welcome back to "Chills with TFC." Today we have a special someone in studio, right? Yes, very special. Very special, right? Yeah. I feel like we level up after he come on the show. Yes, today Anthony will be joining me as a co-host. Are you excited? Yes. Very. I came all the way down here just to record this. Yeah. I know. You skip lunch, right, to do this? I skip lunch. Yeah. Oh, wow. Thank you. I gave up a sleepless night tonight to finish work. Yeah. It's rough to be here. We prepared. Yes. We're very excited for this. Today we're joined with Arthur. Hello. Group CFO of Singtel. Wow. Nice to meet you all. Hi. Hi. Yeah. Yes. Great. Other than your role, right? Sure. Everybody already knows your role. Yes. Introduce a little bit about yourself. I'm Arthur Lang. As Reggie said, I'm the Group CFO of Singtel. I also look after the international business portfolio for Singtel. Also, I'm on the board and really the Singtel point person for GXS, which is Singapore's first digital bank, right? It's a joint venture between Grab and us. On the personal side, I'm a pretty boring guy, not so interesting, right? I'm a father of three and a husband of one. Okay. Yeah, I've got three very funny people, as in they always crack me up. Enjoy really hanging out with the three of them and my wife as well. Nice. Good feeling. Father of three and still do so many things. Yeah. No. Setting and being settled. Yeah. My wife very supportive. Always. Always thank the wife. Yeah. Yes. We have a lot of questions for you because you have a strategic reset for Singtel. Yes Many other things that you want to share with us. Correct. Anthony, you want to start? Yeah. I think we want to dive a bit deeper. Yes apart from the real heart of press statements, right? Definitely, yes. Maybe just to I mean, everybody knows who Singtel is, obviously. Yes. Even if you don't know the company, you know that internet, mobile, that sort of thing. Yeah. That's fine. Of course, you mentioned GXS, right? Yes. Singtel has multiple business arms- Yeah in the digital space. I think maybe to help set the stage a bit, in 2021, there was an announcement of a strategic reset- Correct in your latest earnings a week, two weeks ago, that you say that's been completed. I think that's right? Yes, that's right. Yes. Maybe take us through that history first, right? What prompted the strategic reset and subsequently, why do we say it's completed, and has it been a success? Okay. Well, let me start when this whole strategic reset came. It was really a time Singtel went through a bit of a transition in 2021, where in a matter of a year, Singtel had a new chairman, a new CEO, a new CFO, right? That was you, right? In Singtel. That was me. Also the previous CEO, Sorcun, had retired, and a few other senior members retired, and the chairman also stepped off because his term was up. It was a bit of a new appointments within a short period of time, and it was also a time when this was Singtel going through a challenging period because like Telco, right? Yeah. Always getting into a lot of headwinds with the trend of digitalization and the OTTs coming in to potentially eat our lunch and all that. The industry was going through a challenging time. At the same time, we were coming out of COVID. We had major difficulties and challenges in India with our investment in Airtel. Just generally, it was a time when the new management team coming together had to focus and really figure out what we needed to do. Okay. The rules that we were playing with at that time just had to change because the game has changed. That was really what triggered the strategic reset. Hence the name. Yeah. It's a reset. It's a reset. Reset. Yes. Right. It served the previous strategy, the previous management, it served them well because the context was very different. This was pre-COVID. With COVID and all that, there were new challenges, and we really had to not only face the challenges but capitalize on new trends- Yep right, that we were seeing in the market. Yeah. I think everybody's interested in the new trends that you want to capitalize, right? Sure. Yes. The strategy and all that. All right. Before we go there, just want to get a little sense of, I mean, you named a few things. Yes Based on the strategic reset that you guys went for. Yeah. Maybe you can share with us what worked a little bit better in the reset. Okay. Yes What maybe didn't turn out so well. Didn't turn out okay. Yes. All that. Yes. What did you do? Okay. Not to praise ourselves, but I think we did a pretty good job in the last three years, but not perfect. Okay. What we did well, I think one of the key strategic pillars of the reset was to really carve out and what we call scale up on our growth engines. The growth engines we identified were our data center business or broadly, digital infrastructure. The second one is IT services, which is NCS. Okay. Actually, a little known fact before this reorg was that we were one of the largest owners of data centers in Singapore, and we were Southeast Asia's largest IT services provider. Oh, okay. It was all kept under our enterprise business, and it was mixed with mobile, fixed broadband. People didn't quite realize the potential of that. What we did was we restructured the business. We carved it out as a standalone. Today our data center business is called Nxera. Yep. The other one, IT services, is NCS, as you all know, right? I would say that's one major move, and it made people realize that we actually are more than just Telco. At the same time, Nxera, we last year brought in a very big investor, KKR, to take a 20% stake in our data center business. Not only did the industry kind of wake up to the valuation was quite an attractive one for us, but it was a big win-win between KKR and us as well. KKR needed a data center platform, and we also needed a good partner to grow quite exponentially in this part of the world. It was a good partnership, and now we are very much locked in together and we're looking at opportunities to scale up. The other one was NCS, IT services arm, right? Which today is Southeast Asia's largest, and it's really capitalizing on the digitalization trend that we're