a similar seasonality as the one that we saw in 2022? The second question would be if you could give additional color on the competitive environment in Guatemala's mobile market and what has the impact been on prices?

Mauricio Ramos, CEO

Thank you, Froy. You scared me more than all the lawyers in the last few days with those comments. So we got a CFO here who's been around now for a year. So we can fully tackle number one, Froy, and then I'll talk a little bit about Guatemala. How about that?

Sheldon Bruha, CFO

First of all, just on our equity progression, we're not giving guidance specifically on 2023 versus 2024 in our three-year range. So I think what you picked up on what's underlying or underpinning our three-year equity cash flow target is ultimately our 10% organic OCF growth that we expect over that three-year period. The key levers there, I think you hit on one of the most important, at least what we can do on the top line or what we expect on the top line price increases will be a big component of that. It's something we started introducing in the second half of 2022. It's something that's going to be a big focus in 2023 and beyond. That will be a key piece of driving that as well as how we drive margins. Project Everest is going to be a big component of that. We'll get to, as I said, exiting 2024 at more than $100 million of benefits. 2023 will be ramping towards that now. I wouldn't say it's exactly a straight line ramp. The recent one-off costs might be a bit more in the beginning part of this exercise versus what you'll probably see in 2024. So it will be a bit uneven in terms of getting to that $100 million exit, but that will be a big contributor for both years and ultimately underpins the 10% organic OCF growth over the three-year period. All right. And then on the beautiful country of Guatemala, you get history to provide the context, of course, and, as you all know, for the pandemic period, we took a lot of market share. We were investing heavily as we did with the acquisition of the asset about 15 months ago now. We had expected that our competitor would respond. So compared to the value for that we invested through sales and marketing and network, we launched 5G to make sure that Guatemala remains healthy as we are now. The updates on that, if I can take them holistically, Froy, this is your specific question; there was no deterioration in the competitive environment in Q4, so no deterioration in the competitive environment for prepaid, as you know. This is a result of the way we have built the value for the year. The market remains stable in Q4 for prepaid. I believe the way we responded was smart, and we presented long-term health for the business, but it allowed our competitor not to be in a position where they need to escalate, and they have not. So we return to a more stable prepaid market there as we imagined. The second point, the other businesses, call them subscription businesses on postpaid, they all continue to grow. Although their bases in Guatemala are now out of bases, they're growing very, very well. Point number three, which is, I think, kind of important to bring up since this is a year-end call, it's a good time to take stock of how we're doing. Point number one is that we have sustained market share; same market share as we achieved before. Number two, we've actually improved our number to a better network than the day before. We launched 5G throughout the year; we're the first to do that. It's NSA 5G as I've said several times, so it doesn't change the CapEx; we're still within our normal CapEx envelope. We've actually improved our spectrum position. We were able to acquire 700 spectrum and we have bought from the market effectively. A lot of that wide open spectrum, about 100 MHz. So we now have sustained market share, better spectrum positions, and most importantly, sustained equity cash flow, as you just showed out of Guatemala with our ability to reduce debt, which, of course, is increasing equity in Guatemala. So we are very, very happy with the key outcomes in Guatemala.

Operator, Operator

Next, we're going to go to Stefan Gauffin of DNB.

Stefan Gauffin, Analyst

I hope you can hear my question. I wanted to discuss our plans for building. You've clearly accelerated the practical buildup. We passed 800,000 homes, targeting around 1 million, but we fell short of our overall goal. I know there are some increased back-to-work effects to help accelerate things. Without better insight, would you consider slowing down your network build until demand increases? I'll stop there and then I can ask a few short questions.

Mauricio Ramos, CEO

I believe our connection was not ideal. Although my Swedish is good, your English is significantly better, Stefan. Despite the connection issues, we understood the essence of the question regarding home build, penetration rates, and our long-term dedication. We grasped most of that. In terms of short-term factors, we are observing a slowdown in net additions this year, which makes sense as we continue to focus on long-term growth. We attribute the slowdown primarily to macroeconomic conditions, evident in the second half of the year as people are closely monitoring their consumption. Additionally, there has been a shift in demand from home to office settings as we emerge from the pandemic, which aligns with slower overall market volumes. We are also facing specific challenges in certain countries, particularly Bolivia, where strikes have been ongoing throughout the year and affected our operations. One of the most crucial points is that we have maintained strict pricing discipline. While some competitors have kept their installation costs stable, we have increased ours. Some rivals have not raised prices, but we have, and we believe this strategy will benefit us in the long run, even if it causes some short-term difficulties. We must clarify the situation regarding net additions in conservative areas moving forward. This gives you insight into why we maintain our targets; we anticipate better performance in home build than typical for our business as these penetration rates increase. The fundamental drivers for this growth include population increase, digital technology adoption, household formation, middle-class expansion, and low market penetration, all of which will boost demand for broadband services in the long run. Therefore, we aim to develop our network to meet that demand. We are pleased with our build progress. However, we need to adapt our strategy based on demand. In the short term, we must refine our investments, particularly in how we manage capital.

