Call Start: 08:00 January 1, 0000 9:03 AM ET

Millicom International Cellular S.A. (NASDAQ:TIGO)

Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call

February 10, 2023 08:00 ET

Company Participants

Sarah Inmon - Investor Relations

Mauricio Ramos - Chief Executive Officer

Sheldon Bruha - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Froylan Mendez - JPMorgan

Stefan Gauffin - DNB

Klas Danielson - Nordea

Operator

Hello, everyone and welcome to our Fourth Quarter 2022 Results Conference Call.

Before we begin, please take a moment to review the Safe Harbor disclosure on Slide 2 of the presentation which is available on our website, along with the earnings release. Now during the presentation, we will be referencing non-IFRS measures and we define these on Slide 3 and we provide reconciliation tables to the nearest IFRS metric in the earnings release and on our website.

I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Mauricio Ramos.

Mauricio Ramos

Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today.

Let's go straight to the highlights for the year, starting on Slide 5. On the left, you will recognize the value creation framework that we presented at our Investor Day almost 1 year ago today. Back then, the global economy was bouncing back strongly from the pandemic and the economic outlook was quite positive. That changed quickly after Russia invaded Ukraine, energy prices spiked and inflation and interest rates moved up sharply. Despite this abrupt change, we have stayed the course and continue to execute on our plans. We're actually quite used to executing and delivering through uncertain times. And that's what we did in 2022. We delivered on our objectives with a good outturn for the year, as you will see during today's presentation.

Operationally, we focused even more on our customers and we invested further in our networks and into our people. All of this produced strong financial results. Organic OCF growth was a strong 8.4% and equity free cash flow all in was $171 million. All of this is consistent with our plans. And as we said we would, we used that cash flow to reduce leverage. Our leverage was down to 3x at year-end.

We also made very significant progress in our plans to carve out our Towerco portfolio and remain on track for a transaction later this year. Tigo Money continued to execute on its own plans to accelerate growth which we expect will generate interest among potential investors who can bring expertise and capital to help the business flourish and get to the next level on its own. And finally, 2022 was a big year for us on ESG. Our science-based targets were validated formally and we also made important commitments towards diversity and inclusion. These and many other actions have further strengthened our Tigo culture and are helping us cement our position as an employer of choice in the region.