seeing. Companies, big, small, mom and pop shops, everyone needs to digitalize, right? Especially post-COVID. We saw this trend, and we like this trend. This is not just digitalization individually trying to get onto an app to do payments, digital payments. That's more retail focus on consumer. This is enterprise- where companies, small and big, needed to really digitalize their systems. That's where NCS comes in. We do serve, one of our largest customers is Singapore government/ various ministries and agencies. We also have financial institutions, airport, transportation arms as customers as well. We have a decent size in Australia as well. The other thing about our strategic reset is before the strategic reset, as mentioned, we faced a lot of challenges. Especially this thing called 5G. We had to spend billions of SGD in both Singapore and Australia to roll out 5G. At that time, we could only take the cash that came from our operating cash flows. As a result, it was very clear, especially during COVID period, that we could not sustain it. As a result, you might see, and this is public, we cut dividend twice during the COVID period. That, of course, made our stock price really drop. We had to because the 5G bill was so much, so much cash, we needed to reallocate that capital. Since then, we learned from that experience, and we said, "You know what? We cannot just rely on our operating cash flows because our shareholders will want a certain level of dividend." What we needed to do was we said, okay, we introduce this capital recycling program where we said, okay, there are pools of capital, there are assets that we have today that we could potentially monetize, but yet not monetize too much because we want to still control the assets. Because the valuations are at much higher levels if we sell it versus how it's carried on books. Okay. We decided, okay, maybe we can do that. The third element was we relied on private capital, like KKR. to co-invest with us and fund our business. It's smart money. Yes. It's good to really co-invest. During this strategic reset, we basically opened up two additional sources of capital. As a result, that's why we were confident enough. To be very clear that we will grow our dividends in a sustainable way because it's not like just relying on operating cash flows anymore. There are two new sources of capital. Okay. Yeah. Maybe just to clarify a bit on the asset recycling part. Yes. Right? Yeah. It's not really a case of we have slightly underperforming assets or some assets without the required IRR, and we are cutting them and putting them to higher returning assets in that sense. Correct me if I'm wrong. It's more a sense that we want to monetize our assets a bit better. No Whether that's through gearing up or co-investment. Yes. Correct. I would say it also involves selling loss-making businesses. Which was another thing I think we did okay, quite okay, during the strategic reset was we really took a very hard-nosed approach looking at our businesses. There were some businesses which were loss-making despite years of trying to turn it around. We decided, you know what? Many of these businesses were really actually based out of North America. We asked ourselves, "Hey, we are a Southeast Asian player. We know how to operate in this neighborhood. What makes us think we can be successful in another playground?" We decided to take it on the chin, and we sold those businesses. I would say we sold it at a loss. We booked losses, but we decided we just had to take the bitter medicine and sell. Right. Yes, you're right. We sold them, we got some cash back, and these were unprofitable businesses, which means after selling them- They're profitable profits went up. Right. Which was, I guess, in some ways, indirectly a good thing. As a business, you slim down. Yes. You focus on your core markets. We slimmed down. With 5G and all that. Exactly. Correct. 5G this recycling, I would say, is a very nice name, which covers many different things. Yes. It's selling loss-making businesses, you get cash back. It's selling some of our assets. That's what we were doing. Then, of course, the third bit is to bring in co-investors. This is really what we call, in a very nice term, asset recycling or capital recycling. You just now asked, where did we not do well? I am first to admit that while all this, I would say I'll give ourselves a B+ or A- grade, I think where we did not perform, maybe we get a B-, is where our stock price has been. For the last few years, our stock price has been stubbornly not moving, and this is what I call the holdco discount because if you look at the individual businesses that we have, when we valued the data center business at, or rather KKR came in at a valuation of SGD 5.5 billion. If you look at historical EBITDA and applying SGD 5.5 million, it's a 32 times EBITDA multiple. I think it's an industry record in this region. Yes. A few other bankers have said Yes value your price. Exactly right. I would say that our assets are very valuable. We sold towers in Australia at 30 plus times multiple. We sold a 49% stake in our comm center HQ, also at a pretty decent valuation. I would say all this we've done well with illuminated value in our portfolio, but our stock price remains low. In a sense, maybe you kind of see why. It's like with IAC or any of those- Yes where you mesh together multiple businesses. Correct. Some of the parts always looks great on paper. Yes. Correct. At the end of the day, because people have thoughts on synergies, because markets don't understand Correct whatever, right? Correct. Yes. There's always that bit of a discount. That's right. Yes. It's just a matter of how big the discount is. Correct Whether we can close it. I'll tell you what, Roy, I don't know whether we have time, but I'll segue a bit. I was telling some of my senior leadership, the sum of the parts, to put it in very layman's terms, it's like you go to the market, you can buy the whole chicken, which is a certain price. Yes. You buy chicken wing, chicken breast, chicken thigh, some chicken neck or chicken feet. You summon all the different parts, it's actually worth more than the whole chicken itself. Certain people