session. I'd like to welcome back Digital Realty to our conference. From the far right, we have Jordan Sadler, who is the head of investor relations, and then we have Matt Mercier, to my immediate left, the Chief Financial Officer. Welcome, both. Thanks for having us. Thank you. I want to start with some general questions, and then we'll get into things like customer behavior, project economics, talk a little bit about the financial, the outlook, and balance sheet. But maybe just to kind of kick things off, how is Digital Realty adapting its strategy to navigate through macro uncertainties such as interest rates? Yeah. You know, so, you know, so I think a couple things. First off, I think as probably most of you have seen or heard, I mean, we have the benefit of being, I think, in a sector that's driven by, you know, secular demand drivers. And right now, I think we're at one of those points where, you know, we have the benefit of seeing a tremendous amount of demand at a time where supply has been, you know, constrained and limited, and I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about some of those demand drivers. So, you know, I think at a foundational level, you know, we're benefiting from being in that sector and being able to benefit from that positive demand-supply environment. Second, in terms of the business, you know, we've been working over many years to really evolve the company and the business on a few fronts. So, first off, you know, we've been very very specific and intentional about being a global business. We think that that's been hugely important. And you've seen us expand globally over the last, you know, many years, you know, to the point now where we have 300 data centers. We're in over 50 markets, you know, 20+ countries, which really gives us an opportunity to really serve our clients' need across that large embedded portfolio. And second, we've, you know, we've expanded in terms of our product set. So at our, you know, at our core, we've always been a business that's been able to satisfy the hyperscale segment, you know, what we call kind of the greater than a megawatt business. We continue to focus on that business, continue to do well there, again, being able to land and expand across our global portfolio. But we've also been intentional about being and growing our zero to one megawatt interconnection segment of our business. And we've done that, you know, over the last decade through starting with the acquisition of Telx through to Interxion. So it really gives us an ability to not only satisfy our customers' need across the global portfolio, but, you know, across a stack in terms of being able to, you know, provide anywhere from a cage or cabinet all the way to multi-megawatt. And last, you know, somewhat, I'll say more recently, although, you know, joint ventures haven't necessarily, aren't necessarily new to Digital Realty, but we've also been evolving our funding model, as part of being able to adapt and really go after what has been, you know, a tremendous amount of demand in the market today. So you've seen that recently with deals we've done around our stabilized assets, with GI and TPG, more recently with development JV, we've done with Blackstone, which we closed the first phase on, earlier this year. Expect to close the second phase by the end of this year, so and that really is giving us an ability to, again, be able to satisfy these larger capital requirements, as you know, the demands have gotten bigger in terms of what customers are looking for, and being able to leverage, you know, outside capital to be able to fund that... fund the business, and really improve returns for Digital Realty shareholders as well. I think we hit on a lot of the topics that we were going to get on later. We can double-click on some of those, but maybe just in terms of balance sheet management, interest rates, give us kind of a snapshot and where you're heading. Yeah, I mean, so in terms of the balance sheet, again, a lot of work has been done over the last 18 months, so at the start of 2023, you know, one of the objectives we had set out with is to bring our leverage back down to our target leverage area of 5.5 times, so at this point, you know, we're ahead of schedule on that. We reported last quarter, our leverage is at 5.3 times. And I think that, you know, that's going to just give us an ability to be back, what I'd call, into more regular cadence in terms of a capital funding model. Part of that being, what you might have saw last week, we did a recent euro issuance that was north, or sorry, south of 4%. So it really gives us that ability to be able to be back in that capital markets at a time when interest rates are, call it, stable to slightly declining. And overall gives us an ability, again, to be able to fund the business at an attractive cost and really be more strategic in terms of our outlook and how we attack the market going forward, now that we're, you know, in a more leverage favorable position. Development timelines, how are these trending? A lot of complexities around supply chain, energy transmission, other challenges. Yeah, I mean, so, you know, maybe to kind of set the stage on that a little bit, I mean, overall, our development timelines on data center that's under active construction has not really changed. I mean, so if we're under active construction, you know, we're able to bring to market data center capacity within, call it six to 12 months. Today, you know, just to give some data points on that, we're underway on 430 megawatts of data center capacity currently. Right behind that, we've got over 700 megawatts of shell that we've got started. And then sort of last is, we've got probably 2.4 gigawatts of land capacity available. So depending on where you're leasing within kind of those three major buckets, you know, it gets longer in terms of when you sign to commence. You know, and so you'll see that elongation in terms of development timelines. But I would say, you know, we've been in this environment where our, you know, power capacity has become tougher to manage, to source. You know, you've got to be much more in front of that procurement process. But, you know, that's something that we, again, have been in that business for a long time. You know, we've been very intentional about planning ahead of our capacity needs. So there is, in some cases, an elongation in certain markets around development just because you can't get access to power today. But you know, we've got a number of markets where we've got available capacity that can satisfy current demand quite easily. So development yields is a metric that a lot of folks have talked about over the years. I think in general, the trend has been upward. People may have different specific answers around