Stefan Gauffin, Analyst

You had some test business but EUR50 million of risk business, could you just update where you are with that?

Mauricio Ramos, CEO

I didn't get it, so Danielle's going to have to go on. I think the question is about where we are in AFS revenues as we're seeing this year versus what we've been talking about historically of $50 million. Is that the question? Yes. Okay. So we haven't disclosed the numbers but we're growing at about high single digits to low double digits year-over-year. At this point in time, I think the important point to note around MPS is we've essentially spent a lot of this year establishing the new platform and rolling out the new platform this year. That rollout was really happening in the second half, frankly, in the latter part of the second half of the year. So a lot of the benefits from that haven't really been realized at this point in time. But we've been encouraged by the digital adoption and the like on this platform, which hasn't translated into significant revenues in 2022 or something amortizing. This is why where I would have wanted to give you Q4 numbers but we would have been persistent and everybody during the presentation to be like how are we doing, talking about full year in Q4 because it's really in Q4 actually November, December and you see the runout that MFS is high because you see the digital subscribers coming in, the merchants coming in, the revenue coming in significantly, the NPS really staying high with some really good results on our trials.

Operator, Operator

We'll now go to Klas Danielson at Nordea.

Klas Danielsson, Analyst

Sorry, submissions with the new patent here in Stockholm. So no, I was only going to ask questions on the acquisition but Michele's scared me a bit to here, so I'm going to avoid that. But can you give me your med card? And you have those over line, you just showed it and I was like, okay, that works. It's a good gesture, I think, for sure. A couple of follow-ups, I guess, on Stefan's question on the CapEx levels. So I mean, you had cash CapEx of roughly $960 million in 2022. You guided for $1 billion previously. I guess that's been the kind of headline numbers, I guess. And that's kind of despite inflation being what it is to a certain degree and just the impact that is having. So I guess it's partly due to a slowing momentum in home during this year. But I think with Project Everest, I mean you're guiding for additional CapEx cuts. But then on the flip side, you still want to invest in the home business. Could you maybe talk about some of the kind of puts and takes within the CapEx older? Is this a sustainable level in the long term? Or what should we be expecting in absolute CapEx spend over the next few years?

Mauricio Ramos, CEO

I'll provide some details, and perhaps Sheldon can clarify further. We've been investing significantly, typically around $1 billion, but this time we're coming in under that figure while maintaining a strong CapEx-to-sale ratio and CapEx intensity over the past three years. This is due to our ongoing investments in the business; we are emerging from a substantial investment cycle, and most of the major fixed costs are behind us. We've modernized everything in the last three years and implemented 5G across all operations. We have defined our capabilities within the existing CapEx framework. We're nearing completion on the Colombia 700 project, which is now in the past. Regarding fixed infrastructure, we face some pressure from Stefan's inquiry, but our focus remains on fixed buildouts. We are now close to 13 million passes, with 700 million of those already equipped with fiber, allowing us to significantly expand our customer base. As highlighted during our Investor Day, our existing network is deeply integrated with fiber and capacity. Most copper upgrades have been completed; we only have about 200,000 to 300,000 homes left with copper that we need to address. With respect to fixed, we have enhanced our FTTH operations, which will improve our reverse logistics. The major investment efforts are largely completed, and moving forward, spending will be more variable. This year has yielded positive results, and I believe our CapEx performance will continue to be strong.

Sheldon Bruha, CFO

I would like to add a few comments about Project Everest. From a capital expenditure perspective, I anticipate significant savings, particularly concerning our bottom line figures. There are opportunities related to capital expenditures that indicate we will receive more value for our spending rather than simply reducing costs. Additionally, the other aspect of capital expenditures that we've been discussing throughout the call will depend largely on the demand and pace of new home additions next year. This year's figures were slightly lower, leading to a corresponding decrease in our spending. Project Everest focuses on enhancing efficiency and digital capabilities, which aligns with our long-term objectives. It's not about making cuts; rather, it's about improving efficiency moving forward.

