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Hello, and welcome to the Proximus Q1 Results 2026. My name is Laura, and I will be your coordinator for today's event. Please note, this conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand you over to your host, Nancy Goossens, Investor Relations lead, to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Thank you, Laura. And so welcome from my side as well to the Proximus Q1 results webcast. We will start with a brief presentation followed by a Q&A session. Joining me today are the CEO, Stijn Bijnens; the Interim CFO, Nicolas Gaertner; the Global CEO, Seckin Arikan; and Jim Casteele, the Head of B2C and AI.

So let's begin today with today's highlights, and over to Stijn.

Also welcome from my side to our presentation of the 2026 first quarter results. As you have seen in our published report this morning, Proximus had a good start of the year, and I will take you through the main points, starting with our key financials. I will keep it short as Nicolas will take you through in a bit more detail later on.

So starting from the left on the slide, for the Domestic segment, we closed the first quarter with stable service revenues despite the intense competition and lower revenue from sports content. As a result of lower OpEx, the Domestic EBITDA grew by 1.9% for the first quarter.

For the Global segment, we managed to stabilize direct margin for the third quarter in a row, while year-on-year comparison remains still tough for the first quarter. Overall, this resulted in an EBITDA for Global of EUR 33 million, pretty much in line with what we anticipated. The lower Global EBITDA leads to lower group EBITDA down for the first quarter by 1.9%.

Our CapEx for the first quarter was EUR 261 million. And for free cash flow, we ended the first quarter with EUR 32 million in total. Excluding the proceeds from asset sales, the organic free cash flow was EUR 19 million, a strong improvement year-on-year.

Let's have a look now at the operational results. Despite the intense competition, the operational performance remained robust with mobile postpaid adding 17,000 cards and our Internet subscriber base growing by 10,000 lines. Our convergent customer base continued its steady growth by adding 14,000 residential customers in the first 3 months.

With our new Amplify strategy now in full execution, we are listing here some concrete and recent examples. In the B2B space, we managed Proximus NXT to be selected alongside other suppliers as sovereign cloud provider for the European institutions. In addition, we signed partnerships to support SMEs, making artificial intelligence accessible and immediately applicable for entrepreneurs.

As for our network, we proudly launched 5G stand-alone as first one on a commercial scale in Belgium. And we, of course, also continued our fiber rollout, and I'll discuss this on the next slide.

Regarding the intended network collaboration in Flanders, as you have seen in our recent press announcement, we signed now the full cooperation agreement with Wyre and Telenet. I'm convinced we now have a fair and balanced distribution of the value it will create for the operators, the citizens and society at large. The implementation of these agreements remain subject to final regulatory approval.

Commercially, we launched our new mobile kids offering, reinforcing our role as a digital partner for families. In addition, we increased the data volumes across our mobile subscriptions to address customer needs and to stay competitive in the market.

As a final point, I'm happy that after intense negotiations, we can announce an agreement with DAZN regarding the distribution of Belgium and international football.

So turning to the fiber deployment. Across Belgium, we had end of March, a total of nearly 2.7 million fiber homes, meaning a population coverage of just over 42%. The fiber network filling rate progressed well to 34%, up from 32% 1 year back. In terms of active fiber customers, we grew the base with another 45,000 over the first 3 months. As such, we are reaching 776,000 active fiber customers in total.

So this covers my introduction on the Domestic part. Before we go into the financials, I'll hand over to Seckin, our CEO, Global, to comment on Proximus Global.

Thank you, Stijn. At the Capital Markets Day, we elaborated on the strategy of Global. So let me give you some insights what concrete steps we are taking to transform the business of Global. I would like to focus on 3 areas today.

The first one is implementing a new operating model. We have created 2 business units and simplified organizational structure. On one side, we have Connect business unit and on the other side, we are combining Engage and Protect. Creating different business units will allow us to support the different characteristics of these businesses. It will allow us to go faster in execution and create more focus and value for our customers. We are also taking the opportunity to bring on board additional experienced leaders in Engage and Protect area.

Secondly, we are improving our go-to-market with a couple of specific actions. We have redone our customer segmentations, making sure that we spend more time with our larger customers while we manage the long-tail customers more efficiently.

