VEON

Hello, and welcome to VEON's Q1 2026 results presentation. For those of you who have joined the Zoom webinar, if you would like to ask a question, you can use the Raise Hand button which can be found on the black bar at the bottom of your screen at any time to join the queue to ask a question, and you will be called upon during the Q&A session. For those of you watching on the webcast, if you would like to submit a written question, please use the Ask a Question tab at the top right of your screen. These questions can also be sent in any time during the presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. Anand Ramachandran, you may begin.

Thank you. Good morning and good afternoon to everyone joining us for VEON's first quarter results. My name is Anand Ramachandran, Chief Corporate Development Officer at VEON. Joining me today are our Group CEO, Mr. Kaan Terzioğlu. Next to him, our Group CFO, Mr. Burak Ozer. As usual, Kaan will begin with our strategic and operational highlights, followed by Burak with a review of our financial performance, and we'll then open up the call for Q&A. Before we begin, please note that today's presentation contains forward-looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties. Further details are available in all our SEC filings, including our Form 20-F. Our earnings release and presentation are available on our investor relations website. With that, let me hand it over to Kaan.

Thank you, Anand. VEON has entered 2026 with clear momentum: double-digit growth, accelerating digital revenues, stronger cash generation, and continued capital returns. Revenues in USD grew 17% year-on-year. EBITDA increased 17.7%, and margins expanded by 20 basis points. Importantly, this growth translated into strong cash generation with equity free cash flow up 73.4% year-on-year to $246 million. This performance reflects the strength of our digital operator strategy, combining resilient connectivity, fast-scaling digital platforms, and disciplined capital allocation. As a result, we are raising our 2026 revenue outlook, which I will return to later. Second, we are seeing strong acceleration across our digital portfolio. Digital revenues grew 57.7% year-on-year and now represents over 25% of our group revenues.

Importantly, this growth is increasingly profitable with EBITDA margins of 34.6%. This quarter, we also refined our reporting by including enterprise identity and credentials management within digital enterprise. These are mature services that are increasingly shifting from traditional A2P messaging towards API-based platforms. On a comparable basis, excluding this reclassification, our digital revenues actually grew over 75%. Third, we continue to execute multiple growth levers within disciplined asset-light framework. In Pakistan, we secured the largest spectrum allocation in the March spectrum auction, strengthening capacity and supporting future growth. We are expanding our financial services footprint, and our acquisitions of TPL Insurance and Apna Bank acquisitions to come are on the right course. We are deepening our ecosystem through targeted acquisitions such as OLX and Tabletki. These initiatives enhance engagement, expand monetization opportunities, and reinforce our long-term growth platforms. We remain firmly focused on shareholder value.

We continue to believe our shares do not reflect the value and cash generation of the business, we are acting on that conviction through our buyback program. At the same time, we are reducing leverage and maintaining financial flexibility. Management ownership remains a key signal of alignment, reinforcing our confidence in the value we are building. Let us review our Q1 financial performance. Let's move to the next slide. Our strategy is translating into strong, high-quality financial performance. Both telecom and digital segments are contributing meaningfully to profitability and cash flow, demonstrating the strength of our integrated model. Telecom revenues grew steadily while digital revenues increased significantly and now account for a quarter of total revenues. As highlighted earlier, we are encouraged by the strength of our cash generation this quarter and continued reduction in leverage. Next slide, please.

Our growth continues to outpace inflation across our markets, reflecting the strength of our operating model. On a like-for-like basis, which adjusts for the divestment of Pakistan Towers, Kyrgyzstan business, and the acquisition of Uklon and Tabletki, revenues grew 15.4% and EBITDA grew 15% year-over-year. This reflects our ability to execute fair value pricing supported by strong demand, high engagement, and increasing customer reliance on both connectivity and digital services. Let us move to our digital performance, which continues to scale in size and quality. Let's go to the next page. Digital revenues reached $303 million for the quarter, now representing over a quarter of group revenues. The reclassification of enterprise identity and credentials management within digital enterprise, which I highlighted earlier, contributed $44 million for the quarter, with prior periods reclassified for comparability.

Growth remains broad-based, with financial services leading and strong contributions from entertainment, ride hailing, and healthcare. We also began consolidating Tabletki from February, further strengthening our healthcare vertical in Ukraine. Our digital platforms continue to benefit from structurally low customer acquisition costs and highly efficient distribution, creating a scalable competitive advantage across our markets. Importantly, digital services are structurally lower in capital intensity, supporting strong cash generation capacity. Let's go to the next page. Multi-play customers remain a key growth driver. These customers use connectivity with digital services, and they deliver significantly higher value, with ARPU now 3.9x that of voice-only customers. This fact also helped us raise overall ARPU to $2.3 for the quarter from $2 a year ago. Multi-play revenues grew almost 18% year-on-year and now represents 58% of consumer revenues.

Let me now update you on the operational performance across our markets in the Next page. We are seeing strong operational momentum across the board. Pakistan and Ukraine continue to lead, while Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan deliver steady growth. Bangladesh is continuing its growth for a second consecutive quarter in a row. Digital momentum is consistent across all markets, supporting both growth and diversification. Our focus is clear: to sustain this momentum through disciplined execution and balancing revenue growth with profitability over the course of the year. Next slide, please. Our financial services business in Pakistan continues to grow from strength to strength. JazzCash served over 29 million users during the quarter, while our merchant base expanded to over 600,000 merchants. This is driving a powerful network effect.

Transaction volumes remain robust, with last 12-month transaction value reaching $60 billion or 15% of Pakistan's GDP, reflecting a sustained growth in usage and engagement. We are also scaling lending at pace with over 200,000 loans issued daily while maintaining disciplined risk management. Asset quality remains strong, non-performing loans NPL ratios remain well-controlled. Mobilink Bank's loan portfolio has reached $289 million and is supporting the continued expansion of our digital financial services ecosystem. Together, these capabilities position us well to support financial inclusion and capture long-term growth. Next slide, please. We have refined our definition of digital customers to reflect active users in Q1, providing a more comprehensive view of engagement across the quarter. Across our ecosystem, we now serve 229 million digital customers, including over 72 million digital-only users.

Our platforms are becoming go-to super apps in our markets. Transaction value reached almost $63 billion over the last 12 months, reflecting both scale and deepening engagement. This creates increasing opportunities in cross-sell, advertising and monetization. Next slide. Our consumer digital platforms continue to scale across multiple networks. Financial services, entertainment, healthcare, ride hailing and super apps now serve millions of users across our markets. Our premium digital brands are delivering a differentiated customer experience by seamlessly integrating connectivity with everyday lifestyle services such as healthcare, e-commerce and mobility. Together, these platforms deepen engagement and unlock multiple opportunities, providing people that are underserved with service quality they deserve. Next slide, please. We are also building strong momentum in digital enterprise. Our platforms in augmented intelligence, cloud and data analytics are scaling across our markets, supported by almost 2,000 engineers and data scientists.

Our AdTech platform reaches over 100 million screens, enabling increasingly sophisticated AI-driven targeting and monetization across our ecosystem. Within our identity and credentials management services, the focus is rapidly shifting towards secure real-time authentication as a primary defense against fraud and scams and protection of children. Let's go to the next slide, please. Augmented Intelligence or AI is a core pillar of our value creation. For us, AI is not a standalone initiative. It's a productivity engine across networks, customer care, digital services, and enterprise solutions. We are building sovereign local language AI capabilities. Our Ukrainian LLM, Svio, which means globe, was named by Ukrainian citizens, showing its national importance and strategic value. Our ambition is to put AI to work in real-time economy, helping doctors deliver better outcomes, teachers reach further, and farmers produce more. This is practical augmented intelligence delivering measurable impact in everyday life.

We have over 1,000 prioritized use cases across the group. Over 1.4 million customers are using our AI products across our footprint. We are focused on turning AI from potential into performance. With that, Burak, I hand over to you.

Thank you, Kaan. We continue to deliver strong financial results in the first quarter. Group revenue reached $1.2 billion, growing 17% year-over-year in U.S. dollar terms, with broad-based contributions across our markets. Digital services grew 57.7%, reaching $303 million and representing over 25% of total revenue. This reflects strong execution across both telecom and digital businesses. Next slide, please. EBITDA reached $517 million in Q1 2026, growing 17.7% year-on-year. Margins expanded by 20 basis points to 43%, reflecting operating leverage and continued cost discipline. This demonstrates our ability to grow profitability while maintaining a disciplined cost base. Next slide, please. Now turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with $1.75 billion in cash, including $457 million at headquarters level.

Gross debt remains stable at $4.9 billion. Net debt excluding leases stood at $1.76 billion with leverage reduced further to 1.07x. This provides us with financial flexibility and resilient capital structure. We are also proactively exploring strategies to manage our upcoming debt maturities. With that, I'll hand the call back to Kaan Terzioglu.

Thank you, Burak. Returning capital to shareholders remains a key priority. Our current $100 million buyback is underway with ADS buybacks continuing. We are committed to a minimum of $100 million in annual share repurchases subject to market conditions and liquidity. Following completion of the current program, shares repurchased under future programs will be canceled, supporting long-term shareholder value. Next slide, please. We have a long track record of navigating frontier markets. Volatility is not new to us. We are proactively executing targeted actions to mitigate the impact of recent energy price movements. Reflecting our strong first quarter performance and continued commercial momentum, we are raising our 2026 revenue growth outlook to 11%-14% while maintaining EBITDA growth guidance at 7%-10%. We are making further investments in Pakistan following the recent spectrum acquisition to support future growth.

CapEx intensity, excluding Ukraine, is expected to be in the range of 15%-17%. To conclude, VEON has made a strong start to 2026. We are delivering double-digit growth, scaling digital revenues profitably, strengthening our credit profile, and returning capital to shareholders. At the same time, we remain disciplined and mindful of external volatility. Our model is increasingly diversified, resilient, and cash generative, and we are confident in the opportunities ahead. Thank you for your continued support. We will now open the line for questions.

Thank you. At this time, if you would like to ask a question, please click on the Raise Hand button, which can be found on the black bar at the bottom of your screen. When it is your turn to ask a question, you will receive a prompt to be promoted as a panelist. Please accept, wait a moment, and once you have been introduced, you may unmute yourself, turn your video on and ask your question. Written questions can be submitted on the webcast by using the Ask a Question tab at the top right of your screen. As a reminder, we are allowing analysts one question and one related follow-up today. If you wish to ask more questions, please raise your hand again to rejoin the queue.

We will pause a moment to allow the questioners to enter the queue. Our first question comes from Max Findlay with Rothschild & Co Redburn. Please unmute your line, turn your video on and ask your question.

Hi, all. Thank you for taking the time to speak to us today. The EBITDA guidance implies a downgrade for the business ex-Kyivstar and margin contraction of about 1% following Kyivstar's EBITDA upgrade earlier today. Are you able to walk us through what's changed since we last spoke? Secondly, and linked to my first question, I was wondering if you could provide some color about what you're seeing in your markets now as a result of the Iran conflict and what risk there is to further EBITDA margin compression. I obviously appreciate the high uncertainty around the situation. Finally, I asked at full year results whether your CapEx guidance was a bit conservative following the Pakistan auction. I guess I'd like to know what has changed regarding your network build plans there.

