Proximus PLC

Hello and welcome to the Proximus Q2 2026 results. My name is Gaia and I will be your coordinator for today's event. Please note, conference is being recorded and for the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen only. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. This can be done by pressing pound key 5 on your telephone keypad to register your questions at any time. If you wish to withdraw your question, please press pound key 6 on your telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to your host, Nancy Goossens, Investor Relations Lead, to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Thank you, Gaia. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our webcast covering the Q2 results. As usual, we will begin with the presentation before opening the floor for your questions. Joining me today are Stijn Bijnens, the CEO, Nicolas Gaertner, Interim CFO, Seckin Arikan, Global CEO, and Jim Casteele, the head of B2C and AI. So let's now turn to today's highlights. Stijn, over to you.

Welcome also from my side to our second quarter 26 results presentation. I will take you through the key messages from today's release. They are summarized on this slide, but I will move directly to the next one and cover each point in more detail. Overall, our financial performance was broadly in line with our expectations. The domestic segment continued to perform well, with EBITDA increasing slightly, while global progressed as anticipated. We are therefore reiterating our full-year guidance across all domestic and group metrics. For global, we have narrowed the EBITDA guidance range, reflecting greater confidence in the margin trend. As Nicolas will cover the financials in more detail later, I'll leave it here and move on to the operational results. We delivered another solid commercial quarter. For mobile post-paid, we added 25,000 cards and our internet subscriber base grew by 8,000 lines. Our convergent customer base also continued to grow steadily, adding 12,000 residential customers in the second quarter. Meanwhile, the fixed voice and TV customer bases continued their gradual erosion. Our solid fixed internet performance continues to be supported by our expanding fiber footprint. By the end of June, we reached more than 2.75 million fiber homes across Belgium. This equals a population coverage of around 43% and the network filling rate further progressed to 35%. and we added another 44,000 active fiber customers in the second quarter, bringing the total to 820,000. Over the past few months, we reached two key milestones in our fixed network strategy that will shape our fiber rollout in the coming years. Let me start with Wallonia, south of Belgium, shown in the right hand of the slide. At the end of May, we took full ownership of Unifiber, which is rolling out fiber in Wallonia's mid-dense areas. This simplifies the structure and gives us greater strategic flexibility. Negotiations on the intended network partnership with Orange in this part of Belgium has also progressed well. Turning to the left side of the slide, this is the more recent milestone we announced last week. We're very pleased to receive BCA, the Belgian Competition Authority, approval for the network collaboration agreement in Flanders with WIRE and Telenet. We understand that the process took time and thank our investors for their patience. And we also acknowledge the significant resources committed both by the BCA and the BIPT and appreciate their important role throughout this process. Overall, the collaboration agreement benefits all stakeholders. For Proximus, it enables us a more capital-efficient fiber rollout in the mid-dense areas. It also improves rollout economics and helps to accelerate copper phase outing. In last week's announcements, the addendum included an overview of the deployment commitments and pricing. focus on the additional information shown on the slide specifically on duct access, more precisely the sub-duct access. This duct access applies only on the dense area where we roll out fiber in standalone. It does not apply to the fiber collaboration zones. In principle, this duct access continues the framework previously imposed by the BIPT. The specific modalities are now confirmed in the context of the FDTH cooperation agreement. The duct access is granted under FRAND principles and only in areas where Proximus has already deployed its GPON fiber technology. It only applies to the free subducts in the Proximus network, meaning ducts we do not need today and will not need in the future. On pricing, we are pleased that tariffs are based on current costs, reflecting the investments Proximus has made in its duct network. Prices are indexed annually by 1.9%, except if actual inflation deviates materially. It is important to underline that only Proximus can carry out work on the duct infrastructure. to safeguard network integrity. As a trade-off, we agreed to reduce the related one-time fees by around 50% compared with the rates presented in the market test. In addition to the one-time fees for physical interventions, a monthly rental fee applies for duct usage. The MRC is based on an allocation key linked to the number of subducts used. There are typically seven subducts in a duct. For the first subduct, 25% of costs are allocated to the access seeker. This is increasing to 50% when more than three subducts are used on the same network segment. The rental period is always at least five years with upfront payment. This summary covers the key points. More details are available in the reference offer on our website and in the BCA decision, which will be published on its website. With the agreement in Flanders, we have significantly de-risked our medium and long-term CAPEX and free cash flow trajectory. With rollout targets set, and CAPEX fully within our control, our investment path is now clearly defined. Once the black box is fully analyzed and the SALT agreement is finalized, we can be more precise on the CAPEX expectations over the next few years. But I can say that we are very confident in achieving our long-term ambition of restoring organic free Cashflow to 400 million by 2030 supported by a gradual decline in CAPEX after the 27th peak. This concludes my introduction on the domestic business. Before turning to the financials with Nick, I will briefly hand over to Seckin for an update on Proximus Global.