We are busy defining our geographic priorities. It means which countries we plan to invest and grow and which countries we are going to reduce our investment. U.S. is an important market for us, and we are putting together an acceleration plan for U.S. business.

Lastly, we recently created mission-based teams to speed up the transformation of different activities, including AI, which we believe that is going to fuel our growth in the coming years. And finally, we are executing on our network API strategy, and we are very proud we onboarded our first customer, Aakash Educational Services on our newly launched platform. We also recently received MEFFY Mobile Evolution Award.

Now I will pass it on to Nicolas to take you through the financial results.

Thank you, Seckin. So let me start with Domestic revenue. Services revenue remained broadly stable on a pro forma basis, driven by continued solid growth of residential services revenue. Non-services revenue, however, was down by EUR 22 million due to lower IT hardware sales year-on-year with little impact on DM, and this explains why the total domestic revenue was down by 1.7% for the first quarter.

Now looking at the component parts, I'll start with B2C. Total B2C revenue was up plus 1.5% year-on-year, driven by the continued growth of customer services revenue despite the intense competitive landscape. Revenue from terminals was broadly stable year-on-year.

B2C customer services revenue grew by 2.3% year-on-year, including a plus 4.2% growth for convergent revenue. The ARPC continued to show a positive evolution, growing 0.9% year-on-year, including the January price indexation effect and the benefit of a continued increase in convergent customers and fiber upselling.

Turning now to B2B. The decrease in IT hardware revenue mentioned earlier is fully included in the B2B unit and was driven by an exceptionally high comparable base in Q1 of last year. This revenue is by nature more volatile but also less impactful on the margin. This decline had a material impact on the quarterly results for B2B. The business services revenue showed a broadly stable downward trend, down minus 2.3% year-on-year, so a little better than the minus 2.7% from the previous quarter.

Let's now take a closer look at that. IT services revenue were broadly stable in Q1. As indicated last quarter, we see some temporary business slowdown here, awaiting the implementation of some major contracts, which we won in 2025. On fixed data, B2B recorded a limited decrease of minus 1%. This resulted from a decline in traditional data connectivity services, partly offset by continued strong revenue growth from Internet services.

As for mobile services, despite the competitive intensity, the B2B unit maintains a very solid mobile base, only slightly down over the first quarter. The mobile revenue decline of minus 2.4% is mainly reflecting lower out-of-bundle revenue. And lastly, fixed voice is continuing its steady erosion in line with a declining customer base. In the meantime, value is managed through price adjustments on these products, resulting in a sustained positive ARPU trend.

Turning now to wholesale. We posted a revenue decline of minus 7.7% year-on-year, mainly due to the ongoing erosion of interconnect revenue with no margin impact. Wholesale services revenue was down minus 2.7% related to lower roaming traffic and lower revenue from our fiber JVs, in particular, Unifiber.

Moving to Domestic EBITDA. With OpEx lower year-on-year and a stable direct margin, the domestic EBITDA was up by 1.9% for the first quarter. OpEx showed a favorable year-on-year evolution, down by minus 1.7%. This was driven by continued headcount declines, but also the benefit of lower real estate tax provisions, mainly related to the HQ divestiture completed last year. This closes the Domestic part.

Turning now to Global. Global's comparable base from 2025 remained challenging as much of the market headwinds only took effect in a gradual way as of Q2 of last year. This is reflected in the year-on-year decrease for DM, down by 10.9% on constant currency. That being said, we managed to stabilize direct margin for the third quarter in a row. Proximus Global OpEx landed at EUR 70 million in Q1, down from the previous year, but increasing quarter-on-quarter. This increase is partly driven by some initial investments in targeted growth initiatives to support the turnaround of Global. These investments are expected to further increase over the coming quarters.

Turning to the group CapEx. Q1 CapEx amounted to EUR 261 million, down minus 3.2% year-on-year. The decline is primarily due to lower fiber build CapEx on our own build in the dense areas and mobile CapEx as the network sharing deployment is coming to an end.