Is this CapEx being brought forward, that was perhaps targeted for next year, or is this new CapEx? Thank you very much.

Thank you, Max, for the question. I think, you know, second part of the question is kind of the answer to the first. We have reiterated our guidance as it is on the EBITDA side, and I would like to see the next three months to give a more clear picture about how the EBITDA growth will curtail. If you would ask me, you know, I do not think any margin compression will happen because we have strong control over our pricing. Our services are differentiated, and the tolerance towards price elasticity is quite healthy in the markets that we operate in. Having said that, you know, today President Trump is in China. I would like to see a little bit more clarity on geopolitical landscape before making a change in our guidance on the EBITDA side.

Now, looking into, you know, the impact we see in our markets, especially about the oil prices. Today in South Asia, a barrel of oil goes in between $160-$180, not like in line with the brands. It is not about the pricing, but it is also the availability of fuel which is important. I am very glad to see that actually Pakistan over time has been diversifying its energy production capacity towards wind, solar and hydro. The hydrocarbons have been steadily declining in the needs. In markets like, Bangladesh, we have seen some availability issues over the last couple of weeks, I hope that, you know, the pricing, liberal pricing of oil will adjust this availability issue over the time.

I think it's important to understand that the impact from the current weighted average inflation rate of 8.1% across our markets, we do expect to see double-digit inflation moving onwards, and that's of course something that we are watching very carefully. With regard to investments in Pakistan, we have tripled our capacity on spectrum, and specifically with 700 MHz spectrum getting into our fleet of spectrum, we will accelerate our deployments. It will be our coverage layer for 5G and also 4G non-standard services as well. That's why we decided to upgrade our guidance slightly. Having said that, if you look into our profile of our revenues, now one quarter comes from digital services. Digital services CapEx to sales ratio is in higher single digits rather than higher 20s.

That's why, you know, we believe over time there will be a moderation of CapEx to revenue percentage in terms of investments. Still, for the remaining of the year, we will accelerate our deployments in Pakistan because the average data consumption in Pakistan today is around 7.5 GB per month, which is 1/3 of what it should be. It's not that Pakistanis don't like to consume more, it's because the capacity is limited. We believe that putting more capacity in place will give us the chance also to monetize that business.

Kaan, could I just follow up on the.

Right

EBITDA margin point? I think from what I understood, you're suggesting there will be no margin contraction. Given the upgrade to revenues and EBITDA guidance staying the same, you know, if you take the midpoint of both, that obviously implies margin contraction. Are you suggesting that we should instead be thinking about you ending up at the full year at the top higher end of the EBITDA range if margins are going to stay stable?

Max, I would suggest that, you know, we wait for Q2 end to give more clarity on that. At this particular stage, we wanted to stick to the guidance that we have given on the FTA side.

Okay

I think, you know, our pricing control and inflationary pricing discipline will allow us to keep our margin levels the same.

Brilliant. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Nicholas Paton with Edison Group. Please unmute your line, turn your video on and ask your question.

Hello, everybody. Thank you very much for the additional information on the Pakistan financial services business, which I thought was very interesting. It reminded me of the work that we did in our initiation, and I think when I look back at that now, we were considering the transactions with MTN Group Fintech and Airtel Africa, looking at potential valuations for that business. It looks as though the business has grown something of the order of about 30% in EBITDA terms over the last over the last year or so. At the time, we were looking for a valuation around about a billion for that business. I'm also aware that investors have been discussing a potential strategic investor for that or maybe even an IPO. Have you any more thoughts about crystallizing value in that business?

I'm extremely happy with the progress we have with our financial services business in Pakistan, and specifically, you know, expanding our service lines into insurance and potentially to digital banking products that we do not cover today. I think there is a huge potential of serving 250 million population in Pakistan, and additional to that, 12 million population outside of Pakistan as diaspora. There's a huge potential in this particular market, I would like that growth to show itself a little bit more. What I'm even more excited is applying the same business model in a market like Bangladesh, where there's an additional 180 million population with also a strong diaspora footprint.

I think, you know, our intentions of at certain point opening up this as an investment opportunity stays, but we will not hurry as we see the growth rates actually are still allowing us to develop the business.

Should I infer from that, if you were to look for a crystallization of the value in those businesses, you might look to, for instance, merge the JazzCash business with businesses from other countries? Or would you try to look at options with, on a country basis?

We will keep an open mind in terms of how we see the consolidation, but clearly there are certain aspects of the business which later on actually turn into products such as, digital assets, including stablecoins, remittances. These are global businesses, so some of these things actually could justify a global, multi-brand strategy.

Makes sense. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Our next question comes from Adrian Cundy with Emerging and Frontier Capital. Please unmute your line, turn your video on and ask your question.

Hi, Kaan. Gentlemen, it's good to see you again. Congratulations, first of all, on beating our digital growth estimate this quarter. Last time we did the call, you said that you had a vision of getting to 30%+ of turnover by the AE end of next year, half from organic, half from potential M&A, and 1% a quarter. You seem to be running ahead of that right now. Do you think on an organic basis you might even get to 30% earlier than planned, given what's going on in, particularly in Pakistan?

Well, I think, you know, as I mentioned, you really, the momentum we see, not only just in financial services, but entertainment, our digital premium products, healthcare, marketplaces is very strong. Now actually I see that as a team, we look to end of 2029 to achieve more than 50% of our revenues from digital services. Having that insight, I think half of that should come organic, half of that probably will come with acquisitions that we will see in the markets that we operate in. You know, I'm very happy to see that, you know, we modeled our digital services growth, of course, as 35%+ growth business, and it is proving to be almost twice as fast. I'm happy to see that happen.

Don't wanna give a guidance on the year on growth. That's not something we do at this particular time.

Okay. Just outside of sort of Ukraine and Pakistan and in terms of the growth capital for these, for, you know, digital wallet in Bangladesh, what you might be doing Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, do you see potentially a need for more risk capital or a primary issue in those businesses at the group level? It sort of relates to earlier discussions you said about listing operating companies, particularly Jazz in Pakistan. Is that still on the agenda given the, you know, current geopolitical situation?

I think it's important to look into these not only as, you know, crystallizing of the value, but having the right partners, right investors in place to develop resilience and strength. From that perspective, we are, of course, always looking for, you know, what we can achieve, around the world. Yeah.

Okay. If I could ask a final question for on the debt. You last call, you indicated that you'd like to refinance the notes coming due before they become current in the fourth quarter of this year or address it. Do you sort of, just for our modeling purposes, do you have a target debt to capital in mind? Given that, you know, cash flow continues to accrue at the group level, will there be when you do move on the notes due in 2027, do you need to refinance a whole billion, or will there be a principal payment and maybe an issue of something a bit longer duration, at a smaller size that would provide a further acceleration of free cash flow to equity?

Let me ask Burak to answer that since they have been quite busy on this front. Please, Burak.

Yes. I mean, the work has been going on, and we still plan to address the debt before it becomes current in November 2026. We are working on that, and all options are on the table. Of course, I think we will go for a minimum benchmark size whenever we go for it. On top of that, we will have to decide based on all the capital inflows and outflows that we are foreseeing right now.

If you sort of look two, three years out, what sort of debt to capital structure would you see as optimal for the business?

Excluding leases, we don't want to cross the 1.5% mark, where we are at 1.07% today. That's where we see ourselves.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please click on the Raise Hand button at the bottom of your screen. Written questions can be submitted on the webcast by using the Ask a Question tab at the top right of your screen. Our next question comes from Ahmed Mostafa with INAM. Please unmute your line, turn your video on and ask your question.

Hello, everyone. Thanks for the opportunity. I have a question on Uzbekistan. Customers are nearly flat or declining, but ARPU keeps growing. How should we think about the growth strategy in this market?

Ahmed, thanks a lot for the question. You have noticed, you know, our strategy is around multi-play nature of our services, and that practically means as customers move from being a single-play customer, meaning just consuming our voice services, and transforming into consuming our digital services, the potential of ARPU quadruples and the churn goes down significantly. That's also what we are observing in Uzbekistan. Our customer base is maybe stable, but actually the type of services we provide is getting richer and richer. That allows, especially with the family package models, a much higher traction in our wallet share.

Mm-hmm. That's helpful. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Himanshu Porwal with BMO C. Please unmute your line, turn your video on and ask your question.

Hi. Thank you very much for taking my question, and congratulations for a strong set of results. Just to get some clarity with respect to your financial services business, as in like, how much of the Pakistan revenue comes from the financial services arm, and what are your plans on this very division itself, like the financial services, and do you plan to grow it outside of Pakistan on the similar verticals? Thank you.

Sure, Himanshu. Thanks a lot for the question. To give you an overall indication, for us, financial services business is about a $500 million business. A significant portion, almost 2/3 of it, comes from Pakistan. It's a combination of digital wallet services, insurance business, lending business, as well as, of course, remittances. We are serving almost 29 million customers actively. We have 60 million. Actually, we just crossed the 60 million bank account number. With that, we believe, you know, transacting more than 80% of RAAST transactions and transacting almost 15% of GDP, we are already well-established financial services player, basically.

Sorry. I mean,

Yeah

been more clear. I mean, I meant more with respect to the lending business.

Oh, You mean the percentage of lending business?

Yes.

Okay. We.

So-

Yeah, please. Go ahead

Himanshu, what we Look, we don't get into that level of disclosure, but what we've indicated is that Lending and interest income is slightly over half of the total revenues for the Pakistan business. That's what we've indicated in the past. Clearly, as the business grows in size, we are aware that people want to know more. That's something we are evaluating. I guess over the next six-nine months you'll see us providing more color around that. For now, I think we'll probably leave it at that. Yes, you know Kaan Terzioglu pointed out 200,000+ loans. Mobilink has a pretty big loan portfolio. If you look at the financial services business as a whole, lending and interest income is Yeah, it's north of half of that total revenue base that we have today.

That is precisely what was my concern, I mean, should we start seeing you guys as more of, like a NBFC sort of thing, or are you going towards that? Are there any ambition of moving in that direction or?

Himanshu, I think you should definitely perceive us as a financial services company which serves from wealth management to lending to remittances to digital assets, services in the country. You know, we are already, I think from a numbers side, account numbers side and number of, you know, loans side, we are number one in the country. You will see us getting our fair share from the financial services business as a consumer-oriented financial services company.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Jaslin Ng with New Street Research. Please unmute your line, turn your video on and ask your question.

Hi. Thanks for having me. Just one question. Mobile ARPU growth in general, and especially Ukraine, was really impressive. Can you give more color on that? Is it really all from bundling and multi-play customers?

Look, if you look to our telecom growth, which is I think around 8%, 9%, versus digital services growth, which is around 57%. Then there was another number which I disclosed, which was multi-play services growth, right? This is actually the telecom growth, but for the segment of customers who are consuming both telecom and digital services. We do not recognize the revenue as digital service. We recognize the revenue as telecom service because it actually improves the data consumption. That grows more than 17%. That is actually the sweet spot why our ARPUs are growing. Even if our total number of telecom customers is stable at 150 million year-over-year, our ability to generate more telecom revenues from those customers are increasing because the customers who also consume our entertainment services, they consume more data.

