In other words, no impact yet on revenue or EBITDA but our working capital was about $16 million better than it should be because of these payment delays. Paraguay had another solid quarter with EBITDA up 14.1% organically and the margin expanded almost 5 percentage points to 48.3%. EBITDA in our other segments increased 17.8% with all three countries contributing to the growth. Now please turn to Slide 16 for our usual net debt bridge. During the quarter, net debt increased slightly by $19 million to end Q1 at just under $6 billion but thanks to EBITDA growth, our leverage decreased by 19 bps in this quarter. The key factors that contributed to the increase in net debt were our equity free cash flow was $1 million, however, includes the proceeds of the sale of towers in Colombia for 39 million.
We repurchased our bonds in open market for approximately 132 million. These purchases were made below par leading to a $15 million benefit. We also bought back shares for approximately $27 million. As a result of these items and considering also the strong EBITDA growth that I already talked about, our leverage ratio ended Q1 at 3.10, down from 3.29 at Q4. Now please turn to Slide 17 to review our financial targets. We continue to target equity free cash flow of around $550 million in 2024 and we continue to target leverage of 2.5 x by 2025. These targets remain unchanged from what we communicated to you at our Q4 results last February. As you can see from our Q1, we have started the year on a relatively strong note and we are indeed slightly ahead of our plans.
But as Mauricio and I have already told you, we benefited from a number of tailwinds in Q1 that won’t necessarily repeat. We also see a number of risks for the remainder of the year. These risks are contemplated and reflected in our targets. Now, let me turn the call back to Mauricio to wrap up.
Mauricio Ramos: Thank you, Bart. Pretty good for your first time. Before I take your questions for the last time, as CEO myself, I want to recap some of the key strategic decisions we have made as a team over the past several years to help get us to where we are today. First, we invested heavily in our networks. We deployed 4G and bought spectrum to secure our mobile market leadership and we expanded aggressively into Home and into B2B. Largest chunks of our spectrum, acquisitions and renewals are now behind us, as you know, and B2B is beginning to show its strength. Second, we divested on Africa, where we had no scale. We closed offices in London and Stockholm and we sold out non-corporate assets. Third, we entered Panama, Nicaragua to consolidate our leadership in Central America.
Panama is now a success story and we increased also our ownership in Guatemala, the country where our return on capital is by far, the highest and strong cash flow growth is back. Fourth, we have made great strides to improve profitability in Colombia. We still have a lot of work to do there but we’re closer than we ever were to making Colombia a key contributor to Millicom’s growth and to it’s free cash generation in the future. Fifth, and this is perhaps the most important, we created a winning Sangre TIGO culture that makes all of our plans possible. In this–out of this Sangre TIGO and perhaps because of it, comes our next leader, Marcelo Benitez. TIGO indeed has become a magnificent, unique platform in the region, one that is now more profitable.
Thanks now also to the immense and positive support of our largest shareholder, Atlas. I am happy now to hand over the helm to a seasoned and highly capable company veteran like Marcelo, a great colleague and a dear friend of many years. You will get to meet Marcelo in early August for the second quarter results conference call. Today, Bart, Maxime and I will take your questions.
A – Michel Morin: Perfect. Thank you very much, Mauricio, Bart, Maxime. We will now move to the Q&A session. And first question will come from the line of Soomit Datta, New Street Research. Soomit, the line is yours.
Soomit Datta: Yes. Hi, guys. Thanks very much. Mauricio, thank you for all your help over years and good luck with the new role. Look forward to talking to you, too Bart, going forward, good luck with everything. A couple of questions, please. So, first of all, I mean, a really remarkable job on the cost side over the last few quarters. I’ve looked at the sector for many years and can’t really recall anything quite as heroic in terms of margin improvement. So, well done to everybody for that. It does sort of lead to the obvious question, though, as to how sustainable is that policy and I think you’ve hinted at areas you would look to maybe step up investments within Home, for example. Just curious if you could elaborate, sorry, as you look forward over the next few months, either on the Home side or on the Wireless side where you might see opportunities to pick up investment, again, in order to try and pep up the top line growth.
That would be the first question, please. And then secondly, just going back to something you touched on which is cash coming out of a couple of markets, Honduras and Bolivia. Just trying to get a sense as to how real that risk is, what that might mean for equity free cash flow. I think it’s– you’ve talked about it being within the guidance but again, a bit of color there would be helpful as to what’s happening on the ground. Thanks very much.
Mauricio Ramos: You bet. I’ll take a little bit of the first one. Maybe, Maxime can help out there. And I think the second one will leave our brand new CFO to cut his teeth with, not only on the question but on actually handling the challenge. So listen, on the commercial initiatives and on the Everest project, as I’ve said often, Everest was something we had started quite a bit of time ago, had been properly planned for with external resources and we had started implementing. But in reality, it got deeper and faster with the support, help and challenge from our new largest investor. That external force just made Everest become not just Everest one, but Everest two. And it just sped up the process. And I’ve been vocal in saying thank you for that external support.
And since Maxime is on the call, we allude often to our partnership and it has really worked well. So what you’re seeing today is the combination of initiatives that are strategic in nature from years ago now being combined with that platform, Panama, Guatemala, work on Colombia, et cetera, et cetera becoming more and more profitable. Now, the top line which is very, very important, we have continued as ever focused on it. So let me give you some color on that so it doesn’t just remain as words. Number one, on Mobile, you’ve seen our continued push on postpaid and that’s true in Panama. You see it coming into the results of cross-selling first and then adding postpaid to the new subscriber base. It’s working like a charm. Colombia, you’ve seen the numbers.
Postpaid is really working for us in Colombia, as in other markets but that push into postpaid comes with, as you know, lower churn, a little bit more ARPU and higher or longer lifetime value cycles. And that’s a long term initiative that we’ve continued on. We are increasingly using our fixed footprint to drive convergence. Maybe we don’t speak about it in the calls because we don’t have enough time but we’re raising speeds and adding more convergence into key markets where we have a long fixed network like Colombia and Bolivia, etcetera. So that’s ongoing. And B2B, which today is all about Panama but you’ve heard us over the years talk about the importance of driving B2B into the mix and that you begin to see that. So there are initiatives there on the revenue that have stayed on and will continue to be the focus going forward.
Having said that, and as we’ve said publicly, we did become very price-disciplined in Colombia some quarters ago. We’ve actually implemented installation costs and remain very prime discipline that has come at the cost of volume. It drives cash flow but it slows our growth. And as we just highlighted earlier on, that is one avenue in which if we see an improved industry structure in Colombia as we began to see over the last couple of months, really, prices have stabilized and competition in Homes seems a little bit more stable, you’ve seen us drive ARPU a little bit, then we may go back into Home with a little bit more push on volume. And the same is true on Bolivia for macro reasons that we’ll address later. That’s the long way of saying we remain very, very focused not only on costs but also on revenue going forward.
