Freenet Aktie

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the freenet AG conference call on the Q1 2026 results.

[Operator Instructions] I will now hand over the call to Robin Harries, CEO of freenet AG.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q1 earnings call 2026. I'm Robin Harries, the CEO of freenet. We are very happy about the start into the year. We could see strong revenue growth and strong growth in terms of free cash flow. And yes, we had a solid and sustained customer growth across mobile and IPTV, and we had some nice operational highlights.

For example, the relaunch of our domain, freenet.de, and we started our -- or we started further AI initiatives. So we brought AI bots live, and we are -- keep integrating mobilezone Germany, the company that we acquired last year.

We confirm our guidance for the full year '26. And yes, as I said, we are happy about the start into the new year.

Next slide, please. On the following slides, I will focus on our 2 core segments, which are mobile and IPTV. I'm going to start with an update about developments in the mobile segment. One good thing is that the market is shifting to value over volume. As you know, we saw or we had very strong competition since '24, which had a very negative impact on pricing. It started in '24. And then we saw further negative developments over the course or in the beginning of '25.

But the good thing is that in the end of '25, during the Cyber Week we could observe that it was the first time for years where prices didn't go down further. Normally, during the Cyber Week prices go down further, but last year, this didn't happen. And in the end of the year, we could even increase prices. And this is what we keep doing.

So in the beginning of this year, we increased our front book pricing. And this is also something that we observed in the market. For example, our competitors, they increased the lower prices, for example, from EUR 4.99 to EUR 6.99.

You could see this when you look at 1&1 or if you look at blau.de. And also other competitors, they started to increase prices. We did the same. And yes, I mean, front-book prices went up 1% to 2% at freenet, which is good. And we believe that there is a shift, and this is, I think, good for the entire industry.

Another good thing is that we are in constructive discussions with the one network provider. We mentioned this last time that we have an unfavorable contract, and this is also -- this was the reason why we had an outlook for this year, which was between EUR 500 million and EUR 530 million adjusted EBITDA because there might be a negative impact of EUR 50 million, which is already included in our outlook.

But we are talking to the partner. We have C-level discussions every week, and we see good progress, constructive progress. Outcome is still not predictable yet. But so far, we are also happy about the progress there.

Next slide, please. One important thing when we talk about mobile is the development of our premium brand, and freenet is the most important brand in our company and our premium brand. And we switched or we had a relaunch. In the past, domain for our mobile offerings was under the domain freenet-mobilfunk.de, and we switched it, we moved it to freenet.de.

So now you have our best offers under freenet.de. And this was the start for our brand marketing investments. Since the beginning of the year, since the move of the domain, we already had 4 TV campaigns, for example, and the TV spots are clearly focused on brand messaging.

So we created spots where you can see the brand a lot, where you can feel the brand and then connected to strong mobile offerings where we sell mobile phones so that our customers connect the brand freenet to mobile phones.

And that's very important because if you look at unaided brand awareness, that's a big chance, a big opportunity for freenet because the people in Germany, they know the brand freenet. But if you ask about where they want to buy or where they could buy their next mobile phone. And if you look at unaided brand awareness, our numbers are just around 10%, and this is a low number.

If you compare it to our competitors like 1&1, they are over 40%, the others are even higher. So that's a big opportunity for us to increase our brand awareness. And we are doing this through performance-based brand marketing investments that increase the traffic on our website, which also increase the sales for the brand, freenet. And this will help us to further drive more direct traffic to our websites.

And so far, we are really happy about the developments. We could see a significant uplift in terms of visits, conversion rates are getting better because when you get branded traffic, this is always the most -- this traffic has the highest quality. We will keep doing this over the course, I guess, next month and also years to increase the performance-based brand marketing investments.

And we will also further improve our website. So far, there's still room for improvement in terms of user experience on the website. So we will further increase the conversion rate, and we will also further increase our offerings. When you look at, for example, we will include -- or also offer further bundles.

Next slide, please. And here, we have some nice numbers. As you can see, last quarter, we grew 29,000 net adds in the mobile business. And this -- even though we increased the prices, as I said, we started to increase prices at the beginning of the year, but we could see a solid growth.

And especially when you look at our competitors, I think that's a really strong number. And we're happy about it. And besides the growth in terms of postpaid net adds, we could also increase our postpaid service revenues, and that's always, I think, both is good development.

And on the right side, you can see postpaid reselling. And this is new. We included this, this time for the first time. These are reselling that we generate through our mobilezone business.

So I think overall, we see easing competition, which is good. We are happy about the development in terms of postpaid. So we have strong reselling business and the combination of our service provider business and our reselling business is actually very interesting and gives us new opportunities.

Of course, our objective is to get our own users and to focus on the server provider business, but it can also make sense to increase or to become more active in the reselling business. We look at actually the outcome and look at where we can earn most money. So therefore, this gives us more flexibility, more possibilities, and we are really happy about the new part of the business that we acquired last year.

Next slide. Now I'm turning to our second core segment, the IPTV business. And there, we saw a nice development as well, 42,000 net adds in the IPTV business, which is strong. And besides this, we could also generate a nice adjusted EBITDA. Since the beginning of last year, we see very good developments in terms of profitability. We are proving that, that money can really contribute significantly to our bottom line.

And I mean, the product is really fantastic. If we look at ratings, if we look at tests, so we see that it's not also our view but that our customers that they also like the product a lot. And for example, waipu was the winner of the connect test, which is a very important one. And also on the SATVISION test.

And I mean, that's a stable subscriber business, which is growing, adding more customers contributing to the bottom line. And it's not only that we earn money through subscribers. It's also that we earn money through targeted advertising.

And that's actually very interesting because here we have, for example, the dynamic ad substitution. This is, for example, when you watch ProSieben and you watch it through -- or another channel and you watch it through waipu.tv, you see different advertising, advertising which is really targeted on the audience. And that's, I think, really powerful.

And besides this, we also have FAST channels in waipu.tv, and there we have a dynamic ad injection that means that we have -- that we include our ads and the advertising into those FAST channels.

And I mean, this is -- the targeted advertising is getting more and more important. We already have significant impressions. And I think it's also a very good sign that big German broadcasters are working with us.

On the next slide, please. So for us, mobile business is important, the IPTV business is important. But it's also very important for us to see progress in terms of AI. And I mentioned during the last earnings call that we want to be the AI first telco company in Germany.

I think we have a good advantage because we have flat hierarchies. We have a relatively small organization compared to our big competitors, and we are fast. So we want to be the speedboat, the attacker in the market, and actually, that's what we're doing.

So when you look at the speed, how we implement AI, I'm really impressed by this. I'm impressed by the team and also the capabilities to change. If you look at our teams, they're really hungry. They want this implemented. And they are doing this in a very good way.

And for example, we started our first test with our AI voice bots. If you call our service lines today, so there's already a small part, which is operated by AI voice agents. And here, we are still in the testing stage, but we are scaling this. And this is already an interesting part.

And we are keen to further scale this through the course of the year. So this will improve our customer service a lot, yes. So this will help us to become more efficient. That's really good.

So then we also started our new AI Buddy in Telesales. This is an AI tool for our call center agents. For example, when they do outbound calls, now they got much better information. They have a tool that shows them what to offer to the customer. This tool reacts to the reaction of the customers and suggest new offers and so on.

So this is, I think, also a big opportunity. And then we further develop our AI smart pricing. If you consider that we have over 8 million customers, that's actually a lot of data, and you need to know what to offer to the customer at what point in time, and you need to know what offer you should offer the customer.

And there, we see a big advantage by using [ AI ] and this is our smart pricing. So we have now just rolled out our smart pricing 2.0, which is a further development of our initial activities. And this is just the start, yes.

So we focus on our customer segment at the moment. But besides this, we are also looking into, for example, new customer acquisition into and things how we can further optimize the creation of our commercials.

And we also hired one expert. This is also a nice story. He was -- he came -- he was already with mobilezone. So now he's reporting directly to me. He's responsible for our AI activities within the company. And so there's a lot of focus. It's progressing. We are very happy about it, and I'm relatively sure that we will see further nice development and progress over the course of this year.

With that, I would hand over to Ingo.

Yes. Good morning, everybody, from my side. I start with the group overview. I think you will see that the structure of the pages, we changed it a little bit. We got some hints from your side. I think Investor Relations department was very creative. And I hope that the new structure will give you more transparency than before.

So on this first page here, you see the group figures. Yes, revenue, a strong increase based on first time of mobilezone consolidation. Gross profit with an increase of 2.2% to EUR 242 million.

In the adjusted EBITDA, we see a decrease. But I think Robin already mentioned it, we have this network operator contract, which we are in negotiation about at the moment. And the effect from this is minus EUR 12.5 million versus last year. So without this effect, it would be an increase of 6%. So I think we are happy with the basic business.

And definitely happy with the adjusted free cash flow, which is EUR 85.7 million in the first quarter of '26. And I think I'll come -- I'll discuss it later on, but it's a good development in net working capital because of bonus payments from the networks.

Moving to the revenues. What we see here, definitely, and I already mentioned is, the first consolidation of mobilezone and the strong growth. We see an increase in hardware sales. I think from the past, you know that we were not that interested in increasing hardware revenues.

But here, the situation is different because, as you know, they -- mobilezone, they have a contract with Apple. So we -- first time we get the iPhone directly from this contract, there is the possibility to get more iPhones, which was a problem in the past. So I think here, in this case, I'm not that unhappy about the increasing hardware revenues, therefore.

And what you see in the other business here, which is increasing, this is based on the 182,000 reselling customers, which were gained in the first quarter because in resale, you get provisions and you do see these provisions here on the other. And this is the reason for the increase.

Moving to the IPTV business. Yes, I think it is all as expected. We see an increase in revenues definitely -- mainly driven by subscription revenues, where we saw an increase of EUR 4.5 million, which is more than 10%.

And I think I mentioned that during '25 several times that from the -- that we were unhappy to lose the contract with Telefonica. But on a profit and revenue base, this was not that big problem for us. And therefore, here also the headwind is not that big.

Advertising is also increasing. Robin already referred to it. Other/Holding, now here in the new segment structure, much bigger because in the other holding segment, we show media broadcast now, the antenna broadcasting business, which is relatively stable. But the B2C customers are still shrinking here.

Moving to the gross profit. I think it's a very good picture because we see the increase by EUR 2.5 million here in mobile in the first quarter. If you put into consideration that we have the negative effect of EUR 12.5 million from the Telefonica or from the Telefonica agreement, which is under negotiation now. On the other hand, you see that we gain gross profit from mobilezone of EUR 17 million in the first quarter.

And in addition, you see that we lost or that we sold The Cloud, our WiFi business mid of last year. But in the first quarter, it was still part of the figures. So we lost EUR 3.5 million from this business here. All in, the margin decreased to 26.7%. This is mainly linked to the higher hardware sales, what we did in the quarter.

IPTV, stable, strong development. I think you see -- based on the revenue increase, you see the gross profit increase. Subscription is gaining traction. So we increased it, and we also increased advertising gross profit. So from both sides, this is very successful.

Other/Holding, we see the slight increase based off the shrinking B2C antenna business here, but it's also relatively stable, what we see. All these effects, you can find in the EBITDA on the next page.

Mobile, yes, it looks bad. But if you know the effect, if you normalize the Q1 of '25 by reduction of the EBITDA from The Cloud, the base is something like EUR 101.9 million. And if you also normalize Q1 '26 by the negative effect from this MNO contract, then you would see that there is an increase in the -- and it shows that the underlying business is very solid, it's stable. And so we are fine with the mobile results, what we see.

IPTV, an increase by EUR 3 million. Yes, in terms -- in relative terms, it's impressive, nearly 50%. I think on the one hand, you saw on the gross profit level, an increase by EUR 2.2 million. And this was even possible with the reduction of cost. So we spent less for marketing in this first quarter. And therefore, we see the increase of EUR 3 million and margin step-up here to 17.1%.

In the Other/Holding segment here, on the right-hand side, yes, we see an increase in results. This is not based on the antenna business. It is based on the reduction on the Board level here. And therefore, I think this was something what will be seen during the year.

Moving to the free cash flow, to the free cash flow bridge. Here also, a slight change in the structure, how we show it. I think what you can see is that in net working capital, we are much more successful than last year. So on the one hand, we get more bonus payments from the networks.

On the other hand, we had to increase our inventories because we do not know if hardware will be available during the year. Therefore, we increased our inventories to more than EUR 100 million. This, I have not seen before as a CFO, and all this hardware -- most of the hardware is already paid. So I think it's even more impressive, this net working capital development in the first quarter.

Taxes, no big changes, on the same level as last year. CapEx, slightly higher investments based on the digital radio side mainly. But again, all in, a very low CapEx level. We are still CapEx light, no changes here.

Lease payments, on a comparable level. Interest payments, a little bit higher because we had this bridge financing for the acquisition of mobilezone, which we could repay in April with the new promissory note. But yes, interest had to be paid. And therefore, the higher interest payments here.

So all in, I think we are happy with the EUR 86 million -- nearly EUR 86 million of free cash flow in the first quarter. And I think with this last very good figure and with a hint to the very, very healthy balance sheet, what we do have, I hand over to the operator again and ask you to start the Q&A, please.

[Operator Instructions] The first one is from Sofija Rakicevic, Goldman Sachs.

Two questions from me this morning. The first one on TefD. When should we expect an update on a potential agreement or a renegotiation? Would this be communicated via a stock market announcement or as a part of 2Q results? Could you just give us some color on this, please, given that you're meeting with their management often?

The second one is how are you thinking about postpaid net adds for full year, both in total and also split between the core, well, business ex mobilezone and mobilezone?

Sofija, thanks a lot for your questions. I take the first one. I would have the hope from today's point of view that we get a good agreement, a good new agreement with Telefonica. This would lead to a -- yes, I would expect a change in the guidance, and therefore, the stock market announcement would be necessary. So it is our hope that on the base of an agreement, the stock market announcement would be necessary. And I think, therefore, yes, definitely, yes. And the postpaid question, I think, Robin?

Yes. Regarding postpaid, we gave the guidance that we expect moderate growth here. We showed last year, especially in the second half of the year, our muscles and the ability to grow, to show strong growth. So we are happy about the start into the quarter with almost 30,000. So we have opportunities for the next quarter.

This also depends on our competitors. So at the moment, I think it looks quite good. But as you know, the price is always a lever, it's a driver. So I think we have -- or we are able to steer the customer growth. And so therefore, I mean, we keep our guidance with moderate growth.

The next question comes from Polo Tang, UBS.

I have 3. The first one is just about your MNO agreements. So you mentioned that you're in constructive negotiations with Telefonica Deutschland about a new agreement. But if you do get a new deal, will the step-up in EBITDA be EUR 50 million? Or is that number up for negotiation?

And just related to your M&A agreements, can you confirm if your other MNOs have approached you about renegotiating their existing agreements? And can you remind us if these M&A deals require you to deliver a minimum level of volume in order to maximize the bonus payments?

Second question is really just about waipu.tv. So revenue trends and subscriber trends were perhaps lighter than consensus expected. So how confident are you that subscriber net adds at waipu.tv can accelerate to the 300,000 to 400,000 per annum that you are basically -- that you need to achieve to get to your 2.7 million to 3 million subscriber target by 2028?

And given that Deutsche Telekom has exclusive rights to the FIFA World Cup, do you see a risk that Deutsche Telekom's MagentaTV will take share in Q2, Q3?

My final question is really just about mobile consolidation. We've obviously had a lot of headlines about potential mobile consolidation in the German market. If this does happen, how should we expect the potential impact on freenet?

So regarding the -- yes, thanks for your question. Regarding the Telefonica contract, yes, I mean, we are -- so I mean, it depends, yes. So we are in negotiations there. So far, there's nothing to disclose. It's still unpredictable. We see good progress, as Ingo just mentioned.

It's also important for a new contract or if we want to have a fruitful and healthy long-lasting partnership, it's important that we create win-win situations. And I think that's important, yes, if you think about the following years. And I think this is also something that the new management understands. And so therefore, we are, I think, quite positive, yes.

