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Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026 at 9 a.m. ET
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Liberty Latin America (NASDAQ:LILA) reported substantial year-over-year cost and margin improvements, highlighted by a 27% rise in adjusted OIBDA less P&E additions and a 29% increase in adjusted free cash flow, despite lower capital expenditures. Strategic projects in Manta and El Salvador are expected to materially expand capacity and margins, and cloud initiatives, including an expanded AWS partnership, add long-term operational and customer benefits. Ongoing liability management at Liberty Puerto Rico and storm-related recovery costs weigh on near-term visibility, with management projecting a financial recovery trajectory extending into 2027.
Balan Nair: Any additions and adjusted FCF before partner distributions. Starting on the left, we have already briefly discussed adjusted OIBDA, but the other key input to the calculation is P&E additions. Even in light of the various commitments we had and events that occurred during the year, including new project wins and hurricane impacts, we remained disciplined during 2025. In aggregate, we invested $640,000,000 in 2025, including $220,000,000 in Q4, as compared to $725,000,000 in 2024, including $240,000,000 in Q4. Liberty Latin America Ltd.’s P&E additions as a percentage of revenue were 14% in 2025 versus 16% in 2024, a measurable year-over-year reduction.
Combined with our improved Liberty Latin America Ltd. adjusted OIBDA performance and margins, we delivered adjusted OIBDA less P&E additions of $1,100,000,000 in 2025, including $231,000,000 in Q4, representing year-over-year growth for fiscal 2025 of 27% and for Q4 of 30%. Our 2025 result represents 24% of revenue, a significant improvement over 2024 levels, and one we look forward to continuing to drive higher over time. Turning to adjusted free cash flow before partner distributions, we had a particularly robust Q4, delivering $278,000,000 in the quarter, which brought our full-year figure to $150,000,000, a 29% year-over-year increase.
A key driver of this improvement was the significant expansion in adjusted OIBDA less P&E additions of $226,000,000 over this period, which was offset somewhat by working capital and related movements. Additionally, in Q4, we collected $81,000,000 in net proceeds from our parametric program, which helps to mitigate to a large extent the damage and business interruption from Hurricane Melissa. As discussed earlier, we suffered financial impact in Q4 from Melissa, but a substantial amount of the adverse impact, including a large portion of the recovery investment, is expected to occur in 2026.
Although it will continue to evolve throughout the year, we generally expect that the 2026 adjusted FCF impact from the storm will be in the neighborhood of $100,000,000. Our operating goal is to be run-rating near pre-hurricane levels by year-end, which should set us up for a full recovery in 2027. Next to Slide 20 and a review of our capital structure. At the consolidated level, we have total debt of $8,400,000,000, liquidity consisting of $800,000,000 in cash and $900,000,000 in availability under our credit lines. At year-end 2025, we had consolidated net leverage of 4.3x, an improvement from 2024 levels.
If we exclude LPR leverage, which is undergoing a liability management exercise as previously discussed, Liberty Latin America Ltd. leverage would decline into the mid-threes. Turning to the middle of the slide, which summarizes our two credit silos as C&W and LCR, we have total debt at C&W of $4,900,000,000, covenant leverage of 3.5x, and total debt at LCR of $500,000,000 and covenant leverage of 1.8x. As seen by the combined maturity schedule, approximately 75% of borrowings are due in 2031 and later. Moving to the right, Liberty Puerto Rico has $2,900,000,000 of total debt, with reported borrowing group net leverage of nearly 8x, while covenant leverage of the restricted subsidiaries was 14x as of Q4 2025.
As seen today, LPR performance has stabilized over the last few quarters but has a long road back to gain market share and expand the top line, and LPR continues to look for ways to improve its leverage profile. Of note, LPR may also need to raise additional liquidity in the near future to cover ongoing operating costs, although no definitive decisions have yet been taken in this regard.
As discussed in our Q2 2025 earnings, LPR embarked on a liability management exercise with its creditors in 2025, and as part of that, a transaction proposal was provided to the creditors’ advisers in early November, and those advisers were provided with access to significant levels of information and diligence since that time. To date, while no response to such proposal has been received, the team hopes for engagement from the creditors in the near future.
As previously highlighted, LPR has substantial flexibility in credit documents that will enable the business to continue to utilize its assets to meet any near-term liquidity needs as they arise, as demonstrated by the $250,000,000 secured financing raised to an unrestricted subsidiary of LPR that was announced in September 2025. Additionally, and consistent with our previously stated intention of separating LPR and Liberty Latin America Ltd., we are actively working on this and will update when appropriate. Moving to Slide 21 and our closing remarks. As compared to 2024, we delivered robust financial performance in 2025 with nearly double-digit rebased adjusted OIBDA expansion, 27% adjusted OIBDA less P&E additions growth, and adjusted FCF before partner distributions improvement of 29%.