And this brings me to the free cash flow for the first quarter of the year. As illustrated on the graph, the organic free cash flow was EUR 19 million, strongly improving year-on-year in Q1, driven by lower cash CapEx, lower working capital needs and lower interest payments.

So to conclude, we had a good start to the year, and we are reiterating our guidance on all metrics. And with that, let me hand it over back to the operator to open the line for your questions.

[Operator Instructions] We have a question from Dhruva Shah from UBS.

I have 3, please. First is just on the residential side of things and competitive dynamics. Domestic KPIs remain solid here. So can you just walk us through the competitive landscape and what you're seeing in both fixed and mobile?

Second is on B2B. You called out a few things. So you're still seeing legacy voice declines. You called out the tough competition in the mobile B2B market, but also you've spoken about the new contract as a sovereign cloud provider. So can you talk us through specifically what's happening in the mobile market and why ARPUs are under pressure, who's driving the competition? But also if you can talk us through the further upside you see in areas like cloud.

And then the final question I have is on fiber. I won't ask about the cooperation with Telenet as I'm assuming there's no new news there. But on the pace of fiber rollout, it's almost halved quarter-on-quarter. So my understanding is that there's typically some seasonality where Q1 is slower than Q4. But I think with Unifiber, they were also awaiting new funding. So I understand that you've issued them a loan or a convertible, but is there a chance you could consolidate Unifiber like you did with Fiberklaar and take more control of the fiber rollout in Wallonia?

So I'm going to take the first question, Jim speaking here on competitive dynamics in residential. So if I start with mobile, I would say that there's a very intensive competitive environment, especially on the low end of the market, we have seen end of last year and in Q1 this year, very intense activities on the B brand proposing sometimes lifetime promotions on already assertive offerings. So quite intense and happy to see that we've been able to continue to grow with 19,000 net adds on mobile with our 3 brands in such an intense environment.

I would say on Internet and packs, also intense, but a bit more mitigated. I think you've seen also the recent announcements of Telenet and BASE where you see that entry price points are being pushed up a little bit, probably to support also inflation elements in the BASE. But so I think there, what we have done also on our side is making sure that the entry price points stay high enough to keep value in the market and that we execute this well with our 3 brands as well.

As you might have known, we have also done in January, again, a price increase on the Proximus brand, which has landed well again this year as well. So that continues to show that the brand has pricing power and that we're able to valorize the premiumness that we bring in the market. So I would say mobile market stays very intense competition-wise. On Internet and packs, it's the standard competition, no real increase, but stays very intense as well. So that's a bit, I would say, the takeaway on the residential market.

Okay. Thank you, Jim. Stijn here. I'll take the other questions. Regarding B2B at the Capital Markets Day, we explained that the transformation of B2B is one of the jobs to be done here at Proximus Domestic because of still we need to digest some traditional telco business like voice, but also mobile ARPU. We see a more competitive landscape now also in B2B, but that's anticipated in the forecast. Of course, we see opportunities on cloud. There is increased interest around sovereign cloud given the geopolitical instability, I would say, and we're focusing on that. We had our first wins. But of course, from order intake to revenue recognition, it will take some time, but we do believe we're on the right path that can be the trusted digital infrastructure platform in Belgium. And of course, there are also growth opportunities within governmental institutions.

Regarding the fiber, there's no news on Telenet, Wyre. So we're all waiting regulatory approval, hopefully soon. And regarding the fiber build, Q1 is typically a lower quarter in terms of homes passed. Actually, Q4 is always the best quarter because everybody wants to reach the KPIs at the build side. And the decrease in Q1 compared to Q1 2025 is also partly due to the fact that our rollout in the dense area is coming down. We're almost done at the dense area. So that also explains it apart from the kind of seasonality in the build.

And then your final question around Unifiber. Of course, Unifiber, we started the venture in '21 when interest rates were different and appetite by banks was different. So we see that it's -- there's higher interest rates in the business plan going forward and that appetite from banks to fiber. And as a result, there is a higher equity need. That's why we also temporarily gave a convertible bond. And as a result of the equity need that we anticipated in the plan we presented at the Capital Markets Day, we are having discussions with our JV partners going forward.