They even talk more on the phone, and they stay longer with us. Those three drivers allows us to create more ARPU from the same customer base.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Ali Zaidi with INAM. Please unmute your line, turn your video on and ask your question.

Hi, guys. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I just have one question. Does Apna Microfinance Bank holds a different kind of license than MMBL? Can it, like, unlock any regulatory capabilities for JazzCash and MMBL in the future?

Well, we are definitely taking a very important role within the digitalization of the financial services landscape in Pakistan. We truly believe that as we grow our footprint, including insurance businesses and Apna Bank, we will be basically operating as a digital bank, providing the services that our customers are in need of in the marketplace.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

We have no further questions at this time. I will now hand back to Anand Ramachandran for closing remarks.

Thank you very much for your interest in VEON and for supporting us. As always, the investor relations team and all of us are available for any follow-up questions. We look forward to staying in touch. Till then, it's goodbye from us till the next quarter on this call. Thank you for your time.

Thank you very much.

As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. Anand Ramachandran, you may begin.

Good morning and good afternoon to everyone joining us. Thank you for being with us for VEON's Q4 and Full Year 2025 Results for the period ending December 31, 2025. My name is Anand Ramachandran. I'm the Chief Corporate Development Officer for VEON. Joining me today are Kaan Terzioğlu, our Group CEO, and Burak Özer, our Group CFO. As usual, Kaan will begin with our strategic and operational highlights, after which Burak will cover the financial results. We will then open the call for Q&A. Before we begin, please note that today's presentation includes forward-looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially due to the risks detailed in VEON's annual report and Form 20-F and other filings with the SEC. Our earnings release and presentation are available on our investor relations website. With that, let me hand it over to Kaan.

Thank you, Anand. 2025 was a strong and transformative year for VEON. We delivered double-digit operational growth, accelerated our digital strategy, strengthened our balance sheet, and unlocked significant shareholder value. Let me highlight a few key points. First, our financial momentum is strong. In the Q4, in US dollars, revenues grew 17%, and EBITDA grew 29% in US dollars year-over-year. For the full year, revenues increased nearly 10% in US dollars, and EBITDA grew 19%. We also crossed an important milestone, more than $2 billion of annual EBITDA with margins expanding to 45.7%. The second theme this year is digital services revenue acceleration. Digital revenues grew 84% year-over-year in the Q4 and over 62% for the full year.

Digital now represents more than 17% of group revenue, up significantly from last year. In Q4, more than 20% of our revenues were digital service revenues. Following your request, we are including EBITDA for direct digital revenues to our set of disclosures. For 2025, EBITDA from digital services reached $207 million, with an EBITDA margin of 27.3%. This shows that digital ecosystem is not only growing quickly, it is also becoming profitable at scale. The third theme is execution of our asset-light strategy. During the year, we completed the sale of our Pakistan tower portfolio, deconsolidated TNS Plus, reducing our leverage and strengthening our balance sheet. We launched direct-to-cell connectivity with Starlink, which is already live in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and this capability will expand to Bangladesh in 2026.

These initiatives demonstrate how we are combining connectivity, digital platforms, and new technologies requiring less CapEx to create long-term growth. Finally, we continue to unlock value for shareholders. The listing of Kyivstar on Nasdaq was a landmark achievement. This quarter, we are further increasing the float with a successful secondary offering, which was completed about a month ago. Today, Kyivstar is valued by the market at $2.4 billion, with VEON's stake worth approximately $2 billion alone. During 2025, we strengthened liquidity, reduced leverage, and continued to execute our share buyback program. We believe VEON's ADSs remain significantly undervalued, and today we are announcing our policy of continuing to repurchase at least $100 million of shares annually. Let's move to the next slide. Our strategy is clearly translating into strong financial results.

Group revenue reached $4.4 billion in 2025, growing 9.9% in US dollar terms. Telecom and infrastructure revenues grew 3% even after the consolidation of TNS Plus, Deodar, and Kyrgyzstan, supported by average revenue per user growth driven by strong subscriber engagement. On a like-for-like basis, as the retailers would call it the same store sales, the revenue growth would have been 11% for the year. At the same time, digital revenues grew more than 62%, reaching $759 million. Digital growth is not just about scale. It is not a vanity. It is contributing to profitability and cash flow. This year we have exceeded EBITDA of $2 billion with margins expanding 350 basis points to 45.7%. This reflects both operational discipline and benefits of scale.

Next slide, please. Our growth continues to outpace inflation across our markets. Pricing control empowered by value propositions remains strong. Our ability to implement fair value pricing leveraging low customer acquisition costs and effective distribution enables us to gain wallet share from customers. Next slide, please. Our digital ecosystem continues to scale rapidly. Digital revenues reached $759 million, representing 17% of our group revenues for the full year. Financial services remain our largest digital category, with strong growth also coming from entertainment platforms, ride hailing and delivery, premium digital services, and enterprise solutions. Digital services business model have much lower capital intensity, which supports equally strong cash flow conversion. Next slide. Multi-play customers are a key driver of our growth. These are customers who are using Connectivity Plus at least one of our digital services.

Multi-play customers generate nearly four times the ARPU of voice-only users, and their churn rate is one-third. Today, multi-play accounts for 56% of our total consumer revenues and continues to grow rapidly. This demonstrates the power of our integrated connectivity and digital ecosystems. Next slide, please. Growth across our markets remains balanced and resilient. Pakistan, Ukraine, Kazakhstan continue to deliver strong momentum. Bangladesh returned to positive growth during the year. Uzbekistan continues to expand steadily. This diversified footprint provides stability and long-term growth opportunities. Next slide, please. Our financial services business in Pakistan continues to perform strongly. Monthly active users reached 21.5 million. The merchant base expanded to over 511,000. Transaction value reached $53 billion, equivalent to around 13% of Pakistan's GDP. Mobilink Bank scales rapidly with a loan portfolio of $264 million and a world-class loan quality.

This positions us well to support Pakistan transition to a digital financial ecosystem. Next slide. Across our ecosystem, we now serve more than 135 million active digital service users. Three-month active digital service users exceeded 200 million, already larger than our telecom subscriber base. Digital-only customers also grew strongly, reaching 33 million. Total transaction value across the ecosystem reached $55 billion, growing more than 50% year-over-year. This is not growth. This is a structural shift demonstrating the scale and engagement of our digital platforms. Next slide, please. Our consumer digital platforms continue to scale over several verticals. Financial services, entertainment, healthcare, ride hailing, marketplaces, and super apps together now reach tens of millions of users across our markets.

At the same time, our premium digital brands, virtual digital operators such as IZI, ROX, OQ, or Raiz are creating unique experiences with integrated telecom and lifestyle services such as augmented intelligence, mobility, education, healthcare, and e-commerce. These platforms deepen the engagement and create multiple monetization opportunities. Next slide, please. Our enterprise platforms are also evolving into technology businesses serving governments and corporations. This quarter, we launched Buildix in Uzbekistan, strengthening our regional AI and software capabilities. Across our enterprise hubs, we now have around 2,000 engineers and data scientists building cloud, augmented intelligence, and data analytics solutions. Our AdTech platform now reaches over 98 million screens, enabling AI-driven advertising across our entertainment platforms. Next slide. Augmented intelligence is becoming a core part of our value proposition.

From raw data to digital services, our next frontier is to offer our customers better version of themselves, a priceless value proposition, superhero capabilities, making a doctor a better doctor, a teacher a better teacher, a farmer a more productive one. Through augmented intelligence capabilities, we are embedding AI across our platform services and enterprise offerings. We are developing local language large models, including Kazakh, Ukrainian models, and Urdu, Uzbek, Bengali in the making. These initiatives are already delivering measurable results. I see no reason why we cannot offer the healthcare services today available only to the wealthiest, to everyone at a fraction of a cost. There is no reason why best doctor not to be in Karachi, best teacher not to be in Dhaka.

Most productive farmer will be in Almaty or Odessa. Today, our augmented intelligence-enabled customer care tools handles close to 1 million interactions each month, creating better experience at a fraction of a cost. I can see these numbers growing tenfold over the next 2 years. With that, I will hand the call over to Burak.

Thank you, Kaan. Our group revenue reached $4.4 billion in 2025, growing 9.9% year-over-year in US dollar terms. Adjusting for portfolio changes, revenue growth would have been around 11% in dollars and over 15% in local currency terms. Digital services were again the fastest growing segment, reaching $759 million and representing 17% of the group revenue. Next slide, please. EBITDA for the year reached $2.01 billion representing 18.8% growth. Our EBITDA margin expanded to 45.7% reflecting both operating leverage and disciplined cost management. Growth was supported by strong performance across Pakistan, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Next slide, please. Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the year with $1.73 billion of cash, including $557 million at headquarters.

Net debt excluding leases declined to $1.75 billion with leverage reduced to 1.09x EBITDA. This reflects a strong and sustainable capital structure. With that, I'll hand the call back to Kaan.

Thank you, Burak. Returning capital to shareholders is always a priority. We completed our first $100 million buyback program in August 2025. Our second $100 million program is currently underway. Going forward, our policy is to continue annual share buybacks of at least $100 million, reflecting our confidence in VEON's long-term cash generation capacity. Once our annual buyback program starts after the completion of the current buyback program, shares bought back will be systematically canceled. Next slide. Let me conclude with our 2026 outlook. We will give our guidance in US dollars. We expect revenue growth of 9%-12%, EBITDA growth of 7%-10%. CapEx intensity excluding Ukraine is expected to decline to 14%-16%. We remain confident in the continued growth of both our core telecommunications and digital services businesses.

To conclude, VEON is delivering strong financial results, scaling a high growth digital services ecosystem and unlocking sustainable shareholder value. We are optimistic about the opportunities ahead. Thank you for your continued support and trust in our company. We will now open the line for questions.

Thank you. At this time, if you would like to ask a question, please click on the Raise Hand button which can be found on the black bar at the bottom of your screen. When it is your turn to ask a question, you will receive a prompt to be promoted to panelist. Please accept. Wait a moment, and once you have been introduced, you may unmute yourself, turn your video on, and ask your question. Written questions can be submitted on the webcast by using the Ask a Question tab at the top right of your screen. As a reminder, we are allowing analysts one question and one related follow-up today. If you wish to ask more questions, please raise your hand again and rejoin the queue. We will now pause a moment to allow the questioners to enter the queue.

Our first question comes from Max Findlay with R&Co Redburn. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Hi, this is Max Findlay from Rothschild & Co Redburn. Thank you for taking the time to speak to us, today. Firstly, I've got some questions on the Pakistan spectrum auction. Some might be surprised by the 50 MHz in the 3,500 MHz band you acquired. This bandwidth is normally associated with 5G, and I was wondering if it's an aspiration to build a 5G network in Pakistan, or does the priority remain 4G? Secondly, from my understanding, the costs are denominated in Pakistani rupees. Are there any escalators within the spectrum costs that we should be aware of? Finally, can we expect a ramp up in Pakistan's CapEx as you prepare on utilizing the new spectrum? Just a quick one. I noticed there was an update on the OLX Kazakhstan acquisition, which is still going through regulatory approvals.