like chicken wing, or some healthier people like chicken breast. They may actually look at it. I'm not saying that our businesses are like chicken parts, but that's, I would say, the simplest analogy of sum of the parts. Of course, the challenge for us now looking forward is to see what we can do to narrow the holdco discount. The hard work has been done. The business part has been fixed. We've also simplified businesses. Actually, that's a very key thing. We've kind of like in Singapore and Australia, last time we got a whole business unit focused on enterprise customers, a whole business unit focused on consumers like you and me. The question is why? Both are serving, are selling data and mobile services and data plans, but why do you differentiate by customer? It should all be one, because if you're a small business owner, do you see when you use Singtel, you differentiate in your mind, oh, I'm actually dealing with Singtel as an individual versus a business owner. You don't. Why do we need to differentiate it like that? We did simplify that, and we did the same thing in Australia. As a result, there were synergies. We can move a lot faster because it's one boss, one team. Yes, sir. Sometimes when too many departments would. Too complicated, right? We all know. We all been there, right? Yeah. It's really complicated. Yeah. Yeah. I think you laid the ground on some of these things that you've done. Going forward, you were talking a little bit about the terrain is different and all that. What is this terrain that you're observing? Because your optics is important. How you look at this thing will determine your strategy and your team. Yeah, how are you looking at the world going forward? I think the first point is maybe if you look at the industry landscape, competition. I would say in certain countries, the industry landscape is more conducive for growth. This is really like India, for example. I mentioned earlier, many years ago, we were going through a very difficult time in India. Why? Because we had 12 competitors, 12 players in the market. Now, because of a lot of industry consolidation and all that, we're down to three main players. Actually two main players and the third smaller one. You will see that as a result, the industry is a little bit more sane. There's not excessive price competition. I think everyone is willing to, number one, you see the industry is growing in a very sustainable way, but more importantly, people are reinvesting back into the network, which is good for the country. Thailand, we're seeing it as well, three players becoming two. Indonesia, I think we're at five becoming four, and now there's rumor that it could be three. As a customer, it's good, right? Yeah. I get cheap data, very good, right? Yeah. In the longer term, it may not be that good because in the longer term, as we have seen in COVID, right? If players are involved and there's excessive price competition, then as a result, you got the players may not want to reinvest back into building out 4G, 5G network. In the longer term, it may not serve the longer-term sustainability of the industry, but we'll see. That's one trend, industry. I think the other bit is geopolitical. For us in Singapore, I think we actually, a little-known fact about Singtel is that we are not just Singapore, we're just not telco. In fact, 70-plus% of our profits come from outside Singapore. Almost 80% of our profits come from outside Singapore. If you look at outside Singapore, I would say this is where I think a lot of our forefathers, our past generations of leaders, they had the foresight to actually make investments into India, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Australia, right? I can tell you, 20, 30 years ago, who would have thought which Singapore company would have dared to go into a lot of these emerging markets? Today, they are all booming. In fact, these markets today are way larger than us in Singapore. That's the growth that we are seeing, and we're pretty excited about it. I think the other thing that we need to watch is, of course, at the end of the day, we always need to make sure that we have excellent relationships with our partners, because there's no way we can succeed alone. We always need very good local partners. In actually all these markets, we have a very strong local partner where we've known them for decades, 20, 30 years, and we trust them, they trust us, and we work together. We have to also realize that at the end of the day, we have to give back to those countries and societies. That's something we need to watch as well, especially in this day and age where geopolitically, I think people are a lot more aware and conscious of geopolitics. Yeah. In a sense, it's a bit of riding that developing market story, right? Yes. Where you made an investment 20, 30 years ago. You have learnt a lot of lessons, suffered a bit of pain. Yes over the past decade. A lot of pain, yes. It was worth it. Now those economies are booming, right? Yes. They are growing. Correct post-COVID period. Correct. Singtel, therefore, is placed to capitalize on that. We will have questions around, well, great additions in India, but what’s the revenue per user, right? Yes. How that leads to your top line and bottom line, I think those are actual issues. I think for the story itself, I think it is quite clear that maybe you can think about Singtel as the developing markets and the regional story, and it is not just the price of 4G or 5G in Singapore that drives Singtel’s top price. The last 10 years, I would say the growth was in mobile- in many of these emerging markets. The next big growth trend is fixed broadband, which is Wi-Fi. Yes. As many of these emerging markets, as they roll out, as households, the rising middle class, people are then more of like they start owning homes. They will want Wi-Fi, that's the next big trend. I'll give you a sense. Today in Singapore, probably almost 100% of our households and offices are wired up. In Indonesia, for example, the penetrations are below 20%. India is probably 30%. Where we were in mobile 10 years ago, we are probably where we are in fixed broadband. The growth is still there. The other