United Internet

Hello and good morning everyone. I'd like to welcome you to our Q1 2025 analyst and investor call. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Dominik Grossmann. I am responsible for investor relations at United Internet and here with me today I have our CFO Carsten Theurer. Briefly about today's program. Carsten will first take you through our presentation with the business development in Q1 and will also give an outlook for the remainder of the year. Afterwards, he will be happy to answer all your questions. So far from my side, I would now like to hand over to Carsten. Carsten, the floor is yours. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Dominik. And also a warm welcome from my side to our webcast on our three-month figures 2025. Let's go into our numbers. On slide two, we have summarized our major KPIs for you. Our contracts increased by 150,000 to 29.17 million in the first three months of 2025. Our revenue improved by 4.2% to 1.63 billion euros. EBITDA grew slightly by 0.1% to 342.6 million. However, it is important to note here that we have already more than 67 million for the rollout of our 5G mobile one-on-one network in the first quarter compared to 42 million during the same period last year. Our EBIT declined by minus 12.9% to around 162.9 million. In addition to the explained negative effects on earnings, this was due to higher depreciation and amortization as a result of investments in the rollout of the fiber optic network at one-on-one versatile and the rollout of the one-on-one mobile network. This increase in depreciation and amortization is to be offset by gradually increasing cost savings from this year onwards. EPS decreased slightly from 0.35 to 0.31 as a result of our reduced EBIT. I will continue giving an overview of the development for the first three months of the year for each of our segments, starting with the consumer access segment. The number of fee-based contracts fell by 30,000 contracts to 60.35 million in the first quarter of 2025. Mobile internet contracts decreased by 20,000 to 12.42 million while broadband connections also decreased by 20,000 to 3.93 million. The development of mobile Internet contracts was burdened by increased customer churn in connection with the ongoing migration of all mobile communication customers to the one-on-one mobile network by the end of 2025 and is therefore in line with our expectations. We continue to anticipate that the migration will be completed by the end of the year. Revenue in consumer access segment is fairly stable and amounts to 1.018 billion in that case. While service revenues have remained flat year over year despite the increase in churn, the overall decline was driven by weaker hardware sales, particularly in low margin smartphones, which fell by 2.9% to 169.6 million. Hardware sales are subject to seasonal effects and also depend strongly on the appeal of new devices and the model cycles of hardware manufacturers. That being said, if we turn to the attention to EBITDA on the next slide. We can observe that due to the further year-on-year increase in expenses for the rollout of the 101 mobile network segment, EBITDA fell to 155.9 million. The net rollout costs amounted to 67 million compared to 42.4 million in the same period last year. As shown in the breakdown, next slide, the access sub-segment EBITDA remains robust at around 233 million, while costs for the rollout of the mobile network, one-on-one mobile network sub-segment rose by 42.6 million year-over-year to 67 million. Moving on to the business access segment, we were able to increase sales by 1.6% year-over-year to 144 million. At the same time, the segment APTA increased by 3.4% to 36.6 million. There was corresponding improvement in the EBITDA margin from 25% in previous year to 25.4%. In the first three months of 2025, total startup costs for the new business field 5G and expansion of commercial areas amounted to minus 6.3 million for EBITDA. Let us now turn to the application side of the business. Starting with consumer applications. The number of pay accounts rose by 80,000 to 3.12 million in the first quarter of 2025. By contrast, due to seasonal effects as well as higher security requirements, ad finance free accounts were 180,000 down on December 1st, 2024. The growth of pay contracts in particular led to adjusted sales growth of 3.7% from 71.1 million to 73.7 million in the first three months of 2025. There was also further growth in key earnings figures such as EBITDA. With operating EBITDA increasing by 6.7% to 20.5 million and corresponding improvement in our operating EBITDA margin by one percentage point year over year to 34.5%. In the business application segment, we increased our contract portfolio by 110,000 contracts to 9.7 million. The increase came mainly from operations abroad. Revenues in this segment subsequently increased by 19.7% to 446.3 million. The increase in revenue was driven by strong performance of the ad-tech segment, the former aftermarket business, benefiting from a favorable base effect due to the segment's weakness in Q1 2024. could with a robust overall performance in Q1 2025. This combination significantly contributed to the uplift in total revenues, which were well above expectations. However, it is important to note that for the edtech segment, a phasing effect is expected going forward, driven by a new product launch and associated migration within the edtech segment which is anticipated to be completed by year end. EBITDA in the business application segment increased by 23% compared to the previous year to 124.6 million. The operating EBITDA margin rose accordingly from 27.2 to 27.9%. So much for the segments. Here we have summarized the most important KPIs for the group once again and added a few more. We have already talked about revenues and FBTA. Our capex amounted to 122 million after 139.7 million the previous year for the investments in our fiber optic network at one-on-one versatile and the rollout of the one-on-one mobile network. Our free cash flow decreased to minus 165.8 million, coming from 142.9 million year over year, with more details on the next slide. The net bank liabilities increased 8.8% to $2 billion. 937 million year-to-date, while our equity ratio rose slightly by 0.2 percentage points to 46.7. This slide shows you the bridge of our EBITDA to free cash flow. One of the main contributors to our outflows this period is capex, totaling 120.1 million as net. This reflects ongoing investments in the network rollout along with timing effects from the previous year, specifically two invoices originally due last year that were paid this year. After accounting for taxes and changes in working capital, our free cash flow before leasing stands at minus 126.1 million. Including leasing, this figure amounts to 65.8 million. Finally, a brief word on the outlook. We specified our revenues guidance for fiscal year 2025 to 6.45 billion from 6.4 billion prior year, about 6.3 billion. Operating EBITDA is expected to amount to approximately 1.35 billion, prior year 1.295 billion. This includes approximately 20 million in costs associated with the transition from the Telefonica national roaming agreement to the Wonarphone NRA. Under the Telefonica NRA, certain network components are activated and depreciated. whereas under the Vodafone NRA, these costs are recognized directly in EBITDA. This change has no impact on EBIT. CapEx, excluding any M&A transitions, is expected to increase to 800 million above the previous year's level, in particular as a result of the network rollout and the expansion of the fiber optic network in additional expansion areas for connecting mobile antennas. So much from our side. We are now available for any questions you may have.