And regarding consolidation, as you know, the consolidation is, in any case, foreseen to happen in 2031. Should there be a good opportunity that presents itself before, of course, we will obviously evaluate this in terms of value creation for Proximus.

We have a question from David Vagman from ING.

Three questions from my side. So first, and sorry to come back on the cooperation agreement process. So you've now signed this long-form agreement and the BCA said it took note. What does it practically mean? What has happened, if you can comment? So did you change something in the long form compared to the memorandum of understanding or compared to the market test, what was published then that is leading to a breakthrough or you didn't change anything. So that's my first question.

Then secondly, if it's possible to give us a formal time line for Wallonia also of the fiber cooperation agreement? And then my third question is on the rollout of Digi. They've been pushing to access the fiber duct of Proximus. Do you see them using your fiber duct for their own fiber rollout in the high-dense areas? Or do you think that's -- I mean, what is your view here?

Well, first, on the long form, as the name says, it's a long form. It's a big document. And I think the multiparty complex discussions, there are a lot of items to discuss also value items. So along the process, we've continued interaction between the operators, the competition authorities back and forth to create a fair distribution of the value. So the fact that we signed the long form end of April was that we feel comfortable and also the other side that we've now find the final distribution of value. It's very complex on a lot of matters. It has to do with timing. It has to do with commitments. It has to do with customer connects. There are a lot of customer workflows that need to -- customer onboarding workflows that need to be discussed. So in our opinion, we're finally there.

The time line, typically, Wallonia is 3 months behind the North. So we keep on that time line to do that. Regarding duct access, there are specific regulations and the regulator -- and we're, of course, in discussion with the regulator on the terms of access going forward that it's one element in the complex negotiations. There is specific regulations. And of course, that once everything is finalized, we will also disclose these terms.

Okay. And maybe a very quick follow-up on this as you're saying there is a regulation. So you're saying that there is a regulation. So do you expect the regulation to be enough? Or do you expect some changes to be needed?

Well, there is European regulation, and you have, on the one hand, the telecom regulator, but on the other hand, the competition authority regulator. And of course, as part of the whole fiber collaboration, we will get to a final regulation. There's still interpretation possible. So compare a little bit as what happened in the Netherlands that finally the competition authority created legal stability by making a decision. So it's very complex, these regulations, but one of the outcomes of regulatory approval would be a clear framework on duct access.

We have a question from Michiel Declercq from KBC Securities.

My first one would be on the domestic EBITDA growth of plus 1.9%, which was quite strong. I understand that this was, of course, partially driven by a lower tax provision for the HQ. I'm just wondering if you could give us some sense or quantify what the impact of this was? And what elements we should take into account for the next quarters and the phasing of the growth given that you guide for a stable EBITDA for the full year. So that would imply a decline for the other quarters. Just wondering what we should take into account there?

Then my second question would be also on the B2B. So you mentioned a tough competition. Of course, IT is a bit slower now, stable. I recall from the Capital Markets Day, you expect this B2B segment also to grow around 1% over time. I assume this will predominantly be driven by the IT segment. I'm just wondering, you highlighted some of the big contracts that were signed last year, but when should we expect to see a bit of conversion of that? Or how long is the time line for that approximately? Is that still something to be expected by the end of this year? Or will that be more in 2027? So any color on that would be helpful.

So Michiel, thank you for the questions. Let me take both. So on the first one, on your question on domestic EBITDA, indeed, we landed Q1 with 1.9% growth of our domestic EBITDA. DM, as you'll have seen, was broadly stable year-on-year. And so a lot of that growth indeed came from OpEx being under control. So a couple of things on OpEx. The first thing is our efficiency program continues to deliver strong OpEx savings. If you look at our workforce in particular, we took our internal workforce down by 2% over the quarter year-on-year, which is very much in line with some of the plans we shared at the CMD.