Are you able to provide any updates on expected closing? Thank you.

Thank you, Max. Let me start with commending Pakistani government for their visionary action and reforms in the spectrum allocation in the marketplace. Pakistan struggled with, you know, almost for many years a very low spectrum allocation to the mobile operators. Actually, it was below 300 MHz that was being shared by four operators. In the new auction, they auctioned 600 MHz for three operators. Twice for one less operator. They have tripled the spectrum in use in the country by doing this at rupee-based pricing and at much lower pricing per spectrum. Hands-off, really a great success in terms of the execution. They raised half a billion dollars, but more importantly, they opened up a real chance to improve Pakistan's infrastructure.

Now, during this auction, we have acquired 700, 2300, 2600, and 3500 bands, a total of 190 MHz of spectrum for a total cost of $240 million. This is a fantastic achievement, and the reason that we have invested broad-based, you know, different platforms is our belief that we're gonna be improving the quality of 4G as well as deploying 5G networks. It is not true that 3500 can only be used for 5G. It can be used, actually, 2600 can also be used for 5G, but we need to keep in mind that the amount of 5G capable phones in Pakistan has not even reached 5%. We believe still in Pakistan there is a huge opportunity to improve the mobile broadband services for 4G platforms as well.

This will not stop us deploying 5G in certain pockets where we see relevance, and we will be executing that strategy actually quite quickly since we are ready to roll out both advanced 4G solutions as well as 5G services in Pakistan. Now, with regard to OLX in Kazakhstan, we are actually waiting for regulatory approvals to close the transaction. I think it has already been taking a while, but I hope that it will be closed within Q2. And that's our expectation. But of course, regulatory approvals are always depends on speed of certain institutions.

Kaan, there was also a question on 5G CapEx in Pakistan. We've given CapEx guidance max of 14%-16%, so I think it's fair to expect us to be very disciplined when it comes to CapEx. You know, we would not expect any big lumps coming through. It's something the business will manage in the long run, and as Kaan said, we will be very, very disciplined in what we have as a satellite strategy where we spend where it's necessary to maintain the network differentiation and service innovation that we want to keep.

I would like to highlight that we are not afraid to invest. Our investments actually are returning to us in a very handsome way because all the infrastructure that we build is actually the platform for our digital services to connect to customers. We will of course keep you posted about if there will be any changes in the outlook.

Brilliant. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Max.

Our next question comes from Theodore O'Neill from Litchfield Hills Research. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Yeah, thanks very much. First question is about so your revenue growth was strong here for the year despite somewhat challenging market. I was wondering if you could separate out a little bit the success in pricing versus volume growth, digital services and portfolio changes and that mix in to help the growth for the year.

Sure. Theodore, I think our recipe for success relies on the fact that we rely less and less on selling raw data and number of gigabytes. We managed to transform our customers consuming meaningful digital services from digital banking to entertainment to healthcare, education, retailing, marketplaces. The ability to transition into what we call multi-play really creates an opportunity to build deep relationships with the customer where our relationships are longer, meaning that churn is almost one-third and our revenue generation capacity is almost four-fold compared to a traditional single voice user. We see actually this transition allowing us not only to deliver high growth on telecom space, but also on top of that, direct digital revenues coming directly from these platforms. We separate these things completely separate from each other.

That's the secret sauce of VEON's digital services operator model.

As a follow-up on digital revenue, could you discuss the next phase of growth, where that'll come from and the margin profile?

The margin profile currently for 2025 is 27.3%. We have a business model that is architected to deliver equivalent cash flow generation capacity, whether it's telecom services or digital services. If you look practically to the telecom business model, you create about, you know, 47% EBITDA margin, but then you have a heavy CapEx cost of almost 25%, and that leaves you with a 20%-23% cash flow generation capacity. On the digital services side, you know, we build a model where you create 27% margin, but your CapEx-to-revenue ratio is 7%, which again leaves you with a 20% cash generation capacity. We are very happy with this balanced model as we grow.

Thanks very much.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Adrian Cundy with Emerging & Frontier Capital. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Hi, Kaan, Burak, Anand. Good to see you again. 'Cause I've got one question. Can I just talk about capital allocation in the midterm? Obviously, your CapEx is headed in the right way, so 16% core plus whatever Ukraine has to do to keep things going. You have some leverage due in 2027. You're continuing $100 million in buybacks but no sort of long-term visibility on when dividends may resume. How do you just sort of like, you know, half a billion now at the group level, how do you sort of plan on using that? A number of investors I've spoken to have sort of, you know, some indirect questions saying, "What's the long-term sort of capital allocation?

Sure

Vision for the company? I think it's a big piece missing from your story.

Sure. Adrian, to be precise, as in addition to the $200 million buybacks we announced, we are actually in the middle of the second announcement we have made. Once that is completed, now we have announced the policy of continuing our stock buybacks of $100 million each year with an intention to cancel the shares that we buy back.

Mm-hmm.

We have talked to our investors. What we hear from our investors is their preferred method of compensation is stock buybacks, not dividends.

Mm-hmm.

As you can imagine, our business is a high growth business. We see lots of opportunities to actually grow our business and continue delivering on that policy of minimum $100 million. It doesn't set, you know, where that could be, but minimum $100 million, I believe, is a solid basis for our policy for the mid- to long-term compensation for our shareholders. I do not necessarily see a high growth company like us being on the dividend path, and this is not a desirable outcome for our shareholders from what we hear from the investors.

Okay. A couple have asked me about it, that's why I asked about the long term. I was sort of thinking on a three to five year view.

Yeah

More than anything. Again, you know, sort of $650 million of equity free cash flow after leases, $100 million in buybacks. There's about $1.2 billion obviously debt at the HQ level. What is sort of the thinking on you know refinancing that? How much might be redirected to M&A at the group level? And what's your sort of group level liquidity targets?

Adrian, if you look to the last six quarters of our performance, and if you look to the acquisitions that we have made over this time, you will notice one thing, discipline.

Mm-hmm.

Every single acquisition that we have made, whether it be Helsi or Uklon or solar generation sites in Uklon or OLX, Tabletki.ua, these are all accretive businesses that we have invested in with the purpose of penetrating into adjacent markets in the countries that we are in. We will keep this discipline. Please do not think that we are out there looking for acquiring assets that we can put our hands on. We focus on what matters, customer needs and customer demand, and we will continue doing this in the markets that we are in.

Mm-hmm.

At a certain point, it is also obvious, we as a group, we are kind of maybe unnecessarily experienced in operating in difficult markets. I'm not gonna apologize for being successful in difficult markets, but this is a unique characteristic of our company. If we see opportunities arising in markets where large population countries who are underserved in nature, under-penetrated in nature, with the right regulatory environment, taxation schemes, we might show interest. But again, as I said, we are extremely cautious and disciplined in making these type of decisions. I believe the current growth potential that we have in our five markets is abundant.

All right. Thank you. I'll get back in the queue.

So-

On top of that, Adrian, I mean we have also set up an anchor for ourselves, which is 1.5 net debt excluding leases to EBITDA, which we are now well below that with 1.09, which have come down from 1.34 last year. Therefore, we have room in terms of our balance sheet from a debt perspective. Our strategy continues to push that debt down to the countries which we are at 50% level right now when you look at our debt. We are aware of the fact that our debt at the HQ will come current when November comes. Therefore, actively working together with our investors, banks, et cetera, to address that before that time and have gained some way on that one.

All right. Thank you.

Our next question.

Thank you.

From Nicholas Paton with Edison. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Hello, everybody. I guess I'm sort of interested by Ukraine. I think it's fallen off the radar a little bit with what's happening with the geopolitical situation. The Q4 was quite a bit better than I expected it to be. It was about 10% better on revenues and actually a full 18% on EBITDA. I was kind of interested to hear what you're thinking internally about the optionality of that business. What does it look like over the next couple of years if things continue as they are? You know, as we heard at the Invest in Ukraine event that you hosted recently in Dubai, you know, the potential when the war finishes is clearly very significant, and this might In fact, it certainly is the time to invest if you want to have the full benefit from that. What are you thinking about that upside case as well? Have you made any projections on where you think the business could go in those two scenarios? I'm sure you have.

So-

I just wanna hear what they are.

Nicholas, today, actually, we're gonna have another call about Kyivstar operations with regard to, you know, their quarterly and annual results. More details you will be able to find there. Let me share you my dream. Ten years from today, Ukraine will be the most prosperous, happy, healthy and, you know, high quality living standard country in the entire European Union. That's what I believe. That's why we have been propagating, you know, the opportunities in Ukraine. Yes, today there is war. Tomorrow there might be peace. Who knows when tomorrow will happen? I truly believe that the opportunities in Ukraine and the market dynamics, which is demonstrated in our business in terms of the digital appetite of the users, you know, ability to provide services over digital platforms, whether it is healthcare or entertainment, these are abundant.

I believe with the regulatory environment getting more synchronized with European Union standards, this will give huge opportunities. You know, I really believe that this is an investment that was paid back to us in a very strong way, and I think, you know, we are proud to have an investable vehicle in Nasdaq coming from Ukraine, which will allow people to participate in this growth.

That's great. Thanks. I've got another question but I'll leave it if we're just doing one each.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Chris Hoare with NSR. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Yeah, thanks, guys. Great obviously to see the accelerating trends. I mean, really, you know, very strong in the quarter. I just wanna touch on the settlement with Dhabi Group, though. I wonder if you could give some context around that, where that comes from, why you've decided to settle now, and then obviously also, you know, are there any other contingent liabilities that you think might crystallize over the next two or three years that you'd want to flag?

Chris, thanks a lot for asking the question and giving me the opportunity to explain. We are a peaceful company. Back in 2021, I was deeply saddened with the decision of Dhabi Group in terms of exercising their put option.

Mm-hmm.

We went through a process, and in those days, remember, it was in the middle of the COVID, we came to valuation, and we concluded on that exercise. Later on, it was obvious that, you know, our business in Pakistan did extremely well.

Mm-hmm.

We did not only do operationally and financially well, we managed to execute on the dream of, you know, being asset light. We sold the Deodar. You know, we turned around big time our financial services business.

Yeah.

We could not notice the, you know, bitter taste that our then minority investor, Dhabi Group, had.

Mm-hmm.

We thought it was the right time to find a resolution to this issue. Therefore, I'm very glad to welcome him, His Highness Sheikh Nahyan, back to our cap table, and I think this is a, you know, issue that we are now going to leave behind. The management will have no distraction on thinking about, you know, this issue, and I'm so happy to basically proceed with a strong investor from the Middle East on our cap table. With regard to any other disputes like that, we are 100% peaceful now. This was an issue actually which we have indicated on our Form 20-F long time ago, and I'm happy that one more issue is off the table.