area is really our NCS business, our IT services, our data centers. Many of them are starting to build data centers, establish IT service. Many of the companies, the governments are needing IT services. That's where these partnerships are going beyond mobile. We're going into fixed, we're going into data centers, we're going into IT services and all. That's where the growth is. That's why we're pretty excited. All the painful work, I would say, has been largely done in the last three years. It's about cutting fat, right? Building muscle so that we can run faster going forward. Yeah. Actually, I want to ask a little bit more about the 5G situation. Okay. As we all know, this kind of industry level up across the board, right? Yes. Correct. There's a lot of CapEx that goes into- There's a lot of CapEx building this whole thing up, right? Yes. You've rightfully pointed out that at the top, the business front is quite challenging because there's a lot of competition- Yes in this front, right? Correct. If you have 5G, the other party also have 5G. Got 5G. Everybody also got 5G. Yes. Everybody put in truckloads of money. Correct How does it allow you to then capture that business or expand that margin while putting in the CapEx already? Yes, all our competitors are rolling out or have rolled out 5G already. I think where we are is really how we design the network. What do we spend on smartly to create the best coverage and best kind of network across the country? I think the other point that's very important is network security, not just resilience, right? Especially in this day and age where there's a lot of cyberattacks, it's an area that we also need to be very mindful about, and we have certain services that we provide to protect the person using the network. I think the other area is just really being smart about how we use 5G. 5G has the ability, and in Singapore, I would say the regulators are very forward-looking. They have actually wanted their 5G to be what we call Standalone 5G, meaning pure 5G, and where you can use the 5G to slice it up. That means you can have certain slices of 5G to have certain speeds, others for certain to meet different customer needs. In the enterprise space, in factories, we are actually providing the 5G network to Hyundai, where we are producing their autonomous vehicle in Singapore. You know the IONIQ? Yeah. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I think he's got an IONIQ. Oh, you have IONIQ. Okay. Which one? Five or six? Five. Five, okay. Now got six also in the market. Wow. Seriously? It is very much. Hyundai CEO should come on the show. Yes. He must make sure he mention the 5G network for Singtel. Yes. Okay. That is the type of use cases that we can really make it quite differentiated. The factory floor is automated. Of course, got some factory workers and all that, but it's already powered by 5G because you need the high speeds and the low latency for all these autonomous manufacturing. It's become a bit of an industrial use case, I guess, the promise of the Internet of Things and things like that. Correct. That's where the 5G build-out actually comes to the fore and not my mobile data. Correct. That will be the differentiator in the enterprise space. Just to be clear, right? Yes. In other words, all your investment in 5G, you're really looking at monetizing the upside more in the industry side of things. More in the industry for now. Okay. Whereas Although for the consumer, you do see some faster speeds in 5G. Yeah. That has been a bit slower. No, it's about whether you can translate it into the marginal benefit. Exactly From a rev standpoint. Correct. Yes. At this point, that is inconclusive. It's inconclusive, who knows? Next year there might be some new cutting-edge app that requires- That requires 5G. Yes, yes. Correct. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. I think you laid out quite a full picture of where you're looking at. Yes when you guys took over? Yes. What are you looking at? What are you planning to do into the future? Correct. All that good stuff, right? How would you measure that success then? From an investor standpoint, when I look at your story, how should I measure your success three year, five year down the road? I think probably the easiest is look at us from two or three lens, right? I think the first lens is whether we are measuring up in terms of dividend payments, whether it's dividend payouts or dividend yield relative to the other large caps in Singapore. The second area is earnings growth. I do think, yes, as a telco, we are in a difficult industry, but at the same time, I think you have to measure us on our earnings growth year-over-year and whether it's consistent. What we don't want is one year big growth, second year down, third year go up again. We want a consistent, sustainable growth in earnings. I think that's the second measure. I think the third measure is really just see the impact that we create in some of our core business, which is our connectivity business, but also our new businesses. Data centers is something I personally am very excited about because I do think there is a lot of new things that are coming down the pipe that as a data center owner and player, I think there's a very meaningful role we can play, particularly in the advancement of AI. Last week, I think NVIDIA announced their own earnings call, and they actually mentioned Singtel as their partner in this part of the world where we are partnered together, where Singtel will be providing what we call GPU-as-a-Service. We are piloting it. We're putting aside some capital and investing and piloting this later this year to see whether it works. If it works, I think we will have a very solid grounding in it because we have the right partners. Just to be clear on that, essentially, you're betting on the idea that enterprises will move away from the SaaS layer to the platform layer. To the platform layer. They will build their own stuff. Yes They will engage your GPU in that sense. Okay. That's why we need GPU-as-a-Service. Yeah. Yeah. That's your theory. That's the theory. The theory is that I think the first belief you need to have is whether