unlevered yields on cost. Curious about, given the demand pipeline that you're seeing, and the projections that one hears about continued double-digit growth in rent in Europe and in the US, how do you see development yields trending going forward? Yeah. So I mean, we, you know, if you look at our development pipeline today, you know, which we, we give a decent amount of disclosure around. So today, we're a little overall, globally, we're a little north of 10% on our overall development yields. And I would say, you know, generally speaking, that, you know, that's, that's what we're targeting at, at a broad level. We're looking at, you know, 10% plus development yields is where we target. Now, you look and you kind of break down at least where we are today, within the different regions. You're seeing slightly north of that in APAC. In EMEA, you're seeing slightly under 10%, but it's, you know, pretty close to that. I think it's around 9.7% currently. In North America, where we've probably seen the most movement, you know, if you look back, call it 12 to 24 months, you know, that's now approaching 12% in terms of our returns within the North America region. That's somewhat a function of. You know, that's where we're seeing the majority of AI-related deployments in use cases today. But broadly speaking, we're looking at, you know, 10% plus on development yields is where we target across our global portfolio. Is that the same for your on-balance sheet investments, compared to some of the joint ventures that you would have in Brookfield, which spans a number of different continents, as well as Blackstone, as well as others that you've entered into? Yeah. You know, I would, I would say yes, in general, that 10-plus% kind of fits pretty nicely across the global portfolio. I mean, there's going to be certain more emerging markets where we'll target north of that. And then I would say, you know, part of, again, back to how we, how we're allocating capital and our returns, you know, part of the benefit of bringing in outside capital within the business is that provides a boost in terms of the return to, you know, Digital Realty and the capital that we're putting to work. You know, as we're able to earn fees, not only from, in general, generally speaking from the development side, but also as those assets come into operation, we're earning property management, asset management fees in most cases, which adds incrementally to our overall return profile. So you're not new to hyperscale leasing. The market has gone through what I think is sort of a V-shaped recovery now, but we're on the other side of the V prior to the pandemic, largely speaking. And as we think about re-leasing spreads over the coming years, given that dynamic, should we expect to see kind of a similar trend as we've seen, you know, this year compared to the prior year in terms of upward movement in re-leasing spreads for your greater than one megawatt category? You're talking just greater than a megawatt. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll talk a little bit about both, but you know, I'll start with the greater than a megawatt. Yeah, so I mean, again, as a result of what has been a very positive sort of demand-supply equation across most of our global markets, we've seen, you know, pricing pick up. We've seen that benefit us within our renewal spreads, so we recently guided towards 5%-7%. And we've ticked that up from where we started the year. I would say when you look at 2025, you know, you are seeing in terms of our expiring rates, those are probably still, you know, the rates where our leases are expiring, still relatively elevated. So, you know, the expectation is you're not going to see a huge pop in terms of where 2025 is, but if you look out to 2026, 2027, 2028, you start to see expiring rates, you know, continually step down, where, you know, I think you'll see a more pronounced opportunity for better mark to market, as you get into those outer years as a result of when those leases were originally signed at an interest rate and an overall environment that was lower. So we see, you know, we see better opportunity for improved mark to market as you get to outer years, especially within that greater than a megawatt segment. And, you've seen we've actually seen some of that in terms of the ability to pull some of that forward. We did that in the first quarter of this year, where our mark to market was, you know, closer to 12%. Again, that's not something that, you know, we can do every quarter, but I think that shows what the potential is as you get to these outer years on what the mark to market opportunity is, especially within that greater than a megawatt segment. And then, you know, I know there's a lot of discussion about the hyperscale segment, and rightly so. I think that's where what everybody sees and reads about. I mean, we're also you know, we have call it 40-plus% of our revenue coming from the zero to megawatt enterprise, more retail colocation. And we continue to see that business, you know, do very well in terms of mark-to-market, those contracts, because they're generally in the more two- to three-year time horizon. They're closer to market, but we're continuing to see those, you know, every year step up in the 2, 3, sometimes 4% area. So it really provides a nice, solid, stable foundation for growth within that segment of our business. And maybe in that sub one megawatt category, which doesn't get as much attention, what are you seeing around the demand signals, competitive behavior, as a lot of your formerly listed companies have been taken private? I think it's fair to say the CapEx budgets have gone higher, and to move that capital, they're focusing on bigger deals. Does that have any ramifications in what you're seeing in kind of the retail enterprise cross-connect part of your business around competition and then s hare, basically. Yeah, I mean, we're. You know, like, I think you're seeing that there's globally there's really two players within that segment of the market, ultimately, that can satisfy, again, across from a global perspective, from the product perspective. And, you know, we've had an intentional focus on continuing to grow that zero to one megawatt segment, and we've executed well on that. You've seen over the last, I think, four plus quarters, we've had over $50 million in signings across that segment, and that's continued to step up. So I think we've shown ability to execute within that part of the market. And I think that's one, a function of just being focused on that segment of the business. But also, maybe to your point, I think others have started to move away from that and focus solely on the hyperscale business. And I think we've been able to take advantage of that, take share in a number of