IHS Holding Limited reports second quarter 2022 results

IHS Holding Limited, one of the largest independent owners, operators, and developers of shared communications infrastructure in the world by tower count, reported financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022.

Sam Darwish, IHS Towers Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, stated, “We had a solid quarter despite what continues to be a volatile macro-economic environment across the world, seeing continued organic revenue growth in all our markets, although the higher cost of diesel impacted Adjusted EBITDA while RLFCF benefitted from a favorable withholding tax impact and some timing on maintenance capex. Demand continues to track expectations and based on first half results and our expectations for the back half of the year, we are raising our 2022 guidance for revenue by +$10 million at the mid-point and reiterate our guidance for Adjusted EBITDA, RLFCF, and capex.

Including the 5,691 towers we acquired in South Africa, IHS Towers owns 39,052 towers across 11 countries, making us the 3rd largest independent multinational tower company by tower count. This geographic scale helps diversify our revenue stream and also positions us in some of the largest emerging markets in the world by GDP, including Nigeria, Brazil and South Africa.

Separately, we upstreamed $147 million from Nigeria through the second quarter of 2022 and as of June 30 we had approximately $67 million in cash in Nigeria. While macro-economic pressures continue to impact Nigeria, we believe we continue to be positioned well with a resilient and growing business in the country.

Shifting to our stock liquidity, as you will recall, in May 2022 our Board exercised its right to waive the registered offering requirement for the first block of shares (the “Block A shares”) subject to the lock-up arrangements under our shareholders’ agreement. The block included up to approximately 78.2 million shares which would effectively be available to be sold at the discretion of their holders, subject to applicable securities laws. We will continue to evaluate options that we believe will enhance the value of the company, while at the same time we continue to focus on delivering against our publicly stated fundamental objectives and establishing a track record with investors.

Lastly, regarding Project Green, our team, and I personally, have been busy over the last few months analyzing the various opportunities across many of the countries we operate in to reduce our consumption of diesel and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by either connecting more sites to the grid, which just a few short years ago was not an option in many locations, or adding more battery and solar solutions. We expect to start investing in Project Green in the second half of this year and when we announce Project Green we expect to raise our 2022 capex guidance. When announced, we intend to highlight the attractiveness of the proposed investment together with longer term greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets. To give you a sense of the financial opportunity, in the second quarter of 2022 we spent $94 million on diesel plus last year we spent approximately $69 million on diesel generator maintenance. Combined, this equates to nearly $450 million of annualized spend and represents the opportunity set from which we will aim to extract savings.”

CT Bureau