Yeah. Just in terms of the timing, is that sort of potentially make a potential Jazz IPO simpler? Is there anything to sort of read into it from that perspective or not?

Look, I think our intentions are obvious. Less conflicts, more peace, more prosperity for everyone. I think this is, of course, an important thing with regard to opening up our monetization opportunities in Pakistan.

Yeah

Both for financial services and Jazz itself.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

Also before addressing the bonds, this would be a good time to clarify and bring clarity to all our investors, as I just mentioned a couple of minutes ago, that we will be addressing our bonds. We believe that this would be the good time to clarify the situation and have a clear pathway forward.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Vincent Fernando with Zero One. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Hi. You're acquiring TPL Insurance with expected closing mid-2026. Can you walk us through the embedded insurance thesis behind that, maybe distributing through JazzCash's 74 million subscriber base? Maybe any color on what target attach rate you're assuming you'd achieve? Is this a story we'd see maybe second half 2026 starting to be accretive to digital or it's more a 2027 story? Thank you.

Vincent, thanks for asking. Actually, insurance business has been already accretive to our business in Pakistan. It is sometimes, even if when I say it's hard to believe, on a daily basis, we are embedding about 900,000 insurance policies in our different products. This is happening today. One of the reasons why we thought acquiring an insurance company as part of our financial services offerings is the realization that why are we selling other people's products only if we can sell some of our own assets here as well? There are two important platforms. One part is JazzCash, which is selling lots of embedded insurance policies.

The other platform is FikrFree, which is actually a health insurance platform, which I also think that it's a huge opportunity for us as we focus on healthcare services. You know, TPL it's a small insurance company with about $20-$25 million of top line, but this will give us the necessary licenses and platforms to build, you know, low damage cost insurance products. Thank you.

One other sort of follow-up question for that. You know, a lot of mobile money operators in emerging markets have converted to full digital bank licenses.

Yeah.

Just wanna get maybe the latest. Is there, you know, a digital banking license for JazzCash? Is that something actively pursuing right now with the State Bank?

Digital financial services is one of our priority growth areas, and in all the markets that we are active in, we are actively seeking digital banking licenses. It's no secret. With regard to Pakistan, our operation in Pakistan includes a microfinance bank and a digital wallet. Combination of these things create actually, with certain limitations, equal to digital banking license capabilities. Imagine, with those limitations, we managed to create this business success story. Once those limitations will be gone, I think our business will even grow faster. We are actively seeking those, and I'm confident that, you know, we build the necessary credibility in the eyes of the central banks, not only in Pakistan, but also in other central banks, to be allowed for digital banking licenses.

Great. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you, Vincent.

Our next question comes from Matthew Harrigan with StoneX. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Thank you. You're devising local market LLMs in concert with some very prominent international tech companies, and what's interesting is Zoom is actually taking a somewhat similar approach. They're not trying to have the costs for the LLMs in-house. They're working with, you know, really what they call a federated model, working with Google and everyone else, you know, OpenAI. Interestingly, you're probably aware of it, there's something called Humanity's Last Exam, which is kind of an amusing acronym, HLE. It rates AI models. What they did in-house using this composite approach and doing a lot of SLMs for specific verticals actually graded out ahead of what even, you know, the latest Gemini model did.

I would imagine that with your market specificity and all the language differences, you must really be, if you don't have it already, you must be working toward LLMs that are maybe vastly or considerably better than anything else that would work in the market. Do you have any thoughts about the progress? I know this is kind of a down in the weeds question, but do you have any thoughts about the progress you and your partners are making on the LLMs for the various markets? Thank you.

Matthew, thanks a lot for the question. We have a couple of partners that we work with very closely. One of them is Seeker, one of them is MeetKai, and we really work together to develop low cost but very effective local language models. We have so far been successful with Kazakh LLM, Ukrainian LLM is in the making, and in the meantime, we are working on Urdu, Bengali and Uzbek LLMs. The reason why we take this sovereign AI opportunity is because there is no other player in our markets. You know, our markets is by themselves is a entry barriers around payments, around access, digitalization, mobile broadband and affordability. We are leveraging all those capabilities to make sure that we are uniquely positioned to capture this market.

I'm very excited because this is actually the value proposition in terms of building the next step, right? Raw data is what everybody does. You sell gigabytes. Digital services, what very few does among us is we are very successful in that you sell subscription to services. The third level, you make people better. A doctor having an agent as a maybe an online assistant for him taking notes or a teacher helping with, coaching and planning of educational programs. We really focus on that part because this is what matters, customer getting a better service. I believe there is no other player in the markets that we operate in who can deliver on this promise. We have the right distribution platforms, the super apps.

We have JanaMD, we have Tamasha, you know, we have Hambi, we have Kyivstar, My Kyivstar. You know, all these platforms are just a click away from the customer to make them super human beings. That's the business which is most exciting in my mind currently.

Congratulations, especially on getting about 20% on the digital revenues. I think that's really key to the stock rerating on the valuation multiples. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Matthew.

Our next question comes from Ahmed Mostafa with Inam. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Hello, everyone. Thanks for presentation and congrats on the numbers. I have two questions. First is, your 2026 guidance implies some margin compression, with EBITDA growth trailing revenue. Is this primarily a function of the mix shift toward the high growth digital segment, which carries a lower EBITDA margin but higher free cash flow conversion rate due to its asset light nature? And second, the question is regarding the recent auction win in Pakistan. Could you provide more color on the deployment timeline for the new spectrum? Specifically, when should we expect this added capacity to translate into visible operating metrics such as ARPU growth or lower churn in the 4G base? Thank you.

Ahmed, thanks a lot. If you look to 2025 performance of ours, and I made this comparison like if we were a, you know, a retail business, like we would do same-store basis comparisons. If you would do that, you would see that our revenues grew 11% and our EBITDA grew basically 18.8%. On the back of that overperformance in terms of nominal EBITDA, when you compare the EBITDA guidance we have given, actually you will see that it is not a, you know, a low number. We will actually be growing our nominal EBITDA in a very significant way. We are also looking into the realities of this world. It's not the dilution that potentially, you know, the digital services will bring. It has maybe some small element.

The real reality we are at today, none of our countries, except for Kazakhstan, is oil producing. It is natural to expect $90-$120 per barrel oil price, which will potentially have an inflationary impact of 2%-9% in the countries that we operate in. Now, I do expect that we would react in a positive way. We have pricing power in the markets that we can apply. The timing of these things could have an impact. That's the assumptions that we took into consideration when coming up with our guidance for the market.

Okay.

Now, with regard to Pakistan, we are, I think, allocated today the spectrum. The market is so spectrum hungry that I think some of that will happen immediately. If you think about, you know, the average consumption of data in Pakistan, we are today at 7 GB per person. In any other 4G mobile broadband environment, we are talking about 20 gigabytes per person consumption. Clearly there is a bottleneck that is going to be disappearing, and I do expect some of that to come as early as towards the end of this year, and the rest will of course come from new deployments, which we will see the impact in two years. The good thing about our model is our sourcing mechanisms allow us to start paying for the CapEx when the equipment starts cash generation.

I believe we will be able to balance this process in terms of cash received from the customers and that is invested in the marketplace. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next question is a written question from Yejide Onabule from Barings. It says: What are the plans for the 2027 bonds? Do they plan to come to market this year to refinance it? Are there any more acquisitions in the pipeline? Do we expect FCF to be positive this year? Is there a leverage target?

Burak, I will leave you to answer the question.

Sure. As I said, on the previous answer that we are planning to address those bonds this year before they become current in November. Having said that, the amount will be dependent on what comes in and out in terms of our asset light strategy, sales, our M&A portfolio that we have on the radar screen. So the amount is not decided as of today. In terms of the free cash flow, we intend to turn minimum a double-digit free cash flow to revenue going forward and therefore you could expect a positive free cash flow from us from that perspective. Was there a third question that I missed in terms of M&A? I think there was a third question, Anand, yes.

Yes. I think we are always, as Kaan pointed out, we are always looking at a bunch of targets. As Kaan pointed out, expect us to be extremely disciplined, continue to be extremely disciplined in the way we look at these assets. We have a priority of growing the digital ecosystem. We have a priority of growing the financial services business, and clearly we will look to make investments in telecom as the spectrum investment in Pakistan shows. Absolutely, we will be opportunistic, and that's why Burak went back to the point of, you know, how much we decide to raise eventually will be a function of timing around that as well. The one consistent theme around this is discipline and making sure that whatever we do is accretive to earnings, cash flows, and shareholders value.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Adrian Cundy with Emerging & Frontier Capital LLP. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Hi, Kaan. I'm gonna come back to digital revenues and EBITDA in this question. How- Do you sort of have a midterm goal of sort of achieving what share of revenues in digital given that, you know, roughly, as we're saying, your cash generation capacity 20% revenue in digital, 25% in cellular. Do you sort of see digital achieving like a third of revenue in next three-five years or more, just from a planning perspective? How much of that do you think can be generated organically versus future acquisitions?

The dream I have in three years to have 50-50%. Now

Okay

We increase our percentage every quarter about 1 percentage points, right? If you take that, you know, 12 will come from organic growth. I think, you know, as we have executed it successfully in certain markets, there will be small opportunities to capture not only actually capturing revenues or EBITDA by acquisitions, but talent. We are very well aware of the fact that we are entering into some businesses where we need fresh talent and experience. That's why we acquire an insurance company. We know how to get a license. We can build from scratch, but sometimes it is better for us to actually capture the talent in the marketplace while we grow.

Expect us with these small type of acquisitions in the countries that we operate in, which will not be big acquisitions, but it will give us the talent and the businesses and the products and the customer base. I do like to see in three years from today, a 50-50 balance in terms of our revenues.

Share of EBITDA would be similar given the cash generation.

Yes, exactly. I think, you know, we will continue executing on the business model that I described before. Yeah.

Okay. Just an extension of that and maybe tie this in with the broader asset-light strategy. I mean, we've seen some announcements in Uzbekistan where there's been a small investment in data center. We've seen in Ukraine, of course, an investment in solar. Your Ukraine CEO has commented on previous calls that there is a midterm dream in the country of building something up like a next gen fiber network or an infrastructure network for the company along the lines of Openreach net in the U.K. or Singapore's NetLink NBN Trust. How are you gonna juggle those two sort of things with the?

You've made comments earlier on these calls about your resolute commitment to really keeping CapEx light, and I think you've done so far so good with the sales ratios you have, the intensity.

Yeah

What's the long term? How do you plan on juggling these sort of the necessity of, if you will, you know, of things like data centers with, you know, a digital business-centric business?

Look, we are committed being an asset-light company, and we will continue executing on that. Also we are not dogmatic. There are realities in different countries, and Ukraine is one of those countries. You know, this is a country which has a systemic gap in energy generation and distribution. Therefore, when we see the opportunities, especially from the perspective of hedging also the cash we generate in the country, we are looking for assets which are already revenue and EBITDA positive, accretive to invest in. With the acquisition that we have done in the solar generation, which was 15 MW, I would like to reach at least 30% of our energy consumption in Ukraine to be generated by our own solar capacity. Potentially, who knows? This is a country that needs rebuilding and reconstruction, and I would like to be part of that.