markets, and, as well as part of us just continuing to add to our product capabilities and being able to provide a value proposition to those enterprise customers, you're starting to see us, I think, win and grow within that segment. Some of your peers shifting back to kind of wholesale hyperscale have shifted a bit towards powered shells, and you offer that product as well. Hasn't really been the engine of your growth, but any observations about the mix between turnkey versus powered shell, appetite for yourself as well as by customers? I mean, in our, I mean, to your point, we've had-- that's been, I mean, we've offered powered shells for, you know, for a long time. It's been a part of our business. What I would say in most cases today, our customers are looking for that, you know, fully fit out product. I think, they're looking for that, you know, turnkey solution that we've been able to provide across, again, that global portfolio. And I think they're looking for sort of the expertise and being able to operate and manage within that, you know, within that broader environment. So the majority of the discussions that we've had have been on, you know, our customers looking for the more fit out turnkey solution. But we have more than the ability to offer, you know, powered shell within our portfolio. And we've done that in certain limited cases where customers have asked for it. But for the most part, our experience and our discussions have been customers seeking that, you know, fully fit out, operationally ready, solution. So a lot of your KPIs have shown a lot of improvement. We talked about balance sheet and the delevering, the pricing dynamic, renewal spread, same store NOI growth. Given the, you know, the investor focus on FFO per share, what are the outlook and growth targets for Digital Realty, and how do you navigate from what's currently fairly modest growth to what looks to be much more significant next year and beyond? Yeah. So we've, you know, done a lot of work, as we've talked about through some of these earlier questions, around balance sheet, through capital recycling, stabilized assets, and really putting ourselves in a position now, at the start of twenty twenty-four, to really be in a position where we're growing, you know, bottom line FFO per share growth. I've already... You know, at the start of twenty twenty-four, I had to give, you know, two years' worth of guidance, which is always fun when you're the CFO. So I've been pretty consistent almost through the entire year that, you know, twenty-five, we've been talking about a baseline growth of 5%, and we see opportunity for that to continue to accelerate as you move into the outer years. And so that you know, the reason we feel comfortable about that is, again, back to a number of the dynamics that we've talked about. You know, we're seeing our same-store growth be positive and improving. You know, we talked about being able to achieve 3% to 4% within that area, and that's a result of a positive pricing environment, where we're seeing, you know, our mark-to-markets continue to improve. In addition, you've got the development yields that have been also improving. You'll see more of that development that we've done over the last year start to come online in 2025, more in the back half of 2025, then setting ourselves up for, again, acceleration as you get to 2026, 2027, where the mark-to-market opportunity continues to improve each year. The development yields and the sites coming online give us that incremental growth to be able to start at that 5% 25 and continue to grow it from that point forward. So putting that all together, that sounds like a pretty promising trajectory. What are the biggest, maybe operational or macro risks that would stand in the way of seeing that kind of growth? Is it basically just delivery and execution, what should we be mindful of in terms of risk factors? Yeah, I mean, it's so I think ultimately, I think there's... You know, we've done a lot of the work through 2024. Again, if you look at our, we've got, you know, close to a record backlog. I think we had a record backlog last quarter, and it came down slightly 'cause we had a high commencement quarter, but we've got a record backlog so that, again, that really just sets us up for, you know, 2025 and really starting that foundation of solid growth. I think really, you know, from what we're seeing, the main toggle that we're looking at in terms of future growth is really largely back to how much development do we want to start. Because, you know, in today's environment, development is generally a dilutive proposition to the initially. And this all circles back to kind of how we've been intentional about our funding of the business, bringing in outside capital partners, so that we're able to not only attack and be part of the hyperscale segment, but not have that, you know, continue to be an outsized portion of our overall business and make sure that we're focused on delivering that per-share growth next year and growing that every year beyond. So I think it really comes down to, I think one of the factors is, you know, our ability to manage the development starts and any associated dilution in bringing in capital to support continued growth. So, a growing portion of your commencements will be significantly AI-weighted. With that comes some tweaks to your design and HVAC infrastructure, you know, liquid to the chip and so direct to chip liquid cooling and so forth. Any ramifications to think about in terms of customer SLAs, operations and maintenance practices as you move further into that arena? Yeah, I mean, we're- Compared to, say, cloud data centers. Yeah, I mean, we're still, I would say, generally speaking, we're still in the early innings of deploying liquid cooling technology today. You know, we've been able to satisfy the, you know, majority of our AI workload needs through our, call it, more traditional cooling methods, you know, largely air-oriented. Now, we've supplemented that with things like rear door heat exchangers to help improve the efficiency, but to date, that's the way we've been able to satisfy, just given customers', you know, urgent need, time to market, you know, wanting it now. So that's how we've solved it. Now, as we look towards designing new facility and deploying new facilities, where most of that liquid cooling technology is gonna take place and, you know, where we expect that next wave to be, we're not seeing a significant shift or increase, you know, or decrease. It's been pretty consistent in terms of how we're gonna operate it, you know, the cost to maintain, 'cause you're really swapping out different forms of equipment. Same type of people, there's maybe, you know, we'll have to train some on the operational side, just given the liquid