And so the -- regarding the other network providers, no, they haven't approached us regarding renegotiations. I mean, we are in discussions, and we have good relationships with them. So we are in close touch. So that's normal business. So I think there's nothing special.

In terms of subscriber trends with waipu.tv, I think the quarter is quite strong. If you look at the last quarters, I mean, we grew with over 40,000, that's strong, that's really healthy. It's a good start. And when you think about the rest of the year, I mean, the fourth quarter is always strong. So we believe they will further increase.

And then if you think about the soccer championship, this is also good. If you look at our competitors, our competitor, one competitor, so they have a massive marketing campaign. And this is always good for the IPTV market, yes. So the more people learn the product, yes, so the more people that switch from traditional cable to IPTV and know and experience the benefits, that's good for the market, that's good for us.

And besides this, I mean, we have our own marketing campaigns. We prepare things. We are -- at waipu, we are very fast in creating new campaigns and creating new business relationships and then to come out. So there, we are quite confident that we will see further positive development here.

And your last question was related to the mobile -- to the possible mobile consolidation. So for us, that's actually -- that's not important if there are 3 or 4 mobile network providers. I mean, I was also a Board member of 1&1 for 6 years. And there, we had only one relationship with Telefonica. This worked also quite well.

I mean in the end, it's important that you have at least one partner. So we are now at the moment in a very good situation. So where we have contracts with all 4 network providers, also with 1&1 besides this.

So with 1&1, for example, we started to integrate them into our shops, yes, into our -- and there, we already have over 30 shops where we also already started to sell 1&1 contracts.

So at the moment, we have contracts with all 4 of them. And if there's only 3 instead of 4, I don't think that this will have a negative impact on us. Yes, I hope this answered your question.

The next question is from Stephane Beyazian, ODDO BHF.

I was just curious starting with mobile, if you could help us, which competitors are playing the front book and which are not actually playing the front book and still potentially dragging the industry?

And my second question still regarding mobile is, can you help us understand how significant is the gap between the front book and the back book pricing to try to understand how long it could take for mobile ARPU to stabilize and bounce back?

And finally, if that's possible, I was just curious to know when do you think the O2, waipu contract would be at 0?

Stephane, I take the last one. It is already at 0. So I think there were some customers in the -- still some customers in the first quarter. I think we still have 1,000 or 2,000 customers. But this, I would call 0.

Okay. I take the other questions regarding the front book pricing. Yes, I mean, at the moment, if you look at the -- at our competitors, Telekom increased prices. Then you have Vodafone, they increased prices.

You have a Telefonica, especially with blau, they increased prices. They were very aggressive in the past, and they increased it, and we did the same. We did this especially in our channels where we have price-sensitive customers that we increased a lot.

And so overall, I think everybody does smart things at the moment. It's like last year, this was something -- sometimes it was unhealthy. So there you could see offers that actually did not create value. So they were too cheap. So this has changed.

And when you look at the overall ARPU -- I mean, front price booking went up. If you look at the overall ARPU, it's still going down. So this is something that you can also see with our competitors.

So that's the same with freenet. And this will take time a little bit because, I mean, yes, you have churn. So you have old customers with higher ARPUs that was the normal churn, so they leave us. So then you have new customers from '24-'25 that were cheaper.

So overall, the impact of the overall ARPU is still decreasing. But I mean, if you do the right things today, so this year, so this will be also play out positively in the near future. And yes, that's it.

Next question is from Karsten Oblinger, DZ Bank.

The first question is about the -- just the difference of the adjusted EBITDA and the reported EBITDA. Could you remind us of the EUR 2 million?

And the second one is about the possible IPO of waipu. Is there any new idea about timing or the IPO in general?

Karsten, thanks for your questions. The adjusted EBITDA is the -- most of the EUR 2 million is linked to an old Board -- to a contract of a Board member who resigned. But there was still a payment, which was necessary. And so this could be concluded in the first quarter and therefore, it's mainly driven by HR.

On the waipu IPO side, what I know is that, yes, we did the soft announcement. I think you know our position. We have to support this IPO because the minority shareholders have the right to start it. It is started. We support it. And as I know, there will also be a roadshow from the Board members here from EXARING.

Yes, so this is all what I can say. I think our position has not changed. We are happy with the 75%, what we do have. We would not need an IPO. But yes, I think we have contracts and we -- and I think this is how you know us.

If we have a contract, then we act corresponding to what we signed some years ago. But yes, I think we have to wait and see what happens. You are nearer to the investors. At the end of the day, the investors will decide. And I think we support it, but we do not need it.

The next question is from Florian Treisch, Kepler Cheuvreux.

One question left on my list. I think in a recent newspaper article, you mentioned that you're thinking about extending into new verticals. I think you also touched on that in the recent conference call.

I think you mentioned that fiber might be an interesting idea to enter. I mean, we have seen decent positive feedback from 1&1 in the call some days ago. Can you give us an update here what to expect from your end?

Yes. Thanks for the question. Good one. Yes, this is, I think, a very nice opportunity for us, and we are on it. So I mean, especially when you talk about fiber. So it's difficult to do marketing.

So it's important that you talk to your customers. It's like not easy to sell it because you cannot just do display advertising or so, it's a complicated product that you need to explain to people because you have to go into their house and that stuff and so on.

So therefore, it's helpful if you have shops. And we have around 500 shops in very good locations. And then we also have good partnerships, for example, with MediaMarktSaturn. And so we have a very good footprint in Germany. And we have a huge customer base of around over 10 million customers.

So therefore, I think it makes a lot of sense to also start to marketing and to create a nice broadband product. And we are in discussions with partners. So we are proceeding here. It's something that will take some months, but we will do something here, and this will be a further nice opportunity for us.

The next question is from Shekhan Ali, Berenberg.

The first one is on the M&A headwind. So in Q4, it was positioned that the worst case would be for about EUR 50 million in the year. And in Q1, you sort of did EUR 12.5 million. Has anything changed with how we should think about the worst case and best case with this?

And then second question on mobile net adds, how much of these are coming from the mobilezone sales channel versus own freenet?

I do not understand. I'm not sure if I understood the first question correctly. So we said there could be a headwind of something like EUR 50 million. Yes, in the first quarter, it was EUR 12.5 million. So on a -- if you do the math and if we already had EUR 13 million last year in the fourth quarter, yes, you are correct.

I think the effect from the MNO contract in the full year will be EUR 50 million. So it will be something like EUR 37 million higher than last year. So if I got the question correct. But I think with the EUR 12.5 million in the first quarter, we are -- and I'm not happy about it, but we are on track to reach the EUR 50 million for the year if it works linear.

Then the second one.

Sure. So this is -- as you can see, we now report postpaid customers, so there we grew around 30,000, which is mainly from freenet. And then we also show our reselling contracts, which are around 180,000 and this is then the mobilezone business. And there are some -- there are also some customers included in the -- from mobilezone through the brand high in the postpaid customers, but this is a rather small number.

Dear ladies and gentlemen, as there are no more questions in the queue, I am closing the Q&A session and handing the floor back over to the hosts.

Yes. Thanks a lot. Yes, we want to thank all our employees for this fantastic job. We know that we are demanding, and there's a lot on their plate at the moment. But together, we are sure we will move forward step-by-step. And we have many opportunities about us, and that is really great and besides this is also a lot of fun. So thanks to all of us, and thanks for joining this call. Bye-bye. We wish you a nice day.

Bye-bye.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the freenet AG Conference Call on the Preliminary Results for the Financial Year 2025. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for questions following the presentation.

Let me now hand over to Robin Harries, CEO of freenet AG.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our earnings call. I'm Robin Harries, the CEO of freenet. Overall, we are happy about the operational performance and the strong customer growth. We see many opportunities ahead of us, but we are not happy about agreement with the network provider that we have, which was closed in '24. This agreement might lead to a minus EUR 13 million impact in '25 and to up to EUR 50 million negative EBITDA impact for the year '26 to '28.

We are at the moment in discussions with the management of the network operator and are negotiating, trying to negotiate a better deal. This is already -- so the risks that I mentioned are already reflected in our numbers. So we are in ongoing discussions and we'll provide an update as soon as we have something.

Freenet becomes more lean, focused and effective. We did some nice strategic moves in the last years. One is that we streamlined the executive board. This made us faster, more efficient and we have a clear focus. We optimized a lot in terms of marketing and sales initiatives. We have a clear focus on KPIs and performance. I think we created a lot of transparency within the organization, streamlined the focus. Everybody is on board here and is delivering, and this is I think quite good.

And then we acquired the mobilezone last year, and this was one of our competitors, and we are happy about that as well. Another strategic move was that we have started a customer value management project, and this is a really a high-impact project. At the moment, our conversion rates are not great yet, but I think we have a lot of potential here.

So when we compare our churn rates with competitors, we are at the moment behind, and this is potential. Because if you think about reasons why customers leave network operators, companies, the top 2 reasons are: first, they find a better deal somewhere else, and the second one is that they are not happy about network performance. Both of these things, I think, doesn't make a lot of sense when you look at freenet, because we have really great deals and we are able to offer products on all networks. So our churn rate should be good. So that's why this project is really important.

We made big progress. So we are working on over 50 initiatives. And this quarter or this month, we will bring live our first AI voice bot in the customer service, and we have another AI tool for our call center agents, which will facilitate the selling process. And we are quite confident that we will have -- that we will see better outcomes here in the near future.

We have some really great operational highlights. We achieved an all-time high in terms of postpaid net adds. We achieved over 300,000 organic postpaid net adds. When it comes to waipu.tv, that's -- there we achieved over or around EUR 36 million adjusted EBITDA. This is also a big step forward. In the past, we could prove that we can achieve strong customer growth there. Now we also proved that we can become profitable and show nice EBITDA. And we have a record dividend proposal of EUR 2.07.

Now let's dive deeper into the mobile segment. We have -- our strongest brand is Freenet and the second one is klarmobil. And we put now a lot of focus on freenet. This is our premium brand. We changed a lot over the last month. For example, we moved the freenet offerings from the domain freenet-mobilfunk.de to freenet.de in the end of January. And so we prepared it over the course of last year. And yes, so this will be our premium brand.

We will put our money on freenet. So today starts a new TV campaign and we also invest into digital out-of-home. That's important. We also shifted our marketing budgets to performing channels. We stopped the stuff that doesn't really work and now invested where we have a direct sales impact.

And we will invest into our brand and that's a nice opportunity when you look at unaided brand awareness and brand awareness -- aided brand awareness. You can see that many people in Germany know the brand freenet, but when it comes to unaided brand awareness, our numbers are still very low and far below the competition, and that's a huge opportunity.

So by investing into brand marketing, so we will be able to increase this, and I think this is also a nice upside potential. Beside our premium brand, freenet, we also launched new branded shops, Unlimited Mobile and Mobilfunk.de. We have a nice portfolio of brands that we position on various platforms and target specific user groups. I think this works quite well.

We also relaunched our freenet FUNK app. And what's also very interesting and important is that we started our partnership with 1&1. At the end of last year, we had the first tests in selected shops where we started to sell also 1&1 mobile plans, and this test was very successful. We could achieve incremental sales. That's important for us that we not just replace one partner with another. No, we were able to really generate incremental sales.

The partnership with 1&1 I think is very good. We are in the process of scaling this partnership now and roll it out to more and more shops. We have very good relationship to them, also to our partners, Vodafone and Telekom. So I think that we are very well positioned in the market, we showed that we can grow where we're strong, and yes, now we are further optimizing it and scaling the things that work.

And the acquisition of mobilezone was also one important step. We could add even more brands, and this will further strengthen our market position. We have -- we are very dominant now on certain channels, and we could also add more marketing channels. And we will grow together as one organization. This will lead to nice synergies, the mobilezone team, very smart, very dynamic, moving fast. So I think that's a very good and cultural fit. The teams already work together closely, and we expect further potential there.

On the next slide, this is a really important slide because you know that there's a lot of price competition in the market, a lot of pressure. And what you can see here is the freenet and frontbook pricing over the course of the last 2 years. And you could see that beginning of '24, it went down a lot, also beginning of '25. However, in the end of '25, we were able to do -- to increase it again.

This actually is I think very important for us and for the market, and we could already see it during the Cyber Week. This is always a period where it, in the previous years, it became even more aggressive. This was not the case this year. We even increased our prices. This is also what we are doing at the moment. So we keep increasing our prices. We see that this works.

In the last 6 months, we tested a lot or we did a lot of elasticity tests on our marketing and sales channels, that we showed our models. We could see that we can achieve very, very strong growth in terms of customer growth, new customer growth. But for us, it's more important to actually do this on a really healthy basis. That's why we started -- in Q4 last year, we started to increase prices, and we'll keep doing this.

So for us, it's -- and quality is more important than quantity, and we put a lot of focus on it. So the guidance for '25 was moderate decrease, and this will be still the case for '26, because even though we increase frontbook pricing, we still have impacts from our customer base, and this will take some time. But I think it's very important that we see a shift here and that we will keep focusing on quality and try to further increase prices.

On the next slide, you can see that we really gained momentum in the end of last year, we achieved all-time high customer growth, 306,000 customers, this is really outstanding result. And on top of that, we also could add 240,000 net adds from the acquisition of mobilezone. So this led to 546,000 postpaid net adds.

So we outperformed our guidance here, which is great. And on top of that, there are also still 95,000 subs from base and tariffs. So overall, I think in the mobile segment, strong growth, many opportunities through our customer value management and through AI, also the marketing channels, and we just started there. I mean, last year, the TV campaigns, we started with klarmobil, now with the move to freenet.de. We also switched our marketing campaigns to freenet, to our core brand. And this is what we are -- that we want to scale this year and also afterwards.

Next slide. This is our TV and media business. Media Broadcast shifted to segment orders. In Q1 '26 onwards, here you can see the freenet TV subscribers. The decline continues. And however, we have some stabilization measures. So we increased prices, we introduced a Hybrid TV stick, we prolonged a content contract, so we are working on this side as well.

This segment, we also have waipu.tv and the IPTV market grows continuously. It's a strong market. Also the position of waipu.tv is very strong in this market. It was 20% to 25%, and the market will continue to grow. I mean, we are very well positioned in the competition. The product is very strong. When you look at ratings, when you look at reviews, it's an outstanding product, and we believe that we will further grow here and the market will further grow. So this is I think a very good market to be in.

On the next slide, you can see our organic growth. We did some cleanups during the last quarters. We always talked about the O2 impact. And so here in this view you can see that now we deducted it, so we cleaned it. And now we have with 1,755,000 customers. We have now a clean base, because we deducted the O2, the O2TV customers. I think the migration will be finalized during this quarter, but we already deducted them in order to have a clean base.

And we also deducted further unprofitable subs. So this brought us to the new and clean base. Overall, I think the growth was 152,000, is healthy. And beside this, we could show that we increased the profitability a lot and reached EUR 36 million adjusted EBITDA besides this nice growth.

So on the next slide, you can see our priorities and the guidance for full year '26. Our focus areas are to strengthen the freenet brand. We will keep investing into our brand, into performance-based brand marketing campaigns. We have experience with it. It's important to have a clear branding and messaging impact of our campaigns. And then we will further develop our customer base value management and work on our initiatives.

We will further optimize the conversion rates on our website. At the moment, when you go to freenet.de, you can see that we moved the domain, but there's still also a lot of room for further improvements in terms of user experience and page speed, conversion rates. So we are working on this. There will be further updates in the next months, which will also lead to further sales potential. And we will keep integrating the mobile phone channels. We work closely together with the teams.

We will also reaccelerate the waipu.tv growth and the customer base. So we are -- we see potential in the market. We see potential through the product very good product. And we -- our objective is to become the AI telco company in Germany. So we started our projects in the customer value management, but we will also roll out AI tools to all different areas. It's -- for us, it's really important. We see that this is a huge path.