Now on top of that, you rightly pointed out that we did get some tailwinds for real estate tax provision. Maybe to say a few words about that. They're linked to the sale of our HQ last year. And so as we do every year in Q1 of last year, we provisioned for the full year for the tax -- real estate taxes related to these buildings. We then sold them, as you know, in Q2. And so we had to reverse part of that provision in Q2. So what you should expect this year is obviously a pretty material tailwind in Q1 as we no longer have to book this, right? We have a genuine saving going forward from this. But we should expect a bit of a headwind in Q2 as we reverse some of that provision because again, we own the buildings for 4 months last year, right? So that's a little bit the nature of that reversal.

In terms of scale, our OpEx, as you saw, was down by about EUR 8 million year-on-year. So had it not been for this tailwind, we would have been broadly stable year-on-year. So that's broadly in line with what we've shown in other quarters.

In terms of your -- the second part of your question, how should we think about the rest of the year, especially in light of our guidance being broadly stable for EBITDA. So as I mentioned, one, you should expect a reversal of that -- part of that provision in Q2. So that's going to be a bit of a headwind for us in Q2. And you've also seen that based on some of the [ Bureau plan forecast ] in Belgium here, we expect another round of salary indexations in September. So that's probably going to be another bit of a headwind for us in the second half of the year.

So I wouldn't think about this minus 1.7% OpEx as being the new normal. We do expect a bit of a few reversals in the coming quarters. But overall, obviously, we're confident with our guidance of broadly stable EBITDA for the year. Hopefully, that answers your first question.

On the second one, the B2B and when we should start seeing the impact of some of those larger deals come online to some extent in Q2, but the bulk of the start of revenue generation from both of these material deals will come in the second half of the year. So at that point, we should expect to start seeing some changes to our IT services trajectory. So hopefully, that answers your questions.

[Operator Instructions] We have a question from Roshan Ranjit from Deutsche Bank.

I actually have just one question, please, and it's around the consumer business. So we saw a pickup in the residential customer service growth. You mentioned the price increase. My question is this morning's announcement where we will see the return of the Jupiler League, sorry, from August. How much of a boost do you think that will be to your ARPU? You cited the nonrenewal has been a bit of a drag. So what uplift could we see in the second half of the year to those consumer trends?

So Roshan, thank you for the questions. So indeed, very happy that we have been able to sign the deal with DAZN for the Belgian football. Since July last year, we were giving customers a discount on our sports package to compensate the fact that they were not having access to the Jupiler Pro League. I would say on the overall customer service revenue of Proximus, this is the B2C activities. This is, I would say, a minor impact on the revenues. It's anyway already foreseen in our forecast for the coming year. So we assumed that we would have sports back in summer, which is actually the case. So if you look at the guidance that we gave on domestic revenues and EBITDA, you can assume that it's already embedded in that guidance because we took the assumption that we were going to be able to sign that contract and the conditions at which we've been able to sign are exactly the ones that we have in mind. And so we're really happy that we now can offer the Pro League football without losing money in that sports activity. I hope it answers your question.

Yes. That's very good. I mean if I may just a quick follow-up, sorry. You said that you embedded it into your kind of expectations at the time, I think, the CMD. I mean, I guess the negotiations went accordingly. I mean it seems that DAZN was pushing hard on the renewal and on the fee. Was it just a case of meeting somewhere in the middle on the negotiations or anything else that you can say there?

No, I think my feeling is that, of course, at the end of the current season approached, I think everybody wanted to give visibility to their customers for the next season. And so I think that's what has been a bit of a catalyst to be able to close the deals. But as I said, and then we have been saying that from the start, we really wanted to have a deal that was commercially viable on our side, and I'm really happy that we have been able to find a common ground on that. And indeed, as of now, we can sell Belgian football without losing money. So that has been the ambition from the start, and I'm happy that we've been able to get there.

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions. So I will hand back to your host to conclude today's conference.

Thank you all for joining us today, and thank you for your questions. As usual, if there would be any follow-up questions, you can reach out to the Investor Relations team. Thank you again, and have a nice afternoon. Bye.

Thank you for joining today's call. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, everyone, both here in Brussels in the room with us and all people watching us online. Welcome to the Proximus Group Capital Markets Day. The agenda of today includes several presentations by the members of the management committee. We will be covering both the domestic and the global segment, and we foresee a small break in between those 2. At the conclusion of the presentations, we will open the room here for the Q&A. So please hold on to your questions until that moment.