Still we will keep in the midterm, a perspective and a roadmap for getting asset-light again. Don't be surprised if we would do temporary investments in asset-heavy businesses in Ukraine, but later on, quickly move into finding the right investors for those type of assets as we execute our strategy. Our asset-light strategy has not changed. As I mentioned, country by country, it can show certain differences. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

Our final question comes from Ali Zaidi with INAM. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Hi, guys. Thank you for the opportunity. My question is like with Jazz and MMBL now established as a digital financial ecosystem in Pakistan and with TPL also coming in, what do you think would be the relevant next steps, the digital financial ecosystem in Pakistan? Do you see enough growth within the loan book and the user base to, like, justify a standalone IPO?

Yeah. Thanks a lot for the question. You know, as I mentioned in Pakistan currently, we operate under certain, you know, microfinance bank license metrics, and those metrics require us to, you know, limit our loan book and growth to certain lower level limits. I look forward to upgrading our license to a full digital banking license in Pakistan, and that will of course open up new growth opportunities for us. I expect those things to be happening throughout this year. As those happen, I think we will be in a better position to look into opportunities to monetize this asset. We are very happy with the performance. I think the potential is huge.

Keep in mind that, you know, Pakistan is a 250 million population country, and more importantly, a significant diaspora outside of the country doing quite a lot of remittances. 30% of Pakistan GDP comes from remittances, coming from other countries. Being a real digital bank, ability to have foreign currency translations and a much wider base for lending, I think is a huge opportunity in front of us, and I would like to first see that opportunity realized.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

We have no further questions at this time. I will now hand back to Anand Ramachandran for closing remarks.

Thank you, James. Well, guys, thank you so much for joining us on the call. It's a pleasure as always. Any further questions, please do feel free to reach out to us, and we'll be happy to assist with that in an instant. We look forward to seeing you in the next quarter. Till then, all the best.

Thank you very much. All the best.

Hello. Good afternoon, and good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining us today for VEON's Third Quarter 2025 results for the period ending 30th September 2025. My name is Anand Ramachandran, Chief Corporate Development Officer for VEON. Allow me to introduce our senior management in the room today. Next to me is Mr. Kaan Terzioglu, our Group CEO; and next to him, Mr. Burak Ozer, our Group CFO. Today's presentation, as usual, will begin with the key highlights and business update from Kaan, followed by a discussion of the financial results from Burak. We will then open the line for Q&A. Before we begin, please note that today's presentation may include forward-looking statements, which involve certain risks and uncertainties. These statements relate to the company's anticipated performance, 2025 guidance, market development, operational and network investments and the company's ability to realize its targets and initiatives. Our actual results may differ materially due to risks detailed in our annual report on Form 20-F and other filings with the SEC. The earnings release and presentation, including reconciliations of non-IFRS measures are all available on our Investor Relations website. With that, let me hand it over to Kaan.

Thank you, Anand. Good morning, good afternoon, and welcome to everyone. Let me begin with a remarkable milestone. In September, our monthly digital service users surpassed monthly telecom SIM card users for the first time, a defining moment in our journey as a true digital operator. This signals the scale of the opportunity ahead of us and the extraordinary growth still to come. Across our footprint, more than 0.5 billion people, and we see a rising digital adoption, expanding connectivity and powerful demographic momentum. These markets are not just large. They are accelerating, underpinned by innovation and low base effects that create multiple vectors of sustained growth. At the heart of this opportunity is our digital operator model, uniquely positioned to capture and drive this transformation. By combining connectivity, digital platforms and financial inclusion, we are unlocking sustainable growth and enduring value creation for customers, communities, governments and shareholders alike. And now let's start the key messages from our Q3 results. I am pleased that we have delivered another strong quarter, starting with our financial performance. Our revenues grew 7.5% year-on-year in U.S. dollar terms. U.S. dollar EBITDA increased by 19.7% year-on-year. This is yet another $1 billion-plus revenue quarter and a $0.5 billion plus EBITDA quarter. On the back of this performance, we are raising our fiscal year 2025 EBITDA outlook. We now expect 16% to 18% EBITDA growth for the year in local currency terms, up from 14% to 16% earlier. Second, we are driving exceptional momentum in expanding our digital services portfolio. Direct digital revenues grew 63% in U.S. dollar terms and now contribute 17.8% of our total group revenues. Our AI 1440 strategy is becoming central to our operations with ongoing work on large language models and increasing integration into Agentic AI-powered customer-facing solutions. We are delivering localized multilingual features at scale through our super app platforms. Third, we continue to make good progress in executing our asset-light strategy. We have completed the sale of our Kyrgyzstan operations this quarter, further streamlining our portfolio and focusing on core growth markets. Our global framework agreement with Starlink aims to bringing direct-to-sell satellite connectivity to all of VEON's operating markets, ensuring resilient connectivity even in hard-to-reach areas. Kyivstar is on track to launch nationwide coverage subsequent to approvals. Beeline Kazakhstan is planning to launch services in Kazakhstan as we plan to test activities over the next couple of months. And finally, we continue to deliver for our shareholders. The landmark listing of Kyivstar on NASDAQ unlocked significant value with a current market valuation of $2.8 billion compared to $1.25 billion of equity, which is 2.3x of its book value. We retain an 89.6% stake in Kyivstar, which is worth $2.5 billion at Kyivstar's current market price. We are pleased that uncertainties regarding VEON's going-concern status have been mitigated, reflecting stronger liquidity and a more resilient balance sheet. And finally, our Board has approved another $100 million share and/or bond repurchase program, a clear demonstration of our confidence in our growth prospects and our continued commitment to deliver value to all our investors. Let's move to Q3 key financial metrics. Let me summarize our performance for the quarter. Telecom and infrastructure segment revenues on a like-on-like basis that adjusts for TNS+ this divestment grew 3.5% versus the reported 0.5% number that you see on this page. This reflects the impact of our differentiated networks, products and services in continuing to drive ARPU and subscriber engagement while reducing churn. Our direct digital revenues were up 63% and represents 17.8% of total group revenue. On profitability, our EBITDA margin continues to grow. Year-to-date margins have expanded by 320 basis points year-on-year and reflect both scale efficiencies and cost discipline. Last 12-month EPS stands at $8.89, up 60.2% year-on-year. However, the reported EPS for Q3 alone was a loss of $1.84 per share as we recorded 2 noncash charges totaling $259 million. First was a charge of $162 million related to the SPAC sponsor shares in connection with the Kyivstar listing, which is treated as a share-based compensation according to IFRS and has been recognized in the third quarter. Second was a charge of $97 million for the sale of our Kyrgyzstan business, triggering a cumulative currency translation adjustments. For the avoidance of doubt, Q3 results has contributed $76 million to our shareholders' equity. I will emphasize that these noncash charges have no impact on VEON's underlying operational performance, cash generation or financial guidance, which remains firmly supported by our strong organic growth and margin expansion across our key markets. Moving on, our last 12 months CapEx intensity, excluding Ukraine, was 17.7%, and it is in line with our guidance. Net debt, excluding leases, stood at $1.72 billion as of September. The improvement in leverage to 1.13x reflects our operational and financial discipline and the success of our asset-light strategy. Our last 12 months equity free cash flow reached $584 million. Finally, we ended the quarter with a cash balance of $1.67 million, including $653 million at the headquarters level. Let's look at our growth trajectory, and I will highlight 3 key points. First, on a like-for-like basis, which adjusts for deconsolidation of TNS+, the Uklon acquisition and the sale of Deodar and Kyrgyzstan business, our revenues would have grown 10% in U.S. dollars versus the reported 7.5%. Secondly, our EBITDA rose 19.7% in U.S. dollars, underscoring the resilience of our strategy and the quality of execution. Finally, I am pleased that our momentum continues to exceed inflation and nominal GDP growth, showcasing our ability to implement fair pricing while capturing greater share of customer wallet share. Let me dive into our digital revenue performance. Starting last quarter, we began breaking out the components of our digital service revenues to provide you with greater transparency into growth and potential of our digital businesses. Let me make 3 points here. First, financial services are the largest component, accounting for 54% of total digital revenues, growing 33% year-on-year. Second, growth is pretty broad-based with solid contributions across our entertainment, ride-hailing, enterprise and premium digital brand segments. Third, our sustainable cost advantages are how our low customer acquisition costs and optimized distribution model is driving this growth. These enable us to scale profitably and maintain strong unit economics. Let's look into our progress with regard to multiplay users. Multiplay users count customers that use at least one digital service in addition to our voice and data connectivity services. Multiplay is a key feature of our digital operator strategy and growth story. 4G enables multiplay, making increased 4G adoption is a key growth driver. And it is this 4G base that is increasingly shifting to multiplay, driven by our extensive and relevant suite of digital products and services. The multiplay segment drives growth through stronger customer engagement, higher data consumption, more frequent usage of voice services, improved retention and ARPU expansion. Our multiplay customers generate 3.8x the ARPU of a voice-only subscriber. Encouragingly, this ratio continues to sustain even as multiplay adoption expands as a proportion of our overall subscriber base. In the third quarter, 55.4% of our total customer revenues were generated by multiplay customers, and this segment grew revenue-wise 23% year-on-year. Let's look into different operations growth performance. And I'll use local currency terms across our markets for this. We have delivered strong double-digit revenue growth across all of our markets, apart from Bangladesh. While the headline revenue growth for Beeline Kazakhstan shows as single digit, revenues on a like-for-like basis, adjusting for TNS+ deconsolidation was up 23.3%. In Bangladesh, we are encouraged that the revenue returned to year-on-year growth for the first time in 14 months in September 2025. Our profitability trends across markets were strong as well. Headline numbers for Beeline Kazakhstan and Beeline Uzbekistan were impacted by tax effects. However, after adjusting for these, organic profitability trends remain very strong. Finally, please note that our consolidated financial results for Ukraine include full consolidation of Ukraine Tower Company, UTC, whereas the stand-alone disclosures for KGL Group that are also released this morning excludes UCT. We can take specific questions and discuss market-specific issues during the Q&A session. Let me now turn into the Financial Services business success story in Pakistan. This business is the largest component of our Financial Services business, which I have highlighted earlier. This quarter, we completed the operational separation of JazzCash. JazzCash will continue to provide technology and services to MMBL. Both are now fully owned subsidiaries of VEON. This is a key step in accelerating growth and unlocking value across our digital financial services portfolio. The business continues to deliver strong growth, as you see on this page. Gross transaction value for the quarter rose 40% year-on-year, representing 13% of Pakistan's gross domestic product on a last 12-month basis. This was driven by a 48% increase in total transactions and a 38% increase in transactions per user. JazzCash with its over 700,000 merchant base processes over 80% of all Raast payments value under the Prime Minister's Cashless Society initiative. Loan origination expanded sharply this quarter with the daily average number of digital loans rising by nearly 26%. The average of 153,000 micro loans disbursed on a single day in Q3. More recently, JazzCash achieved a major milestone with its highest ever single-day lending disbursement of PKR 1.1 billion through 200,000 loans. We are extremely proud of what JazzCash has achieved. With its trusted brand, deep market reach and a growing ecosystem, JazzCash is leading Pakistan's rapid transition to a cashless economy and is positioned to unlock meaningful long-term value for VEON. Let us now have a closer look at the continued momentum of our digital ecosystem. We continue to see strong and broad-based growth across platforms with the total monthly active users growing now to 143.3 million, up 39% year-on-year. Our digital-only user base has more than doubled to 50 million and now represents nearly 35% of our total digital users. As I highlighted earlier, digital engagement exceeded mobile engagement for the first time in September, an important milestone that highlights how our platforms are becoming the primary customer interface and unlocking new opportunities for cross-sell, advertising and digital services monetization. Over the last 12 months, transaction values grew 50% to reach $48.8 billion throughout our financial services platforms. Let's look in a more detailed outlook to our digital portfolio, and we focus on consumer-centric platforms on this page. Our Financial Services segment has increased by 25% to reach 42.1 million users across all platforms. I highlighted JazzCash earlier. Simply in Kazakhstan, Beepul in Uzbekistan continue to scale their roles as the financial layer of our digital ecosystem in their countries. Our entertainment platforms delivered a strong quarter as well. Tamasha in Pakistan and Toffee in Bangladesh achieved record levels of engagement, fueled by the excitement of Asia Cup Cricket tournament. This also drove a sharp uptick in advertising demand. In Ukraine, Kyivstar TV's revised partnership has elevated direct customer engagement to an entirely new level. Meanwhile, BeeTV in Kazakhstan and Kinom in Uzbekistan continued to gain solid traction, reinforcing the growing strength of our regional entertainment portfolio. Our super apps continue to scale, positioned as one-stop digital hub. These platforms are seamlessly integrating essential services from health care to entertainment and driving deeper customer engagement across our footprint. Uklon's ride-hailing service reached 3.6 million users and recorded strong growth in active riders, trip volumes and digital engagement in Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Our premium digital brands, spanning life cycle, digital identity, productivity tools saw users grow strongly to 3.3 million. With evolving lifestyle and content integrations, these platforms are designed to meet evolving customer needs with curated high-value experiences. Let's move to our enterprise platforms. These platforms are transforming from internal enablers to market-facing technology leaders, driving next generations augmented intelligence and innovation. This opens up new revenue pools and strengthens our position as next-generation digital operator. QazCode, Kyivstar Tech, Garaj, U-Code and bCloud are winning new contracts, delivering augmented intelligence solutions, cloud services and data center solutions to corporate and government clients, expanding our presence in fast-growing enterprise technology markets. Across these companies, we have now nearly 2,000 engineers, software developers, data scientists executing at scale to build commercializable next-generation digital products. Our advertising technology business, VEON AdTech, is scaling rapidly, powered by augmented intelligence and big data. It reaches over 70 million screens across our footprint, delivering measurable return on investment for advertisers. Built on our own AI and data infrastructure, the platform provides 360-degree advertising ecosystem, enabling precise audience targeting, real-time optimization and creating a powerful new monetization layer across our digital portfolio. Let's turn now how we are embedding augmented intelligence across our ecosystem. We call it AI1440, augmented intelligence for every single minute in a day. In Kazakhstan, our Kaz-LLM is now alive in 4 languages, Kazakh, Turkish, English and Russian. -- powering agentic features across multiple platforms. In Ukraine, Kyivstar Tech is co-developing the country's first sovereign Ukrainian language model with the Ministry of Digital Transformation, a landmark step in building national AI capabilities. We will extend this capability to Uzbek, Bangla and Urdu and deepen market-specific intelligence. Across our applications, AI is becoming truly agentic and reshaping customer engagement from self-service to entertainment and education. In entertainment, AI recommendation engines now reached nearly 35 million monthly active users across Tamasha, Kinom, Kyivstar TV, [ Rithmm ] and Hitter. On Tamasha, AI already drives over 1/3 of all live TV sessions and nearly 60% of video-on-demand plays. Its AI news channel has alone became the third most watched channel on the platform. The news channel is sometimes having male or female news anchors that presents the news on live TV. In customer care, our SIMOSA AI chat assistant now autonomously manages customer journeys for nearly 1 million users every month. Our customized personal growth solutions are seeing strong adoption with our consumer audience. Janymda AI Tutor engages 17,000 monthly users, while Ryze AI tools processed over 16,000 requests, helping students write their CVs. We are also innovating with AI for enterprise. QazCode successfully launched Aventa AI, an enterprise-grade AI native platform designed to scale agentic workflows across HR, finance and procurement functions. In summary, augmented intelligence is now a leading layer in our ecosystem, delivering measurable impact for us across all our markets. I will now hand over to Burak, who will take you through the financials in more detail.