Our guidance for '26 in terms of postpaid subs and moderate growth. I said that we have many opportunities here. But here, for us, it's the ARPU, the quality is more important. So we -- I think we showed that we can grow. We can outgrow the market. But for us, quality is more important. And postpaid ARPU, we expect still a moderate decline because of the impact of the customer base. However, we believe that the pricing for new customers that we are quite confident. In waipu.tv, we expect noticeable growth.

With that, I hand over to Mr. Arnold.

Yes. Thank you, Robin. So I'll start with the group financials. So yes, to be honest, at the beginning, I'm disappointed by the figures, especially because there's one effect. I think all the figures are quite fine. The performance was quite fine during the year. And a lot of initiatives, what Robin was talking about, they worked quite fine and quite well. And then there is one effect now, which is a little bit disturbing, the picture here, but coming to the details further on.

So if we look into the revenues here, yes, I would say, it's nearly stable. What we see here, we sold this WiFi business, which was called the cloud. We sold it mid of the year '25. This was an effect, especially in the second half of the year. If we look into the Q4 revenues, we see the effect from the cloud, the missing revenues.

On the other side, if you remember, last year, we sold these IP addresses in Q4 last year, which was a positive effect in revenue of nearly EUR 20 million last year. So more or less, the miss in the revenues in Q4 is explained by these 2 reasons. I think what is important that revenues from high-margin services continue to grow.

Switching to the gross profit. Here, what we see, we see a miss in Q4, but we still see that the gross profit is stable. Even with the bad Q4, it is stable for the whole year. What are the effects in Q4? I already talked about the phasing of the sale of IP addresses, which took place in the third quarter in '25 and took place in the fourth quarter in 2024.

On the other hand, from the sold business, there was a gross profit contribution last year of something like EUR 5 million. And then Robin was already talking about the effect out of one single MNO agreement, where we chose to be very conservative in our accounting. Robin already mentioned that we are in discussions here, especially about a totally new agreement. These discussions are ongoing. And as we are here, as you know us, we are conservative. We are cautious. Therefore, here in the actuals, we chose to be -- to build up a worst case, and this is what we also did in the figures starting with '26 into the future.

Adjusted EBITDA, here again, the reason is this -- especially this MNO agreement, which is a negative effect of nearly EUR 13 million in Q4. What we also saw as a negative effect was this sold business. Again, the cloud, they generated an EBITDA of EUR 2.7 million in Q4 '24. And so if you deduct or if you normalize by these 2 effects, it would be a very good quarter, and it would be a very good full year deeply in the guided range.

Moving to the next page, mobile business. We see these -- we see on the one hand, in the revenue in the quarter that we lost some revenues in the segment here, hardware other. It is again this disposal of the WiFi business. But on the other hand, we -- and Robin explained it, we focused or we had to focus in marketing -- in online business, we had to focus on our discount brand, klarmobil.

And with the discount brand, klarmobil, I think this is as usual, you do not see a lot of bundles. You see a lot of SIM-Only. So what I do expect for '26 ongoing is that with the new brand, and we just started with the new website, freenet.de, where we can sell the more premium quality tariffs and where we can sell more bundles. I do expect these hardware/other line to increase again.

The service revenues, here on this page, not separated the postpaid service revenues, which grew slightly during the year. The miss here in service revenues is based on a reduction in prepaid business. So I think there is still a number of something like 1.5 million prepaid customers, what we do have, but it is reduced step by step. And therefore, we see a reduction of revenues here, but unprofitable revenues.

Gross profit in the mobile business, here, you see it even clearer the effect from the conservative accounting of the MNO agreement. So without it and without the effect from the sold WiFi business we would be in the quarter. But definitely, on a yearly basis, we would see at least a stable gross profit.

Adjusted EBITDA, again, the same reasons here. I think without the special effect, we would be near to the level -- much nearer to the level what we saw last year, and we would be deeply in the guided range.

So moving to some KPIs of the postpaid business. Robin already talked about the growth in the postpaid business. So I think it was a proof of concept in the fourth quarter, especially in the fourth quarter, where we generated this high figure of new customers, but I think also for the full year. So -- but just to make clear here, and I read it from also some of our competitors, but for us, definitely, this is a top priority here for generate customers and to have the priority value over volume.

So in the first quarter, I do not expect a comparable figure to what we saw last -- the Q4. But I think this makes a lot of sense because in the middle of this chart we see the ARPU, and Robin already talked about the base effect. We still -- we are happy that the ARPU of the new customers could be stabilized and even increased in the last month. And this is also what we focus on in the first quarter. We try to increase the prices. We would like to have a turnaround here in the ARPU situation. But during '26, it will stay difficult because of the base effect. But I think we are so happy that on the new customer side it was possible to stabilize it now.

Digital lifestyle revenues are stable compared to last year. TV and Media, yes, definitely a success story with waipu.tv. Here, this is a page which definitely makes the CFO happy. All figures could be increased, higher revenues, higher gross profit, higher EBITDA, everything inside the range what we guided, even at the upper end of the range, the EBITDA. So I think it's a very good picture. It was possible to prove that waipu could not only grow, but could also generate relevant EBITDA. And so I think it's really a success story what we see.

On the next page, financial structure. I think it's no changes to what we had in the other quarters. Still a very low leverage, a very healthy balance sheet. Yes, if you see the debt maturities, it is obvious that we do have to do a refinancing in the first quarter. I think we postponed it to April. It's no reason by market or that it would be difficult, but we will place promissory notes. We just started the process with the banks. So there will -- a refinancing will take place. And I'm optimistic that it will be possible with similar margins what we saw before.

Free cash flow, I think we came in -- I think, yes, the EBITDA was lower than expected in our last call because of the now known effect. But all the other buckets are near to what I forecasted during our last call. Net working capital, I think I forecasted minus EUR 45 million. We came in a little bit better. Taxes, I forecasted EUR 60 million. Now we -- EUR 4 million better, EUR 56 million. In the -- on the CapEx side, we instead invested, especially on the AI side, we decided to invest some additional CapEx at the end of the year.

Lease, as forecasted. And also, interest nearly as forecasted. And then we have to deduct the EUR 12 million here from the sale of this WiFi business. As you know, we generated sales -- we generated a price of EUR 40 million. So this was the cash in. We are not allowed to show the cash in, in our free cash flow based on our definition. Out of this EUR 40 million, EUR 12 million was relevant for the EBITDA, but we reduced it here again, but the cash is in the company, definitely the EUR 40 million.

What we also did to be fair to our shareholders, and we know that a lot of shareholders are shareholders because of our high dividend, and there were some payouts in the second half of the year because we reduced the number of Board members here. And then there were some compensation severance payments, which were necessary in the second half of the year. Yes, it was linked to LTIP programs. This is correct on the chart, but it were compensation payments.

And in a normal world, these would not have -- we would not have to pay them in the second half of the year. So therefore, we corrected this figure. And after correcting it, we are on a free cash flow level above EUR 300 million. And on this level, the calculation of the dividend is based and we stick to our promise to pay 80% of our free cash flow as a dividend. This is a calculation now and this leads to EUR 2.07 and the EUR 2.07 will be also proposed to our AGM. And I'm of good mood that they will support it there.

Then on the next page, the guidance for '26. I already said that what we built up here in the guidance and also in the ambition for the years, we built up a worst case from this agreement with the network operator where we do have a problem now, where we do have the discussions. And therefore, in the guidance '26 and also in the following years, there is a negative EBITDA effect of EUR 50 million, EUR 5-0 million from this topic.

And this is -- and therefore, I think on the first view, the figures may look disappointing. But if you put this into consideration, I think it is clear that basically we believe in the business, we stick to what we promised and we are -- for the underlying business, we are still very optimistic. It is only this one problem what we do have at the moment.

And so we had -- we showed in the actual EBITDA of EUR 515 million. You have to add EUR 25 million for mobilezone, then you would have EUR 540 million. But on the other hand, you have to reduce the difference from this network operator agreement. So we already had EUR 13 million in '25 in the figure of EUR 515 million. And so in addition, there is something like EUR 37 million. This is a negative impact. And so therefore, we see EUR 500 million to EUR 530 million on an EBITDA level and free cash flow is corresponding to this.

As the free cash flow may be a little bit disappointing. We would like to give some certainty to our shareholders and to make very clear that we believe in the business and that we do not see any negative signs in the business and in the underlying business. And therefore, we decided to promise to pay at least EUR 2 as something like a minimum dividend for the years '26 to '28, payout '27 to '29. But definitely, if the 80% of the free cash flow, what I believe today, if it would be higher than the EUR 2, definitely, this rule is still valid. So maybe these explanations to the guidance here hopefully helpful.

Then I would hand over to Robin again to discuss the ambition what we renewed.

Yes. Thanks, Ingo. So we updated our ambition. We have -- our 2 pillars are the mobile business and the IPTV business. Mobile, I think we have a healthy market share. We have over 8 million postpaid customers. The big advantage is that we offer all networks. So now we also offer 1&1. I think that's a very good value proposition.

We have a multi-brand strategy, and we have strong sales channels. We have our own shops around 500. We have exclusive partnership with MediaMarktSaturn. We start brand marketing in TV. We do connected TV. We have many affiliates, online partners, offline partners. We acquired mobilezone. So this really gives us a very, very strong footprint in the market, and I think it's a very strong position.

So we will -- and I mentioned it before, it's not only the new customer growth or the new customer potential that we see through our strong offerings. It's also the improvements in our customer base, and we want to reduce churn. So all of that let us believe that we have a potential to grow here, a stable business. It's healthy.

And in our second pillar, the IPTV business, we have a product that is really outperforming the market, very strong, very good reviews. So we have a nice market share there as well, highly recommended and we believe that the market will further grow. And so the customer base will grow.

On the next page, yes, so you can see our plans to become a leading AI telco in Germany. Our big advantage is that we are the smallest. So we are much smaller than our big partners and big competitors. And so I think that's an advantage. So we have a flat hierarchy. So we can -- we are very strong in decision-making. We can make decisions very fast and we are doing this. So we did this in the customer value management. So this was started last year. So this month, we already bring the first AI tools and agents live. So we are very, very quick here.

And we do this in all different areas in the company. So we have customer care, customer base management, then we also bring our AI tools to our shops. So as I mentioned, we have 500 -- around 500 shops in Germany and the tools that our salespeople there use, they will be -- they will get new tools so that they will get information, which are -- they will get AI information. And this will make the user experience within the shops and the experience for our salespeople much better and hopefully also increase conversions.

We also keep investing into our staff. So we are -- we have our people here. They are able to adapt quickly. So they have -- I think we have many, many growth mindsets here. They are able to change. And yes, so this is, I think, whenever you do something like a transformational company, 70%, 80% is people. And here, we are, I think, very strong.

So -- and besides these big lighthouse projects, we apply AI wherever we can do this. So for example, when you look about -- or when you think about creatives, how to produce creatives for your advertising campaigns, we want to use AI.

And when you look into mobile, so I mentioned it, we have a strong customer base. We have strong offerings. All networks makes a lot of sense to come to freenet and to buy products there. And we improve our customer value management. We use AI. So -- and this will lead to a reduction in churn, and we will also increase our sales after service.

So when people call our hotlines and they have a service request, we help them. After that, we will also start to do more sales after service and sell family cards, for example, or waipu.tv.

Customer acquisition, so a premium strategy that's important for us. We will focus on Freenet, on our premium brand. And when you look into unaided brand awareness, there we are around 10%, which is very low where our competitors like 1&1, they are, I think, around 50 or even higher percent. So there, we have a lot of room to grow. And we will close this gap by investing into smart performance-based marketing campaigns.

We know how to do this. We already tested this with klarmobil last year, and those campaigns were very successful. We really saw a nice sales impact and also -- and then that's important. So whenever we do brand marketing invest into TV, we do this with a clear sales approach. So we produce our creators always with a clear focus on a product, on a price, which drives sales. So this is a combination of performance and brand.

And yes, so also when you look at our websites, so they are getting better step by step, but there's also a lot of room for improvements. Our conversion rates have become or we already have improved them a lot, but there's still a lot of room for further improvements. This will also help us to further increase performance here. So therefore, we see a potential to an uplift of EUR 30 million by '28.

Next slide, IPTV. Waipu.tv is a success story, very strong customer base, strong offerings. And besides this, also the advertising business within waipu, it's growing very strong. We see further potential. We have strong partners here. And we believe that we will further grow our subscribers and we will further grow subscription revenues, advertising revenues. And all of that, I think, is really a huge opportunity, and we expect an uplift of EUR 85 million by '28.

As I said, here, the market is healthy. Our customer base, we expect that we will grow very nice until '28. So this is reflected or this is due to our strong products, the outstanding product, but also through the market development. If the market itself will grow, we will grow. Therefore, we are quite confident that we can see nice subscriber growth. And we have strong advertising partnerships with RTL, [ ProSieben ]. And besides this, we will also grow in our advertising business.

Yes. Coming to Page 26, I think base information which is relevant when we published the financial ambition for '28, the first time 2 years ago, I think we based it on the EBITDA of '23. Now here, there is a new baseline. The baseline here for this financial ambition is the year 2025.

In mobile, yes, we -- Robin already mentioned the plus EUR 30 million, what we see here compared to '25. Here again, we have this negative impact from this MNO agreement. On the other side, we have mobilezone. We have cost efficiency, especially from AI projects. So we see possibilities here to reduce our cost line by something like EUR 10 million.

And then from all the initiatives, which we started here and what Robin already talked about, we expect something like EUR 30 million. And this seems possible. We also restarted freenet energy. We restarted freenet fixed net. So I think we -- there are a lot of initiatives. And so we are very confident to reach at least EUR 30 million out of these initiatives in the next years.

In IPTV, we slightly increased our ambition compared to what we published 2 years ago. Because what we did that time was only to put into consideration the increase from the subscriber -- from the subscription and from the service revenues. This time, and Robin already showed this, the revenues from advertising, which are increased. So therefore, we increased it here compared to last time.

And then in the other holding, there is also an increase compared to the last ambition '28, what we published because of the lower Board salaries. So all in, we increased our ambition from more than EUR 600 million to more than EUR 620 million. And yes, I think it's challenging, but I think especially if we get a solution with one network operator. And if you use it and if you would correct it by this and if we could solve it, then it would be even higher and definitely higher than what we published 2 years ago.

Moving to the free cash flow ambition. Yes, I think we have the positive effect from the EBITDA, what I already described. The other items of the EBITDA to free cash flow bridge are more or less unchanged, but we have the negative effect from the taxes. I think everybody is prepared to it because the tax loss carryforward will be -- will fall away in '28, up to the end of '28. And therefore, there will be a higher tax what we will have to pay.

So all in, a free cash flow of more than EUR 340 million, which implies a dividend of something like EUR 2.30. And this is still based on the promise that we will pay out 80% of the free cash flow with the addition now what I already mentioned that we pay a minimum dividend or we grant a minimum dividend of EUR 2. And dividend is still the first priority in capital allocation. So no changes here. Second pillar or second priority is growth. And third priority is to do any share buybacks in the future or to reduce the leverage further, but this would not make any sense from my point of view.

So therefore, for the last page, I hand over again to Robin.

So here, you can see what freenet will stand for in '28. Our 2 strong pillars, mobile pillar. We will -- we believe that we can grow our customer base by doing smart performance-based marketing, reducing churn. And we are implementing AI first and tools and want to have an AI first operating model. So we believe there will be steady profitability, and this will lead to highly cash generating -- this will be highly cash generating.

In our IPTV business, so here, we see a very strong second -- core business is developing. We believe we will grow the business up to 3 million users. The advertising will be additional revenue stream, and we believe that there will be an EBITDA of at least EUR 120 million in '28.

So all of this, I think it's -- we have very healthy financials, low leverage. We are growing free cash flow. We have a nice dividend policy, which I think is a very healthy and attractive business.

So therefore, we give back to the operator to start the Q&A, please.

[Operator Instructions] And we have the first question from Polo Tang from UBS.