companies, governments, enterprises, will want to move into AI. Our Singapore government is very forward-looking. I think they do believe AI is something that they want to spend time and invest in. The larger companies, I think many of them have realized that AI actually is a game changer. The medium-sized companies, the smaller companies, I think because they're still trying out or they're still testing it. That's where what we potentially can provide is where we come in because we're saying, look, you don't have to invest millions of SGD into AI because you know what? You may not realize you may not need it, right? The companies, yeah, AI is a very sexy thing, it really depends on the company, whether how they're going to use it to improve their business. They can rely on what the service we can provide, you can buy bite-size capacity. You don't need to sign up for some crazy amount of capacity in one go, you buy it through bite-size. Think of it as like the hotel business where you book a room for one night or six nights or a whole month, right? Yeah. A bit like service apartment you can decide. This is where I think the flexibility, I think it's important as companies decide whether they want to migrate to the platform layer to test out AI. Because it's quite interesting, right? There was a whole decade of SaaS companies just growing. I kind of think about it the other way around. This is really just an analog to people moving from on-prem to the cloud, right? Yeah. Okay. Instead of having your own server racks and maintaining that, you have an external third-party service provider who can do everything, maybe provide a few more services, and you pay them money subscription. That's not a fresh business. Yeah. It's been out there for a while. I mean, the shift to the cloud, if you listen to Amazon, it's like, "We are 20% in," right? Yeah, yeah. Yes. This is analogous, where you sell the service. Okay. Yes. Instead of having to buy the NVIDIA GPU or having to build your own data center, you go, "Oh, I have somebody who can provide me that service. I pay them either by utilization or however your business model wants to work. Yes. I get the benefit of that service. Okay. Maybe I can try it out first. Yes. If it works, then I steadily grow. Correct. Yes. If I try it out and AI doesn't really work, then that's fine. You limit your loss. Correct. The key differentiator here is that the provider needs to have, number one, data center capacity, which is in significant shortage here in Singapore. Yeah, I know. Even if someone I tried to rent a rack. It was so hard to find. If someone wants to even want to start a data center business, there's no supply. Good luck. Yeah. It's like, you must know people to know people to even get a space. Yeah. All my templates. Yeah, correct. That's one. Two is also customers. You need customers that trust the provider. There are a lot of security concerns here, right? As you all can imagine. I think that's where we are quite differentiated. We have the customer base, given our very large enterprise business. We have capacity. We have, in fact, set aside capacity. Not only just capacity, but we need to focus on green capacity. Especially Singapore, it has a 2045 goal to go net zero. Data center is a big power guzzler. Any data center provider here, I think it's a distinct advantage if we can position ourselves as a green data center powered by green power or in a very sustainable way. Even water or what do you call that? The cooling. The cooling technologies and all that. I think the third point is, of course, the partnership with NVIDIA, because you need the chips. That perhaps is why NVIDIA also decided to go with us because of some of the differentiators that we provide. I agree with you. Over time, we need to also evolve our business model to make sure that it's sustainable. Yeah. Customers over time may decide, hey, I don't want to use AI, or I want to double down on AI myself. Two metrics we're going to measure on, right? Dividend and earnings growth. Dividend, earnings growth. Yeah, earnings growth. I would say third is the innovation that you will see coming out of Singtel, whether it's in this new business or even in the product offering we provide in our core business. Hey, welcome to the Financial Coconut Podcast Network. I'm your host, Reggie, AKA your Chief Financial Coconut, and if you are loving what we are creating here, like, share, subscribe, share with your loved ones, comment in the comment section below, and yeah, we'll see you for great content on Chills with TFC. I think in the last earnings, you've mentioned this thing called Singtel28? Yes. Is that to 2028 or? Yes, I think we do think that by 2028, we need to convince the markets that this Singtel28 is a success. It's a bit like our strategic reset. When we first established it, after three years, we thought, "Okay, we're done with that." It's really what I call, if you look at people's lives, this is a company's journey. That three-year strategic reset was really a period of, I would say, transformation. The next three, maybe five years, is part of this ST28, is really about growth. I talked about dividends. Yes. I hope I can grow dividends, and I also hope we can grow earnings, right? It's really about growth. 