In Jamaica, we have generally recovered our mobile business and will be disciplined in our capital approach to reconnecting homes and businesses as conditions on the ground improve. No doubt the full recovery will take time and impact our reported results in the coming quarters, but we anticipate that we will be running at a much fuller tempo by 2027. Looking forward, Balan highlighted his 2026 strategic vision on his concluding slide, covering commercial, operational, and financial priorities. Without repeating, I believe they can be further summarized into our continued focus on driving organic growth within our operating businesses and cash flow improvement.
We clearly have near-term headwinds, especially with the timing of the Jamaican recovery, and given our planned cadence for 2026, we would expect our financial performance at Liberty Latin America Ltd. and across our markets to be heavily weighted to the second half of the year. Activities related to cost-out, our investments in projects like Manta and product innovation, our new arrangement with AWS, all speak to setting the stage for future growth. Finally, for our equity investors, certainly, 2025 did have its share of ups and downs, but trending positively at the end of the year.
Management remains committed to working to unlock value, including returning capital to shareholders, and will be focused on executing Balan’s 2026 priorities we believe will be beneficial to value creation in 2026 and beyond. With that, Operator, we will open it up for questions.
Operator: Thank you. The question and answer session will be conducted electronically. If you would like to ask a question regarding the company’s operations, please do so by pressing star 1 to ask a question, or star 0 for operator assistance. In order to accommodate everyone, we request that you ask only one question with one follow-up if needed. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. We will pause for just a moment to give everyone an opportunity to signal a request. Our first question today will be from the line of Matthew Harrigan with Stonex. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Balan Nair: I wonder if AI will ever enable the Q&A to not be conducted electronically.
Matthew Harrigan: Actually, two questions. Firstly, you had some really abusive expectations on private equity infrastructure investment at one point. That did not materialize, but certainly, the results are really inflecting upward, even apart from Manta and El Salvador, by virtue of economic growth and increased volume even at lower per-bit pricing. Do you think you have a really nice tailwind just organically from economic activity, or is it really going to be largely your step function off Manta and El Salvador and whatever other discrete projects materialize? And then I have a follow-up. Thank you.
Balan Nair: Hey. Good morning, Matt.
Operator: On the Manta and El Salvador project, they do actually quite—
Matthew Harrigan: different projects. The Manta project is—
Christopher Noyes: both building more resiliency as well as adding a huge amount of capacity on routes we think are going to be highly profitable. It is being built right now, and we will start selling into it very soon, starting later this year, early next year, and we have quite a bit of interest in that.
The El Salvador project, on the flip side, is really a build-operate-transfer kind of a model with the government of El Salvador, but it has some really good upsides for us as well, including the fact that we will be running and maintaining that network, and in the future, perhaps, we could put a branching unit and add some capacity to some of the other drops. Both projects are hugely accretive and have very good margins on it, but they are very complex projects. Ray Collins leads our business unit there. He and his team have been really on top of it.
The build and the engineering are ongoing right now, and we have a lot to deliver on here, but the team is really up for it.
Matthew Harrigan: And then as a follow-up, you know, Mike Fries yesterday—this was not his expectation—but I think he said one of the hyperscaler executives said that it was possible that they could reduce Liberty Telecom’s OpEx from $15,000,000,000 to $7,000,000,000 or $8,000,000,000. Mike certainly did not endorse that, but he implied that there was going to be a long run of AI and cost improvements, given, obviously, telecom has a lot of repetitive processes and big data lakes, network management, customer management. Do you think you are going to have that type of improvement? Well, obviously not of that, but do you think we are going to be seeing very, very significant prolonged margin benefits?
And I was also curious—this month you just the other day with AWS and then Liberty Global with Google and Gemini somewhat before that—you both entered into relationships. I am curious how the expectations vary between Google and Amazon, and was there any clear explanation as to why they went with Google and you went with AWS? Thanks.
Balan Nair: Yes. Let me answer your last question first, and I will get back. I really cannot comment on Liberty Global’s decision with Google. Google Cloud and the work the Google team is doing is extremely impressive. Chris, myself, and a number of my executives visited with the Google Cloud folks just two weeks ago in California, three weeks now. Our relationship with AWS is slightly different, and it is really focused on our business. Most of our models and most of our services and compute and storage are done over AWS. Most of our customers prefer AWS.
The relationship with AWS is strong for our internal usage, and certainly, it is a great product for us to partner with our customers. We have quite a number of customers today—cloud customers on our premises—that are migrating, and we think the migration to AWS makes a lot of sense for them and for us, and the folks at AWS have been really great to work with us as well in this partnership. So that is really why we went down that path. We think it is great for ourselves internally, and it is great for our customers as well.