I have 3 questions. The first question is just about the MNO shortfall. So you highlighted a EUR 13 million profit shortfall with one MNO contract that could rise to EUR 50 million if you do not meet certain volume commitments. However, do your deals with the other MNOs have a similar structure? And is there a risk of further profit shortfalls if you do not achieve volume targets?

Second question is really just about the impact of AI. Do you see a risk of the MNOs becoming more efficient at acquiring and retaining customers, meaning they will be less reliant on independent third-party channels like freenet going forward? Alternatively, if you look at it the other way around, do you see AI as an opportunity?

Third question is just on waipu.tv. You indicated that your underlying net adds in 2025 were 150,000. Your mid-term guidance indicates that growth will pick up to 300,000 net adds per annum going forward. But can you remind us what caused the underlying slowdown in 2025? And why are you so confident that the net adds will rebound and improve going forward? And who do you think your main competitors are when you look at waipu.tv? And is Vodafone bundling cable TV for free with broadband having any impact on waipu.tv?

Yes, your first question, I think we have very favorable contracts with the other MNOs. I think it's only one partner where the agreement is as it is. This was done before Robin started. It was done in '24. So I think we -- and both partners now think that discussions do make sense. So also for the operator, it is not a healthy agreement. And I think we are on the same side there. And so with the other operators, no, we do not have comparable risks what we see at the moment.

Then I take the third question about waipu. Yes, I think you linked your question to the 152,000. On the other side, what I would do in my calculation is I think we were free to clean up the unprofitable subs. We decided to clean it up by the 88,000. If you would not do so, then we would have something like 240,000, which is not that far away from what we guided and the 240,000 is something like 15% of growth. And this is something what we also see for the future, something like between 15% and 20%.

So I think even in a year where we reduced our marketing spending, where we were not that aggressive, it was possible to grow the business by 15%. So therefore, we are optimistic here for the future. The IPTV market is growing. And I think you also asked about bundles. It is possible. We are in discussion here with different suppliers in the market for fiber, for broadband, etc.

And so I think maybe -- and also in the mobile area, maybe there it will be possible in the -- maybe in the second quarter to another contract with one of the big players. But I think I do not want to promise anything today. Discussions, negotiations are ongoing. But I think we are -- basically, we are happy now with the waipu base because it is clean. I think we do not have to discuss in '26 about Telefonica customers. We just can show the growth, and we are very optimistic already for the first quarter to be on a relevant growth path again.

And then we had this AI question.

I'm happy to take it. So for us, AI is an opportunity, it's not a threat. And to be clear here, so when you talk about direct, freenet is direct. Freenet is no comparison website. Freenet is no intermediary. We are direct. People come to us, customers come to us, they book with us, they become our customers. And so we compete like with all the other direct players, the network operators.

And when you look at our offering, so we offer all networks and we offer this to very nice prices. So -- and I mean, AI should be smart. And if you look at the benefit of companies and products, I think we are in a very good position to benefit from this. So I see this really as an opportunity because of the very attractive offerings.

And we also have a multi-brand approach. It's not just one brand. So we have premium brands. We have brands for pricing. We have budget brands. So we are very well positioned through the offerings of our brands and through the massive footprint that we have in all marketing and sales channels and then through the attractive price and because we are direct, we are no intermediary, no comparison website.

The next question comes from Ulrich Rathe from Bernstein.

3 questions for me as well, please. So again, on the MNO contract, could you talk a little bit about when this became apparent during 2025? It sounds like this became apparent only during the fourth quarter. How is that possible? I mean, the market trends have been unfolding throughout the year. So it's a bit difficult for us to understand how only in the fourth quarter you suddenly see something developing that costs you EUR 13 million this year and EUR 50 million next year. That will be -- and with regard to the mitigation for this issue, is there a precedence for such a contract renegotiation? Or are there any other reasons for confidence you can give us that the renegotiation would be successful?

My second question is on the waipu outlook for 2028, which you have raised. Could you talk a little bit about your level of visibility here in terms of the customer revenue and margin outlook? I mean, there is -- it is very optimistic, but I suppose I'm trying to sort of gauge to what extent you're guiding for things that you feel are very achievable compared to sort of a little bit like a moonshot kind of guidance on waipu.

And my third question, if I may, you pointed to a voice robot launch in the context of this better customer value management. Now my question on that is, why would be an AI robot, a voice robot be better at customer value management than engaging with a person? I understand why AI is cheaper. I also understand why it might help your sales force to put the right information in front of them when they deal with the customer. But do you actually believe that a voice robot has the ability to manage customer value better than a person?

Ulrich, from my side to the MNO topic, I think at the end of the third quarter, we were still optimistic to have no gap in '25. We already started some discussions with the network operator, but with the former management of it. And so yes -- and therefore -- and I think the conditions what we get for the tariff plans, the margins, this all was not sufficient to promote this network. And therefore, we reduced it during the fourth quarter, and therefore, we saw the effect. So it's -- and now we are in these discussions to make, but to make it clear.

And you asked about some -- I cannot give you a confidence level to it, how -- what level -- how the success rate could be of these discussions, what we do have there. But what we -- what I can definitely say is if the discussions would not be possible, then we would also take legal actions against it because we think the behavior of the network was not fair to us here.

Then about the waipu outlook, maybe I take it also, Robin, if you're fine. I think it is -- the increase versus the ambition what we gave 2 years ago. The increase is based on the advertising contract what we could close with the big TV channels here in Germany.

And on the other side, and it refers to the question of Polo, we think that it is possible even on the reduced base what we see today to increase the customer base to 3 million customers up to the end of '28. And this is also -- this is another effect. If you have more customers, then your advertising revenues are also higher. And if you have more customers, definitely, your service revenues are higher.

So I think we did the calculation. And yes, it works if we have the increase by something like 15% to 20% in the customer base year-by-year. And this looks for us -- and I think this is the key to the ambition here. But I think I tried to make clear already with Polo's question or with the answer to Polo's question that even in a year where we focused on EBITDA, it was possible to grow the base by something like 15%. And so I'm optimistic that this could also work in the future.

And related to your question regarding the voice bot, so it will be an AI voice bot. We will start the first test this month in our service line. And you -- so normally in the service line, you get many requests that you could also answer if you go through the FAQ section. So at the beginning, we are building our knowledge base. This is important. So this is the fundament for the AI bot.

And so the benefits of the AI bot is that it's available 24 hours, 7 days. It's very efficient in terms of cost. It has a huge knowledge base. So the knowledge is -- I mean, it's huge, so it can answer many, many questions. And it's continuously improving and learning. So calls will be transcripted, they go back into the machine, they will learn, they will develop.

The AI bot will also do sales after service afterwards. So for example, if like by the way, her name is Ginnie. And if you, for example, have a service request, you talk to the very friendly Ginnie. So afterwards, she might ask you, okay, now that we've solved your problem, I see that you also have 2 kids. And may I also offer you like a family card for your kids, stuff like this.

And I think this is -- that's the future, and we have made huge progress during the last weeks, months with also with the help of external consultants. And that's a huge workforce here internally is working on this. And I'm sure that we will make a big step forward this year.

We have the next question from Florian Treisch from Kepler Cheuvreux.

I have to ask a question on the MNO agreement. My one is on the EUR 50 million headwind you mentioned. I think in your remarks, you phrased it as a worst case. I just want to double check. Does it really mean EUR 50 million is the absolute worst case in a way it cannot get lower? And what is, to be fair, a base assumption we have -- we can make for '26, i.e., a lower number than the EUR 50 million you have mentioned?

The second one is on mobilezone. Can you give us a feeling what is the implied EBITDA contribution in '26? And are you expecting already a net positive synergy effect, i.e., after the integration cost in '26 or is it something more likely for '27?

And the last one, you just mentioned that you are restarting freenet energy, the broadband operations. I mean there was a reason to shut it down in the past. What has changed here?

Florian, your answer about the worst case, I think what is the worst case in the world? I think, yes, I would say from -- and I called it worst case and I mean it is a worst case. We do not know what happens in the world. But if the framework is as it is today, yes, it's definitely a worst case. I think there is only a possibility to optimize it. And therefore, definitely, it is a worst case, EUR 50 million.

Mobilezone, I think for the year '26, we used an EBITDA of EUR 25 million. We have not calculated or put into consideration any synergy effect. I think the team is working hardly to get synergy effect. And so yes, there is an additional chance. But yes, I would support your idea that it makes more sense to show the synergies or to get the synergies then in '27.

I think that we'll -- we will start in '26. We will -- there will be some low-hanging fruits. This is what we already saw. but we have not calculated these synergies. I think we have to get more knowledge of the business of mobilezone. We just started at the beginning of January to discuss with all the operating with the finance people.

So I think it is too early to put any synergies in our forecast, but I'm optimistic that we will have some. And so there will be additional chances definitely compared to the plan for '25 and for our guidance.

Yes. And related to the other products, broadband and energy, so we are on it. We are calculating cases. We are talking to partners. So for us, that I think it's obvious that it makes a lot of sense to sell broadband and fiber. So we have a strong footprint with our owned shops, almost 500 in very good areas. And if you want to sell broadband, it's important that you have a face to the customer, that you can talk to them, that you can explain them about the process, how to get fiber in your home. So that's the opportunity.

And we are -- also there, we are in discussions with all the important players. They are all very interested in us supporting them. You can see that for all of them, fiber is, I would not say, a pain, but it's a top priority. And it's really difficult to do advertising and marketing and sales for broadband because you really have to talk to people, explain that to them. And we are there in a very good position.

So this is -- it's not so easy to develop the product. So from the IT, from the technical side, yes, broadband is complicated. But -- and therefore, we are looking into solutions, how we can get there, external solutions, internal solutions, talking to partners. So -- but makes a lot of sense. We are quite confident that this will be an opportunity for us.

In energy, it's the same. I think it's also obvious if you think about our shops and if customers come to our shop or to buy a mobile, so then it also makes sense to ask them, okay, where do you buy your energy? And if you have a good offer, so why would you or why shouldn't you try to sell this as well? So I think this is something where at the moment we are -- where we small, tiny, but we are working on changing this.

The next question comes from Karsten Oblinger from DZ Bank.

I have 2 questions. The first one is a follow-up question on the waipu outlook for '28. So how much of the advertising business with ProSieben and RTL is included in the guidance? So is it EUR 10 million, EUR 20 million? So could you give us a rough idea here?

And the second question is related on the new business with 1&1. Could you give us an idea on the magnitude of the business so far?

Karsten, I would say, from the advertising side, as we had an EBITDA forecast or ambition in the last time of EUR 100 million without marketing revenues. Now it is without additional marketing revenues or advertising revenues. Now it is including advertising revenues. So it is something like the EUR 20 million.

Yes. And related to the 1&1 partnership. So we started it in Q4. So we started it in the first shops. We selected some shops in order to have a test group. And I mean, for us, it makes sense to sell 1&1 if we get incremental sales. And yes, so the test was successful in the first stage. So that's why we scaled it. We are in the process of scaling this.

Overall, I mean, we want to be the place where you get all networks, also 1&1. We want to have an offering for the customer, the best out of all worlds. And so therefore, 1&1 is important for us. But it's also -- I mean, they have attractive products. They have a strong brand. They do a lot of brand advertising as well. That's good. So people know the brand. If they see that they can get it also in our shops, they will come to our shops. This might further increase the frequency.

And then on the other hand, Mr. Dommermuth, I mean, he's a smart guy, and it's always possible to make smart deals with him. So therefore, we are quite confident that this can become a fruitful partnership for the future.

We have the next question from Joshua Mills from BNP Paribas.

A few questions from me. I wanted to come back to the MNO shortfall and the rationale you have for how you could renegotiate that contract. So my understanding is that the freenet position is we're not being given the right kind of tariffs in order to meet the volume commitments with an operator, which would be necessary. So if that operator isn't giving you those tariffs and without them you can't hit the target, what levers and what legal backing or support do you have to demand access to those tariffs? I would assume that given you're accounting for the headwind now and you're putting into guidance, there's at least a degree of uncertainty to whether you do have any of those levers.

And can you also confirm that beyond 2028, you'll roll on to a new contract with that MNO? And if so, should we expect to see a similar kind of setup or similar headwind? I just really want to understand what your negotiating position is on this if they decide that they don't want to use your services as much going forward?

And secondly, you did mention that if the negotiations broke down, you could resort to legal action. Can you remind us what the legal backing for freenet's role as a reseller in the German market is today? I believe it is that MNOs must negotiate with freenet in good faith. But as far as I'm aware, there's no guarantee on paying a certain amount to freenet or giving them access to all tariffs. So if you could clarify that would be helpful.

And then finally, on the waipu subscriber guidance, I think comparing to the 2024 guidance update, it looks like you have scaled back the subscriber target somewhat even with the 300,000 run rate, which you're looking for. Is that right? I know there's been some adjustments with the O2 sub base. And I just want to understand whether the better waipu TV EBITDA assumption is in part driven by the fact you expect to deliver fewer subscribers than previously under the old plan?

Maybe I'll start with the waipu question. I think it's still 3 million. I think in the last quarter, we already forecasted something like 3 million as a customer base for 2028. And so there's no relevant change.

About the legal actions and possibilities, I do not want to talk about. I think this is something -- I think this is not what both parties want to have. We want to have a solution in the discussions and in the negotiations. But if these negotiations fail, then we have to think about legal possibilities and legal actions. And we see possibilities there, but I think it's -- you would understand that we do not want to talk about it.

And I think first priority for all parties is to find a partnership solution. We want to have a good partnership with all networks. And I think we -- in the talks, we see a very good mood. We see that all -- both parties are interested in a solution. So we are very optimistic to find a solution. But I think we have to wait and see what happens.

And after -- I think we have to wait what happens after '28. I think we give an ambition and an outlook up to the year '28 and then the other years have to be negotiated. So this is what I can comment on it or what we want to comment on it. I think we have discussed it in depth now. And I think I do not want to give further information about it from our point of view. I think we said what has to be said. And then I think we have -- action has to follow.

And maybe just one follow-up. So if we assume that this particular MNO contract expires in 2028, could you just update us on when the other 2 MNO contracts expire? I think one -- another one is in 2028 as well and then one in 2030, but just to get some clarity on that.

I have not said that it ends in '28.

And we have one question from Siyi He from Citi.

I have 2, please. The first question, I just want to go back on the waipu.tv 2028 guidance. And it's just looking at your guidance for '26, and it seems that there will be a quite big step-up on EBITDA growth for '27 and '28. Just wondering if you can help me to understand why the acceleration? And I think you mentioned that advertising revenue would be EUR 20 million. Do you expect the full impact of that EUR 20 million to start hitting from '27 onwards?

And my second question is on the synergies you talked about regarding mobilezone. I'm just wondering you can give us a little bit more details of where are the low-hanging fruit? And also what would be the ultimate situation for you when you're looking at potential synergies with mobilezone?

Yes, I think waipu, I already tried to explain that we saw on an adjusted base, we see already a growth of 15% we saw in '25. And so this is something what we do expect for the following years. The IPTV market hopefully grows again further, then we could grow further. We think a similar market share, stable market share is possible with a very good product what we offer. So I think we are -- it's -- yes, it's a forecast, it's an ambition, but we think this looks possible to us.

With the synergies at mobilezone, yes, I think we -- what we did is we had a lot of meetings with the management first, but then we connected all the people who do similar jobs. And so we have a lot of small teams now and they are looking into their business. This is different thing. This is the HR department. This is the marketing department. All departments are talking with each other. And then you have some small low-hanging fruits, you have some bigger low-hanging fruits and then you have the operational business.

And on the operations side, sometimes we have the same partners. So we -- it's like scaling the business with the partners. You talk with the partners, what could be possible. We talk with the MNOs, which could be possible, which is their interest, which is our interest. And so -- and also on the side, they have in an Apple contract to buy iPhones directly. This is something what we did not have in the past. So we can use this channel now to buy iPhones, to buy Apple products.