28 is kind of within the three to five-year mark. Yes. That's why we picked 28. Yeah. is there any, I don't know if you can say this, actually. Are you able to give any guidance as to what you expect the growth to be? Okay. In terms of profits, right? Yes. Just impact. We gave guidance for the immediate year. That is this financial year. The guidance we gave was EBIT. Yeah Earnings before interest and tax, to grow at high single digits or low double digit. That means call it anywhere between eight and 13%. or something like that. We do feel quite confident that we can do that. Just to give you perspective, the last three years we were at kind of mid to low single digit type of EBIT growth. Right. I think it was between 3% and 6% type. Now that, as I mentioned earlier, all the difficult things have been done, we're quite confident going forward it will be high single digits or low double digits. I'm actually quite excited because if you look at today, our dividend, it's call it around 6%, right, at today's dividend yield, today's price. If we can exhibit an earnings growth of, let's say, 10%, just pick a number. Right? It's somewhere in between that range. It's actually pretty good if you compare ourselves to the different large-cap companies in Singapore. I think what's also very good to pointing out, in an interest rate environment where it probably in the next few years, today, this year is still very high, but it will come down. I think people are saying this is probably the max, the peak. In an interest rate environment where it's actually decreasing, I think we'd have a better story than, let's say, a bank, right? Yes. Because banks actually benefit from a high interest rate environment. Fair. It even goes to the level of how some of these credit cards are no longer giving as much awards. Because there's no need to. Right? Exactly. Interest rates are high. Yes. You can make good money from that, right? You can make good money, yes. I think, like you pointed out. Yeah the environment going forward will be slightly different. Correct. Yeah, the macro has changed. Investors will look at different things. I guess from your perspective as well. Yeah If there's lowering interest rates, then your CapEx costs actually decrease a bit, your debt load decreases. Yes a bit. It's actually a good thing for Singtel as well. Correct. From your view. Yes. Correct. Yeah. I think, in a sense, it's still firing on all cylinders. You have kind of narrowed down the business focuses. Yes to those few areas, now it's just executing and growing those business. Yes. Right? Exactly. I think it's really hard-nosed approach to just really roll up your sleeves and hunker down and deliver. Yeah, actually that. Okay me to mind, maybe we have been spoiled by the U.S. markets. The most famously, Amazon. We don't really care about profit. Whatever spare cash we have, free cash flow, operating cash flow, we just chuck it back into our business. The stock price will move up. Yeah, we grow our stock price. Yes. We do some share buyback. Yes to offset dilution, buy back. Yeah our stock awards and things like that. Yes. Even though you are trying for growth. Yes that doesn't seem to be the model you are operating on. You are still looking at having a very consistent dividend payout, and I think quite a high dividend payout ratio as well. Yes. Yeah. Well, okay. If you look at, let's say, on your point about growth, I'm not going to kid ourselves where if you look at The Magnificent Seven. Yes. in the U.S., their earnings growth is like in the double digits, 20%, 30%. Yeah plus. 30% is low, right? 30% is low. Correct. You know. We're a telco. I think even if we can deliver low to mid-teens earnings growth, that is actually across the telco industry or I think it's very good for a telco It's very good. The other important point is, if you look at our shareholder base, actually first Singapore stocks in general, the investors do look for dividend. Whether it's a REIT, whether it's a bank, whether it's one of the big Temasek-linked companies or anything like, and Singtel. We are very cash generated business, people do look at dividend. That's the other point. I think it matters to our shareholders. I think the other point is we are also very widely held by Singaporeans in general, and they do look at dividend. It does not mean that we plow back everything we earn into dividend and then we don't grow. The reason why we can still grow 10%+, or at least EBIT, we're saying up to low double-digit, is we've got two buckets. We return 70% to, or our policy is 70%-90% of underlying profits. If our underlying profit grows 10%, which actually what happened in our recent earnings result, even if I stick to a one payout level, the fact that your underlying net profit moves up by 10% means your absolute dividend goes up by 10%. a 10% dividend growth is pretty good. It's great. Very respectable. Yeah. Very respectable. Only that's just one bucket of your dividend. The other thing which we added in, okay, and we were trying to come up with some nice term, it's called value realization dividend. Okay. Actually, I forgot one more word, programmatic. Right. Okay. In very simple terms, we talk a lot about this asset recycling and all that. The feedback that we've heard from investors during the strategic reset period, the three years, we recycle about SGD 2 billion-SGD 3 billion to fund growth. Three years have passed. We've raised SGD 8 billion, and the model seems to have proven itself, and it has been very successful. This SGD 8 billion was used to fund growth in our NCS, in our data center business, because part of the SGD 8 billion came from KKR. It also used to pay down debt, and you can see the benefits of that because in these three years, interest rates probably tripled. Our interest expense actually dropped by 16%, and we paid down quite a bit of debt. If only the REIT did that. Huh? If only the REIT did that. If only the REIT did that. Okay. I know. I didn't quite follow. That was my previous life. My previous life. Yeah. Okay. The other thing was we returned SGD 800 million as a special dividend, that's SGD 8 billion. A lot of investors say, "Hello. You recycle SGD 8 billion. You're only returning me, the Mr. or Miss Shareholder, 10% of it." We take the investor feedback and we say, "Okay. Going forward, we commit" That's why we say programmatic. That means it's not one-off, not a special dividend. It is embedded into our dividend policy that we will look to return SGD 0.03 to SGD 0.06 per share of value realisation dividend every year. Which means that if you believe in our capital recycling model, and you believe that we will return it, we will get additional SGD 0.03 to SGD 0.06 on top of your core dividend at 70%-90%. I know we call this asset recycling. Yes in reality, it's divestment of stakes and reductions of stakes and things like that. It involves two things. One is, yes, maybe it is selling off minority stakes and doing that. The other bit is bringing in capital partners to fund our business. I want to clarify something. This asset recycling, right, is not just to fund