In addition, by the way, AWS is making investments in our region with building out what they call Outposts and their Wavelength product in our data centers in Panama and Colombia. So this is not just a reseller agreement. This is a really deep partnership between us and them. To your second question in AI—or your first question in AI—I think we are really in the first innings here on this. The opportunity is large. Let us be clear.
I do not want to put a number on this, but clearly, as you pointed out, we have a lot of repetitive processes in our company, and we have a lot of things that perhaps we are not really good at, and AI can actually make us a lot better. It will take cost out. It will help us be more productive, and in addition to that, it will have a better experience for our customers as well. On all those fronts, we either have trials we have implemented, we have launched, and we have just seen the beginnings of it.
I think the challenge in our company that we are challenging ourselves with is how do we translate all of this into some real tangible free cash flow improvement, and that is really, as Chris pointed out, our primary goal. Everything that we work on here has to, at some point, translate to a free cash flow expansion, and we are working on it. I think if you ask the same questions two quarters from now, I will probably have a slightly different answer with much more tangible initiatives that we are working on.
I can tell you now, if you go to Costa Rica, you call our call centers right now, there is a high likelihood an AI agent will be answering the call.
Matthew Harrigan: Great. Thanks, Balan. Thanks, Chris.
Operator: Your next question today will be from the line of Michael Rollins with Citi. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Balan Nair: Thanks, and good morning. I am curious if you could help us—help all of us—understand the fixed-to-mobile convergence opportunity in your major markets or regions. Can you frame what the current level of converged take rates are, where you see that potentially going on a volume basis, and to get there, do you have to do substantial discounting, or can it be nearly as accretive as if you were getting these customers on the standalone services and just coincidentally packaged together? Thanks.
Balan Nair: Sure. The fixed-mobile convergence has been a real benefit for us. I guess there are a few ways to look at it. One, if you know most of our markets—with the exception of Puerto Rico—it is primarily prepaid, our primary prepaid markets. So when you go to fixed-mobile convergence, there are two things, two steps here. One, you go from pre to post, and then you link the post to a fixed product, and it is primarily postpaid mobile with a fixed product. That is really the golden product here, the bullseye product, we call it, and this has worked quite well across our markets.
In Puerto Rico specifically, we have been looking at—we have more than 50-some percent market share in our fixed broadband in Puerto Rico, and we have slightly under 20% in our mobile postpaid, and clearly, the opportunity to link both of them is pretty high. So for every fixed broadband customer that does not have our postpaid, it is really an opportunity for us, and for any of our postpaid customers that do not have fixed broadband, also an opportunity for us. The trick is really our systems, and we have been going through, as you know, in Puerto Rico, quite a significant upgrade in our systems and stabilizing them.
We are now at a point where we can start doing a lot of this pre-to-postpaid and fixed-mobile and fixed-broadband convergence, and it really provides two things: one, a higher ARPU in the home of that specific customer, so the customer ARPU goes up; and secondly, churn goes down. These are proven facts across all telcos over many years, and I think we have been quite successful. We have quite a number of my general managers who are really steeped into this, focused on it, and this is really one of our growth opportunities in 2026 and beyond.
Balan Nair: Thanks. Maybe just a follow-up on the revenue side.
Balan Nair: Mhmm.
Balan Nair: Give us an update when you take into account what you just described in terms of the FMC opportunities, the opportunities to continue growing your markets. What is a fair range of annual rebased revenue growth that Liberty Latin America Ltd. should operate within on a multiyear basis?
Balan Nair: You know, it is a great question. I am going to be careful. I do not give guidance here. But here is how you look at it. Our mobile product is growing because as we move from pre to post, ARPU gets better, we attach it to a fixed product, and you start growing. So the mobile product, you will see growth. It will not be in the double digits, but it will be very respectable single-digit growth annually, and we have a long runway in that. On the fixed side, broadband continues to grow; however, it is offset by headwinds on video and voice.
So as you look at the fixed product, you will see flattish, despite growth, but it is mostly because we have some legacy products that you have to adjust for. Eventually, the washout will get to a steady cadence. B2B has good growth as well, and in B2B, we are really excited now getting into more and more services that we are selling. We still continue to sell connectivity, but in addition to connectivity, we are selling a lot more cloud services. But even in B2B, there is a headwind, and the headwind is mostly a lot of customers are canceling their voice product.
So that voice services decline will continue a bit, but it is offset by this new cloud services. The second thing that offsets our revenue going forward is roaming. Clearly, as people travel, this is a great market for us because of a lot of the cruise ships; a lot of people roam. But with new technologies and most people getting on Wi-Fi with their WhatsApp, the roaming revenue is going to slightly decline, and that adds to a headwind to our product. So our product portfolio has a lot of really nice good products and a few headwinds that are just the nature of where the technology is at.