And so I think there's a lot of fast development in all these conversations what we do have with all these discussions. And as I said, I do not want to -- I gave you some examples, but I think if we would talk to the teams now, you would have 50 examples where the synergies could be possible. And a lot of them could be get fast. But I think it's too early. I think we will keep you informed in the upcoming quarters. And then I think we will see how it develops. But I think we already have a lot of initiatives which are started. So we are on the way to generate it.

Yes. So yes, thanks for your -- thanks for attending this call. I think we are happy about the operational progress. We have many, many initiatives. We have a very motivated team here, and we are working on this and try to deliver step by step. We are not happy about the current situation with the network provider, but we are working on this.

And as Ingo said, we are in fruitful discussions. Both parties share the view that we have a sick agreement there that we need to change it, that we have to work on a new agreement. We are doing this. But yes, I see like many, many opportunities, and I'm really happy to be here in this company. It's a lot of fun. We are working on this. And yes, thanks for your time. Wish you a great day.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q3 earnings call. I'm very pleased with the development of our last quarter and with the opportunities ahead of us both in mobile and with waipu.tv. In mobile, we see strong opportunities for efficient customer growth through optimized marketing mix, through optimized web shops, through a reduction in churn and through the acquisition of mobilezone. And with waipu.tv we also believe that there is huge potential for further customer growth and even more profitability.

I'm very excited about the final sprint of The Year and an initiative-rich '26, which will mark our transformation into an AI first telco. There's a lot to do, and we are on it and looking forward to it. I would like to thank our entire team for their hard work and their courage to discover new paths. I'm truly enjoying this. And I'm -- and we are just getting started. I also want to thank our CFO, Ingo Arnold, working with him is a real pleasure. We have rolled up our sleeves and he has been a tremendous support.

Let's dive into the presentation and our key messages. We can confirm our '25 guidance. We are on track. We can show strong financials. Our most important postpaid and TV service revenues are growing and our adjusted EBITDA grew nicely 1.6% for the first 9 months and for the last quarter, even 4%, Waipu.tv has been a driver in our EBITDA, contributes nicely. It's a fantastic product, not only growing in terms of customers but also getting more and more profitable.

Our free cash flow in the first 9 months is growing nicely with 2.8% and yes. So we are on track in Q3, impacted by the communicated tax one-off, but fully on track. We are very pleased with our customer growth. Postpaid net adds even exceeded our expectations. Waipu.tv growth recovers, and we are here on a strong path, and we will continue. freenet TV is declining, but this was also expected. We are focusing on waipu.tv by continuing to monetize our user base at freenet TV. We can confirm our '25 guidance. And when you look into our strategic initiatives in the Mobile segment for our organic growth, we are focusing on 3 pillars.

It's optimization of our marketing mix and optimization of our web shops and reducing churn. In terms of marketing mix, we are shifting budget. We look at the return on ad spend. We don't do just fewer brand marketing. We always connected with direct performance impact clear messages. And yes, so we improved the transparency of our campaigns. We improved the reporting. We really put the money where we see a direct impact. Conversion rates, I mentioned it last time, the conversion rates on our web shops, they are not there yet where we want to have them. They're not great yet, but we are getting better and better, and we see strong improvements in the last quarter.

The page speed improved drastically. We have a better user experience, we create kind of urgencies on our website. All of this helps and there's still a lot of stuff to do, but we can already see that it's working. And the third pillar is that we are working on churn reduction. If you look at the top 2 reasons why users change their the mobile provider, it's either they get a better offer somewhere or because they are not happy about the network connection. So this does not make sense when you look at freent because we are really offering great deals, we are able to match the most aggressive offers, and we provide all networks.

So there's obviously no reason for users to leave us. And so therefore, we are working on it. We see huge potential in reducing our churn. We have created more than or develop more than 50 initiatives to reduce the churn to bring it down, and we are working on it. And yes, so this is, I think, one of our drivers, success drivers also for next year. When we look into our customer value management, we also try to use AI wherever we can use it. So whether you look at the customer service, if you look at telesales, if you look at smart pricing. So we try to apply it everywhere, do smart tests, don't do crazy things. But there's -- we believe there's huge potential and we are on it.

And besides all of these 3 pillars, of course, we are also constantly trying to improve our other channels, where we are happy about our stable retail business with our almost 500 stores, our strong online and off-line partners, and we are optimizing this as well.

In September, we started our first performance-based brand marketing campaign with klarmobil. So we produced a new TV spot. We changed the website, improved the UX. And there was a clear message. So when you look at the TV spot, you can see that there was clear branding, but also clear messaging, a clear offer, and this was reflected in the successful numbers. We could increase the visits significantly and also the conversions and sales. This was a very successful campaign. We have the next campaign in October. We see and also the team see that it's working. It's driving sales on one hand. And on the other hand, it will also create more brand awareness.

And klarmobil is one of our top brands. Together with freenet, it's important that we increase the unaided brand awareness and performance-based marketing campaigns will help to reach this goal. We are very happy about the mobile subscriber growth in the first 9 months and also the last quarter. Within the first 9 months, we could increase our customer base [ to ] 190,000 postpaid customers. If you look at our historic data numbers, you can see that this is quite a lot, also the last quarter, very successful also when you compare it to last year. So we can see that the initiatives, the things that we change that they are working.

We also are very happy about the renewal of our -- about the 5-year renewal of our strong partnership with the MediaMarktSaturn, it's important channel for us. And yes, next steps. So we will keep doing what we have started in the last quarter, looks promising. And besides this, there's also one big thing that's coming at the moment when you look at our -- I mean, the strongest brand that we have is freenet and we do advertising with freenet. So there, you can see our strongest product, mobile phones, mobile plans. But at the moment, it's on the domain freenet-mobilfunk.de.

And if you, for example, go to freenet.de, you can find the news and e-mail portal. So -- and this is not ideal, yes. So you cannot do marketing efficiently with freenet if people or if users then search on Google and end up on freenet.de where they don't find the offers that you do advertising for. So this is something that we changed, we made the decision to change it, and this will be in place beginning of next year. And then we will do advertising for mobile phones and mobile plans on freenet.de. And then we will also start marketing campaigns, performance-based marketing campaigns for freenet.de. So this will increase the conversion. This will be much more efficient than in the past. And so then we believe that this will be a nice potential for the next year to really increase numbers for freenet and increase the unaided brand awareness for freenet as well.

And besides this, one big thing is you heard about it, we -- we already disclosed it. We bought mobilezone. This is a strategic acquisition. mobileZone, it's a really strong company. It's a sales machine. So they -- every year, they generate over -- they close over 1 million contracts. It's one of our strongest competitors. They are very successful, they have many nice brands like sparhandy, deinhandy. And yes, so we acquired them. Yesterday, there was also news that the antitrust approved the acquisition. So we are in the process of closing the deal. And this will give us much more -- even more sales power. So consolidation in the market, I think it's healthy, makes a lot of sense if you look at allocating resources about the offerings, so it makes us even stronger.

We'll -- and I think it's also good for the entire industry, for our partners. We have really healthy relationships to Vodafone, Telefonica, Telecom also to 1&1 and we believe that this makes us even stronger and that will enable us to further support them. Waipu.tv, I mentioned it. We believe it's a fantastic company. We could show in Q3 subscriber growth again and also nice profitability. It's -- for us, it's important that we have a company that's not only growing but also getting more and more profitable.

I think we prove both of this with waipu.tv where we're happy about it, it's developing as expected. So -- and we also believe that in Q4, we will see even stronger growth and that we are on track to reach our guidance for '25.

Waipu.tv has started -- has just started a new campaign which is promising it's -- they offer a start-up package with a TV stick and [indiscernible] product for just not so much money. It's an entry product and which will help to -- for people to experience IPTV and this great product. And so afterwards, we believe that there will be upselling opportunities. And besides this, we also started to do marketing with bundles where we bundle mobile plans together with waipu. And all of this, we believe, is really is -- makes a lot of sense and will bring us or leads us into the right direction.

Yes, with this, I hand over to Ingo.

Thank you, Robin. So I start as normal with the group financials. I think we are and Robin already commented, I think from my side, there's nothing to add. We are really, really happy with what we generated during the first 9 months of the year 2025. We are totally on track to reach our guidance. So in terms of revenues, you see in the quarter, a slight decrease of revenues, I think, main reason, and we will -- I think you will hear the name of the company, The Cloud more often than in the years when we owned the company today. But I think it is important to show the deviations what we do have in -- on the group level, but also on the mobile level.

So here, I think what we lost here in revenues with the sale of The Cloud is something like EUR 10 million. So without it, also in Q3, there would be a small increase of revenues. So all in, it's a confirmation of the guidance where we promised moderate growth for the gross profit. I think, much more positive than the revenue development. We see an increase of the gross profit in the quarter by even 7% on a 9-year base, 4.3%. It is definitely driven by the IPTV. I think we are so happy that this is the first year where we do not only generate growth in the base of waipu.tv but where it is also possible to make the business much, much more profitable.

And you see the effect here even on a group level. Moving to the adjusted EBITDA. Strong quarter, 130 -- nearly EUR 138 million. which brings us to EUR 395 million up to the end of September. And I think I did the calculation in August. I do the calculation again what is necessary to reach the full year guidance. I think it is relatively clear that from EUR 395 million you need a quarter and you need an EBITDA of something between EUR 125 million and EUR 145 million to reach the guidance. And compared to the performance in the third quarter. I think this looks totally doable. And I'm even more convinced now than I was in August to reach it.

So moving to the Mobile business. I think, yes, definitely, the revenue looks a little bit disappointing. But on the one hand, again here, there is the reason from the missing revenues of The Cloud in the full quarter. And if you would add the EUR 10.3 million, the difference would be much smaller. On the other hand, we -- and this is something what we already commented in after Q2, we had some no-frills, some prepaid revenues where we could not generate any profit.

And to make administration easier, we cut some -- we terminated some of these contracts. This makes a lot of sense from our side. It has a few negative effects on revenue. But as you see, moving to gross profit, this does not have any profit effect. The gross profit in Q3 slightly decreasing. Also here, it was something like EUR 3.5 million, which was missing from The Cloud. If you would add it, I would say it is something like a stable development, Q3 to Q3 and the Q3 '24 was a strong one.

So all in, there is an increase in gross profit to nearly EUR 527 million. Moving to the adjusted EBITDA. Also here, we are near to what we had last year. It's a stable development. and making the same math, what I did on the group level, what we can see here is that we need an EBITDA of something like between EUR 100 million to EUR 120 million in the fourth quarter, and then we would reach the guidance. Maybe a small comment to marketing spending because we discussed it intensively after the second quarter. And the good news is that even with all the campaigns, what Robin was talking about and all the action and the big growth in the customer base, it was possible to decrease the marketing spending in Q3.

So I think in the first half of the year, we spent something like EUR 6 million more in '25 than in '24. But in Q3, we spent less than last year. I think we have some long-running contracts with some brand marketing partners, which does not make that much sense. But I think it is not easy to terminate these contracts. Some of them are still running. So I think there will be a full saving effect from stopping these contracts in 2026 but also in Q3 and in Q4, we will see something comparable.

Marketing spendings are down. And I think the results are still affected from the negative first half spending what we saw. Moving to some KPIs of the -- in the mobile business.

Yes, Robin already commented. I'm really surprised how strong we are in terms of postpaid net adds. I think we discussed during the year to reach something like 200,000 net adds for the full year time. I think definitely, it will be far above 200,000, what we will reach I think it is still a surprising quarter as ever, the fourth quarter because of Black Week and so on. But I think we are more than on track here to grow the postpaid customer base. Well, we are not that good on track, but I think this is a market problem what the whole market does have is still that the ARPU is decreasing.

So what we see at the moment with the growth, what we generate, it is possible to overcompensate the ARPU effect and I'm positive and optimistic that this will also continue in the next quarter. But I think it is a pity and it is market driven. I think we discussed it already in the other quarters. It's not a freenet problem. The market is slightly aggressive. Still, we hope we can come back to a rational, a more rational behavior in the mobile market here. So we are not that unhappy that there will be a CEO change at Telefonica because we saw them very aggressive in the last quarter.

So I think this could help to repair the market here. So we are basically optimistic for the following quarters, but -- and this is clearly shown on this chart here. At the moment, the negative trend for the ARPU is continuing. But clear message service revenues are slightly increasing. So it's possible for us to to compensate it. Digital Lifestyle revenues, the last picture here on this chart. I think you all know that we were behind plans at the beginning of the year. We could close the gap now. So we are totally on track compared to last year.

And yes, I'm even positive for the fourth quarter to see a slight increase here. Moving to the successful TV business, revenues and all financials are mainly driven by the positive waipu.tv developments. What we do see in revenues is in the quarter and even an increase by 10% for the full year, it increased by 7.5%. I think the fourth quarter was here a little bit influenced by a media barter deal. What is a media barter deal? It is that we have these deals, these contracts with the private channels. And therefore, we get on a -- at the end of the day, we get some marketing to place -- some channel plays there for free but we have to show it in our figures.

So on the one hand, you see it on the revenue. But on the other hand, you see it on the marketing cost. So at the end of the day, these marketing campaigns are for free. But you show it on every level here. And so therefore, we made it clear or we try to make it clear and we wanted to make it clear because especially the development in revenues and in gross profit is slightly exaggerated from these deals, and we want to have positive figures, but we want to have honest figures. And therefore, we mentioned it here that there is an effect of EUR 5 million even in revenues and in gross profit. On the adjusted EBITDA level, you see that we have an increase compared to last year. Waipu.tv EBITDA year-to-date is something like EUR 25 million.

So it's a perfect confirmation that the business cannot only grow but that the business can also generate EBITDA. And I think this is -- I think we discussed it earlier times that we expect something between EUR 30 million and EUR 35 million of EBITDA from the business. And I think we are totally on track here. We have lower marketing spending. This is something what we discussed earlier together. This definitely helps in the fourth quarter. Yes, I think we need some marketing campaigns. We need and we want to generate some growth in the fourth quarter. But I think we are also on an EBITDA level, we are very optimistic to reach the goals that we do have.

Last page from my side is the free cash flow bridge. I think -- most of you should not be surprised that we have the negative tax effect. I think we -- to be honest, we expect it for years. And now we really got it. So we had to pay something like EUR 20 million for the period 2015 to 2018. I think we are not at the end of the road here because we also took legal action because we -- I think we had a -- we built provision years ago, and -- but we took legal action now.

And -- but the legal proceedings will take years to find an end, but we paid the EUR 20 million now because we have high interest rates to pay here in the meantime. And I think there are good chances to win the case. But for now, we paid the EUR 20 million. And I think let's wait and see. I think I do not expect a decision as long as I am here CFO. So could be quite open. But there is a good chance to get the money back. But for now, the tax expenses are higher as expected. On the other hand, change in net working capital. It is a negative of EUR 32 million.

I think those of you who are familiar with our working capital figures, know that EUR 26 million out of it is a liability or a reduction of a liability where we have to pay a monthly fee to Media Saturn. So out of it, it is more or less stable. Then the CapEx figure, EUR 26.8 million. It's near to what we saw last year. Lease payments. It's easy to calculate EUR 45 million now. So no surprises and interest payments, EUR 15 million. So I'm quite fine here. I'm also fine with the free cash flow for the guidance for the full year because what do I expect from change in net working capital, maybe some more investments in the fourth quarter into the business. So I expect something like EUR 45 million for the full year. I expect EUR 60 million for taxes, EUR 35 million for CapEx. Lease is easy to calculate, something like EUR 60 million and interest payments nearly to EUR 20 million. So this is also in -- the sum is the same what we expected or what we forecasted at the beginning of the year.

And so I think at the end of the day, no surprises for all of us. And therefore, I think the guidance could be reached. So therefore, the overview from my side for the financials. So I would hand over to the operator again to start the Q&A session.

And the first question comes from [indiscernible] Goldman Sachs.

I have 3 questions, please. The first 1 is on the guidance. What are the main 4Q drivers that could push results to the low or high end of the guided range? The second one is on mobile. Can you please give us more color on your net adds mix? How many come from the lower end of the market? And how do you perceive quality of your customer base in general? And the last one is on the marketing. So I'm just wondering, can you compete effectively in 4Q without a big marketing increase for both waipu.tv and mobile because we are heading towards Black Friday and Christmas.

