Swisscom Ag Ittigen R/Shs

The conference call is now being recorded. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining the Swisscom Q2 2024 results conference call hosted by Christoph Aschleman, Eugen Sternmetz, and Louis Schmid. Louis, the floor is yours.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Swisscom's Q2 24 results presentation. My name is Louis Schmidt, Head of Investor Relations and with me are our CEO Christoph Eschlemann and Eugen Stermetz, our Chief Financial Officer. Our CEO starts the presentation with Chapter 1 and a quick overview on the highlights, the operation and financial performance of the second quarter. Then in Chapter 2 Christoph presents a business update for Switzerland and Italy. In the second part of today's results presentation, Eugen gives a short update on the Vodafone Italia transaction in Chapter 3 and then runs you through Chapter 4 with the second quarter financials, including the confirmation of our full year guidance. With that, I would like to hand over to Christoph to start his part. Christoph.

Thank you, Louis, and welcome everybody to our first year, half year, 2024 results. I will move on directly to page number four. detailing the highlights of the first half year. Overall, we can say that the Q2 financials are on track to achieve the full year guidance. Our top line was up by 1.8%, mainly driven by the 7% growth in Italy, which is an outstanding achievement, giving the market context in the Italian market. Our EBITDA is in line with Q2 consensus. and we confirm our full year guidance for 2024. In Switzerland, we have unchanged business trends compared to Q1, but slightly better telco service revenue evolution, thanks to the measures that we started implementing in the last quarter. We also recorded appealing IT service revenue growth in the second quarter, mainly driven by AI and cloud offerings extensions. And also our FTTH rollout is going on in full swing. On the Italian side, we are continuously successful with FastWeb. We launched a new product energy offering for our B2C customer base, which we will talk about a little bit later. And we also launched an AI sovereign infrastructure as well in Italy and with an Italian LLM offering for our Italian customers. One of the highlights was also the attractive sale of our FibroCop stake for 439 million euros. The acquisition of Vodafone Italy is on track. Eugen will talk a bit in more detail about where we stand overall. We secured the financing, we received the first approvals and today we communicated that Valterena is the designated CEO of the new merged company. Moving on to slide number five, you can see the operational performance of Switzerland and Fastweb in Italy. In Switzerland, we have improved momentum both on mobile and broadband. I can see that the measures that we implemented in the past quarter are starting to show up in the numbers with increased postpaid subscriber base of plus 22,000. and still a slight decrease in broadband with minus 9,000, but substantially better than what we saw in Q1. TV as well as broadband is slightly impacted by the ongoing measures that we are executing with regard to phase out of older products and our more for more approach with our customer base, which leads to temporarily slightly higher churn both on broadband and on the TV side. If you look at the Italian numbers, you can see that we have a strong growth or strong continued growth on the mobile side with plus 113,000 net ads, bringing us to over 5% market share on the mobile side. We're the second best performer in the market just behind Iliad. On the broadband and wholesale segment, we see the same trend that we had over the past quarters, wholesale overcompensating the loss we are having in broadband due to our value strategy, but overall still a combined growth of 33,000 net ads if you accumulate broadband and wholesale. On slide six, you can see the overall financial results. Second quarter revenue growth of 1.8% to 2.75 billion Swiss francs, leading to a stable revenue of 5.45 billion in the first half year. EBITDA was slightly lower by 1.3%, 1.12 billion, mainly driven by the EBITDA decline in Switzerland, where we saw softer results on the cost saving side, which we will talk about a little bit later in the presentation. But overall, I would say both on the revenue and EBITDA are roughly in line with our expectation and with the full year expectations. Now we'll move on to the business update of Switzerland and Italy. starting with page number eight. Our strategic priorities for 2024 are unchanged, and we continue to execute on all four pillars simultaneously. The most important are starting with delighting customers. We are very much focused on our value strategy, both in Italy and in Switzerland, improving customer experience, investing in customer experience, both in the shops, but also the brand and the call centers. We also launched many new products in the past quarter in Italy and in Switzerland, as you will see later on in the slides. So we continue to invest in innovation to generate growth in the future, both on the telco side, but also the ICT market. An important pillar, despite the softer cost savings in Q2, achieving more with less remains an important pillar of our strategy execution and remains a top priority of the company improving or at the same time improving customer experience and reducing our cost base which will be one of our main focus is also going forward in the second half year of 2024 to achieve our full year targets last but not least we also work on our skill-based on our collaboration to increase overall performance of the company. Now, starting with Switzerland, the B2C telco business on slide number nine, you can see that we continue to execute our value strategy and our focus on NPS lead. Although competitors have been slightly improving in the past quarter, we still have a very substantial lead on the NPS side, and we continue to invest in the satisfaction of our customer base, because this leads to an exceptionally low customer churn. You can see just below, slightly increased on roughly stable on mobile and slightly decreased on the broadband side. But we continue to see very low customer churn, which is mainly linked to the high customer satisfaction that we have. And overall, we also see stable ARPU development on the broadband side, which is, I would say, an exceptional achievement, giving the markets aggressiveness that we see today and on the mobile side we have stable ARPU on the main brand or the different brand mix leading to a slightly lower post paid value ARPU which is also a great achievement in light of the promotional intensity that we see on the mobile market how did we achieve this we continue to invest in our value and brand orientation and We managed to secure the content rights for football, which is important for our TV offering until 2029. And we are now a new partner also of the Swiss national football team going forward for the next years, which will help us to position our brand in the market. Next to this, we invest a lot on ARPU evolution, new offerings to upsell and cross-sell to our customer base. We remodeled the Blue TV Room Max option. We introduced the new Wingo offerings and we are certainly working on phasing out older products which have lower ARPU and replacing these customers with or moving these old product customers to the new Blue portfolio in the same for more for same or a more for more approach driving up our average ARPU. On page number 10, you can see that we are also working on sales measures as we talked already about after Q1 when we had quite a weak net ad performance and we increased our intensity on the sales side, making promotions more visible, modifying the shop layouts slightly and really pushing more sales activities also in terms of advertising. increasing the convenience, making it easier to buy from Swisscom. And we can see that these measures are already showing some effect and stimulating the net ads in the market. We don't intend to increase promotional intensity and we'll certainly continue our price