Klas Danielsson, Analyst

All right. No, very good. And then just a quick follow-up also on that side but the other line, I guess, on the spectrum and licenses part because there you're also tracking a bit lower than what we were kind of expecting since the CMD. Is this the kind of full level? Or again, what should we kind of expect on that side?

Sheldon Bruha, CFO

I think we said spectrum under our Investor Day we track 100 to 150 kind of where we were from before. I'll tell you as the structure is very lumpy. Any given year, you have to depend on whether something didn't happen and didn't get delayed. So don't read too much into any given year and rather take the averages and go back some time. I'm sure part of your question has to do with the Colombia spectrum. I would imagine there's a large chunk of that. Just the question is going to come up later and use yours is a good segue to go into it. We're in the middle of those negotiations this year as you're very well aware. So I'd rather not comment too much, only to say that we're not really expecting enterprises against our targets over the long term because we've been conservative in that regard as we should be. It does not need to say class that spectrum prices in our region mean how we should be for international began. It just means that we are conservative and realistic in our approach to forecasting as a result. We don't expect surprises.

Operator, Operator

So next, we're going to go to an undetermined point in the discussion.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

I have three questions. First, could you provide more details about your pricing activities across different markets? You've mentioned some already, but considering the current inflation and your service revenue growth, it seems challenging to keep pace with inflation. Could you elaborate on how this is developing? Are the price increases primarily for new contracts or for existing ones, and are you seeing any reductions in spending? My second question is about Everest. I wanted to clarify that the $100 million in annual savings is expected to help you meet or potentially exceed your guidance. Additionally, although it may not be part of Project Everest, I assume that the increased financing costs due to higher interest rates might affect your free cash flow. Could you comment on that? Lastly, I'd like to ask about the context of the deal. Do you need to adhere to U.S. regulations, Swedish regulations, or both?

Sheldon Bruha, CFO

Definitely, that is going to be used for that; we're not going to be going there. But the first three are good for you, Mauricio.

Mauricio Ramos, CEO

All right. So I'm going to hand over the end to our Everest expert. Right? Give me actually in that time at risk, by the way. So we'll hand one and I'll take the pricing one right after that. I'm not sure what the third one was?

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

Just on whether that kind of propels us, I think, beyond what we're discussing in the free cash flow range. I believe I mentioned some of the earlier comments that support the 10% organic operating cash flow growth that we've been talking about.

Sheldon Bruha, CFO

That just help support the company that targets not to the supplemental to that target. With regards to the interest expense cost, look, from that perspective, I comment quite rightly, we're pretty well positioned in this environment of increasing interest rates. More than 80% of our debt is fixed rate. So we have a very low one that's actually floating and exposed to. We don't have a lot of debt maturities here in the near term which you've shown in our maturity profile. So there's not a lot of need for us to be going out the repricing destinies current environment. So we felt that's positive. And then, of course, even better than that, we've generated some good cash here that were going to be used to reduce leverage and you would probably even reduce our need to go out and the capital markets for financing. So on a deleveraging standpoint, which is positive from that perspective too. So we think we're pretty insulated and well-positioned in the strategic issue.

Mauricio Ramos, CEO

So let me try the pricing math in a constructive manner with a little bit of detail and also some big pictures to share with that. So let's split the question in the segment. So you get a better feel for what's going on state whether you're doing prepaid favors, residential broadband book. So prepaid because it's dynamic pricing on a daily basis or as some of our new top office fans and comprise market, it largely is done, of course, on the gross basis. In most of the markets, we've been adjusting as much as we can. And there is price sensitivity and elasticity, with the exception of also market where we've been more careful, like I already talked about, of course, in Bolivia, where our competition has kept competition significant on prepaid. We've not been able to do that. With the exception of those two markets, everywhere else, we will be pricing up to the new offer as much as we can in general terms. When you look at postpaid, the same is true; we focus with the price increases on the new offers rather than under base, we're a lot more careful with the days because you don't want to create a big massive difference between the two. And generally, we've been very good at doing that, particularly in El Salvador, Paraguay, and we see positive results. We're actually being able to do that in Guatemala as well. We've held back in Panama for the reasons that I think Sheldon mentioned. We're also being a little bit more careful for the same reasons. So that gives you an idea on that. And then on home, I talked about has been very price-sensitive. So we've been slowly putting price increases. And we do this on a poll, right? We don't do it to everyone in the same day. We do a small regime. This is across the region in a measured way with some delay in Bolivia to get the position back to do. Now your question had an element to okay, what's the mismatch, I think it is a word you used of this one I wrote down, there's a indiscernible. So inflation which is part of your question, it hits the cost base immediately; it hinges that and we've shown you the impact on energy, which we've been able to observe on labor, which we've been able to observe on the bottom line but we're not able to pass on inflation on pricing with the same level of experience in terms of timing. So there's a mismatch in time. As I think I've shown, we need to manage ARPU a little more into next year. That's part of managing that site. Now being careful with expectation, we all know that elasticity does not have a high factor to find inflation into customers; there are some screens or some varieties, et cetera. And that's just part of this initiative. So I hope that gives you a lot of color point on the timing of it and some expectations on where it's possible.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