Thank you, Kaan. Looking at group revenues, we delivered total revenue of USD 1.115 billion in the third quarter, representing a growth of 7.5% in U.S. dollar terms. As previously noted by Kaan, the quarter included the deconsolidation of TNS+ in Kazakhstan, the consolidation of Uklon and the sale of Deodar and our Kyrgyzstan business. On a like-for-like basis, that adjust for this, our revenues grew 10%, underscoring the continued momentum across our operating markets. Direct digital revenues grew 63% year-on-year to reach $198 million. Digital services now account for 17.8% of total revenues, up from 11% a year ago. Turning the page to profitability. EBITDA for the quarter was USD 524 million, representing growth of 19.7%. The EBITDA margin stood at 47% for the quarter, up 410 basis points year-on-year and was supported by operating leverage and disciplined cost management across all markets. We note that our digital services now account for 17.8% of group revenue. While digital margins are structurally lower, their significantly lower CapEx intensity ensures comparable cash conversion relative to telecom services. As our revenue mix continues to shift in this direction, we remain focused on sustaining EBITDA growth at scale while enhancing group-wide capital efficiency and long-term free cash flow generation. Turning now to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with USD 1.67 billion in cash and deposits, of which USD 653 million is held at headquarters. Net dividends upstream from operating companies during the quarter totaled USD 96 million and USD 285 million for the year-to-date. Gross debt stood at USD 4.86 billion, up slightly from June and reflected the completion of our USD 200 million bond issuance during the quarter. Approximately half of our external debt is now held at operating company level, providing natural currency hedging. Net debt was USD 3.48 billion, while net debt, excluding leases, improved to USD 1.73 billion, bringing leverage down to 1.13x EBITDA. Let me now hand the call back to Kaan.

Thank you, Burak. Let me conclude with our outlook for the year. Despite ongoing macro and geopolitical challenges, VEON continues to execute strongly across all markets. We are revising our EBITDA outlook for the full year and now expect EBITDA growth of 16% to 18% in local currency terms for the full year. We are maintaining our revenue guidance of 13% to 15% growth in local currency terms. In U.S. dollar terms, we expect this to translate to 7% to 8% revenue growth and 10% to 11% EBITDA growth for the full year, assuming no significant fluctuations in exchange rates from current levels. Our capital intensity, excluding Ukraine, remains with 17% to 19% range. These targets are based on a blended weighted average inflation rate of 8.2%. In closing, we are pleased with our business momentum. Looking ahead, we remain confident in VEON's trajectory and the opportunities before us. As I highlighted earlier, the Board has approved another $100 million share and/or bond repurchase program, reinforcing VEON's confidence in long-term value creation. VEON is well positioned to sustain growth and long-term value creation for our shareholders, customers and communities we serve. Thank you for your attention and support. Now we can open the line for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Jesse Sobelson with BTIG.

This is Jesse Sobelson with BTIG. I just wanted to ask about the recent transaction involving Kyivstar and the decision to bring the asset public via SPAC. Could you share the motivation for choosing a SPAC structure for this process? And then additionally, you noted that you own nearly 90% of the asset. Looking ahead, how are you thinking about your future ownership stake? Would you consider selling a portion of the holdings to generate liquidity? How would you balance the liquidity versus maintaining control of the asset?

Thank you very much, Jesse, for the question. So with regard to Kyivstar's de-SPAC transaction, we are a true believer in Ukraine's future, and that's why we are championing invest in Ukraine now initiative throughout the world. And we thought it would be the right thing for us to find a deal certain fast track to list Kyivstar. And that's why we have opted for a de-SPAC process. And I'm very glad to conclude it on a successful basis as Kyivstar is now listed in NASDAQ at a valuation, which is 2.3x its net equity value of $1.25 billion at $2.8 billion. I think this was a very, very successful transaction from our side. Now naturally, SPAC comes with additional cost, given that deal certainty element and the speed of transaction process. But overall, I think being a pioneer in making sure creating opportunities for international investors in Europe and U.S. in participating for the future growth of Ukraine, I think it was the right thing. Now looking with the same perspective, we are keen to allow more investors to invest in Kyivstar. So we will be open for diluting our current position further to allow people from Ukraine, first of all, to have a chance to invest in Kyivstar and any credible international investor to also come in and be part of the success story that will be built in Ukraine. And we will continue championing our invest in Ukraine now initiative all around the world as well. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Nicholas Paton with Edison Group.

Just a quick question on Kyivstar. There's quite a lot of cash at the head office level. I think it's $600 million or so. What's the plan for that? And how easy will that be to repatriate up the chain?

I think Nicholas, $653 million is the headquarters cash at VEON, not Kyivstar.

Kyivstar $470 million.

$470 million would be the right amount for Kyivstar. And as you know, we are still at war. So Martial law still stays in place. During the Martial law, there are limitations on upstreaming. There is $1 million per company type of a dividend limit. But what we would like to see actually is just in line with our Invest in Ukraine Now initiative, you will see us actually investing in Ukraine. And we have been active with Helsi acquisition and Uklon acquisition. We believe that there is a unique opportunity to build a digital ecosystem in the country. And naturally, based on the needs of the country, whether it is energy resilience, energy storage needs or investing in growth opportunities, we will be also looking into those. But in the meantime, our objective is to make sure that we keep our cash safe in assets that are in either generating cash or creating capacity for us to protect ourselves from potential devaluations.

Our next question comes from Adrian Cundy with Emerging & Frontier Capital.

Sorry, my video is not functioning well today. So I just [indiscernible] you can see my picture. I have 2 questions. First, relating to UTC and just infrastructure in general within Kyivstar, will we be seeing you continue to pursue divestment on the Pakistan model of tower assets in the Ukraine? Or is VEON planning to retain control of that for the foreseeable future, particularly given that Kyivstar is now talking about a significant network upgrade and is beginning to touch on 5G in line with the national development strategy. And the second question I have relates to the financial services in Pakistan. Now that JazzCash and the bank are stand-alone entities, how do you sort of see them working with the [indiscernible] business? Can we get some more color on what type of loans are being extended? And finally, do you sort of see further initiatives and value extraction for the Pakistan business?