nature of it. But overall, you know, based on what we're seeing, our initial designs, you know, we're not expecting any incremental cost or complexity really in order to satisfy that demand. And on the return side, I mean, again, given the, you know, the macro supply-demand dynamics that we're seeing, the improved pricing, the returns on AI versus cloud are also similar, just given the demand backdrop that we've got in front of us. So big audience in the room, if there's any questions, feel free to raise your hand. I can call on you. Number of alumni at the company here as well. I've noticed quite, quite a few. Yeah, go ahead, John. I'm interested to hear, so you're forecasting no additional capital expense to support the liquid cooling technology? I agree with you in representing tenants that I haven't seen it be a deal breaker if the data center isn't able to support liquid cooling today, obviously. But I would've assumed that there would be additional cost, because some preliminary feedback from data center providers, as we look to 2025 through 2028, is that those liquid cooling deployments would come at a premium. So therefore, I would assume it's because there's a higher build cost. I mean, we're again, this kind of goes back to, and maybe not, you know, totally clear enough. I think we're seeing it's a marginal incremental cost in order to deploy liquid versus air, right? 'Cause you're swapping out different components. So ultimately, there's a slight marginal increase in the total overall bill cost, but we're seeing that more than offset in terms of rate and price that we're able to achieve in today's market, so that our overall return profile and margin, we don't see a huge difference between what we're able to achieve from a fully liquid cooled design versus a more traditional air handler design. I think Matt's referencing de novo builds, right? As opposed to retrofit, right? Yes. Sure. Go ahead. One of the interesting phenomena we're seeing is SLA fines. You know, a lot of the times, delivering a project late often meant just negotiating that away with a hyperscaler, and that's now changing. They're demanding those penalties. It's very hard to collect data on it. What are you seeing in the market on SLA fines? How vicious is this problem? So the question is SLA fines, and what is Matt seeing in the market, and how are they navigating that with customers? I mean, you know, the way we navigate it is to make sure that we don't, we don't trigger those. I mean, we've got, that's where we've got a history of, you know, we've been building data centers. We've been spending $2-$3 billion a year for the last, you know, four or five years. Before that, we were, you know, we've been one of the biggest developers, operators of data centers for, you know, for a long time. So we, you know, we're aware we have those, you know, we have those in our contracts in terms of making sure that we're hitting our RFS dates. But, you know, and ultimately, it comes down to conversation with the customer. But we're, you know, we're aware of those. We know those are out there, but, you know, I think we've been able to manage through those by, you know, by the fact that we've got a great team involved in bringing data centers online. We've got deep development expertise, and it's ultimately down to a conversation with the customer, if and when that ever happens. I want to ask real quick, and then Dave. So just capital strategy going forward, given target leverage ratios, equity issuance, capital recycling, what are the sorts of things that you're kind of thinking about, and how do you balance those different tools? Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, you've again, we're now that we're in a position where our leverage is near our target leverage area. You know, I think going forward, you know, what you'll see is more of a mix of, you know, the way that we want to optimize funding the business is, first off, you know, use cash flow from operations. That's the cheapest source of, call it, equity for us. Two, you know, leverage what we expect to be growing EBITDA to be able to, you know, put incremental debt funding on the company at leverage neutral. Three, you know, to the extent demand driven, you know, utilize, you know, public equity if and when needed, but, you know, ultimately, it would be to be funding, you know, developments that are in that 10-plus% area. And then fourth, we're continuing to evolve, as we've talked about, you know, our private capital sources, and those would be similar to the mix that you've seen, you know, over the last, call it, 12 to 18 months in terms of portion of recycling capital from, you know, stabilized joint ventures, continuing to work with Blackstone, you know, as that development JV comes online, where we've raised, you know, close to $7 billion of potential capital, you know, which will be spent over the next several years. Putting all that together, and again, making sure we do that in a way that ultimately, you know, at the end of the day, results in us growing, you know, bottom line core FFO per share at that baseline level for 2025 and accelerating going forward. Dave? You stole my question. Read your mind. Any other questions? Go ahead. So, I think the startups raising capital for GPUs and rent them, like, they're very powerful as well. I'm just curious how much of those startups you see asking for loan, or how does it. Uh, yeah. Like, how- Yeah, you're talking. So GPU as a service- GPU as a service. startups, and how are you dealing with those customers, and- Yeah ... what kind of behavior you're seeing? So, I mean, yeah, we see those in the market. I mean, right now, I think we're in an enviable position where, you know, we're able to focus on, I would say, the larger customers within that we have existing relationships with. You know, better credit quality, you know, those are the customers that we're serving primarily, you know, within our core markets. And if and when we look at sort of the more GPU as a service, you know, we'd look to put them in markets that, you know, have available capacity, you know, that's been there for some period of time. And two, we'd structure in such a way that we were protected, either from significant deposits and/or structurally, from a legal perspective, able to make sure that we can get back that space efficiently. But you know, as of today, in today's current sort of demand environment, and supply constraints, you know, we've been able to focus more on sort of the larger technology cloud companies in terms of satisfying that demand. Very good. We are out of time. Appreciate, both of you being on stage with me. Yeah, thank you. ... We're gonna get started in thirty seconds. So welcome back. This is our last fireside for the day, and