I think the way we look at it is we are going to invest further and deeper into all the products that are growing, and then we are just going to manage the rest of the products that we are challenged with—voice, video, roaming—those kinds of products we are going to just try to manage that. I think the team has done a pretty good job. You can see it in our numbers, and that is why you can see while revenue is kind of flattish at the top, there is a significant EBITDA expansion. The EBITDA expansion comes from cost cutting, base management, and really moving to higher-margin products. So that is one way to look at it.
Balan Nair: Thanks. Very helpful. Thank you.
Operator: As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad now. The next question today will be from the line of Chris Hoare with New Street Research. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Yeah. Thank you. I had a question on the top-line trajectory in Puerto Rico. Obviously, great news on the inflection in postpaid net adds. I wonder if you can give any color on the shape of how that played out in the quarter.
Obviously, what I am trying to think of is what we should expect going forward, whether you would expect to see further improvements in terms of postpaid net adds, and then also on the top line in Puerto Rico, obviously, that was slightly offset by a bit of weakness on B2B, and I think you said that was a function of hangover from the transition, but I would be interested if you can give any more color on what happened there as well and, therefore, also trajectory on B2B revenues in Puerto Rico.
Balan Nair: In 2025, we had a whole bunch of headwinds there. We started the year with an outlook that was very, very different than what we ended the year with, meaning extremely— in the way we ended the year compared to how we saw it at the beginning of the year, because there were some headwinds and challenges we did not anticipate as we came into 2025. Just a few things that show the improvements.
One, of course, you see financially retaining this business around, but it is really based on a whole bunch of things that we fixed in the business, whether it is the leadership talent, whether it is the processes in IT, the stabilization of the systems, and really coming out with value propositions and products that make sense to our customers. There is a huge amount of improvement in the business when somebody walks into our store today than they did last year. So a number of things that I think will give us some nice tailwind into 2026.
The net adds you saw in 2025 were driven by all these improvements, including a real big turnaround in our NPS scores, but it was also assisted by the fact that we were migrating a ton that came to us—new subscribers, subscribers we bought from DISH. They were prepaid subscribers, but because of our really strong postpaid value proposition, a number of those prepaid subscribers actually ended up buying a postpaid product instead of moving as a prepaid, and so that drove some of the growth of net adds in Q4 2025.
If I look into 2026, January—they had a very good month in January, without any of the boost subscribers moving up to postpaid, so we continue to see the progress in that. But I think this is a journey that is going to take a lot more than one or two quarters, and my sense is by the end of 2026, we will be in an even better state to set up for a really nice opening balance into 2027. Back to the revenue list, you correctly pointed out B2B was a challenge for us in 2025. We opened the year with a very weak opening balance coming into 2025 and struggled throughout the year.
We made a number of changes in the team and the B2B team. We brought in a new leader for the group. She is extremely focused, and if I look at my budget for 2026, she has a very good and, I think, a budget that, when we hit it, people are going to be quite happy. So the turnaround is happening, but we have to be patient. This is going to take many quarters.
Operator: Okay. Thank you. And then maybe one follow-up would just be on the slide on equity value unlock where you talk about shareholder returns focus. Is there any more color you can give there in terms of either what you are thinking of timing around when anything might be announced there?
Balan Nair: I think things are looking on the up and up here. We feel really confident about the business. We really feel confident about the future. As Chris pointed out, the cash flow generation in the fourth quarter was really good, and we can see that our intention, as Chris pointed out, is we are going to expand that into 2026. Now, yes, most of our free cash flow comes in the second half of the year, so there are a number of things that we have been thinking about.
I suspect that sometime during the course of this year, we are going to come out with something that, together with our board, makes some decisions that I think will reward a lot of the shareholders that have been with us.
Chris Hoare: Thank you.
Operator: That will conclude today’s question and answer session. I would like to hand back to Balan Nair for any additional or closing remarks.
Balan Nair: Firstly, I would like to say thank you for everybody that has been patient with us. Certainly, the story has got lots of moving parts, and we have had our fair share of challenges, and some of it is self-inflicted. Some of it, clearly, you know, mother nature—we were not expecting that hit in Jamaica under a hurricane.
We are going to power through all of it, and one thing that is really good about this team is we are quite resilient, and when we see things going off, we try to fix it, and we do, I think, a pretty damn good job bringing things back to where it should be, and we will do the same thing within Jamaica as well, as Chris pointed out. I think by the end of this year, you are going to see that Jamaica is back to where it should be, which sets us up for a great 2027 as well.
We have had our setbacks, and we should be seeing in our company that all these setbacks create a great comeback, and I think we are on our path to a great comeback. So thank you very much for all your support, and we look forward to talking to you again next quarter.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes Liberty Latin America Ltd.’s full-year 2025 investor call. As a reminder, a replay of the call will be available in the Investor Relations section of Liberty Latin America Ltd.’s website at www.lla.com. There, you can also find a copy of today’s presentation materials.
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