followership and do not intend to amp up or discount levels, but really working more on the sales side and the promotion advertising push to stimulate the market. We also launched or expanded our insurance portfolio in Switzerland, which was well received by the market. Overall, we have a slightly increasing RGU base in post-paid, year-on-year plus 74,000, and a slightly decreasing on the broadband side with minus 21,000. On page number 11, I will move on to Swiss. B2B, telco, and IT. So in both market segments, telco and IT, we continue to invest in new product offerings. On the telco side, we launched a new security offering, SignGate. And on the IT side, we also launched new cybersecurity offerings and launched our new AI platform, which is based on an NVIDIA offering to enable AI sovereign compute in Switzerland for our B2B customers. Overall, you can see the telco service revenue evolution was down minus 2.6% year on year, achieving 375 million Swiss francs in revenue, mainly driven by still price decreases in the market. So you can see that the ARPU wireless has decreased by two Swiss francs to 26, driven by the emotional intensiveness in the market. On the IT side, we were able to drive very appealing growth of plus 7%, mainly driven by cloud security and the platform business, but also some M&A we executed over the past month, leading for the first time to revenue over 300 million revenues in a quarter. On the network and IT side, you might have seen in our press release today, we announced the new CTIO. Mark Duesener, who was previously managing our mobile and B2B telco technical division, will take up the CTIO role starting 1st of September. So I'm very pleased that we were able to promote an internal talent to this important position. And we continue to execute the current strategy. We don't plan any strategy change, but we'll focus on continuity and execute our current priorities that we are working on since a number of years on the network side. First of all, this will be continue to increase the mobile coverage. We were able to increase the 5G plus coverage by six percentage points year on year. And we now stand at 83% population coverage. with 5G+, and also we made substantial progress on the FTTH rollout. Our rollout speed is now two times higher than it was one year ago, and we added five percentage points of FTTH coverage and now stand at 49% FTTH coverage for Switzerland, meaning that in the next quarter we can most likely report that more than half of Switzerland is built with FTTH connection. We are also making great progress in our internal network modernization. We were able to migrate the full mobile traffic to our new internal core network called Titan. This is an important milestone because it generates more operational stability, resilience, and also energy cost savings, and we will continue to execute the next core migrations over the coming two years to finalize the ongoing network modernization within Swisscom Switzerland. Overall, you can see on the right-hand side that the NPS of our customers regarding to stability is very high and stable. On page number 13, a quick highlight on our cost saving, where we stand on cost savings or achieving more with less. As I already mentioned, this remains an absolute top priority, although we had a weaker Q2, driven also by seasonal effects and some one-off costs that we had in Q2. But overall, we continue to work intensively on delivering cost savings. You can see some examples on this slide on the achievements we had in the last quarter, especially in the B2C side. We launched our new GenNI-based chatbot, which delivers very encouraging first results, both in resolution rates, but also in terms of customer satisfaction, and also continues to drive what you can see on the right-hand side, a move to more self-care and an increased, sorry, decreased workload on the call center side. which then helps us to overall reduce our cost base. We also celebrated the five-year anniversary of our DevOps centers. The first one we opened in Rotterdam five years ago. We now have over 500 people working in our DevOps centers, and we will continue to expand these centers over the next years to continue to increase our work we can deliver in a shoring mode versus a Switzerland or Swiss-based cost base. Now, moving on to Italy, I can also start with a personal highlight. You have seen that Walter Renner was confirmed as a designated new co-CEO. I'm very much delighted about this confirmation. Walter is doing an outstanding job with his management team at FastWeb in Italy, and I am convinced that with his inspirational and caring leadership, He is the perfect CEO to work on the integration of the two cultures, the two companies and bring together both Vodafone Italy and FastWeb and form a strong number two in the market in Italy. Now on the B2C side of FastWeb, we continue to execute our strategy and focusing on quality and pushing or expanding our offering beyond the core services. So we are also working on AI-driven activities on the Italian side. One of the examples is we introduced AI support for call center agents, which helped us to drive down the average handling time by 20%, while at the same time increasing the NPS of the customers calling our call center. And this also is a good example of achieving more with less in the future. We were also on the mobile side again awarded with the fastest network for the fourth time. And as you've seen, we managed to gain 113,000 net ads in the second quarter, which was the second best performance in the market just behind Iliad. The second quarter was also the start of our new energy offering, which allows our customers to buy energy with a fixed price or quite an innovative monthly tariff approach where we are reselling energy and we can say that the start was very well perceived that registrations are ahead of our expectations and we will continue to this offering in the next quarter until year end as it is a very nice effect on our ARPU uplift you can see that 81% of the customers are also broadband or mobile customers and generates a 45% ARPU uplift with regards to customers which are only buying telco services from us. On the core side, we can see that the conversion is up by 1.4% to 43.4%. And we continue to drive conversions in our customer base. And it also has positive effects on ARPU and overall insurance. Overall, the RGU base on mobile is up by 11% and we now send a 3.7 million mobile customers and the UBB customer base is slightly down by 0.3% and sends a 2.3 million customers. Moving on to slide number 15, you can see an overview of the FastWeb B2B and Wholesale, two business units which have excellent market momentum and produce amazing revenue results. B2B is up by 11% in revenues, now stands at 295 million euros in the second quarter. We have won many new contracts and the revenue increase is mainly driven by cloud and cybersecurity services. We also launched the new what we call Next AI Factory, which is an NVIDIA-based AI compute infrastructure to offer a sovereign AI infrastructure in Italy. We also released an Italian LLM, or Large Language Model, and entered into partnerships with primary editors and contact providers to improve the value of the LLM with our partners, such as Gruppo Mondadori, iStart, or eBee. so that the LLM is really of high value to our Italian customers. On the wholesale side, you can see that we have quite a high growth of plus 37% to 97 million euros in the second quarter, driven mainly by the increase in UBB lines and reselling of wireline connectivity by our partners such as Iliad or Enel and driven by Enel and Iliad. As I mentioned before, we were also able to sell our 4.5% fiber cob stake for 439 million euro. This represents a capital gain of 189 million euro, which is not recognized in the P&L as it was cooked directly in our equity. And we will use the proceeds of these sales to execute the deleveraging in light of the transaction, which I think is also good news for our bond investors. Now I'm handing over to Eugen to provide the transaction update on Vodafone Italy.