And I think with that, I can hand over to our first presenter, Stijn Bijnens, the CEO.

Well, a warm welcome to all of you. I'm now 6 months into the job as Group CEO. And for me, it's a privilege to present our like 5-year plan that I've built together with this incredible team here also sitting in the front row and that you will meet today.

Let me start with giving a broader overview of the Proximus Group, and then we will go further in detail. As most of you know, the Proximus Group is a combination of 2 businesses, each operating in different markets and also having different challenges.

First, Proximus Domestic, where we have a leading telco position in the Benelux in B2C with strong brands, Proximus Mobile Vikings, Scarlet, but also Tango in Luxembourg. And in B2B, we address both telco and IT. And of course, we also have a wholesale division.

Next to that, Proximus Global helps customers connect, protect and engage digitally through 3 strong brands, Pick, Telesign and Route Mobile and Proximus Global represents about 10% of our group EBITDA. Domestically, we're in great shape. From a network or leading network, we cover more than 40% fiber coverage in the street at the moment. And from a 5G perspective, indoor, we're over 90%. We're going to 97% this year and 99% in '27, and Geert will passionately talk about his fantastic network later today.

We're also strong in NPS, definitely in B2C, we have very strong NPS numbers. And also in B2B, I still think we can do better in B2B, but I'll come back to that later during the talks. And from a market share perspective, although a lot of competition, we were able to maintain our market share, sometimes improve a little bit over the last 3 years. Both in broadband Internet, TV, although it's a declining market, we were able to gain market share and postpaid stayed stable.

So these foundations have enabled us to grow the number of customers in Internet. We're still growing mainly also driven by our early mover advantage in fiber. Postpaid, we've been growing over 100,000 net adds over '25. And also in convergence, you all know that bundles are very popular in the Belgian market. And this brought us to services revenues. In '25, we grew 0.4%, despite the impact of the deconsolidation of B-Mobile and the loss of the football contract, we were still able to grow our services revenue.

OpEx stabilized, and I'm also very pleased with the Q4 OpEx evolution, and we had strong EBITDA growth of almost 2%. Proximus Global, as I said, unites the strength of Picks, Telesign and Route Mobile to elevate digital communications. Our new Proximus CEO, Seckin, here in front of me, will tell you more just after lunch for the future direction of Global. But as most of you know, Global is facing some headwinds and integration challenges, declining voice and P2P voice, SMS, but also international onetime passwords that were traditionally done through SMS are moving to cheaper omnichannels like e-mail.

And we had some integration issues, mainly at the go-to-market and delaying some go-to-market synergies. Since my arrival over summer, we reset Global to get it back on track on a positive track. So we hired a wonderful guy from the industry. We reviewed the guidance and outlook. And since the new outlook, we also delivered upon that. We took a noncash impairment in Q4 -- and we are creating optionalities for future value creation, but you will hear more around that.

So my first contact with you was on the Q3 results, and we gave an updated guidance, and I can proudly say that we hit on all guidance metrics and particularly in the organic free cash flow, we were able to overperform with about EUR 30 million of organic free cash flow.

Looking forward, I think the next 5 years, it will all be about execution. I like to talk about the jobs to be done. And basically, we have 4 jobs to be done, and I want to take you through them, 3 domestically and 1 at the level of global. First one, sustain our Telco leadership and grow IT. We deliver on nationwide gigabit access for everybody domestically and drive efficiency through simplification.

And global needs to focus on returning back to growth. And by doing so, that will create optionality for future value creation. So the first one to sustain Telco leadership and profitably grow IT, we have clear priorities across residential and business by focusing on staying the reference operator for Telco services, increasing our NPS and grow revenues going forward. So this leads to a financial ambition to keep domestic EBITDA stable between '25 and '28.

The second job to be done is deliver nationwide gigabit access in the long term, and that's really our commitment. This view as well as you see on the map as well as all further communication today are assuming we land the collaboration deals in the North and the South, and Geert will tell that picture in more detail. The target of getting to this nationwide gigabit access map of 35 is a combination of rollout of fiber and smart collaboration deals. And this approach helps us rationalize our rollout of CapEx, optimizing market share, filling rate and realizing, of course, savings.

