VEON Ltd. (NASDAQ:VEON) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Faisal Ghori: Okay. The next question is from [Dmitry Ivanov] (ph). How do you plan to utilize the expected tower sale proceeds? Do you plan to finance local operations from the sales proceeds or upstream to the holding level?

Kaan Terzioglu: So as I mentioned, from my perspective, tower transactions is a very effective way of refinancing, hard currency, top line debt with local currency, long term debt. And this is our primary objective. And of course, we will use this also to further de-leverage the company.

Faisal Ghori: Dmitry also has a second follow-up question regarding your debt profile. Do you plan to reduce it? And if yes, what is a comfortable amount of debt at the holding level for you?

Kaan Terzioglu: Joop, please also chip in, but the way I see it today, our leverage ratio is 1.43 if you exclude the long-term leases and 1.83 if you include them. And ideally we would like to be somewhere in between 1 and 1.5 during this period, right?

Joop Brakenhoff: Yeah, and especially we want to deliver it to the group, especially de-lever the HQ and then leverage the OpCos. And as I mentioned in the presentation, this will of course result to higher interest rates and therefore we are a little bit conservative on that 1 to 1.5 times. Yeah.

Faisal Ghori: Those are all the questions in the queue. I think we’ll give it another minute.

Kaan Terzioglu: Thank you very much for being with us. I see that we have almost 100 people online. My greatest respects and looking forward to talking to you soon. Thank you very much.

Joop Brakenhoff: Thank you.

Faisal Ghori: Thank you.