Yes, Sofia. Thanks for your questions. From my side for the guidance. I think if I would have a clear plan where we would end, I would already have told you. I think there is good chances to end on an EBITDA level between EUR 520 million and EUR 540 million. I think it is correct that we have to look, and it's -- I think the question to the guidance is linked to your last question about the marketing spending. I think we want to grow the business. And therefore, if we see chances, especially during Black Week to increase our customer base in both segments, then we would -- then we have to decide what we would like to invest.

So it's difficult to say from today's point of view. So I cannot -- and this is something I think we have not published a guidance which is -- which narrow band because it is still open. I think we will watch the market. And if there will be chances to grow and to have a profitable growth, we will use the chances. But I think this is the main reason why we are not more concrete on the guidance now because as typical during Black Week and during Christmas business, there could be so many chances. And we do not want to miss chances and opportunities. And therefore, I think it is it is still open.

But basically, I would not expect a big increase in marketing expenses compared to last year because also last year, we had the Black Week and we had a Christmas business where we were. And last year, we were very aggressive. So I would even expect that even with a strong and growth-oriented philosophy in the fourth quarter, I would expect marketing expenses to be lower than last year.

And related to your question regarding the mix, we have different brands. We have brands like indiscernible], Happy SIM where we have aggressive offers and then we have klarmobil, it's something in between. And then we have our premium brand, which is freent. And at the moment, we -- freenet is not ready yet. I mentioned this. It does not make too much sense to do advertising with freenet if it's not on the freenet.de domain, yes. So therefore, we don't invest into brand marketing campaigns, we rather focus our activities on the other brands like klarmobil and the other brands where we have better conversions. So this is what we are doing at the moment. And so therefore, the -- it will be, I think, relatively similar to the last quarter.

But if we look into the next year, I mentioned it that we want to scale the performance based brand marketing investments for freenet as well, and this is an opportunity for us because with freenet, this is our premium brand. We will be able to also sell for more -- for healthier prices with higher ARPUs. We will focus on mobile phones. We will position freenet as a premium brand. And I think this is a nice opportunity for us next year.

And then ideally, we have a freenet as our premium brand for mobile phones with nice brand marketing campaigns but based on performance, so we want to sell. Then we have klarmobil our brand for mobile plans for good prices that make a lot of sense. And then we still have our -- where we -- more aggressive brands like Doctor SIM, Happy SIM, mega SIM where we try to get users in a more aggressive environment and compete against those brands who think they can be more aggressive.

And the next question is from Ulriche Rathe, Bernstein.

I have 2 questions, please, if I may. The first one is on the service revenue situation. I think you highlighted that this is owing to the market backdrop at this point in time and that is not necessarily a big concern from a managerial perspective at this point. Could you talk about how you see this unfold. I mean what's your base case here for the market backdrop and the service revenue performance in 2026. And related to that, this sort of slight compression on the service revenues, how does this affect your gross margin? I mean that's ultimately a question how the cost to the MNO hosts scales with sales revenue performance?

And my second question is on the Media Saturn renewal economics. That's more technicality, I suppose. But you talked about this EUR 5 million incremental barter deal in -- sorry, in the third quarter. Is that related to the renewal, should we add that to the renewal? And have you agreed to a different cost compared to the prior contract with a multiyear contract with Media Saturn in the current renewal which explain the economics of that another EUR 5 million sort of fits into this.

This is Robin. Regarding the service revenue, as you -- I mean when you look into the Q3 numbers, you can see the ARPU, but you can also see strong mobile growth. Overall, the effect of both is positive, and we expect that also, if we look into the future, we -- as I just said, we want to also more marketing with freenet. We believe there's a fair chance to sell products with higher prices to increase the ARPU, this might have a positive effect as well.

Yes, that -- I mean the market is -- the competition in the market was tough in the last month. I think, is what's driven by Telefonica. So there are some changes. There were -- they announced that there will be some changes. Hopefully, this will be healthy for the market, for the industry, but we are prepared. We have many opportunities to grow our subscribers -- our marketing channels through our website, through performance marketing, through marketing to not lose so many users by optimizing our churn. So there's really a lot of potential for us to grow. And so therefore, it also will put us in a situation that we will hopefully also be able to sell for better prices, which are more healthy for us. So therefore, we are quite confident.

Yes. From my side, Ulrich, I think you also asked what effect does the service revenue has on our MNO contract. And yes, definitely, this is very relevant. I think in earlier times, when I started in the business, all were only focused on road of customers, but this changed during the year. So the contracts, what we do have with the MNOs are mainly based on revenue, on service revenue. And so yes, it is important to generate service revenues, but I can only confirm what Robin said. I think that there are -- and I work in this company for a long time, I never saw so many initiatives here to increase the number of customers.

And therefore, if we could combine it with a stabilization of the ARPU, I think, and you asked about '26, I have no -- I'm not afraid of '26. I think -- I'm more afraid of the fourth quarter now because this will be difficult to -- and this is what we saw during the year. But with all the initiatives, what we saw -- what we see and what we have here, we are much, much more optimistic for '26 in terms of service revenue than based on '25.

Then you asked about the Media-Saturn one-off of EUR 5 million, I think this is, is it linked to the contract? Or it is not linked to the contract? My official answer is not linked to the contract. But I think it's definitely only -- it's only a one-off and it is not by accident that the one-off happens in the same year when we renewed the contract. So -- but this is something that will not happen again in the next years. And what happened -- what has not happened again in the last years. So therefore, it's a typical one-off.

It is not typical. I think we have other payments what we do pay -- what we do grant to Media Saturn, but this is definitely a one-off.

ingo, can I just sort of follow on on this comment, which you put into a sub-clause that maybe you're afraid of Q4. Could you just for clarity, explain what you meant by your afraid of Q4?

Yes. I think what we see at the moment that is that the service revenues are growing, and we are happy that they are growing, but they are only growing by small euro effect. And so -- can I be 100% sure that in the fourth quarter, it is plus EUR 3 million or minus EUR 3 million? No, I cannot be 100% sure because the effect, the positive effect is not that big that I do have a lot of headroom. So -- and this is the -- I do expect stable service revenue for the fourth quarter to make it very clear here and to clarify it. So thanks for your question.

But what I do expect for '26 is that we are not only see a stable service revenue but a growing service revenue.

And the next question is Siyi He from Citi.

I just have a question on this redefinition that you put through on the adjusted EBITDA. I think now your adjusted EBITDA is including [indiscernible] sales and restructuring. I'm wondering if you can talk us through the thinking behind that. And also, it seems that the adjustments led to around EUR 10 million uplift on your 2014 EBITDA, but you decided to not change the full year guidance of '25. I want to understand the thinking behind that as well. And finally, just on the free cash flow bridge, you have kept the free cash flow guidance unchanged. But it seems that the CapEx guidance is now reduced from EUR 55 million to EUR 35 million. I wan to check if that is sustainable reduction on CapEx.

Yes. So thanks for your questions. I think the -- what is the reason why we started to report an adjusted EBITDA at the beginning of '25 or -- in '24. What we saw were from the sale of the IP addresses. We saw a very positive effect, and it was the idea to to show an adjusted EBITDA, which is really based on the ongoing business. So then this year, we had a similar effect from the sale of these IP accounts. And in addition, we had the sale of The Cloud.

And so this was also a positive effect in the EBITDA, which we wanted to correct. So I think we were -- we were very open here, and we were very transparent and corrected the EUR 25 million of positive effects this year. On the other hand, what we saw were that, and you all know that we reduced the number of board members here. And we saw a -- and the restructuring, the amount of EUR 6 million is more or less only the payments, the severance payments, what we had to do to the leaving Board members here.

So this is definitely also a one-off. And in the thinking, what I was describing before to only show the ongoing business. Therefore, we decided that we use the adjusted EBITDA to correct the EBITDA by the effects in both directions. And so therefore, I think we changed it. Then you had a question about the full year guidance. And yes, you are correct that there was a -- that with starting putting all the effects in the -- on the adjustment list we had also to adjust the year 2024. And you asked if, therefore, the guidance should be increased.

My answer is that we do not guide a delta to the year before. What we guide is an absolute EBITDA amount for the year, and we calculated the EBITDA for the year, which was from the beginning, something between EUR 520 million and EUR 540 million. So with a change of EUR 24 million, we do not change our guidance. Your question to the cash flow bridge. Yes, you are correct. To reach the full amount of the bridge and to have a comparable amount to what we forecasted at the beginning of the year, we had to reduce the CapEx compared to what we forecasted at the beginning of the year.

I think we expect, especially from the radio business -- from the digital radio business we expected more spending during the year. This has not happened. It is not -- it was not necessary during the year, and it it will not be possible to catch up here in the fourth quarter. So from my point of view, the EUR 35 million, what I said is I think this is a strong figure, and I do not see any big risks here.

The next question is from cash flow guidance Kepler Cheuvreux.

I have 2 questions. The first 1 is for Robin, I mean in the -- sorry. In the Q2 call, you made very clear that you want to change the marketing strategy, the customer journey. I mean, this is what you have underpinned today with the presentation. So my question would be a bit when do you really expect, let's call it, first tangible impact. I mean you mentioned in the presentation that they are first positive signs. But to really make a difference, is it fair to assume that this will only happen over the course of '26 and how relevant is the closing of the mobilezone transaction to support that journey.

The second question is on waipu.tv. I mean you have seen an improving momentum in Q3. So the first question would be how much of that is driven by lower headwinds from the O2 shift. And you flagged high confidence in a good finish to the year. Can you also quantify your expectations here? And do you expect this momentum to stay as strong as in Q4 entering 2026?

Yes. Thanks for your question. Regarding the impact, so we could already experience the impact in Q3. So far, in Q3, we only did 1 campaign. It was a short campaign, was 2 weeks brand campaign. So I mean, it's just like 1 month out of 3 months. So therefore, the impact is not so big. But if you just isolate this campaign, and if you look at the visit uplift, it was very strong. The conversion rates were very strong.

We improved the user experience on the website klarmobil and also the sales numbers. This was a very successful campaign. And we just started the second test in October. And also, again, a small test. That's how we do it. Yes. First, we shoot with bullets. And then with cannon balls. At the moment, we are still in the stage of shooting with bullets. So we do small tests, but they are already very promising. And yes, so also for the plan for next year, we then scale their investments, but they are performance based. That means that it's not that we are burning money. If we scale the investments, this will be also lead directly to more sales. so positive impact.

And at the moment, we just do the first test with Klarmobil. As I mentioned, we are preparing the freenet.de domain, will be done beginning of next year. And then we will also scale and freenet together with klarmobil. So most of the impact will come next year and also this year, but also for Q4, we are -- I mean, if you improve the conversion rates on the website, you'll see directly a positive impact because visits are rather going up.

End of the year, we have some nice campaigns. And then it's -- at the moment, it's a little bit, but most of it, you will see in the -- over the course of next year. This was your first question then you asked for mobilezone. I mean, mobilezone, they -- it's still not closed. I haven't checked their conversion rates. And so their return on ad spend, how they do it. If you look at top line numbers, you can see that they are very successful. They have strong brands, [indiscernible] is a prong brand, [indiscernible] is a strong brand. They -- I think they do a very good job. They have good -- they have a good performance. And yes, after closing, we will look into how how we can benefit from it.

I'm sure that there are synergies. If you look at allocating resources, if you look at positioning of brands and all that stuff, this will be, I think, healthy for us and for the market.

Regarding waipu.tv, there was -- still impacted by the end of the partnership with O2, yes -- old O2 users are churning. But even though we are growing and if you look into Q4, we anticipate that there will be a much stronger growth than in Q3. This will, I think, a strong quarter. There is -- I mentioned that they just started campaign for the strong starter package, then we have some campaigns where we bundle it together with mobile plans. This also makes a lot of sense. Then there's a Black Week. We are quite confident that we will see a nice subscriber uplift in Q4.

And for the moment, the last question is from Simon Stippig, warburg Research.

First 1 would be I wonder about your long-term guidance, 2028 or your long-term aspiration in 2028. Because certainly, by your acquisition of mobilezone and Germany segment, you should get a bump in growth. And you also mentioned the marketing contracts. Longer term, you could cancel in 2026 as I understood it. And then additionally, you expect from your campaigns quite some growth in the next year and beyond, hopefully. But on your presentation, you kept your longer-term aspiration in 2028 unchanged. So can we deduct anything from that? Or will you review that in due course?

And then secondly, tied to that is the financing of the transaction. You mentioned you will or you will debt finance it and you have a brige loan in place. But then you will receive around EUR 150 million in H1 2026 from the [ CECONOMY ] sale of your stake. And will you then lever up a little bit from your 0.5x net debt to EBITDA currently? Or do you intend to use that cash for financing transaction. And lastly, I saw until the end of October, you bought back EUR 60 million in shares. Will you continue to buy back shares until the end of the year and then you stop or will you continue to purchase back shares until you have fulfilled the full volume of your EUR 100 million.

Yes. Thanks a lot for your questions. I think, yes, I think maybe in all levels, the long-term guidance could be different, and this is normal during the years. But I think what is important for us at the moment is that we stick to the whole amount to the EUR 600 million of EBITDA, for example. So we stick to the guidance 2028. I think we -- earlier or later, yes, we have to recalculate the levels and have to decide if it could be even more than EUR 600 million or if there could be changes between the levels and between the effects. But from our point of view, the most important thing is at the moment that we stick to the guidance. And yes, definitely, we will recalculate it during 2026.

And then we -- maybe I think we have not decided when we give an update to the guidance 2028, but I do expect it for 2026, whenever in 2026. And then I think we -- all your points are correct. But I think this does not change the big picture for now this does not make it less probable that we reach the guidance, it makes it even more easier to reach the guidance. So therefore, I think during 2026, we have to think about it internally. We have to -- have our discussions and then we will come back to you and to the market definitely. Then you asked about financing of the transaction.

We use a bridge loan, which has a duration of 12 plus 6 plus 6 months. So we are not in the hurry to refinance it at the moment. But we do also have some promissory notes due in November. So what I would expect for the first quarter is a transaction with promissory notes where we refinance our debt. And yes, there's the chance that we partly repay the debt by the EUR 150 million. What we could get from CECONOMY, and we hope that we will get it during the first half of the year, and this will only change the volume of promissory notes, what we would do.

So at the end of the day, there will be a slight up on the leverage. This is what I would expect. If we spend EUR 230 million on the one hand and if we do get EUR 150 million on the other, there is a slight increase, but I think this will not change the world. Concerning the share buyback, yes, you are correct. We spent something like EUR 59 million at the moment. So nearly EUR 60 million. And we announced during the year that we will pay at least the EUR 60 million, which was the cash overhang from 2024. So we spend it now. I think we will look into the cash flow development during -- until the end of the year. If there will be some room then we would invest more.

If there is no room, then we would stop the program at EUR 60 million. But I think this is not clear. We have no final decision. We will decide based on the cash development in the fourth quarter. But I think we have done the EUR 60 million. So from today's point of view, I would not expect any additional share buybacks during the year.

Okay. Great. And maybe if I can One follow-up on the bridge loan. Did you tell any conditions of the bridge loan, like what you're paying there and interest costs?

I think they are relatively lower than what we pay in other instruments at the moment, but this is -- it is difficult to say what the margin on a bridge loan is because I think this is typical for a bridge loan that in the first 6 months, you pay much lower rate than an average market rate. And if you use it for longer, then it's getting more expensive. So I think the main information is that at the moment, it's much cheaper than what we pay on our outstanding promissory notes. .

And the last question is from [indiscernible], UBS.

Just a couple on waipu.tv. So it's clear that you expect an acceleration into Q4 of around 180,000 net adds to meet the EUR 2.2 million guidance for the end of the year. But one bigger picture question is just how do you see the competitive environment in the IPTV market? And then perhaps more specifically, if a large part of the growth you expect is going to be driven by the lower ARPU entry-level products or the bundling with Klarmobil,how do you weigh up the balance between financials or ARPUs and volume in that unit going forward?