Thank you Christoph and welcome and good morning everybody also from my side. Brief update on the transaction in Italy, obviously I'm on page 17, obviously the strategic rationale has not changed at all. We create a leading converged challenger in Italy based on improved scale, based on improved conversions and owning our own infrastructure with according owner economics in the mobile segment. The transaction will create substantial value through high and tangible synergies. We will increase the dividend and we have a clear the leveraging path. So this is the basic framework that most of you know quite well by now. Let me talk a little bit about the good progress we are making on our way to closing. First of all, the regulatory approvals that are required for closing are coming in one after the other. So we very quickly got the Golden Power approval by the Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers. We got the approval of the Swiss competition authority. The UK listing rules have changed as expected by everybody. So no Vodafone shareholder vote will be required for the transaction to close. So this leaves us with exactly four remaining closing conditions. Most important one certainly detailing competition authority. We have appointed a new CEO as Christoph explained. And we have successfully completed the financing of the transaction, as I will say about on the next page, which is page 18. So we fully financed the transaction with a mix of syndicated bank loans of 3 billion euros, Swiss domestic bond issuances of 1.1 billion, and a multi-trans European issuance a couple of weeks ago of 4 billion euro in total. the incremental interest expense out of these financings for the Waterfront transaction will be below 250 million Swiss francs per year and therefore below our assumption that we presented in the March 15 business case and therefore the financing fully supports the business case and the pre-cash flow evolution due to the transaction. That's it for the transaction update. I move on to the financials of the first half of the year. Go directly to page 20 with the group overview. I'll start with revenue. Revenue was, underlying revenue was 42 million above prior year. Q2 much better than Q1 with plus 55 million. Switzerland in the first half year was 56 million down, but also here. The second quarter much better than the first one with just minus $4 million in revenue. Service revenue decline has been a bit more benign than in the previous quarter. And the revenue increase from the IT business was able to almost compensate the decline on the telco side. FASEP with a very strong quarter of growth again, plus $53 million after $35 million in the first quarter. We'll get to the sources of that when I talk about FastWeb later. EpiTeA, evolution underlying EpiTeA was down 26 million, but also here, second quarter a bit better than the first quarter with minus 8 million. Swisscom Switzerland was down 43. Q2, pretty similar to Q1, a bit worse with 24 million after minus 19 million in the first quarter. The cost savings have been a bit low due to some extra costs. I'll get to that later. That's the main driver here. Fast-step another quarter of growth with 2 million more in EBITDA compared to prior year after plus 4 million in the first quarter. Obviously, the incremental margins or the margins on the incremental revenue are quite low, which has a lot to do with the mix of revenues that changes over time. And I'll also explain that on a later page. So I'll move on to page 21, still on the group-level CapEx. Group CapEx was up $44 million. That's still mainly the effect we already talked about in Q1. Our fiber rollout in Switzerland has has achieved cruising speed this year, which wasn't the case in the first and second quarter of the previous year. You might remember that last year, 2023, we switched from the point-to-multipoint to the point-to-point rollout, which cost us a bit of rollout speed, and therefore also lower capex in the previous years. So this is the main effect here. And obviously, all as expected and in line with the guidance we have given and operating free cash flow minus $70 million. in the group, mainly driven by Switzerland. And here again, out of the minus 91 million, about two-thirds is the pickup in fiber capex that we expected and guided for. I'll move on to Swisscom Switzerland, page 22. Again, revenue, as I said, minus 56 million, but just minus four. in the second quarter. If we quickly go through the segments, B2C in the second quarter, just minus 19 million after minus 59 in the first quarter. Hardware revenue evolution was much better in the second quarter than in the first. Service revenue evolution was a bit better, so that yielded overall a better evolution in the second quarter than in the first. B2B up 28 million, 24 out of which in the second quarter, also better than The first quarter, basically all revenue categories better than in the previous quarter, so strong IoT service revenue growth, service revenue decline on the DELCO side a bit smaller than in the previous quarter. And we also had some growth in hardware revenues. So that's the mix. Onto Ebitda on the Swiss side, underlying Ebitda. minus 43 million. As I said, Q2, pretty similar to Q1. You see it on the B2C side, minus 6Q1, minus 4Q2. So same, same, but different. In B2C, we had the typical mix of service revenue decline on the one hand, lower subscriber acquisition costs, and also indirect cost savings on the other hand. On the B2B side, minus 27 million, minus 10 in the second quarter, better than in the first quarter. Here, the typically mixed revenue increase in IT services on the EBITDA margin level cannot fully compensate for the revenue loss on the DELCO side, and this gives the typically net effect. So that's the overview on Switzerland. I move on to the always very important deep dive on page 23 on service revenue on the Swiss side, Elco service revenue on the Swiss side. Service revenue decline in the first half year was minus 54 million. Minus 30 million in the first quarter and now minus 24 million in the second quarter. Out of those minus 24, minus 14 in B2C. That's 3 million better than in the first quarter. Minus 10 million B2B. That's 3 million better than in the first quarter. If you look at the individual drivers starting with B2C minus 14, In the second quarter, out of those minus 14, I remind you that minus 4 million out of these are related to the VAT increase that we didn't pass on to our customers. So they split basically in two and two on the ARPU effects, both on wireless and wireline. So without that move, and that's a non-recurring move, the ARPU effect in both wireless and wireline would be 2 million