Millicom Intl Cellular (NASDAQ:TIGO) released first-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Tuesday. Read the complete transcript below.
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View the webcast at https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_4uPQQ9vGQaqXd2H_7iVlYA#/registration
Summary
Millicom International Cellular SA reported a strong start to 2026 with service revenue reaching $1.9 billion, a 45% year-on-year increase, driven by acquisitions and organic growth.
Postpaid net additions were $5.6 million, with organic service revenue growth at 4.9% year-over-year, indicating continued momentum and a healthy customer base.
Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $857 million with a margin of 43.2%, despite integration and restructuring charges, and equity free cash flow improved by $48 million year-over-year to $225 million.
The company completed significant acquisitions in Colombia, including EPM and Telefonica’s stakes, and is applying its operational playbook in Chile following the acquisition of Telefonica Chile.
Millicom’s strategy focuses on pre to postpaid migration, cost efficiencies, and network improvements, with strong performance noted in Guatemala and a positive outlook in Colombia and Chile.
Management highlighted a successful integration in Ecuador and Uruguay, supporting adjusted EBITDA expansion and cash flow improvements, with ongoing initiatives to improve margins.
The company expressed optimism about its strategic initiatives, particularly in Colombia and Chile, expecting them to contribute positively to future financial performance.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Hello everyone and welcome to our first quarter 2026 results call. This event is being recorded. Our speakers today will be our CEO Marcelo Benitez and Bart Van Areen, CFO of the company. The slides for today’s presentations are available on our website along with the earnings release and our financial statements. Now please turn to Slide 2 for the safe harbor disclosure. We will be making forward looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties which could have a material impact on our results on slide 3. We define the non IFRS metrics that we will be referencing throughout this presentation and you can find reconciliation tables in the back of our earnings release and on our website. With those disclaimers out of the way, let me now turn the call over to our CEO Marcelo Benitez.
Marcelo Benitez (Chief Executive Officer)
Marcelo thank you Luca and thank you everyone for joining our call today. We are off to a solid start in 2026, both operationally and from a financial perspective. From an operational standpoint, postpaid net additions amounted to $5.6 million while home net adds amounted to $1.5 million. These significant increases reflect the relevance of the Colombia acquisition and the opportunity that lies ahead. Importantly, even excluding inorganic growth, postpaid net additions amounted to 250,000 and home net additions amounted to 46,000. This is a testament of the health of our underlying business and the strength of our customer value proposition. From the financial perspective, organic service revenue growth was a robust 4.9% year over year. This not only represents a solid continuation of the momentum achieved in our seasonally strong fourth quarter in 2025, but also reinforces the expectation of our top line acceleration throughout 2026. The quarter ranks among one of the strongest growth performances in recent history. As a result, total service revenue for the quarter reached $1.9 billion. This robust top line performance, combined with our tireless focus on cost efficiencies, delivered expanding operating leverage. As a result, adjusted EBITDA in The quarter totaled 857 million, representing a margin of 43.2%. This is a very solid outcome, particularly as it already reflects the impact of integration and restructuring charges related to the Coltel acquisition. Excluding Coltel, the adjusted EBITDA margin would have reached 47.9%. Our relentless focus on efficiencies also improved equity free cash flow by 48 million year over year, reaching a strong 225 million for the quarter. This is a robust entry point for the year, especially when considering that EFCF excluding LATAM transaction would have increased 90 million year over year. As we mentioned in our fourth quarter call. We acquired Telefónica Chile together with NJJ and we have started to apply the Millicom International Cellular playbook in that market. During the quarter, we also took important steps to strengthen our position in Colombia. We completed the purchase of EPM, 50% ownership stake in Tigo UnE and Telefónica’s 2/3 stake in Coltel. Since we acquired the majority ownership of Coltel at the beginning of the quarter, we are already fully consolidating Coltel’s performance in our results. Importantly, we finalized the transaction and acquired the remaining stake in Coltel from Lanacion just two weeks ago. By unifying these operations, we are creating the resilience and the scale that needed to move faster, invest more effectively and ensure that our infrastructure supports the long term sustainable development of the country. I will come back to both Colombia and Chile later in the call. Now let’s turn to our mobile business performance on slide number six. Our mobile business continued to perform very well in the quarter. Underlying customer growth was 4% year on year, with postpaid customer increasing 25% and prepaid customers growth largely flat due to our pre to post migration efforts, seasonal effects and customer base cleanup initiatives including acquisitions. Reported growth was 38% reflecting the addition of Coltel. In Colombia, the customer base is steadily migrating toward postpay which now comprises roughly and 29% of our mobile customers, highlighting the substantial opportunity ahead to continue executing our pre to post migration strategy. In the center of this slide you can see the progress we are making on set Strategy. Today, almost 7 out of every 10 postpaid sales are migration sales, an increase of over 10% points year on year. This reflects the strong execution of our commercial teams and the attractive value proposition we are offering to our customers. Bringing all this together, mobile Service revenue totaled 1.1 billion, including 120 million contributions from two months of operation in Coltel. Excluding inorganic growth, mobile service revenue grew 7% or 63 million year on year. This represents a clear acceleration over previous quarter and shows that our commercial strategy continues to gain traction. Now let’s turn to our home business on slide number seven. Our efforts to provide the best network experience and higher speeds continues to resonate with customers. Our home customer base expanded 4.6% organically year on year, reaching 4.2 million customers. This growth was mostly driven by broadband only customers which increased 5% year on year. Here too, the recent Coltel acquisition meaningfully increases our customer base, adding 1.5 million customers, reaching a total of 5.7 million customers. More importantly, the fixed Networks are highly complementary. Tigo is comparatively stronger in managing, whereas colortel is more dominant in Bogota. We have also made significant progress in fixed mobile convergence. Almost 36% of our customer base now have both fixed and at least one mobile line with us. This is important for two reasons. First, it shows that our convergent offer is compelling for customers and second, it materially improves the customer Lifetime value as churn for converging customers is almost 50% lower than for non convergent customers. We are very pleased with this progress and we will continue working to expand our convergent customer base. As a result, home service revenues continue its recovery trend reaching 374 million flat year on year. On an organic basis. We remain committed to building the right foundation to return this business to positive revenue growth in the near future. Now let’s turn to B2B on slide number eight. Our B2B business continues to play an important role in our growth strategy. Digital service revenue, which increased almost 19% year over year, continues to be a key growth driver, supported mainly by strong demand for cybersecurity …
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