Thanks for your question and the competitive environment. So we believe that the product is superior. So when you look into ratings, reviews, when you test the product, it's really a fantastic product that makes a lot of sense, yes. And I think it's it's one of the best, maybe the best product in the market. Also, when you look at growth rates, I think it's outgrowing competition. It's really strong, yes. So therefore, I'm not afraid of any competition in the German market. I believe if we do our job, so there is no reason why we should not grow. And in terms of -- the offers at the moment is a start-up package. So -- but there is also a clear path for upselling.

That means that we want to make it easier for people to switch from the old world to the new world, to experience the product, make it easy. And so therefore, it's also a product where you don't have or the channels is something where you can get to know the product. And then later, after a certain time, we will show you the -- like the entire world, the entire product you can experience it. And if you like it, you would have to pay more. So -- and I mean, I think it's normal for advertising for and promotions that you go out with reduced pricing.

That's the same in the mobile world, but then you need smart upselling. I think we are quite good in it. And then there are also convincing arguments why you should do the upselling. So therefore, yes, it's -- and this is something that we have been doing throughout the year. There were always promotions and campaigns. Nevertheless, you can see that profitability went up quite nicely. And this is something that we are -- that we believe will also happen during the course of next year. We will further grow the customer base.

We will further grow profitability and generate more EBITDA. So there, we are fully on track and absolutely convinced about the product and don't fear any competition in the market.

If there are no further questions from the audience, I would like to hand back for closing remarks.

Yes. Thanks for attending our earnings call. So as we've said, we are very pleased about the quarter. We are confident about the outlook for '25. We are excited about '26, many, many initiatives. We have a very motivated team, open mindset. They show a lot of courage, they want to explore new opportunities. It's really -- it's a lot of fun. It's a very good vibe, good spirit here. And I'm very confident that we will keep delivering. So therefore, thanks for your time and looking forward to the next call.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the freenet AG conference call on the Q2 2025 and Half Year Results. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand over to Robin Harries, who is leading this earnings call for the first time as the new CEO of freenet AG.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Robin Harreis, and I'm honored to speak with you today as the new CEO of freenet. I joined this exciting company at the beginning of June, and it's been a dynamic and inspiring start.

Prior to freenet, I served as CFO of Trivago, a NASDAQ-listed company. Before that, I was a board member at where I led marketing and sales for over 5 years. So I'm no stranger to this industry and it feels very familiar and energizing to be back.

I would like to begin by sharing some of my impressions of freenet after these initial 2 months. What stands out immediately is the agility of the company. We have a strong competitive position in both mobile and TV supported by powerful and well-established sales infrastructure. We are proud to have nearly 500 retail stores, which allow us to maintain daily direct contact with our customers.

In addition, we benefit from numerous strong partnerships and a broad market presence, which gives us an excellent position to market our offerings effectively and with impact. Technologically, freenet is well positioned. We're already leveraging AI in key areas like pricing, customer management and telesales and the corporate environment is dynamic and full of potential. The team is highly motivated and there are numerous opportunities to further develop the business.

Actually, freenet is built on openness, the willingness to change a strong desire to grow and deliver I can feel a lot of entrepreneurial passion in the company, and I really like that. I can tell you that I met a lot of talented, motivated and hungry people. Financially, we are in a solid position with high cash generation and low leverage. Our guiding principles being customer-centric, demand-driven and AI first are more important than ever and will continue to shape our strategy moving forward.

Looking ahead, we've defined several key focus areas for the future, and I see many opportunities. But first, we are committed to maintaining clear guard rates for change -- this includes our '25 guidance, our '28 ambition, shareholder remuneration and our financial policy, we stick to that.

In Mobile, our goal is to keep growing. Brick and mortar, we remain a vital stage channel, but we're also changing our online approach. We are proving our user experience and conversion rate on our website. So far, we see a lot of potential here. For example, when it comes to page speed, our website at the moment, not fast enough. So for example, when you go to and want to order something, you see too slow loading times. And this is also -- this also affects our other websites. We are working on that. We will improve that. And when it comes to user experience, overall, the conversion rates on our online website are not good enough. So the market standard is higher, and we see huge potential here to further improve.

We are preparing for performance -- performance-based brand marketing. So we are in the process of that, and we are working on improving our churn rates, especially through AI tools. It will take some time, but we are seeing nice potential down the road, we are strengthening our own marketing channels. We have just restructured our leadership team and the telco pillar -- and I'm truly excited to take the step into the future together with the hole management team I believe we made a fantastic team and working together have already been a real pleasure. I'm glad to be working alongside some of the most capable people in the industry.

Related to TV, we are continuing to support strong B2C growth. We have strong products that customers like a lot. And we have amazing teams that will further strive for success. Also here, we see a lot of potential and for focus on it. Internally, we are fostering a cost-conscious culture that is focused on performance, experimentation and scalability. We are empowering our people to take ownership and make decisions. We've been building a flat organization structure with minimal bureaucracy, which supports it and gives us the agility to move fast. Our ambition is clear. We want to be the fastest player in the market. In the long run, this will only be possible with the help of AI.

And AI is not only the future at the present at freenet, we are fully committed to becoming the flagship AI company in the telco industry -- this is one of our top strategic priorities, and I can already feel strong appetite for change and innovation across the organization. We are still at the very beginning of our AI journey, and it's too early to quantify the full impact -- but one thing is crystal clear, we see tremendous potential ahead.

Now let's look at our performance in the first half of '25. Financially, we are fully on track, postpaid and TV service revenues are growing [indiscernible] contributing notably to EBITDA, and we also delivered strong quarterly free cash flow. On the customer side, growth is in line with expectations freenet TV is slowing its decline, continues to grow strong in several marketing channels at postpaid had a particularly strong second quarter.

So here in mobile communications, we are seeing a nice development and accelerated growth in postpaid we added 130,000 postpaid customers in H1 '25 compared to just 25,000 in H1 '24. Q2 added around 80,000 postpaid. This growth reinforces our strong market position. However, we remain focused on profitability, not growth at any cost.

Our next steps include scaling online challenges including scaling online channels, refocusing brand marketing on performance and continuing to reach this churn I talked about it earlier. For '25, our guidance for postpaid subscribers remain moderate growth.

Turning to TV and Media. continues to show strong B2C development net adds were impacted by churn from the O2 TV base, but we expect roles to recover in the second half of the year. Our guidance remains unchanged.

Freenet TV saw a churn of just 3,000 in Q2, which gives us hope that we are approaching a stable base. Our next steps include retention and upselling of TV customers from the '24 growth phase and a price increase for freenet TV. For '25, we still expect notable growth in TV subscribers and the noticeable decrease in freenet RGUs.

With that, I'm happy to hand over to Ingo.

Thank you, Robin. So good morning, everybody, from my side. So I -- if you allow me, I would start with a few personal words because I think it was a very successful time what we had together with Christophe, now a new era starts here. And just to give you my first impressions after 2 months, I think, again, the organization freenet was very well coming, I think. And I think from the first day when Robin started here, he was something like part of the organization. And therefore, I'm thankful to all the people working here. And on the other side, I think, yes, it's life is faster than it was before, clearly. So we see some very fast changes here. I think we gained pace again, which was necessary for the company. We have different views now and a totally different drive. So yes, I'm very happy that the Supervisory Board decided here to appoint Robin as the CEO of the company. And I think we are already really a good team here. And so I'm very optimistic that the new era will be as successful as we were before. It will be different, but definitely good.

After these words, I would like to start with an overview about the group results. I think I think everybody saw the share price this morning. So I think some of you or some of the investors are disappointed, but definitely from my point of view, I was not disappointed about the results I think we are totally on track to reach our guidance for the year. And we stick to what we promised and we will not change it. So if you look into the revenues, we see a slight increase only in the revenues.

But on the other side -- and we are focusing on this every time this is based on higher margin revenues, we increased the higher margin revenues, and we decreased the lower margin revenues. And as a proof of concept, what you can see if you look into the gross profit, you see -- for the half year, there is an increase of gross profit by 3%. In the second quarter, there was an increase of 3%. So still the increase of gross profit is much higher than the increase of revenues and therefore, still the revenue development is important for us, but it is not as important as the margin what we generate -- and this is with 39.8%, still very high and higher than before.

Looking into the EBITDA, the adjusted EBITDA, it is EUR 257.4 million up to June for '25. And yes, there is some work to do to reach the guidance definitely. But if you -- because if you multiply the results at the end of end of June, if you multiply it by 2, then you have only 550 , this is obvious. But I think we -- what we did in the first half of the year, we did a lot of marketing spending in mobile, so EUR 8 million more than last year.

If we would just reduce it in the second half, then we are already in the guidance range. So therefore, I'm still optimistic that we will reach the guidance for the group. Moving to the mobile results. I think we stick here to what we published here in the earlier quarters. but we changed it a little bit on the next page because if you look into the revenues, yes, we see a slight decline of service revenues in the second quarter. for the first half, it is still growing. But I think it is misleading to follow these service revenues here because we focus our whole business on postpaid, on contract business.

And what is here part of these figures is also the prepaid and the business. And there, we generate low sometimes negative margins. Therefore, we cleaned here a little bit up. So with the lower revenues, and this is what you can see. If we move to gross profit, the lower revenues does not translate into lower gross profit. The gross profit is quite fine. We see the increase of 2.4% in the gross profit. And what you also see is that we have a lower ARPU. And this -- the whole market does have a lower ARPU. You can compare it with all the others.

But the difference here in our figures is even with the lower ARPU, it translates in a higher gross profit. So from my point of view, this is still a very healthy business, what we do have here, and therefore, I'm quite happy with these results.

If we move to the EBITDA to the adjusted EBITDA, we see the slight decrease in the second quarter and also in the second -- in the first half of the year. But I would like to repeat what I said on the group level, this is nearly EUR 8 million, what we spend for brand marketing in the first half with no relation to gross adds what we did. So if we could reduce it in the second half then we would be back to see an increase here. So it is based on this football advertising. And so what we did. So I think we cannot stop it totally in the second half, but we will definitely reduce it.

Moving to some KPIs from the mobile area. On the postpaid side, I think we -- it was a very, very successful quarter. So we could increase the number of postpaid subscribers by 77,000. If you compare it with the second quarter in '24, it's something like 11x or what we did 1 year ago. So I think, very successful in the second quarter.

On the other side, and this is the negative, what you are -- where we have to -- what is obvious on the other side, you see the ARPU, which is decreasing. I think after -- in the call, after the first quarter, we were still a little bit more optimistic to generate a stable option during the year. I think there is some truth and there are some real figures. So therefore, I think to be open here and to be fair, this will not be possible to have a stable ARPU. Therefore, we changed the guidance. But we are optimistic to find a stabilization on these new levels here. And I think this is what we are working on during the year.

Digital lifestyle, back on track. I think we had some problems with accessories in the first quarter. Now we are back on track. So the second quarter was quite fine, and therefore, we are happy.

Moving to TV. Yes. On the revenue side, I think it is still maybe a little bit misleading that we mix the media broadcast, the antenna TV business and the IPTV business, waipu.tv, because therefore, you do not see the good development clearer from the waipu.tv. What we plan to do is with starting into the year we plan to separate it to make it more transparent for you. So during this year, we will still report both parts together, but I will give you some ins what is based on the waipu.tv on the IPTV development.

So in the revenue area, you see an increase of 6.5%. And only from waipu, it is a revenue increase of 25%. I think this is important to know -- if you -- if we move to gross profit, here, we still have a margin of 60%, which remains as high as it was before.

Moving to the adjusted EBITDA here, we do see an increase in the first half of the year by nearly 14%. If we would only watch into waipu.tv, there, it is an increase. There is an all-in EBITDA in the -- of EUR 15 million in the first half -- EUR 15 million higher than last year. So I think all in, very successful, still here, definitely, it will not be the big topic to reach the reach the guidance as we do focus also in IPTV more on profitable growth here.

Moving to my last slide, which is the cash flow bridge. As usual, I do also give you some ideas of what I see up to the end of the year. Working capital, we see a need of working capital by nearly EUR 17 million. This is much lower than the figure what we saw last year. But I still stick to the guidance for the full year of EUR 45 million minus here from working capital because we have some provisions to be paid during second half of the year, and we are just in some discussions internally if we should do more hardware bundles, which would -- where we would need some working capital.

So still EUR 45 million from working capital. On the other hand, in Texas, we guided for the full year minus EUR 50 million. At the moment, we have EUR 22 million, and we have 1 big effect which we expect to see in the third quarter. It is a tax statement what we post payment where we do have to pay for the year, years 2015 to 2018, it's value-added tax, what we have to pay here. It was already part of our guidance for the full year -- so therefore, we still stick -- maybe it is EUR 55 million at the end of the year instead of the EUR 50 million, what we guided in.

But on the other side, at the moment, we only spent EUR 16.5 million. There is some phasing -- but typically, during the year, it is not possible to do all the projects, which are postponed. So therefore, definitely, I think last year, we -- for the full year, we had a CapEx of EUR 38 million. And so therefore, I think something around EUR 40 million looks possible for me. So I think we have even some room in our free cash flow guidance here.

So I'm totally happy with what we have. And on the other side, we have the EUR 13 million what we expect from the sale of some IP addresses. So I think I'm very comfortable here. And therefore, I would hand back now to the operator to start the Q&A, please.

[Operator Instructions] And the first question is from of Bernstein.

So I have 4 quick questions, please, if that's all right. The 1 -- the first 1 would be, Robin, you're saying you're sticking to targets and midterm targets one of the midterm targets was for waipu to get to 3.5 million subscribers by 2028. So simply, mathematically, that would require a quarterly customer intake of 125,000 per quarter.

Now given you have churn from O2D that we know that. But still, it's 0 now. would probably be fairly low in the second half. So how confident are you that you can rack up the IPO intake to that 125,000 per quarter? And what measures would you take to get there? And really related to this, why is it the right management decision to stick to this EUR 35 million EBITDA goal for waipu when the growth of subscribers has collapsed essentially right now?

Second one is what exactly is holding back the mobile ARPU. Could you talk a little bit more whether that's mix or that retention offers you're giving sort of below the line of offers of discounted ARPUs for contract extension or anything else really. And my last question to Ingo. The gross margin is up and has been now also in the first quarter. But there is a little bit the suspicion that this is a one-off on the new wholesale deals. So this momentum that you have in the margin on relatively weak service revenue growth might just go away next year if it is just reflecting the new wholesale deals you've closed for this year. So could you comment on the dynamics behind that margin increase?

This is Robin. Thanks for your question. Related to your first question with the ambition of waipu. So regardless of customer development until we assume that waipu.tv's EBITDA contribution of EUR 100 million remains a valid benchmark. So we stick to this. In terms of the customers, Yes, we see at the moment, we see the churn of the O2 users. But in the other market channels, we see a strong growth.

And so therefore, we are very confident about the outlook of why we believe that this is really a fantastic company, a great opportunity with a very strong team. So they -- they've built this from scratch, they deliver. And also, when you look at the product, it's really good the reviews are good. they outgrow the competition. So we are very happy about it and we're confident that we will reach our long-term EBITDA targets there.

So the second question was, so why we believe that the EUR 35 million is good. So why shouldn't it be less? Or why shouldn't it be more? So I always think that it's always good to show both, on the 1 hand, to have a company that is growing strongly. That's performing on the other hand, also showing that you can own money. And for our business, it's important to earn money. So therefore, we believe that this is the right mixture and we are confident that we are on a good track here. Your second question was related to the ARPU development.

When you look into the market, you can see that prices are going down, competition is tough everywhere in the market. I mean it's a pressure that all companies in the industry feel at the moment. So when we look at our own business, there are some components that influence it. On the one hand, we have our discount brands than we have. Our bundled business, if you see a shift in in mobile plans and bundled business. This also influences the ARPU. If you think about shifts between markets where you have, on the one hand, a brand where you have maybe more premium customers. On the other hand, you have brands that are where you have more price-sensitive customers as also influences this.