better, roughly. You can also see the levers we are working on that Christoph alluded to in his presentation. If you compare the numbers on the B2C side and the drivers to the Q1 numbers, you see the one difference is in the ARPU wireline number, which was a negative number in Q1. I mentioned it at the time that this was positive in the previous years, sorry, positive in the last year and helped us with service revenue evolution last year. Now it's a zero, so it's already become better. So we see the results of some of the measures we have taken already in the numbers. On the B2B side, things are pretty similar to what we had in the first quarter. The drivers, as usual, are due pressure mostly on the SME side, price pressure on the corporate side. So where does that leave us all in all with the outlook for the full year? The outlook for the full year is the service revenue decline of roughly minus 100 million. You remember at the February conference, I talked about the guidance for the full year, about similar service revenue decline to 2023, which was 72 million, plus a risk of 20 million due to the VAT increase that we didn't pass on. And that's pretty much where we are and where we believe we will end up towards the end of the year with roughly minus 100 million one other note on this page important one as always indirect cost savings you will have noted that indirect cost savings have been quite uh quite weak in this quarter with just plus 1 million we didn't have great expectations for cost savings in this quarter since we always expect cost savings to be biased more towards the second half of the year and the little expectations we had for q2 basically got diluted by some one-off effects with some extreme Weather events in the southern part of Switzerland in the second quarter with flooding of central offices, which cost us a couple of millions in extra maintenance and also some higher customer care levels due to higher call volumes and that diluted the cost savings. But we fully confirm our cost savings target of 50 million plus for the full year and are convinced that we will hit it. With that, I move on to page 24, CAFEX. On the Swiss side, basically unchanged in Q2, and for the first half year, $44 million up. As I mentioned before, operating free cash flow is obviously just the sum total of the EBITDA effect and the CapEx effect, very much driven by the pickup in the cyber CapEx. Moving on to page 24. FastLap starting with revenue. Revenue was very positive in the second quarter, plus 54 million, so a very different mix by segment. So B2C revenues are basically flat, with mobile revenues growing and wireline revenues decreasing. B2B revenues up strongly, 23 million in the first and 29 million in the second quarter, very much driven by growth in ICD services. Lots of it rather one-off than recurring and typically with low margin as we see in the EBITDA evolution. Wholesale was up strongly, 27 million in the second quarter after 13 million in the first. That's very nice, very much driven by the increased UBP sales to our wholesale customers as Christoph mentioned. In the second quarter, it was a bit amplified by higher ERO sales, which make up about one third of the growth in the second quarter. Ebitda evolution on the FAS website, so underlying Ebitda was up 6 million, 2 million of this the second quarter. If you look at the individual segments, you see B2C EBITDA is down compared to prior years. So B2C EBITDA is obviously suffering from this change in revenue mix with wireless revenues going up and wireline revenues going down with very different margins. Obviously, the margins on the wireless side are low. This is one of the main reasons why we did the Vodafone acquisition and one of the major sources of synergies that we expect It now shows up in the B2C P&L, and we had to be fair and to explain also the change from Q1 to Q2. We had some extra costs in customer operations in the second quarter, not all of it recurring. But the underlying trend that you see here is the change in the cross-margin mix from wireline to wireless revenues. B2B, EBITDA slightly down despite the massive revenue growth. What's going on? What's going on is that BELCO revenues on the violence side, which are high margin, are declining. We are compensating or much more than overcompensating actually with IT service revenue with a very different margin profile. And so that leaves us with a small minus overall on the EBITDA side. So the EBITDA growth from FastBed is mainly related to the growth in the wholesale segment, as you can see. In terms of outlook, let me briefly comment on the revenue side. You saw that the revenue growth was much higher with 7.1% in the first half year than our guidance for the full year of 2 to 3%. That means for the second half of the year, there will still be some growth, but most likely not in the amount that we saw in the first quarter, but rather in the range of the original guidance of 2 to 3% for the second half year. So that obviously leaves us with more than 3% for the full year, but probably certainly less than 7.1% we saw in the first half year for the full year. On the epidural side, you can see that the epidural growth does not keep the pace of revenue, in other words, of our original guidance of 2% to 3%. It's more between 1% and 2%, and this is what we believe you should expect for the full year rather than the original 2% to 3%. Although admittedly, in absolute terms, we are talking about very small numbers and are obviously exposed to volatility both on the upside and on the downside, given the small absolute numbers. Very quickly, page 26, CapEx at FASTA is virtually unchanged compared to prior year, and so is operating free cash flow, given that EBITDA and CapEx is unchanged. Page 27, back to the group level. Group free cash flow bridge. Group free cash flow was 109 million below prior year. That's mainly driven by the decline in operating free cash flow. As usual in the first half of the year, we have quite a significant negative net working capital effect as we prepay a lot of annual services in the first half of the year. Typically this reverts back to normal towards the end of the year, as you have seen in previous years. Page 28. Group net income bridge, net income is marginally below prior year, minus 12 million, a mix of lower EBITDA, 24 million, and somewhat lower tax expense, plus 15 million, which gives the marginal decline in net income. With that, I come to page 29 of my last page with group guidance. Obviously, given that the results are by and large in line with our expectations, the guidance remains unchanged across all metrics, including the dividend. And with that, I hand back to the operator.