then we're gonna have a final thematic panel later on. So I'd like to welcome back Steve Howden from IHS, Chief Financial Officer. I think you have been involved in our conference going back quite a number of years, so appreciate your coming back. For those that are relatively new to the IHS story, maybe you could provide a little bit of an introduction. Sure. Well, firstly, thank you for inviting us back all the years. It's always a good conference for us. We get to see a lot of different cross-section investors, so good to be back. Yeah, good afternoon, everybody. I'm glad I'm not the only thing between you and cocktails. I'm glad there's one more panel. So IHS, what is it? We are an emerging market-only tower infrastructure platform. We're listed in New York, but all of our business is in the emerging markets, and that, for us, means a pretty significant African business, a pretty significant Latin American business, which covers 10 markets in total, 10 geographies, about 40,000 sites, all told, and a couple of smaller fiber networks as well. We've been listed for about three years, but been in existence for more like 25 years, and really, our story is all about trying to demonstrate that the towers business model can work well outside of developed markets. In fact, there's a lot of similarities between our own business and a lot of the more developed market names that I'm sure you're very familiar with, but we do it in markets where, firstly, connectivity is much more of a required utility, and maybe I'll explain a bit more about that during the course of today. But also where hopefully over time, we can demonstrate higher growth rates, and an area where people can deploy capital into a safe and known business model, but with the opportunity to generate more reward through growth. So our biggest markets today are South Africa, Brazil, Nigeria, and then we're across various other markets as well. We are, broadly speaking, a $1.7 billion revenue business. EBITDA this year will be plus minus $900 million. Our equivalent AFFO metric is gonna be around $250 million this year, and we're 3.9 times levered. So that'll give you a little flavor for what we are, and maybe we can dive into some of the topics. ... so you recently concluded a comprehensive renewal and extension of contracts with MTN in Nigeria, and this includes the changes in contract structure. Can you paint a picture of the renewal, the new contract terms, and how this benefits IHS? Yeah, well, first and foremost, it's not just in Nigeria. So MTN's our biggest customer across all of our geographies. We have them present in six countries. That's all of our African countries. And over the course of the last roughly 12 months or so, we've been renewing and extending all of our MLAs with them. The biggest and the final piece of that puzzle was in Nigeria, which is our biggest single market, and therefore, they are our biggest customer in that biggest single market. And we renewed that contract in August. That had been a long time in the making. We'd obviously been talking about it in the public domain, probably a little too much. But we got that concluded in August, and, you know, a few of the key benefits coming out of that particular renewal. Firstly, all of our MTN business is now extended out through at least the end of 2032, and in some cases, 2033, 2034, 2035. So we've put 8-10 years extension on all of our contracts around Africa, which is really positive for us. That brings us to a total as a business of having $12.3 billion of revenue under contract now, and obviously, a decent chunk of that is with MTN, the largest carrier across the African continent. Within Nigeria specifically, one of the key areas where we spent a lot of time focused was around the overall contract mix. Historically, we charged MTN in dollar-denominated use fee and local currency-denominated use fee. We've changed that mix slightly because previously we weren't hedged to power, so now we have dollars, power, and local currency within that use fee construct. So what we've managed to hopefully do is protect ourselves from an FX standpoint, as well as introduce some hedge around the power, which over the last few years has led to some volatility in earnings and all the time retaining the usual CPI escalators. In the case of our local currency, CPI escalator in Nigeria, that's actually now semi-annual, not annual. So we've been trying to optimize some of the different mechanisms within the use fee structure to better cater to the realities of operating in Nigeria, but also to try and smoothen out our global earnings. Doesn't all come as a win-win, we have to compromise in places, which we've done so in this particular contract. We offered very small discounts to MTN as a part of that and we concluded on some disputed sites as well. So I think both of us were suitably happy and suitably unhappy, which is probably the sign that it was a good compromise. So in recent... You alluded to this, but maybe drill down a little bit more. In recent contract renewals, you've rotated your African business away from taking risk of providing power- Yeah ... to being substantially more protected against volatility. So can you explain more on that? Yeah. So historically, as a business, you know, let me go back in history. We grew up as an African tower infrastructure player, and even more specific to that, we originated in Nigeria, where the power environment is incredibly important. It's not just connecting your sites to the grid. You have to provide generator backups, battery backups. In more recent years, we've introduced solar power as well. Power is a big component of the value chain in operating towers in Africa. And historically, we had quite often taken the stance that we will charge our customers, the carriers, an all-inclusive use fee. So I'll charge you $3,000 a month to be on a site, and then we will look after the power, whether that's good or bad. That incentivized us to invest in that power, and it meant that we took the benefits of where we could generate excess returns, from operating in that power element. But what it did also do is lead to some volatility in earnings, i.e., when global oil prices go up, that filters through the diesel value chain, and therefore, it passed into our cost base and therefore our margins. And what we've done during the course of this year in particular, and this is relevant in two specific countries, South Africa to some extent, but particularly in Nigeria, is we introduced in Nigeria roughly a third of our lease fee to MTN. Our biggest customer there is now indexed to diesel prices, which means that if those diesel prices are moving around, that is passed through to the customer. If they go up, our cost base goes up, but so does our revenue. You know, the