Millicom International Cellular S.A. (NASDAQ:TIGO) Q3 2024 Results Conference Call November 7, 2024 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Marcelo Benitez - Chief Executive Officer
Bart Vanhaeren - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Andreas Coello - Scotiabank
Andreas Joelsson - Carnegie
Stefan Gauffin - DNB
Marcelo Santos - JPMorgan

Operator

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our third quarter 2024 results call. This event is being recorded.

Our speakers today will be our CEO, Marcelo Benitez; and our CFO, Bart Vanhaeren. 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.

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, Marcelo Benitez.

Marcelo Benitez

Thanks, Michelle, and hello, everyone. I appreciate you all being here to review the company's performance in the third quarter. This was an excellent quarter for us at Millicom. The actions we've taken over the last 15 months are clearly delivering results. Our restructuring is now almost complete. And even with significant one-off costs this quarter, we were able to generate a record equity free cash flow.

We have successfully combined aggressive cost reduction, CapEx optimization and strong customer growth. And just as important, this very strong performance is broad-based with nearly every country producing much improved EBITDA and equity free cash flow. We are also advancing significantly in the organic side, having announced highly strategic transactions in Colombia and Costa Rica and an important tower transaction in Central America. Each of these transactions is expected to close in 20'25 and we expect that will enhance the company's return on capital in 2026 and beyond.

I want to thank all our team members for these outstanding achievements. Your commitment to the company and our customers is at the heart of these results.

Please turn to Slide 5 for the highlights of the quarter, Q3 was one of our strongest quarters ever. In terms of customer net additions with postpaid adds of almost 300,000 and home net adds of almost 70,000. These are the strongest net adds since 2021 when we were just coming out of the pandemic, which speaks to the strength of our performance this quarter and I want to recognize our sales teams who are out on the streets every day and deliver record levels of new customer activities in the quarter.