Thank you, Eugen. Ladies and gentlemen, to ask questions, please press star 14. I repeat, star 14. If you wish to withdraw your request to speak, please press star 15. Thank you. I will now open the lines one by one. As soon as your line is open, you will hear a corresponding text on your own line. then please introduce yourself by name and company before asking your question. Thank you. We have a first question.

Hello, it's Polo Tang from EBS. Thanks for the presentation. I have three questions. The first question is just really about Swiss competitive dynamics. Can you maybe talk through what you're seeing in terms of promotional activity in the Swiss market? And can you maybe also comment on what you're seeing in terms of the duration of promotions, but also the quantum of discounts? My second question is just on the Swiss fiber rollout. You've mentioned that you've hit cruising speed, but what impact, in terms of your build, but what impact is this having in terms of your broadband net ads and your B2C revenues? So is the fiber rollout accretive to service revenues and net ads? Or is there more competition because it also means that salt is also entering that footprint, given your wholesale deal with them? And my third question is really on the fast web. How much of a benefit do you expect from your energy business in terms of revenues and EBITDA? Because in terms of your presentation, you did highlight a big step up in terms of fixed ARPUs, like you said, 45%. So as this business scales, how big could it be? Or maybe asking the question another way, how much of a benefit from this energy business is factored into your guidance for FastWeb for 2024? Thanks.

OK. Thank you, Paolo. So maybe first on the Swiss competitive dynamics. So we see, or I would say overall, the market remains very promotional and we don't see a huge change. It's certainly not dialing down. It's rather contrary that we've seen a slight increase in promotional intensity in Q2, both in terms of discounts provided and duration. So, for example, Sunrise increased the promotional period from 12 to 24 months again. and we have seen discount levels of even over 70% for example from SALT discounted. So I would say overall still very intense activity and that's why we also decided that we need to become a bit more pushy on the sales side and work on sort of incentives, shop layout, promotional, let's say, advertising material that we, let's say, instead of maybe talking a bit more about brand, you talk a bit more about attractive offers to really stimulate our own net ad intake. On the FTTH build impact on our B2C business, I would say, on the one side, it offers upselling potential to move our customers from lower value subscriptions to higher value subscriptions. And on the other side, as you mentioned, it also increases competition because you have salt entering the turf and basically where they were not available before because they don't sell on copper. We expect that this effect overall balances each other out. So we don't expect, let's say, an upside on the B2C. But what we should see is hopefully an upside on the wholesale business, reselling more fiber lines to our market competitors. In Italy, the energy business, I would say it's still too early. So the benefit on, let's say, 2024 is fully factored in into our guidance that we provided for 2024. I mean, and even if the offering is very encouraging for the moment, we're still talking about quite low numbers in terms of RGUs. I think going forward, it provides quite an interesting potential, especially once we have merged the new code and we have a much larger customer base to upsell to. But let's say for the moment, at least this year, it only has a marginal impact on EBITDA and revenues.

Thanks. Next question. Next question, please. Maybe you need to unmute yourself on your own phone. Yemi Falana. Okay, we go to the next question.

Yeah, hi there. It's Steve from Redburn Atlantic. Thanks for taking the questions. Just coming back to FastWeb, thanks for the excellent disclosure on the EBITDA bridge. I wasn't quite sure on that exceptional amount of $13 million. Did that all land in the second quarter, or you can just clarify that? And maybe you can help us understand the margin impact of those IRU revenues, or you call them out in number six, but I'm curious to know what the margins in IRUs are. And sorry, just going back to energy, can you just give us an idea on how the economic, the energy performance offer works. I mean, have you any exposure to wholesale energy price at all, or should we assume that it's a very, very low margin sort of ARPU uplift kind of gig? That'd be great. Thank you very much.

Sure. Sorry, I just tried to figure out what your first question was, but it was on the 13 million, right? It was the exception we discussed last year in the second quarter. It was for the four weeks billing ruling 13 million. So If you need the details, it's in the Q2 report of last year. On the IRU margin, these are pretty high margins. So you can assume that most of it drops down to EBITDA.

Any visibility on future IRU sales? I know they're difficult to predict, but I presume the guidance you're giving for the second half assumes there's nothing coming through in H2 and beyond in the immediate future.

Yeah, I wouldn't say that nothing comes through, but probably no major variations compared to the prior year. But as you say, it's a bit difficult to go into, you know, segment based and revenue predictions. So I would stick with our overall message that I gave for the second half year evolution. You may remember that Q3 and Q4 last year at FastBear was particularly strong on the B2B and on the wholesale side. So it will be increasingly difficult to beat that. But there is always some IRU sales in the mix. It's not that IRU sales per se is something exceptional. We flag it when the deviation to the prior year is significant, which was the case in this quarter.

Thank you.

And regarding your questions on energy, so we are basically reselling energy to our customers. So we don't take any trading or pricing risks. But this is passed on one-to-one to customers, or let's say we backed up with back-to-back contracts with our energy providers, and we take a margin on reselling the offering to our customers. That's basically how it works.

There is no exposure to wholesale energy prices. I would assume the margin is kind of very low, kind of teens are pricing on single digit, basically.

Well, it has actually quite interesting margins. So it's obviously like not telco margins, but it's better than IT. But we don't, I mean, obviously, we don't want to take any pricing risk or trading risk on the energy side, which is really not our business. So in that case, margins are limited because we are basically in a reselling context. But it is still, I would say, worthwhile doing. especially if you have a huge customer base, which we will have after the merger, which allows you quite substantial upselling possibilities.

Great, thank you.

Next question.