customer has to pay for that. Likewise, if the price of diesel goes down, so does our cost, but the customer then benefits from that. So a bit more of a risk-sharing approach there, but it'll lead to much smoother earnings from our perspective, and as I just mentioned, South Africa, we had something completely different where we were providing backup power under a certain contract. We've effectively removed that now, and we're a straight pass-through business in South Africa. So you know, now we used to have a page where we compared our business model to US tower cos, and it used to be, you know, tick, tick, tick, all the contract structure, CPI escalators, no churn, you know, leasing environment underneath the towers, et cetera. And the big difference was FX and power. And now we can put a tick next to power as well, 'cause we're effectively hedged throughout the business across all of our markets and geographies, such that really the only difference now is FX. Obviously, a significant one, but that's the only difference now. So you, earlier, I'm going back a couple of questions, but you mentioned AFFO equivalent, so recurring levered free cash flow. Yes. Any nuances to keep in mind around ground rent, amortization, working capital? How do you basically define that AFFO equivalent metric? Yeah, short answer is no real nuances to keep in mind. We, we are not allowed as a, as an FPI, and a non-REIT business, we are not allowed by the SEC to use AFFO as a metric. But what we are allowed to use is a metric which gets to a very similar place, albeit reconciled in a different way. So, we provide a metric that you know, the investment community and the analyst community can compare on an apples-to-apples basis with AFFO. We call it ALFCF, adjusted levered free cash flow. And what that does is basically give you a true keep the lights on cash flow metric prior to growth CapEx. So it takes into account taxes, interest, maintenance, CapEx, leases, strips all that out and says what's left for us as a business to allocate capital, however that may be. So it's, you know, it should be pretty comparable for you. Last, maybe, exogenous question before we get into kind of your actual business and the growth drivers, but just FX more broadly. Mm-hmm. You've had a couple of adventures in the past, and you know, what is kind of the outlook for this year, FX macro in Nigeria and any other geographies to kind of keep in mind? Yeah, I think, for those of you that follow any of our markets in particular, you'll know that Nigeria has obviously been the biggest moving part this year. We saw a very significant devaluation in quarter one, where the naira to the dollar moved from roughly 900 naira to the dollar to around 1,500. So pretty significant devaluation. How our contract structures work are, the local currency portion of our contract structures, you know, they obviously are exposed to that, but then, you know, come back to us with semi-annual CPI escalators. We have dollarization in the contracts as well, which short version of it is the following quarter, the contract resets up to the current FX rate. And we now have diesel indexation, which also has a lot of dollar inputs into it as well. So what you tend to see with our business, and you can see this over history, is in the quarter of a devaluation, you'll see a temporary dip in earnings and profitability, and then the next quarter, you'll see that bounce back as our contracts reset up to the current FX rate. So you saw that with quarter one, so we saw a dip in profitability, and then we saw a very substantial bounce back in Q2 as the contracts reset. So, you know, we've tried to protect ourselves from an FX point of view by saying we have some dollarization as well as annual CPI escalators in the mix, and, you know, that gives us an ability to ride out the macro pressures that otherwise we would face. So we talked about power volatility, currency volatility, and then some of the events around your largest customer. Moving past all that, what are your kind of principal financial and operational priorities going forward? Yeah, as you say, hopefully, you know, in the last six, twelve months, we've ticked off a lot of those big issues around customer renewals, continuing FX protection, as before, and now power protection. So as we look to the future, what are we really focusing on? I think, you know, we came out earlier in the year and said we were conducting a strategic review around the business. You know, our view is that, you know, the share price of IHS hasn't reflected fair value for a significant period of time now. That means that we have to think differently and have to think about how do we demonstrate the true value of IHS. You know, we've been thinking in that lens for a period of time and certainly publicly for the last few months. What that means right now is, you know, we have all sorts of internal programs running, and we're looking at how can we continue to improve profitability? How can we continue to improve cash flow generation, and what should we do with that cash flow generation? You know, from the profitability side, embedded within our guidance for the rest of this year gets you to roughly a 56% EBITDA margin for Q3 and Q4, given what we've posted already this year. That's showing incremental step-up from prior years when we were more like 52, then 53, then 54. We're slowly pushing up from a profitability perspective. We wanna get to 60% EBITDA margin. That is, you know, a, let's say, a medium-term target of ours. So moving up from, call it, a run rate 56% to something closer to 60% over the coming few years. So that's important for us. What else is important for us is we've changed our view on CapEx investment at this point of our cycle. Again, we feel like we haven't been rewarded for growth in our markets, and we understand why, and so therefore, it's not prudent of us to continue investing in those markets at the same rate. In 2022 and 2023, we invested, you know, plus or minus $600 million a year in CapEx. Now, some of that's maintenance CapEx, but the majority of it was growth CapEx. We've trimmed that quite substantially to be in the range of $330 million-$370 million all in this year. And we've actually been guiding people to the low end of that range. So, prioritizing only the growth CapEx that we think is giving the biggest bang for our buck, recognizing that we could do much more, but recognizing that, you know, we're not in that point of the life cycle, we're not getting rewarded for that right now. I'm sure we will do again at some point in the future. And then we've also said, you know, we want to focus the group a bit more. We've spoken about disposing of $500 million-$1 billion of assets, trying to really highlight the value of some of the parts