At the moment, that's the way how we steer it I think when you look into the broader market, it's the development here is reasonable. We believe it will be stabilized. There's some things that you can do to influence it also to shift budget performance base between brands. So we are looking into it. We are doing this, but we feel quite comfortable at the moment.

And I mean if you look at our subscriber growth, I think it's -- I mean, the market is tough to you see prices going down. But overall, we are still able to grow. We grew by 130,000 subscribers in the first half of the year and then we increased the revenue with it. So overall, the effect is still positive. And I already said that we see a lot of opportunities down the road, for example, improving our website, improving conversion rates and starting performance-based brand marketing. Again, in the past, there was also brand marketing, but I have a little bit different approach. So maybe not ago.So we -- in the past, we've been -- we did TV advertising 50 countries worldwide, at the same time. And we always did this where we're performance-based. So that means that we look at direct response, we produce platform where we were so that bring directly traffic to the website and traffic that converts into order and then we optimize on that like other companies optimize online marketing. So it's really performance-based.

We want to start it again. We want to scale it with a clear target to get more orders and to increase our unaided brand awareness in the mid- to long term. So -- but then there are also other opportunities like reducing the churn. Also, when you look at our strongest brand at the moment, it's freenet. So in the past, we did marketing in the mobile segment for freenet. But actually, when you type in the broader free net you end up on a freenet DE, which is news and website portal. So it's not the website where we sell mobile phones.

So there's also room for improvement. So there's a lot of stuff that we can do, so that will help us to further grow our subscribers, and there's a lot of room to -- or a lot of stuff that we can do to work on the ARPUs. So therefore, we are quite confident that.

And then the -- on this margin question, so there is a margin uplift this year and you're highlighting that the slow revenue growth is offset by strong gross margin growth. But is that not just a one-off on the new contracts.

We will back to the conference in Justin.

No, I just repeated the question because I couldn't hear anything. I think Ingo just about to answer that.

Yes. Okay. With your question about the gross margin, the first answer would be no, but definitely, the contract what we do have with the network help us to optimize our gross profit. This is clear. But the contracts that we do have has a long-running time from 5 to 10 years. So therefore, it's definitely not a one-off. .

And so -- and it already started to help in '24, and it's just ongoing in '25 and in the following years.

And the next question is from Polo Tang, UBS.

Firstly, apologies, I missed the earlier part of the call. But in terms of my questions, can you talk through what you're seeing in terms of competitive dynamics in terms of both the mobile and the TV market. And then specifically, in terms of waipu.tv net adds and the lack of growth in -- could you quantify the headwind from the O2 cancellations? Was it still around the minus 50, minus 60,000 run rate.

Was there anything exceptional to call out or unusual in terms of seasonality to call out for waipu.tv in Q2. And just to kind of follow up in terms of waipu.tv, prior commentary on net adds was for 300,000 net adds for 2025. So is this still achievable just given the lack of growth in Q2?

And my final question is just kind of clarification in terms of the guidance. because for H1, your EBITDA growth was about flat. So to hit the guidance, you need quite a notable acceleration in terms of H2. So excluding one-off gains from IP sales full year guidance implies 3.5% to 7% EBITDA growth. So could you just basically talk through the main drivers that are kind of leading to this acceleration? And what are the risks?

I know that you could have committed a lot about lower marketing costs in terms of mobile, but also implicitly waipu.tv, but can you reduce these costs in the second half, just given the competitive environment?

Yes. This is Robin. Thanks for your question. I will start with the competition in the mobile market. yes, there's competition. We see competition everywhere, like in all our marketing channels and also our competitive I think everybody at the moment has aggressive prices and is trying to get users. So there was a -- it's a dynamic market. So I think it has always been a competitive market at the moment, a lot of prefers true and it's challenging.

However, I think we find answers to this. And if you look at the that we drew 130,000 subscribers in the first half of the year. I think that's impressive. I think there will be -- also, there will be more growth potential in the future. so far, we are working on several things. I mentioned this earlier, and it will take some time, but the market is difficult. Yes, but we are growing and we see a lot of room to further grow. And maybe you can elaborate on waipu.

Yes. I think the biggest problem we -- I think the competitive environment in TV has not changed that much. It is still Magenta, who is the biggest competitor what we do have here. And you may have seen their figures in the morning. They are also slightly lower compared to the other quarters. So -- but there are no big changes.

I think in '24, there was some backwind from the leading cost in This helped definitely. So I think this push is not there in '25. But without the effect from Telefonica, we are still growing. So what we did in '24 was that we gain something like 60,000 to 70,000 gross adds with Telefonica. These gross adds are missing now definitely. Otherwise, we would show a good growth, not as big as last year, but a very, very good growth. So we are still fine. So no changes in the environment here. So it's not based on competition that we are worse. It is based on the loss of Telefonica.

And I think up to the end of the year, we hope that we cleared this and then starting in 2016, it will be easier to follow the growth what we have here. Moving to your question about the guidance. This is -- you were correct in your intro. This is something what I already tried to explain during the -- during my presentation. You are correct. At the moment, we have something like EUR 257 million.

If I double it for the whole year, linear, then it would be something like EUR 515 million. So this is below the guidance range. But on the 1 hand, we see the increase in customers. On the other hand, we will reduce the marketing spending Robin already described. that we will focus on performance marketing and that we spend less marketing on brand, because from the investments in brand marketing, and it's based in the naming. We do not see any performance.

This is what happened during the first half of the year. So we cannot reduce it to 0 because we have some contracts here which are still in place, but we will definitely reduce it very strongly. So I think subscriber base on the 1 hand, less marketing spend, which does not have any influence on performance. And then we have some optimizations. And you also see that we have the restructuring on the board level and that we are reduced here our personnel costs starting on the 1st of September.

So I think we have some -- we -- I think we will optimize ourselves during the second half. We have some positions here also on the cost side, what we can optimize. So all in, we still stick to the guidance. And even if you just double the result of half year, it is not that far away to reach the guidance range.

And the 300,000 net adds for waipu.tv for 2025?

I think there will be an increase of -- I think there will be what we say, a noticeable increase. I would expect from today's point of view 200,000 up to the end of the year. But because we expect a very strong fourth quarter, what we also saw in the other years.

So I think the first quarter I just do not want to disappoint anybody here, but the summer quarter for TV is difficult every year. But yes, I think we could also be -- this is linked to the question from Luis before. I think we are very, very good on the EBITDA side at the moment, and our offers are less aggressive than last year. So it is also possible to be slightly more aggressive here -- but we were very, let me call it, conservative in the first half.

So I think without any negative EBITDA effect, I think we could push it in the second half, and this would definitely happen. So I think something like 200,000 for the year still looks reasonable for.

And the next question comes from Josh Mills BNP Paribas Exane.

I had a couple, please. The first 1 on mobile. So you made the point that the market remains competitive, which I think all your competitors have done as well. on their conference call, Vodafone, you seem to be indicating they'll be willing to seed some share on the mobile front in order to encourage broader price rationality in the market. .

And historically, one of the ways that operators have tried to signal that and to deliver that kind of dynamic is by using third-party operators such as ourselves less. So I'd just be interested to hear if there's been any change in the kind of volumes we are being offered by any of the MNOs or any of the commission terms, which you're using?

And perhaps if they're now restricting some of the premium offers to their own channels and focusing more on the subfunds through you? That would be very helpful color.

Secondly, it kind of goes back to what Alrik was asking at the start of this call. But could you give us a bit more clarity on, firstly, what the overall O2 sub number was within the initially? And how many are left? And then at what point do you expect the headwind from O2 sub-churn to be fully out of the base would be helpful for our modeling purposes.

And finally, Robin, I think in your introductory side, you talked about a priority being to find platform users to replace the O2 brand. How advanced are you in those discussions say I'm not aware of any other big operator that group placed 2 on scale, but any detail you could give about alternatives would be great.

Yes. So Joshua, thanks for your questions. price rationality was the first question. And if the -- if I got it correct, if there is a push from the networks in the direct -- the shift to direct -- this is nothing what we can see. I think we are important for the networks as we were before.

And I think even in situations where the competition is a little bit higher, this is also the experience what we have from earlier times is that they use us, especially if there is more there's more aggressive aggressivity in the market. So I think we have good partnerships with them. We have good contracts with them. We do not see that they are more aggressive in our direction or if anything has changed. So I think this is all fine.

Price rationality I think what everybody is trying to do in the market is to avoid cannibalizing the base what we do have. So everybody is doing it with separate brands with -- and this is also us. And so still also the networks are using us because we are something like a separate brand for them.

And so is it rational what we see there, some of the offers, definitely no. But I think the market all in is still rational, and especially, again, in the discount part of the market, it is less the rationale than in the, let me say, classic part of the market. Then you ask for more clarity about Telefonica and the O2 subs based on waipu, I think we I think I'm repeating it, I'm sorry about it, but we are not allowed to give the full figures.

So the only thing what I can repeat now is that last year, in the first half of the year, we gained something like 130,000 customers under the O2 brand. And yes, as we do not have a partnership in this area now, we do not have these gross adds. This is -- I'm sorry about it, but this is the only figure that I can give you.

Yes. And this is Robin, to your third question, I'm not sure if I regard it, it would be great. Can you repeat it, please?

Yes, I think on Slide 4 of Slide #5, you talk about looking for platform users to replace Telefonica on the IPTV side. And my question was how advanced are those talks? And are there other players in the German market, which are big enough to make that replacement to test? Or do you need to find several partners to make up for the lower O2 numbers? .

So we don't talk about specific discussions with partners and what we are doing there. I mean we have partnerships with like the take providers, and we try our best to offer great products to our users to give a right range of products. So therefore, for us, it's important to have good relationships to them to get good products, yes.

But maybe 1 follow-up you're sure because I think -- I'm sorry, but I think it was a slight misunderstanding here on our side, I think you asked about the waipu platform. And so we lost Telefonica. And I think we definitely in talks with some other players in the market to replace it. But today, we are not in a situation to publish anything.

But I think it is still promising the talks. What we do have, and we do not only talk with 1 possible partner. So -- and -- but it's also something which would not -- which could not be realized in the next 2 or 3 months. If it works, and yes, we are hopeful here it would start at the beginning of '26 or something like this.

And the next question is from Deutsche Bank.

Apologies, but 1 more question on waipu and net Completely understood that you're not allowed to give us the exact figures. But nevertheless, waipu's customer base grew by 2,000 customers quarter-on-quarter. Could the reason be that more at customers left -- or is it -- was it about the same level of O2 customers leaving like in Q2 and only the new customer base growing slower than in the past.

Yes, it would be an easy answer for me to say yes. But I think I'm honest in these calls. So the reduction of gross adds from Telefonica, it is slightly higher but it is not significantly higher, the gross add figure, what we lose here. So it is still -- it is a lower figure than in the first quarter all in and from all in, but from Telefonica, I already said it is something like 130,000 in the first half. So it was more or less 50,000 in the first quarter and 80,000 in the second quarter.

So I think this is more or less the split of it.

50,000, 80,000, that is the number of customers leaving the platform or the number of customers you are missing they were coming on the platform last year.

This is the number of customers that we gained last year and what we have not gained this year. But then we would need to add the number of customers that are leaving the platform.

Something that I'm only allowed to tell you the gross figure.

Okay. Understood. Okay. Perfect. And then your guidance unchanged profitability to 1 unchanged, much appreciated while ARPU is lower and now expect it to be lower for the remainder of the year, we see you're increasing the number of your customers or the customer base -- but are you also focusing more on unbundled and unlimited tariff spend during the last 2 to 3 quarters? Or is it the name of the game still changing discount tariff customers.

No. It's the name of the game that we do both bundled and unbundled tariffs. We are just -- as we have some room in our working capital, we just discussing if we do more bundled tariffs in the second quarter, this would definitely help to stabilize or slightly increase the ARPU. But all in for the whole year, even with doing more bundles in the second half, we see a decrease in the ARPU.

Okay. Understood. And then I guess, marketing spend, you already talked about, and that includes TV and media where you said that a decision on the ordering spending will be taken during the summer rate? So I guess you already covered that your comments.

The next question is from Simon Steve Warwick Research.

Firstly, key focus areas you presented in that regard, I wonder where do you see the biggest lever for freenet's business on especially revenue and the cost side. And then we tied into that question would be time-wise where do you see the low-hanging fruits and also where do you see the most sustainable change -- positive change for the business? And then secondly, I saw that the energy stake in CECONOMY.

And obviously, you will get some liquidity out of that. Is there already a plan to deploy that cash? And would it, for example, the option to increase your currently running share buyback program?

This is Robin. Thanks for your questions. Maybe let me start with the so-called low-hanging fruits. I think it's obvious if you improve the conversion rates on your websites that it has a direct impact on your subscriber growth -- and since we have some brands, some websites where we do see potential, which are below market standard, I think this is something which maybe is a good opportunity for us. We are already working on this. We already improved on website take some time and so -- but we are with full focus working on this.

And those are, I think, opportunities that can maybe show impact in the next couple of months. Furthermore, we are shifting budgets from marketing channels or marketing campaigns that were not so performance based, so where we didn't or where we haven't seen the impact right away. So we take the money -- we put it into a performance-based channels. And also, we -- I mentioned this, we changed the way how we do brand marketing.

So what we don't do is spend money and to stuff where we don't see a direct impact. We'd rather start producing TV commercials that drive traffic immediately that drives sales immediately and then also have to build the brand awareness. And when we look into -- when we look at our brands, we have a strong aided and brand awareness. But if we compare freenet with our competitors, and in terms of unaided brand awareness, there's a lot of room for potential and there's a huge opportunity to get there, you need to do -- you need to do performance-based brand marketing -- we are preparing for this. We will test this shortly.

But this is much more cost efficient than what we have been doing in the last couple of months. So shifting budget, improving conversion rates shifting budgets to performance marketing channels. And then also in terms of churn, so we are looking into it. We are applying AI towards we try to better understand why we lose customers, yes. So I think there shouldn't be a reason what customers is a fantastic company. So we are working on this and try to reduce churn. I think we have really good opportunities here.

So this might be also something where we see impact in the near to midterm. Yes. And if you -- if we do our work here and work hard and move forward step by step, I think that's a chance to increase the revenues on the cost side. And we also cut costs. So we -- as I said, we stuff that doesn't pay in. Yes.

And in terms of your third question, the CECONOMY stake, yes. So we were approached. We signed a revocable we followed the recommendation of the management and the other shareholders because they are our partners. We have a very good partnership with them. So we support this -- and in terms of the money. So it's -- so we still don't have the money. So the management expect closing at the beginning of '26. So until then, it some time. And if this like accounts reality, then we will also inform you.

Okay. Maybe 2 follow-up questions. First 1 would be in regard to your brand marketing contracts, when would they expire easily how long do they run? And then would you expect direct cost savings when you reallocate to your performance marketing because you mentioned it's more cost efficient.

Yes. So we have commitments until next year. So it's also -- there's no way to get out of it. So we have to spend it. And -- but those brand market, it's like sponsorships, -- and it's -- yes, so we have contracts until, I think, until next year. I think there's also 1 point thing that is a little longer. But there besides those sponsorships, there was also market brand spend invested into, for example, TV campaigns.

So this was something that we also stopped at the beginning of June. And now we are optimizing it trying to produce better performing TV sports try to find better ways where we can do the advertising. And so this is also stuff that we shift.

Okay. And one, if I may, 1 follow-up in regard to CECONOMY. And your business relationship with will it be the same? Or do you foresee any changes there.

No, I don't foresee any changes. We have a multiyear contract. So we are happy about the partnership I think this has been lasting for 3 years now, very good relationships with them. And so it's, I would say, a win situation. And so therefore, I don't foresee any changes there.

So as we do not have any more questions, I thank you for the participation in the call today. I think Tim and team are available for further questions. Robert and me. Also available if you would like to contact us, I think our lines are basically open. So -- yes, have a good time. Have a good day, and thanks a lot.