Hi there, this is Ajay Soni from David Morgan. I wanted to ask you around the Swiss retail margins. You mentioned you're investing more in sales and marketing. obviously avoid being more proportional with pricing. Your Swiss retail margins have improved year over year. So what's kind of offset that increase in your sales and marketing? And then secondly, just on Italian business, obviously it's quite difficult on the retail side for you guys, but what are you seeing in terms of competitive dynamics? Is there any ease up on the pressure there? Any further details would be useful. Thank you.

AJ, I must admit I'm a bit at a loss with regard to your first question. Obviously, we managed by and large to keep EBITDA on the B2C side in Switzerland stable despite the service revenue decline. But maybe you can kindly rephrase your question. I think we all didn't quite get it.

Yeah, so I'm actually agreeing to that. You've managed to kind of maintain the margin, I think, but you've also said that you are investing more in sales and marketing, which would naturally increase your costs. So what I'm asking is what else have you done within the business to offset that increase in cost within your sales and marketing?

Maybe I'll start and then Christopher. I think we did not say that we increased marketing spend or anything like that. So that's not our plan. So if you go there, that's not what we meant. What we do mean is that we increase our sales orientation in our organization across all channels. But that does not necessarily mean increasing marketing spend. That's not the plan.

Yeah, maybe just to give you some more details, you know, we worked on, let's say, incentive structures for agents in the shop. Sometimes, you know, we were last year, we were more focused on in the marketing spend on general branding activities, like promoting the Swisscom brand as such. And now we do a bit less of that and more, let's say, marketing campaigns that promote products and prices directly. So it's more, let's say, sales oriented type spend, but it's still at similar levels. But overall, obviously, B2C is also continuing to execute cost-saving measures, so driving down call center costs or other costs that help balance out some of the spend that might happen in other areas or which led to this, let's say, overall nearly stable EBITDA and I think maybe even a percentage margin increase. On the Italian side, competitive dynamics, I would say, are, as always, very intense competition. Pricing levels remain roughly where they've been over the past quarters. But on the mobile side, we do see, again, even targeted attacks on the smaller operators like Iliad and FastWeb. But I would say, overall, the dynamics are pretty much unchanged. which is not surprising as the market overall is still roughly the same, and everybody is fighting to gain new customers.

That's great, and thanks for clarifying that question. Very helpful.

Thank you. Next question.

Yes, good morning. It's Luigi Minerva from HSBC. Thanks for the presentation and for taking my questions. The first one is on the process in Italy with the acquisition of Vodafone Italy. And I just wanted to clarify whether you have already filed the transaction with the Italian Antitrust Authority, and if not, what is the expected timing? And then secondly, just to go back on the Fastweb energy product, which is quite interesting, I was just wondering, you know, What is your interpretation? Why is it that in Italy all operators are now reselling energy? And whether you think that there could be perhaps a read across to other markets, say Switzerland?

Okay, maybe on the process first. I would like not to give too specific dates and information about our interaction with competition authority, obviously we don't want to be over secretive, but it's a very delicate process. We are in full engagement with the Italian competition authority. So there is active exchange and given the interactions we have, we reiterated our expectation that the transaction will close in the first quarter 2025. I would leave it at that for the moment, if that's okay.

If I may, but the filing hasn't been done, because that's a public statement that you can make when you do file with the competition authority.

That's correct. That's correct. On the energy, just on your last part of the question, will it cross to Switzerland? No, unfortunately not. The energy retail market in Switzerland is awkwardly not liberalized, so that would be quite a difficult undertaking. Other markets I cannot touch.

I would say from regarding your question why all operators are starting doing this, I think it has something to do also with the competitive dynamics and operators looking for new growth opportunities. And telecom being quite utility-like service, it is a good question why shouldn't you sell other utility services to your same customer base? And we can see that this is clearly somehow corresponding to customer expectations. And customers are willing to buy energy, for example, from a telco provider. And it also goes the other way around. I mean, Enel started entering the broadband business and is actually selling broadband to their energy customers. And it's quite logical. Why shouldn't we enter the energy market and resell energy to our broadband customers if it works the other way around? And I think that's the logic you see in Italy and with other operators launching similar offerings. And at the end, it's for us interesting because it adds incremental revenue and EBITDA to our business and is not eroding anything else that we are actually providing to the same customers.

Thank you so much.

Next question.

Hi there, it's Joshua Mills here from BNP Paribas. I have a few questions, please. The first one would just be going back to slide 23, where you lay out the different moving parts on service revenues and highlight that, as you commented, the RP dilution in wireline VTC is now flat, whereas the wireless RP dilution is still running at minus 10. I wondered if you could give a bit more color about what kind of initiatives you've taken during the quarter to increase prices on fixed line and therefore offset the brand dilution, and whether you are doing or have plans to do similar things in the wireless segment. I'm just trying to understand how you get that ARPU dilution in wireless to improve. The second question, there was some interesting detail in the presentation about your AI initiatives, particularly regarding NVIDIA. I wondered if you could, again, give a bit more color about the kind of margins you're getting on these AI-supported B2B solutions and how those margins compare to traditional telco services, but also the other IT services which you've been selling, which I know are a lot lower margin, just to try and understand the mix shift going forward and how we should think about the B2B revenues dropping through to EBITDA. Thanks very much.