the value realisation dividend. Yeah. To backtrack, just now I mentioned SGD 8 billion, right. We still have SGD 2 billion left that is excess. Out of that SGD 2 billion, we have taken SGD 650 million that we have returned already. We still have SGD 1.4 billion left of excess capital that we can fund for the future. We have also said to the market we have identified SGD 6 billion of pipeline. This SGD 6 billion pipeline is not everything returned to shareholder. The fundamental thing is we are recycling for growth, to invest into all the things we talked about earlier. If there is any excess, which we believe we have, out of that SGD 6 billion, we will also return it as a VRD, which is part of that SGD 0.03-SGD 0.06. Three cents, to be clear again, is about SGD 500 million, I think. SGD 500 million-SGD 1 billion, or actually, to be very exact, SGD 450 million-SGD 900 million a year. We already have SGD 1.4 billion for the next few years because we are paying out about SGD 600 over million already. I think we can fund this, and then if people believe that this SGD 6 billion is real, right, we have recycled SGD 8 billion, then this is something that can be sustained. At least for the next three to- It is part of this cycle, right. We did say it's part of this journey. This Singtel28. Correct, 28. The other thing about ST28, in addition to the capital management, which is not just about the VRD, but it's also to bring in capital partners to fund our growth. Actually, if I have time, I should maybe talk a bit more about it. The reason why we bring in capital partners like KKR is because today, data center, as an example, is a very capital-intensive business. All your business are capital-intensive. I know. 5G also very capital-intensive, right? I know. Except NCS. Correct. Very true. All capital saving. All very CapEx saving. How can we say, "Mr. Shareholder, three years, next three years, I don't pay you a dividend. I take this money and invest in data center." We will get hammered by the market. We also cannot say, we don't want to invest, right? To your point, right? We cannot just pay out dividend and don't invest. We rely on private capital because they see, or they are rather patient capital. They don't need dividends in year one, but they want a good return in year seven, year eight. They come along with us on that journey. They invest in data centers. They go through the cash burn period for the first few years, and then year five, year six, when it's time for them to exit, that business is really cash generative. In the meantime, we protect our core dividend, right? We don't use that because again, like 5G, as you rightly said, we got only one source of capital. That's why we had to cut dividend. That's why the capital management policy is about bringing in private capital, and it's also about returning some of the excess capital to our shareholders. That's capital management. You're right, this party can't last forever. At least we're confident it can go up to five years. Yeah. What we also, the other leg of Singtel28 is now that the hard part is over. Not that the future is going to be very easy, but the next big hard part is really what we call lifting the core performance. All the difficult things, we combine, we cut costs, we sell loss-making businesses. Now, whatever's left behind better deliver, and they have to generate the profits, that double-digit or the low double-digit earnings growth that we are guiding. This has to grow, right? If this grows, based on the 70%-90%, we can easily pay more dividends. Yeah over the years, right? If we can maintain our 10%, hopefully it can grow every year. Over time, you will see that the core dividend will move up. The VRD will stay within SGD 0.03-SGD 0.06. Maybe next year, if the core does very well, we could pay a bit less than SGD 0.048 and then slowly shift down, and that's how we kind of mix it up, what's important is the overall total dividend. Hopefully, we can grow on a sustainable basis. Nice. Just to go back, circle back on two things, right? Yeah. One, on the KKR private capital thing, I think that really makes sense. Yes If you look at all sorts of infrastructure, it's always that heavy CapEx build-up at the front end. Yes. That medium, long-term recurring cash flow, right? Exactly. Correct. 10, 15-year payback period. Yes. What you're doing is essentially getting somebody in to help fund that period. First few years. Yes. You don't have as much cash outlay. Correct. You can return a bit to shareholders. Yes. That's essentially leverage for you. Precisely. Yeah. Subsequently, you hopefully get a bit of the boom towards the end. Yeah. I think that makes sense. Secondly, it sounds a bit like with all the initiatives, there's a bit of, in growth investing terms, this flywheel coming up, right? Mm-hmm. Yes. You have your data centers as your platform. That's precisely correct. You have your GPU as your service. Yes. You have your MC as your implementation. Correct. Yes. You can, in a sense, become that one-stop shop. One-stop shop. We've got the 5G network. You have the 5G network that actually underpins all of this. If I must say, right, and I have to say, we have the number one 5G network in Singapore, right. That's a must-win. Correct. Yes. That's the flywheel. Precisely. That's how we're looking at it. The other point also to mention for the kind of bringing in KKR for that patient capital, it is also not selling our stakes at bargain basement prices. We, of course, work very well with KKR and with private capital, but it has to come with a punchy valuation that we are happy with, right? I must caveat that. Which is why there's the 35x, right? Yeah. There's 35x multiple. Yeah. Correct. Yes. The other PE funds you have spoken to shake their head and go, "How? How? Seriously. Crazy. Actually, I want to add one more question in, right? Yeah. You're talking about flywheel. Yes. We're talking about flywheel, trying to be a bit lighter, in terms of asset, right? Right. Just wondering, data center is such a heavy CapEx thing, and then it's such a thing these days to push out a REIT, on the side- recycle it and open it up-. All that. Yeah. Then you just operate