Thank you.

To ask a question, you will need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 and 1 again. We will now go to our first question. And the first question. comes from the line of Polo Tang from UBS. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks for taking the questions. I have three. The first one is just on IONOS. Do you think IONOS can be a beneficiary of the 500 billion euro German infrastructure fund? Second question is just about your stake in one-on-one. So you recently increased it from 78% to 80%. Can you talk about the rationale for that move and would you consider buying out all of one-on-one? And the final question is really just about working capital. So there was a minus 170 million negative working capital swing in Q1. So could you maybe give a bit more color in terms of what's happening here and how should we think about working capital for the full year? Thanks.

Thank you very much for your questions. I will start in the row you asked the questions. First of all, IONOS. So we hope that we can profit from the infrastructure fund. But so far, there are no details available for the infrastructure fund. And so we have to wait and see. But for sure, in mind that the sovereign cloud is a big topic for the European Union and also for Germany, we were well positioned with the IONOS and the products we therefore provided. The second question was why I bought the shares from the one-on-one. As Mr. Dormammuth said, if there is a possibility to get some shares, we will buy it because our interpretation is that the share price is still not where it should be, in our opinion, and therefore we have the opportunity to buy some shares and we bought them. for the working capital effect. Therefore, we already mentioned that we paid two invoices in this year, which belong to the last year. That's one of the effects. And the smaller effect is also that the stocks for hardware is slightly increasing in line with a reduction in the hardware sales at the one-on-one site. Okay, thanks.

Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 and 1 on your telephone keypad. That is star 1 and 1 to ask a question. We will now take the next question. And your next question comes from the line of Nizla Nazir from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Karsten. I have two questions from my end. Firstly, and it's one that we ask every quarter, but How do you as United Internet view your stake in IONOS? And maybe linked to that, if you look at your leverage position as a group, are you comfortable with where the net debt is? And do you see a need to reduce it by monetizing certain parts of your holding? So some color on maybe how you think the holding structure would be great. My second question is on the sale of the energy business. Could you give us some color on this? When is it expected to close and how much are you expecting for it? Some details there would be great. Thank you.

Thank you for the questions. How do we think about the IONOS? As I mentioned before, we think we are in a favorable situation to have such a company and to have such a big share in those companies because we believe in the strong story of the IONOS. Not only on the hosting side, but as I mentioned before, in the cloud side, and there is always room for improvement on that side. And therefore, we are at the opinion that we stick to our stakes at the moment. And maybe it's too early to leave the party. As also on the leverage level for the UI, we are now slightly over two leverage factor of two. And we feel very comfortable also in a range till 2.5. And therefore, there is no reaction favorable from our side to reduce our leverage level. Concerning the energy business, we are still in negotiations. We hope that we close the deal in a few months. So it's already Q3, Q2 maybe, as my colleague mentioned at the moment. And therefore, we close the deal this year, we are sure, and make then the information.

Great, thank you.

Thank you. There are currently no further questions. I will hand the call back to Dominic.

Thank you, operator, and thank you everyone for attending our call today. Please do not hesitate to contact us for any follow-up questions. We wish you a nice day. Stay safe and goodbye.