So maybe I'll give you the start on the first question. So yes, we had a list of measures already implemented at the beginning of the second quarter, end of the first quarter, aiming at improving ARPU. And most of them were related to the wireline segment, such as phasing out old tariffs, et cetera. Christoph gave some examples in his speech. The impact was mainly on the Violet side. On the Violet side, obviously the big impact that we see and that we have also seen in the past is related to the success of second brands in the Violet segment, which is much bigger than in the Violet segment. So there is this output dilution effect of successfully selling on the second and third brands. The change we saw here this year compared to last year is basically in the first of these four columns on the B2C side. If you remember last year, we managed quite well to balance the increased subscribers on the second and third brand with the output dilution effect. And in the first and second quarter of this year, we didn't fully achieve our targets in terms of sales from second and third brands. So the measures we are taking on the wireless side are more directed at increasing net debt, and in particular, increasing gross debt, because churn numbers are quite good. And Christoph gave some of the examples of what we're doing there in his talk. So the focus, I think, on the wireless side is more on increasing the number of subscriptions by improving sales on second and third brands, whereas on the wireless side, where the second and third brand card doesn't play that well, we work more on the ARPU. That would be my take.

I think it was a good explanation. You can see that the mobile ARPU, out of the minus 10 million, minus 9 comes from the brand shift, meaning that the ARPU and the main brand is essentially flat. We are also changing some of the older tariffs to the new tariffs, but other than that, we new measures on the mobile side. And on the wireline, we actually have increased ARPU overall to compensate the brand mix impact of minus 4, which is linked also to some of the TV options that we repriced and all the tariffs that Eugen mentioned. I think on the AI initiative question, it is still early days. I'm not sure we can already talk about margins because we are just in the process of launching this offering and onboarding the first customers. So I think we still probably need a couple of quarters to see overall what is the business demand and how is the onboarding going forward. But overall, if I look at our margins on the regular, let's say this AI offering is sort of a compute a cloud compute offering and if I look at our traditional cloud compute offerings the margins or gross margins are actually quite interesting if you are able to produce your or produce a customer on your own cloud infrastructure so there on that side you obviously you don't look at telco margins but still it's a substantial you know double digit margins that you you generate on the cross margin side and much more interesting than reselling other IT services or much more interesting than professional services which typically you are in like I don't know the low single digits or the low double digit seekers so if this service works as we expect it could be quite an interesting service going forward but first you need to generate revenue to actually book margin so I wouldn't you know I'm Don't want to get too excited about your service right now.

Thanks. Maybe one quick follow-up. On slide 10, you do give some helpful detail on the split of your main brand and sub-brands in the top right. And you can see here that your post page is much higher than fixed, which tramps, I think, with what you're saying. But do you have any targets on where you're comfortable allowing the second, third brand penetration to get to before you risk full cannibalization, should we think about 30% as the ceiling or would you be happy to see the sub-brands grow further from here, particularly in FIPS?

Well, this is a topic that we are working on internally as well as sort of what is the right level of second brand. And obviously, we would like to keep it as low as possible. That's sort of the main target. But you can see on the mobile side, it's already quite high with 32%. And we expect it to continue to grow slightly over the coming quarters. But we are also implementing measures now to stabilize the main brand customer base to avoid the second brand taking a too high proportion. At the moment, I would say it's still okay because the cannibalization effect is still lower than what we gained from the market net ads overall. But for sure, we don't want to see the second brand taking over more than half of our customer base, for example. So I think that's a clear no-go, but we're still very far away from that figure. But I would say probably somewhere in the 30% to 40% range on mobile is something that we will see in the future. And on broadband, we will see. At the moment, it's still at very low levels, and the uptake on the second brand is also much lower, or intake is much lower. on the second brand, because there, I would say the customer base is still more focused on the main brands in the market.

Thanks very much. Next question.

Hello, thank you for the opportunity. I just wanted to here from . I just wanted to touch base on the the insurance opportunity in Switzerland, I mean, is it meaningful or is this just kind of a side activity? And also, if you could remind us of the margin dynamics of this business? Is it similar to what you've described on the energy business in Italy, for instance, where it's lower than the telco business, higher than the ICT business? So any color there would be helpful. And also, if Swisscom is the only kind of telco kind of selling insurance here, or are your competitors also going down this route? And the second question was just going to the Italian market, you know, looking from the outside in, it seems like at least the mobile market seems to be stabilizing a bit on the R2 side. If I look at the, you know, the market trend, but obviously the wireline market seems to be deteriorating. If you could perhaps provide any color on, you know, what you're seeing on the consumer wireline side in terms of churn to Iliad or to other players and if things are stable but weak or if things are deteriorating. Thank you.

The insurance business in Switzerland at the moment is not meaningful and rather a side element looking at the number of contracts sold. But Going forward, it really depends on how well the offering is picked up. I would say the service has the potential to generate a couple of millions of revenue and margin, but for this, we need to substantially sell more contracts. It's still early days, and we will see in the coming years how these contracts will evolve because the insurance market is a very slow-moving market, so this is more sort of a long-term play rather than a quick fix for the next quarter. But we also hope that or expect, let's say, converged customers which buy also insurance products from us having a lower churn delivering benefits on that side. At the moment, we are the only player or telco player in Switzerland delivering this. The others are, I think, to some extent delivering the easy protection we have as well, which is linked to device. if it gets stolen or if a break your device which we did in the past years already which is quite successful but in the the other insurance space i think we are the only one at the moment so i would say we first we need to do some quarters of selling and then we will be able to see how um how meaningful the impact of this will be in the future on the the italian side so i do agree that mobile prices are stabilizing around sort of the six euro area. And overall, I think wireline is slightly deteriorating, but I would say overall also roughly stable to what we've seen in the past. For FastWeb, you know, this is basically the same situation as we used to have, so it's not a deteriorating situation for us. Our turn to Iliad on the mobile side is very low, so we are not using a meaningful amount of customers to Iliad, but rather to the general market. So I think overall competitive dynamics in our Fasco context, I would say, are stable.