of the business, and doing that through monetizing different bits and pieces around the group. Haven't been too specific on what that involves yet, because we wanna negotiate that in the private, not in the public. But we'll get there, and we have a whole bunch of balance sheet initiatives that we're running right now as well. Back to your question, operationally, it's continuing to drive the utilization of all the sites, you know, the nuts and bolts, colocation, lease amendments, the best type of business. Being very careful and considerate with our growth CapEx and what we're rolling out, in particular, in which markets, and then, you know, continuing to realize the value of the business through focusing down into fewer markets and utilizing those proceeds, all of that excess cash flow that we'll generate, we'll pay down some debt, and we'll think about share buyback programs as we get a bit further into that program. So you kind of answered part of my next question about capital allocation. A lot of companies have had to adjust their strategies for higher interest rates and just general macro factors. Just remind us of your current capital allocation strategy, and then any further update that you would want to allude to on asset dispositions, notwithstanding the fact that you want to keep it all private, but just broad strokes. Not give you any scoops, so current capital allocation is. We are investing some CapEx back into growth, particularly in Brazil. That for us continues to be a core growth market, one that continues to be, you know, interesting, lots of opportunity available, the right returns available, and we feel like, you know, our stakeholders continue to value that growing part of our business, so the growth CapEx that we have allocated this year is largely going into Brazil. Most of that into towers, some into fiber, and then outside of that particular destination for our capital, we're not in outbound M&A mode right now. We have been historically. I would expect us to be again in future, but right now, not so. We are paying down debt, as a primary use of that excess cash flow, if you like. And we have a share buyback program in place right now, albeit we have paused it whilst we get through our strategic review. So there's the potential to reinvigorate that, you know, in due course. We haven't historically paid a dividend. You know, we'll consider that in the fullness of time. Brazil has gone through some changes in the M&O landscape, and then- Mm-hmm. and then going just a little bit further back, there, there's been some notable portfolio sales, and obviously you acquired your way in, into Brazil. But, as you think about kind of the build to suit priorities, is that on the back of principally one M&O relationship, or is it balanced across all the three majors? How would you describe that? Yeah, so we took the view or the strategy with Brazil to acquire our way into the business, build mass through bolt-on acquisitions. As many people will know, there's a long tail of potential tower cos in that market and from the period when we entered in 2020 up until really 12-18 months ago, we continued to consolidate to build scale, to put us at number three in that market. We've got close to 8,000 towers there, but along the way, have a build program as well. You know, the economics in Brazil are pretty clear. It is much more beneficial to buy—to build a tower, excuse me, as it is to buy a tower. But the reality is you can only do so many builds in any one year, given the market. So we've had a pretty active build pipeline in the last two years, in particular in Brazil, again this year. We're forecast to do 600 sites this year. We may end up doing a few more. There's plenty more in the hopper as well for next year. There's a huge amount of pipeline opportunity. It's not just one carrier. We've spent a lot of time with Tim in the last few years, principally 'cause we have a joint interest in a fiber business there as well. But we're actually seeing demand across the board from all three carriers, Vivo, Claro, and Tim. Whereas historically it's been a bit more focused on TIM, it's actually broadening out now to be pretty equal. So you're nearing the end of Project Green. Maybe you can summarize what Project Green is for the audience and what's been invested, what sort of benefits you've seen? Yeah ... and any transferability or learnings that might apply to other regions such as Latin America. Yeah, so Project Green was a very imaginatively entitled project targeting renewable energy. And it really had two principal aims. One was to drive down the reliance on diesel and therefore drive cost savings. That also had tangential benefits on maintenance CapEx, because we wouldn't need to invest as much in replacing generators. So call it cash flow savings. And the second benefit was around going towards meeting our carbon intensity reduction targets. So we announced that in the fall of twenty twenty-two, that over the period to twenty thirty, we would reduce our carbon intensity by 50%. And Project Green in rotating to more renewable forms of energy, solar, battery backups, et cetera, was gonna help us deliver that. In terms of how it's gone, so we originally said that we would invest $214 million of capital over a three-year period. We are largely through that CapEx plan now. We've got about $8 million or so of it left to do. And so we've been rolling out those solutions to our sites. We said that in 2023, we would expect $22 million of savings for the year. We actually generated $24 million of savings. This year, we said, we expect to see $51 million of savings. Okay, we're not done on this year yet, but we're on track for that. And next year, we told everyone that we expect to see $77 million of savings from that program. So you can figure out it's a pretty high returning project, and something that we are pretty keen to finalize. We're very close to finalizing the operational rollout, and we'll see the full impact of that, you know, through the course of 2025. So cost savings, very much on track. On the emission side, of our 50% reduction, Project Green, to the end of 2023, delivered 11%. We will see more in 2024 and more in 2025. We forecast that that project by itself will deliver about half of those overall, that overall reduction in carbon intensity. So, yeah, it's a really important project for us and one we're pretty proud of so far. ... Talk a little bit about the shareholder base, how that's evolved during your period as sort of a public company? Yeah. So we listed the business in October of 2021, so just coming up for three years now. When we listed the business, we had a pretty small free float. It was 5%, primary-only deal. And we have continued to try and evolve that into a much higher free float. Right