Millicom International Cellular S.A. (NASDAQ:TIGO) Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call February 27, 2024 8:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Michel Morin - VP, Investor Relations
Mauricio Ramos - CEO
Maxime Lombardini - President and COO
Sheldon Bruha - CFO
Conference Call Participants
Marcelo Santos - JPMorgan
Phani Kanumuri - HSBC
Soomit Datta - New Street Research
Eduardo Rubi - UBS
Michel Morin
Hello, everyone and welcome to our Fourth Quarter 2023 Results Call. This event is being recorded. Our speakers today will be our CEO, Mauricio Ramos; our President & COO, Maxime Lombardini; and our CFO Sheldon Bruha. The slides for today's presentation are available on our website, along with the earnings release and our financial statements.
Now, please turn to Slide 2 for the safe harbor disclosure. We will be making forward-looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties and could have a material impact on our results. And on Slide 3, we define the non-IFRS metrics that we will reference throughout the presentation, and you can find reconciliation tables in the back of our earnings release and on our website.
With those disclaimers out of the way, let me turn the call over to our CEO, Mauricio Ramos.
Mauricio Ramos
Good morning, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. As you likely recall, we set four key priorities at the beginning of 2023. We will update you in detail on each of these priorities in the next several slides, but here are the key highlights. First, we continue to make very meaningful strides in executing Project Everest to improve our operational efficiency across the business. During the fourth quarter, we implemented Phase 2 of the project in each of the nine countries where we operate. The headline is that we are exceeding our own expectations for cost savings.
Second, in Colombia, the strategy we laid out some years ago and our increased focus on driving profitability are now really paying off in a combined manner. EBITDA was up more than 24% year-on-year, excluding severance, and the margin reached 38%, which is another record for this business. This, even as we continue to build our mobile subscriber base. We are achieving this while also optimizing our CapEx because we are now harvesting the very significant investments we have made in Colombia over the past several years. As I told you during our Q3 call, we're not done yet in improving Colombia. In fact, our performance in Q4 does not yet reflect the additional actions we have taken in the quarter and in January of this year. So stay tuned for more on Colombia.