There will be the third job to be done is all about efficiency, and there will be a strong focus on simplifying operations. Simplifying starts basically with simplifying the organizations. We've already taken some steps, and we're taking further steps mainly in the domestic B2B area to further simplify our structure. But being in the company for 6 months, I was already surprised how many automations and how many real AI cases are already implemented within Proximus, just not proof of concept. They're really operationally active, creating measurable results like reduced customer contacts, thanks to Proximus Assistant.

In '25, it was minus 12% by better quality of devices, certified WiFi installation, the Proximus Plus app. We push for self-installation where technically feasible. So the self-installed increased 78% in '25. And we avoid back-office tasks by better tooling in the back end and better training of the people who are working there.

On the right-hand side, AI is also an accelerator for workload reduction. Proximus AI Assistant processes 100% of residential customers. And already today, about 20% of these cases are fully resolved end-to-end by AI. Also at the network level, when AI can predict a network incident before it occurs, it is about 50% cost reduction in '25, about 15% of all issues were already automatically predicted by AI and our target in '26 is about 20%.

And of course, within Proximus, many of our people, especially in the front line of staff, rely on our AI assistant to help resolving questions. And like in '25, over 1.4 million questions were resolved automatically by our AI tooling in active and we're improving every day.

In the coming 5 years, we will translate these workload efficiencies into reduction of FTE. And here are the number at the level of the SA. We also have affiliates. We all know that flexibility in affiliates is higher. So I'll mainly talk about what we're going to do at the level of SA. It's the mother company, the historic Belgian Telco entity. We're current with about a little less than 8,000 employees. So we will make smart use of retirements and only replace 1 into 3 levers. So it's a simple algorithm for the business for every 3 people that leave, we hire 1 new.

And this allows us to do avoid significant transformation cost. It will be done step by step. So we're also not announcing a social plan. We will just do it according to this algorithm using the specific age pyramid. And of course, the most important thing is about reskilling and upskilling. AI will change the way we work the next 5 years, not only at Proximus. And it's all about reskilling and upskilling. So we will have a strong program and emphasis on that.

And I think it's kind of the most important thing to realize these numbers going forward is. But of course, AI also amplifies and makes our people stronger in doing that. You will learn later today that you have to look at Proximus kind of in a 10-year window. And this is also the view of the -- of our specific age pyramid of the company.

So the first 5 years, we will have 800 people at the level of the SR who will go on their very deserved retirement. But after 30, between 31 and 35, we will have another 1,400 people that will go on retirement. So bringing us supplementary optionality to reduce internal workforce cost in a nondisruptive and cost-effective way. Our 3 jobs to be done domestically are translated into a new strategic framework. We call it Amplify. You know an amplifier in the music industry, basically with less input, you can create more output. That's what the plan is. Fewer people, fewer CapEx, more customers, more customer satisfaction, more free cash flow.

So we have the plan with 3 focus areas with 6 pillars. We amplify our customers by doubling down on our strength in residential and profitably grow enterprise and public markets. We amplify our infrastructure by keeping the best fixed and mobile network and -- but also building sovereign and resilient digital infrastructure and we'll amplify our future by reimagining the way we work, but also by delivering edge compute.

So the sixth pillar and I can talk hours about that passionately, but Nancy didn't give me the time slot. It's all about edge compute. Our network will become your computer. So AI will now become physical, robotics and AI will get distributed.

I don't think all AI workloads will be central. In the physical AI world, these workloads will move closer to the action, and that means edge compute. And we really, I think all large telcos own the real estate to serve distributed AI going forward.

Finally, global, the fourth job to be done. We want to focus on realigning the portfolio with market segments; and secondly, improve the go-to-market execution. And we are confident that by accomplishing this, -- we will get back to growth and back to growth also helps creating optionality for future value crystallization. Sachin will present you this strategy. It's a different strategy. It's called Elevate, but you will hear that just after lunch. To conclude, our group embarks on a 2-stage growth path. I talked about a 10-year window.