Well, let me start answering your first question about our tower business in Ukraine. Naturally, it's no surprise, I think no secret that we have a strategy of being asset-light, and we see actually tower operations more valuable under the management of independent tower companies, which allows sharing of infrastructure among multiple operators. So it's no different in Ukraine. So the first step was us creating our independent tower company is, I think, a move in the right direction, but we will be looking for opportunities around sharing infrastructure in the country in a more effective way and ultimately, making sure that the tower operations are owned and operated by an independent party, which can further focus on marketing activities of this infrastructure. There are multiple benefits of separating towers from the operating companies. As you know, our telecom industry has been heavily penalized by cross-subsidization of business models like infrastructure businesses and service businesses. And in everything we do, we try to avoid that and make sure that we focus on the right customer rather than cross-subsidizing different businesses. So you will see more actions and news on that front. We are one of the biggest infrastructure providers, of course, in Ukraine, but I believe no telecom company can afford to have its own exclusive networks. We need to learn to share networks, and that's the path for increasing cash generation capacity for our businesses. So -- and that's the first question. The second question, financial services business. In countries like Pakistan, the unmet demand in financial service area is huge. People who are unbanked, who have no way of having access to financial services is an existing opportunity that we have supported. So that's why we have our microfinance bank, MMBL as well as our digital wallet operator, JazzCash, serving our customers there. We have close to 50 million bank accounts and a monthly active user base of 22 million people. On an average day in Q3, we issued 153,000 nano loans. These loans are around $30 to $40 in nature. And they are really the type of money that a taxi driver would need if they would have a flat tire or they need to have 1 day advance of putting gasoline into their tank or a housewife would need that $30 to buy some flour, sugar and eggs to make some cookies and sell in the marketplace. These are really the type of loans that provides lifeblood to practically to small businesses, to family businesses, and we are very proud to make this work. Now naturally, we have also a merchant network of 700,000 merchants. These networks also allow us to significantly drive cashless economy in the country. We operate a significant portion of entire Raast transactions, which is the mobile payment clearance platform, and we transact almost 13% of total GDP. So for us, it's not only being big, but it is being really serving the customers on a daily basis. And this business is growing at 33% year-on-year, and it is, I think, going to be an extremely successful case study when it comes to the digital banking and fintech businesses. We will, of course, be looking into how we can take this business even at a higher scale. And you might see actually some strategic investors also looking into this together with us.

What was the third question again? Can you repeat it, please?

I guess the follow-up is just on that on even a stand-alone, is there any -- are you looking at value extraction or value recognition for your digital assets in places like Pakistan?

I think the answer is clearly, yes, as the opportunities come to the right level and scale. For us, digital services portfolio we have serves 2 important purposes. One is the multiplay strategy that we have on our regular telecom business. As our customers use our digital services, they stay longer with us, they consume more. And then, of course, the direct digital revenue potential of these service lines from entertainment to financial services drives additional growth for us. And to be precise, the ARPU level increase and the churn reduction of digital services impact on our SIM user base has nothing to do with the direct digital revenues that we report. These are 2 different growth. The growth on one side drives our business on telecom side and the other one drives the business on the digital services. And when the right scale arrives, of course, we will be looking for crystallization of the value of our digital services portfolio.

Our next question comes from Ahmed Mostafa with Inam.

I have two questions. Jazz delivered a strong EBITDA margin uplift this quarter. And yet you have indicated that consolidated margins may soften over the long run as digital services say. So how do you manage this trade-off between scale and profitability? And second, you have raised your EBITDA growth guidance for this year. So could you walk us through the main drivers behind this improvement in the EBITDA margin?

Ahmed, good point. We thought the digital services businesses would be having a bigger dilution on our EBITDA margins. So far, we failed on that. Yes, our EBITDA margins are also improving compared to the business as our digital services are growing. But I think I attribute that on really discipline when it comes to operational cost management of our operations. But let me also give the word to our CFO, Burak, anything you would like to add on that?

Yes. On top of the discipline in terms of driving efficiencies on cost side, we are also having disciplined price actions, price increases that we are taking in line with the market conditions that would beat the inflation, devaluation plus the GDP growth. So those 2 combined together definitely is helping our margin.

Our next question comes from Vincent Fernando with Zero One.

We can't hear you yet.

Operator, shall we try again move to the next question maybe come back to Vincent.

Can you hear me now?

Yes.

I apologize for that. I just want to ask again on the JazzCash and MMBL. Now that you have these more operating independently, do you plan to also try to take some of the capabilities in that -- in those businesses and then maybe bring it to expand your fintech business in other markets? The other question is that when you look at the MAUs for JazzCash, it's about 20.6 million, I think, most recently. Your total telco subs are 72.7 million. So there's still a lot of room to actually convert just your existing subs into JazzCash or MMBL customers. So are there other strategies you have to sort of increase the penetration for that as well? Those are my 2 questions.

Vincent, I think you're spot on in terms of both organic and accelerated growth opportunities in this business. Now you need to keep in mind that Pakistan is still a frontier market where 4G penetration as well as smartphone penetration has certain limits in terms of the penetration capabilities. I translate those into upsides that are in front of us. So one of the key initiatives that you will see us focusing on in Pakistan is smartphone ownership. Affordable smartphones will be critical. And they will come up with, of course, their own embedded digital services on top of that. So we have quite a lot of appetite in this conversion. And I would like to make sure that everybody who is our customer is having access to the digital services, whether it be on financial services or entertainment or health care or education to have access to these platforms. So you're right. In addition to the growth that we see, I think the organic growth can accelerate, and that's the basis of the sustainable growth expectation we have from the marketplace really. Now with regard to our ability to leverage the competencies and the experiences that we built in Pakistan in other markets, absolutely. And that's why we are very excited about the growth potential in Bangladesh and potentially in Ukraine. And the know-how that we have in terms of risk managing a bank, first of all, but also having credit scoring engines fine-tuned for these type of nano loans, all these capabilities are applicable in all the markets. And of course, our intention is to make sure that we leverage these, just like our intention around making Uklon or Helsi, our health care platform or our ridesharing platform also be available through all the super apps we have in all the countries.

Got it. Just one little quick follow-on on that. So Pakistan, I believe, has a digital bank licensing framework. But I guess under MMBL, you also have a license there. Do you -- is there value in you having one of those digital bank licenses? Or is it that you can actually operate -- you can have MMBL, I guess, operate on parts where you want more banking services, JazzCash and payments? Just want to understand if that's something that's part of the road map or maybe just not needed?

We operate currently under the microfinance banking license. However, I believe that we can do more and we can contribute more to the Cashless Economy Initiative of Prime Minister, that will require us to upgrade our license to a digital bank, full digital bank license, and we are in the process of looking for ways of achieving that sooner rather than later. I think the success story of JazzCash is very visible and recognized very strongly by the Pakistani government as well. They want the same. We want the same. And I think we will get to a level of much higher capabilities if we upgrade it to a full digital bank license, and we are working on it.

Our next question comes from Ali Zaidi with Inam.

So my question is related to ride-hailing. We have seen that it already contributes -- it's like the third largest contributor to the digital revenue. So do you have any plans to like explore other markets for this business, specifically Pakistan considering recent exits of the major player in that country. Do you see a potential for like an entry and growth in this segment?

So Ali, the ride-hailing business is really -- when you look to the markets, it's a city-by-city operation. So currently, it operates in 28 cities, 27 of those cities are in Ukraine. One is in Tashkent in Uzbekistan. And we clearly have an ambition and appetite to grow this business in a certain priority list to other markets. Whether this will be starting from Kazakhstan or Pakistan or at the same time, we are working on different sort of initiatives, but it will be a city-by-city decisions as every city has different characteristics.

Our next question comes from Matthew Harrigan with The Benchmark Company.

I feel more confident in putting out a positive VEON preview than I do on T-Mobile or Comcast, which is -- I'm not sure whether that's good or bad from my perspective. But one thing that's interesting and clearly, the dynamics for you are different because you're such a market leader. But when you look at T-Mobile in the U.S., they have a very strong benefit from switching share relative, obviously, Verizon and AT&T to other large competitors that don't have as good a network, but still definitely big animals that they're wrestling with. And if you really assume that there's not a lot of growth in the U.S. mobile market, just by virtue of their switching share, they can continue to put up really, really nice numbers. And your -- that analysis, I guess, would be pertinent to you on the full gamut of apps that you're running as well as mobile. But are you such a market leader that anything that comes along with device innovation or any perceptions of network quality don't affect you that much because almost by definition, you're so much larger than your competitors that it's -- you almost definitionally have to erode a little bit? Or do you think that as you do get CES, you see -- and I know people are not buying iPhone 17 Pros in Pakistan very often. But do you feel like with switching share and device innovation and awareness of how powerful these apps are and how good it is to have the best mobile network when you're running these apps that it can help you? Or do you think that you're kind of largely a function that just really, really correlates with the overall market growth in mobile and the demand for the app? Sorry, a little long-winded there, but I'm sure you get the gist of it.

Matthew, I think the opportunity that in front of us is exciting from 2 perspectives, not only that we have the digital services, which are attractive to our customers, but also there are so many customers who are still not yet connected even. We're going to be having 90 million additional people who will be having access to 4G networks, who will be buying their first smartphones. And hopefully, those smartphones will be bought from us with our applications installed on them with their ability without having maybe a credit card that they can pay for the services for the games, for the videos for the channels that they need. And that's why I'm excited because, yes, we are big. We are -- except for Bangladesh, we are #1 in all the markets that we operate in. And in Bangladesh, we are #1 if you compare our entertainment platform and the other super apps that we have. And I truly believe that as our customers who have never touched yet any other service than calling somebody, and there are 40 million of them on our network. Those people will have a smartphone. They will have their first connection. They will watch their first movie online on mobile networks. And we are looking forward to those days and 40 million of them will be there to basically be our customers. That's why I believe the organic growth is an incredible opportunity. That's why I opened it with that slide. But the acceleration that will come through digital services will just be unmatchable as an opportunity for us to grab.

Okay. No, that's -- you're in a better position than having to fight to grab market share in a privileged position, but you kind of are the market growth. That's a good place to be.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Vincent Fernando with Zero One.

There's a little lag, but I'm here. So I just want to double tap again on the fintech in Pakistan. You reported $23.8 million EBITDA for the third quarter. Are you able to give any color on maybe how much of that -- like where can we start to look at a run rate? Because you did $20.3 million in the second quarter, USD 23.8 million EBITDA in third quarter. I'm just trying to try to find a base for run rate. Is it relatively recurring in nature? I just want to understand that.

Yes. Our financial services business in Pakistan is actually quite a steady growth business. So over the last 6 quarters, every quarter, we have been seeing a continuous growth of 40% to 30% every single quarter. And looking into our future, I see no reason for this to go down. I think we'll continue keeping that lines. Clearly, the lending business has a balance sheet criteria in terms of growth. But currently, I feel comfortable with those.

We have no further questions at this time. I will now pass back to Anand Ramachandran for closing remarks.

Thank you. Thank you. Well, guys, thank you so much for dialing in as usual. Thank you so much for your support of VEON. As always, please e-mail us, call us here if you have any questions at all, and we'll continue talking. But till then until the next quarter, thank you, and bye-bye.

Thank you very much.