I don't know, Eugen, if you... Yeah, I think the only thing I'd add is maybe on the mobile side, what you see in terms of up, who above the line and below the line can be quite different. So kind of the list prices seem to coalesce around 8 to 10 for the main brands, and as Christoph said, around 6 or so for the fiber brands. In particular, there is still this practice of targeted operated targeted offerings so if you are a customer of fast app and you come over back to me you get price x this type of offering which is quite widespread in italy which is not allowed anymore using the customer data but which is still being done in in shops and and this creates some some churn so obviously net we we gained a lot of customers on the mobile side we we saw that in the first pages of the presentation but we also at times had quite elevated churn if we are the the big stream of these operator target attacks, if you like, below the line with super aggressive prices. So that's, I guess, the only thing on the mobile side I would add. On the buy line side, we obviously do lose customers, but it's very important to know that we are probably the most expensive operator in the market based on the high quality perception and decided consciously to stick to that quality and high price positioning. And in terms of overall result, I think it was quite great for us because we are in the 30 region on pricing compared to 24, 25 for most of the competitors. And the subscriber decline is still manageable. So that's the only thing I would add.

Thank you very much. Next question.

Hi, good morning. This is Nuno Vash from Bernstein. Thank you for the opportunity to ask questions. I have three on the Swiss business side. First one is on the guidance, which from what I understood, you've said that you're pretty much confirming the full year outlook and namely this net 50 million cost savings and just the overall impact to EBITDA. My question is, considering you've seen minus 43 million of underlying EBITDA loss in the first half of the year, and the service revenue loss you expect in the second half is sort of stable, you have to see considerable cost savings in the second half of the year. So just to understand, I understand that the second half, as you said, is a bit better in terms of cost savings, but this would have to be considerably higher than last year's. So just to understand a little bit better of what's driving this stable outlook. Also, because you've mentioned a one-off impact in terms of weather, so Just trying to understand how you could have predicted this in a way that your outlook is unchanged. Just on the free cash flow, because the working capital... Sorry? Oh, go ahead. Just two more very quick questions. Just on the free cash flow, because the working capital movement in the first half of the year was also a bit more extreme than last year. I understand you don't really guide on free cash flow, but would you give us a sort of idea of where the working capital might end? At the end of the year, would we still see a sort of around 100 million net negative working capital for the full year. And then very quickly, we talked about repricing TV offers and cutting some lower-priced broadband offers that help the ER pool in the fix in Switzerland. Would we expect to see some extra churn in the second half of the year on the back of those? So what's been the customer reaction to these actions? Thank you.

Okay, so I'll take the first and the second. The first one is absolutely fair with minus 43 million in the first half of the year. I would just add technically before I get on the content that the guidance split we give is always between Switzerland and Italy and Switzerland for that purpose includes not only Swisscom Switzerland, but also the other segments. So there is a bit more moving parts to the whole story. Your basic reasoning is perfectly correct with minus 43 million. How do you end up with minus 50 in the end that we guided for? And the answer is the one that you gave. We do expect significant cost savings in the second half of the year. And we do expect a slight improvement in service revenue dynamics, although we don't want to oversell it because we also see some risks on the subscriber side that might lead to service revenue. So that's on the guidance on pre-cash flow. We do expect a significant swing back of the net working capital, but I will not guide to a specific number. As you know, working capital is to a large extent determined on the last day of the year, but there will be a significant swing back, and so that can be expected in line with what we saw in previous years. TV, there was already churn, maybe if I take the third one. So you spotted that perfectly correctly. With the repricing, we had some extra churn, and you may have noticed that the TV net ads in the second quarter decoupled a little bit from the broadband net ads. Normally, they are pretty much in the same range, and this is exactly the effect that we saw here.

Okay, thank you.

Our last question for today.

Hi, it's Robert Grindle calling from Deutsche Bank. Just a couple from me. May I confirm on the FTTH targets, you've reiterated them, but in April you said you'd have some delays due to the point-to-point ruling. Is that because you had already factored that into your guidance and is the whole point-to-point, point-to-multipoint thing a done deal with no further discussion? Secondly, on the FibreCop transaction, just to confirm, you actually got the cash in Q2. I heard that you didn't book it in P&L. And then please could you just revisit the fast web guidance in the second half of the year? I didn't quite hear what you were saying there. Thank you.

Okay, so the FTTH target is actually, I'm not sure exactly what you are referring to, but I think the guidance that we gave is factoring in the point-to-point shift, so the 57% coverage by the end of 2025. Initially, we had 60% planned when we were running or building point-to-multipoint, and this we had to revise slightly to 57% when we shifted to point-to-point. But this is pretty much stable guidance since two years now, or since one and a half years since we changed the rollout to point-to-point, and we still think that we will achieve the 57%. probably landing at around 53 by end of this year in the rollout. On the cash side, we booked the cash this third quarter.

In Q3, yeah, we got the cash on 1st of July or 2nd of July. So that's why it's not in the Q2 financials. And happy to repeat the FAFSA guidance, sorry, they got lost in the action. So separately on revenue and EBITDA revenue, the first half year was up 7.1 percent and our original guidance for the full year was two to three percent so so obviously we are already there so the question is what happens in the second half of the year and what i said is what we expect for the second half of the year a growth that is more in line with our original guidance two to three percent which gives you a total growth for the full year certainly above the 2% to 3% that we guided originally and certainly below the 7.1% that we saw in the first half of the year. So that's on revenue. EBCR, our original guidance for the full year was 2% to 3%. First half growth was plus 1.5% and we expect the growth for the full year now to be more in line with what we saw in the first half of the year. So the 1% to 2% rather than the 2% to 3% originally guided. However, I added and I will edit again. We're talking about very small numbers here. So we're talking about single digit million euro numbers. So there is certainly some volatility still in that guidance. I hope it was clear, if not just follow up. No problems. Got it.

Thank you very much indeed. So far.

Thank you very much, Robert and everyone. And with that, I would like to conclude today's conference call. If you should have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us from the IR team. Speak to you soon and have a nice day. Thank you.