now, as we sit here today, we've probably got something of the order of 21-22% of the total ownership outside the hands of pre-IPO shareholders. So we've, you know, done a 4x on the so-called float. And we've also seen, you know, our ADTV increase about four times in the same period of time as well. We started off as a, you know, pretty small, low liquidity stock, and we've been improving that. There's more to do there, for sure, but, we're certainly trending in a, in a really positive direction from that, from that standpoint. So... Great. Let's pivot to fiber. It's a good segue into kind of the coming panel that we're gonna have. So Brazil, you co-own I-Systems with TIM. You co-own I-Systems with TIM, residential footprint of 8.8 million homes, 24,000 fiber route kilometers. Give us an update on kind of tenancy growth that you're seeing there and performance relative to expectations, and then I'll follow up with Nigerian fiber. Yeah. So that business, to be clear, is, it's quasi-residential, but for us, as an infrastructure provider, it's much more like towers. So we own fiber between, cabinet and the home, but Tim retains the end subscriber. So what we are charged with, what we're focused on, is the, ownership, maintenance, and subsequent rollout of cabinet to home. Tim's our anchor tenant, so we, lease capacity on the fiber back to Tim, effectively a towers contract, so long term, no churn, escalators, et cetera. And then it's open access, so we can go and rent capacity on that same fiber to other customers. So what we try to do with that specific part of fiber in Brazil is say, we're happy to be in fiber as long as it's complementary to our towers business, and as long as it looks and feels, in terms of contracts and economics, like towers. And so that, that's what we managed to achieve with that business, by extension, you know, returns should be towers-like as well. How's it going? It's going well. We are somewhere just south of nine million homes passed at the moment, with a target to get to 10 million homes passed by 2027. What we're also doing within that overall count is, swapping out copper for fiber for TIM, so that's part of the plan. You know, we're continuing to do that. I think the pace of rollout probably a little slower in the last twelve months than we would otherwise want. But at the same time, you know, rollout means CapEx invested, and so we're more incentivized to make that CapEx good CapEx, rather than just do it to a timeline that we originally set with TIM. So business is going well, going fine, and we are starting to get other tenants on the network as well, so we've got something like 20 contracts in place with ISPs and other MNO customers, and we're just starting to get some of those customers onto the network. And then turning to Nigeria, I think it's ten thousand route kilometers. Maybe talk a little bit about government, you know, the role of government in fostering fiber penetration, any opportunity for you to kind of take advantage of that? Yeah, so more like 14,000 km now, so we've been continuing to roll that out. That's a bit different to what I just described in Brazil. In Nigeria, it's much tighter to the tower. It's effectively connecting our own towers to a carrier's metro ring, so it is really an extension of the tower. So whoever's on the tower, we then lease capacity on the fiber too. And it's a pretty interesting kind of extension of the tower. How's it going? Again, that business is going well. It's small. It's growing nicely, but it's quite small. Fiber for IHS is about 5% of total revenue. So, you know, although we spend time talking about it, it's reasonably small in the overall scale of the business. In terms of, let's say, regulatory support or governmental support, there is different programs available to further the digital agenda, within Nigeria, in this case. Those are really related to pushing out to rural connections, which is something that we obviously are involved with as part of our, you know, our presence in the market and being in the ecosystem. But I think the real bang for your buck, in that particular business is in the urban setting, where we can do short connections between our own towers and metro rings. And we know that we've got one, two, maybe three tenants on a site, and we can, you know, push those customers onto the fiber as well. There, the government doesn't need to help us with that. That's for us to do. So, there is some help, but more the commercial aspect of it is where we tend to focus. Got time for one or two audience questions, if there are any, so maybe just to wrap it up, looking to maybe the medium to longer term as 5G build-out continues across Africa, and perhaps there's, you know, things around edge computing, AI, but any- Mm-hmm. Anything to kind of call out around technological development as either a threat or an opportunity to your core business or an adjunct to your core business? Yeah, I think we're looking at it as all opportunity at this point in time. So within our portfolio, Brazil, okay, outside of Africa, but Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa are all in the first innings of 5G. They're starting to, all the carriers have spectrum, and they're starting to be rolled out. We're starting to see 5G being rolled out onto our network. About three thousand of our forty thousand sites have a 5G antenna on them. So a lot of that growth, that densification, that growth is yet to come in our core markets. So it's a real opportunity to drive the next wave of growth for us over the next two, three, five years. So we're pretty excited about that. The densification element, you know, could lead to more rollout in different forms, not just on existing infrastructure, and we are not seeing much of that, to be honest, at this point in time. We're seeing carriers overlay existing positions, to begin with, which, you know, frankly, is the best business for us as well. So, you know, we are pretty excited about 5G. In terms of AI, that for us is really a big internal opportunity. How can we operate our business more efficiently using artificial intelligence? Like a lot of the comm infrastructure companies, we have a huge amount of data within our business, which we frankly are figuring out different ways to utilize, such that we can then layer on AI applications and drive efficiencies from that. That's anything from how we supply diesel to towers in Nigeria to revenue recognition, such that we have, you know, a constant real-time feed on what equipment's on site, can we derive more revenue from customers, et cetera. There's all sorts of revenue and cost opportunities that we think we can achieve through AI. Great! We are just out of time, so I wanna thank you for spending time with us. Thanks, John. Yeah. Thank you.