it, right? Yes. Are you going to do something like that? Is it part of your discussion? I think in the next two years probably. Probably not, because I think we're in that still growth scaling up stage. We're not saying no. Eventually, if it makes sense for our shareholders, we will definitely consider it. I do think my gut feel is in the short, in this year or next year, probably not, because now we're in growth mode. Not only growth mode, we got currently three data centers that we are constructing in Singapore, Batam and Bangkok, and we just have to focus and make sure all of them get completed so we can provide the capacity to our customers. Fair. Just for clarity's sake. Yes You believe that there's a lot more asset appreciation even at that data center-. We do level over the next few years. Yes. When you think that there's no more, then you try to recycle it. Actually, I think the other way around. Now we still have private capital, as we've talked about. There will come a time when public capital is also needed, because this thing requires a lot of capital to grow. The REIT will allow us to grow even bigger. To your point, yes, we do believe in this space because at the end of the day, we are going to use more and more of our phones, and we're kind of connecting digitally a lot more. AI just turbocharges the whole demand. We do believe in this space. Not only we have data center capacity, we have submarine cables that we own across the region that we connect these data centers. All these are actually very valuable infrastructure. We have fiber broadband in Singapore. The whole fiber network as well. I do think we have a right to play. Okay, fair. Yeah. I think as an operator- Yeah that is probably right. Yeah, I think that's fair. Yeah. I guess one last part. Yeah We touched about this briefly as well. It's really just around valuation, right? Okay. I know we have talked a bit about some of the parts and things like that. I know there's talk about that really your strategy to share price changes. Yes is really to still stick to the dividend story because that's a function of a shareholder base. Yes. Maybe a bit of a recharacterization as a dividend grower. Because even within. Yeah dividend play. Dividend grower there's many different Correct supports and a nice category to put you in. Okay. Yes. Would be dividend growth. Yeah. I guess besides that, and maybe even more broadly, traditionally, how do holdco discounts get reduced? Actually, on the dividend growth part, yes, we definitely are focused on growing dividends in a sustainable manner. Maybe it's perhaps more accurate to call ourselves total return play. Okay. Which is dividend plus earning or share price growth. Where overall is a total return play, and today, I don't know, shareholders expect maybe 10% annual total return or more or less, thereabout. To your point about what can we do to narrow the holdco discount, I think it's just, number 1, just deliver on the results. If people are convinced that our strategic reset, all the transformation work has been done and is successful, it would set us up for a very strong foundation to deliver growth as part of this ST28 time. We need to deliver. From an operational standpoint. We need to show earnings growth. Number 2, we got to make sure continuing our returning of the capital to our shareholders. Then people realize, wow, I as the shareholder, am also benefiting from all the work that Singtel is working on. I think we will then get rewarded with our share price. As the share price goes up, our holdco discount will be narrowed because of returning the capital, equally important is we need the earnings growth. Our operational performance needs to lift. You've seen our underlying profits. We have actually been growing quite decently, I think now we need a bit of a step change. I do think we do, because we sold our loss-making businesses. We've cut costs. It'll be quite weird if after the reset then- I know. I agree. Knock on wood. Got to make sure we deliver. I think we feel quite confident that we can grow this. Yes. Great. Great. I think we're good. I've touched on a lot of good stuff. Yes. Any last things for investors or the fans? Okay. I think we talked a lot about more technical, finance, stock market stuff. At the end of the day, we do believe Singtel as the 800-pound gorilla here in Singapore. We also have a bigger kind of duty that we need to play. We are definitely by far the largest, the most widely held stock more than any others because we have this CPF scheme. We have, I don't know, 700,000 retail investors. You can go and check. We are by far, I think OCBC is the number two, but by a mile. I think we all know that we have a certain duty to our shareholders as well. We are very cognizant. We want to deliver. As I said, I am quite confident we can. That's something I would say, at the end of the day, we need to deliver on results. We know we have a bigger purpose, bigger kind of duty that we need to perform in Singapore. At the end of the day, it's people. The only way we can deliver on earnings growth, do asset recycling, is we need to find the best people and to be able to retain them. The culture of the organization needs to also attract that kind of talent and people. Yeah. You support work from home? Actually, we support flexibility. Nice. We actually are very focused on, we're saying, okay, you come into work, but if certain things, if your parent, your child, your brother, your sister, you need to stay at home for whatever reason, or your helper take leave or whatever, we are actually taking a very open approach to that. I think that one is important. At the end of the day, people will give their all to the company if they know the company is taking care of them, on the personal side. All of us are children, all of us could be parents, your husband, your spouse, your girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever. All of us have some role to play at home. Nice. Thank you. Thank you for your time. No, thank you. We actually thanks Anthony. All the best. It was nice to catch up. Yeah. Thanks, National Stadium. Okay. Yeah. I hope I got angpao or something. Okay, great. Thank you.