Absolutely. Just a follow-up on the home, just to make sure I understand clearly, you are also increasing the front book and the back book, both.

Sheldon Bruha, CFO

Based on the growth.

Operator, Operator

We'll now go to Fannie at HSBC.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

I have a couple of questions. It's been a year since the Investor Day when guidance was provided, and I want to understand our current position on a couple of issues. First, at that time, we anticipated organic service revenue growth would be in the mid-single digits. Is that still achievable, or will the project offset any weaknesses? Secondly, we were told share buybacks would start in 2023. Is that still in the plan, or is it too early to provide details? I will ask other questions later.

Mauricio Ramos, CEO

Sheldon is having a lot of fun today because these are both for him.

Sheldon Bruha, CFO

I believe in the first year we are reiterating some of the targets we set during the Capital Markets Day. The key points include an organic cash flow growth of 10% over the next three years and a debt-free cash flow target of $800 million to $1 billion within the same timeframe. We also have a deleveraging target aiming for bioscience at 2.5 times by 2025, reducing to 2 times thereafter. We discussed at the Capital Markets Day our intention to initiate share buybacks in 2023, and we remain committed to that goal. However, the world has changed significantly over the past year, and we are now facing a riskier environment with tougher capital markets and higher interest rates. We will see how the year unfolds. In the immediate term, our focus will be on deleveraging and reducing our debt, as we believe this is the best use of capital to meet our targets. Although we aim for buybacks in the near term, it is still our ambition. My soccer coach used to say to remember that soccer matches last 90 minutes, and it's important to keep playing until the final whistle.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

And just a final question on the fixed competition. As you said that the competition is not responding to your price increases. Is there any specific market that is not responding? Or is it a broad-based kind of a response from the operators? Any specific markets or competitors?

Mauricio Ramos, CEO

Yes, regarding our board and if I'm good to proceed. We discussed the important area in Colombia, focusing on the current market conditions. I've already mentioned our position in Colombia. The mobile market there has been significantly adjusting its pricing over the last few quarters. Our prepaid ARPU in local currency has increased by 6%, and postpaid is also on the rise. Both the prepaid and postpaid segments are now contributing to our mobile growth in Colombia, which is at 13% to 15%. This growth is driven by an increase in volume as well as rising prices. It's crucial to note that the market behavior is positive, reflecting that it’s a two-player market with healthy market shares. We anticipate that Guatemala and Panama will also maintain a healthy market share. We talked about Panama, noting that there has been a pullback on price changes as we capitalize on our market. Paraguay is performing well with consistent service revenue growth for six or seven consecutive quarters, margin expansion, and pricing restructuring. I believe I've addressed all pertinent points.

Operator, Operator

So that was our last question. Mauricio, back to you, if you want to make any final remarks.

Mauricio Ramos, CEO

Okay, that's it. We had an investor call about a year ago; we laid out a number of initiatives. And as you do point out, we gave a three-year outlook that is composed of three key targets: 10% organic cash flow both in average for that period, derivative equity free cash flow of $1 billion and reducing leverage to 2.5 by 2025, 2x by long term. All I need to say is that the first year that consists of is on track. And that's really the summary on this. The second point is we've made a couple of big acquisitions over the last few years, both Guatemala and Anima. Both are working. As I hope you can see, after a year Guatemala and about two years Panama, that they are on track to our acquisition plans. Thank you for joining today.

Operator, Operator

Thank you.