The first stage by 2030, we will bring our organic cash flow to around EUR 400 million, mainly driven by controlled CapEx decline and our own fiber rollout matures, of course.

Beyond 2030, there are 3 key elements that will support further free cash flow growth. a substantial increase in retirements, as I explained, a significant drop in customer CapEx because you have the build phase till 2030. You still need to do the customer connect, the drop cables, but that will also slow down in the second phase. But also the copper phaseout by '35 will bring structural OpEx and CapEx savings. This is kind of the picture we want to present today. You will hear much more detail, and I'm happy to introduce to Jim to talk about B2C.

Good morning, everybody. So I'm Jim Casteele. I'm leading the B2C segment at Proximus, and I'm really happy to explain to you how we're going to continue to grow by sustainably differentiating as part of our Amplify strategy.

So no surprise, of course, if I say to you that the Belgian telecom market is a mature market. We continue to see some growth opportunities volume-wise on Internet and mobile postpaid, while at the same time, our digital TV and fixed voice volume business is declining. This has allowed on the value side for the market, a growing market until 2024. In 2025, with the arrival of the fourth entrant, which has put pressure on mobile market value, we have seen a stabilization of the total market value in residential in Belgium as a result of that.

So as mentioned, DG, the fourth entrant arrived in Belgium in December 2024, early 2025. And of course, at the Proximus Group, we were ready for that arrival, and we executed on our strategy, which in the firsthand consisted in making sure that we adapted the portfolios of our 3 brands in the right way. So we also wanted to make sure that we didn't react too fast. So we wanted to react as we always do, managing both volume and value at the same time. So Scarlet and Mola Vikings were the first brands to react. But at the same time, we also decided for Scarlet, which is our low-cost challenger brand.

We didn't want to change the price points of that brand too fast. So we stuck to our EUR 8 entry price point, even though competition was present with more aggressive price points. Next to that, of course, we also wanted to make sure that our customers stay satisfied with everything that we bring to them. So we put a lot of focus on loyalty, on customer experience and on the retention activities. And then finally, we also made targeted actions, both in sales and in marketing to make sure that we sustained the volume growth in the market. So as a result of that, we have seen, however, that customers have become more price sensitive. And so we do see also a shift in our A, B brand mix in our customer base.

The good news is that we haven't seen a real increase in churn. So it's more in the acquisition dynamics that you see that customers are now more choosing for B brands rather than A brands. And this has resulted in a change in our customer base on mobile postpaid of about 2% points people moving from the Proximus premium brand to our challenger brands, Scarlet and Mobile Vikings.

Now in this competitive market, I'm really happy that we have been able to continue to grow also in '25, which was visible in the quarterly results that we presented this morning. If you look at it over a longer period over the last 3 years, you can see that we have been able to grow our Internet customer base with about 12% over the period, which is a CAGR of 3%, which is above market growth, which was a CAGR of about 1%, as you saw earlier.

And also on mobile postpaid, we have been able to grow our base with 15% over the last years, which is a CAGR of 5%, which is also above market growth where the CAGR was about 3% -- thanks to this growth of our customer base, we have also been able to continue to grow our services revenue with a CAGR of 4% over the period, which, again, if you think about what you saw earlier, is above market. So that means that we have been able to grow faster on the market, both on volume and on value by executing in the right way our multi-brand strategy.

At the same time, also, of course, price increases continue to stay an important element in our value management approach. And also there, I'm happy to say that the price increase that we did in January '26 has again landed well with our customers despite the increased price sensitivity. We haven't seen a significant increase in churn, as you can see on the slide here as well.

Now of course, fiber plays an important role in driving this commercial success. As you can see here, we have tripled our fiber customers over the period to about 730,000 fiber customers, residential and business. Even more importantly for me is that we have also been able to grow the filling rate of our fiber network with 10% from 23% end of 2022 to 33% end of 2025, which shows that we are able to fill the fiber network faster than here is deploying new fiber plugs because you know that we are still deploying fiber in a lot of the country. And so we're able to fill it faster than we are rolling out new fiber plugs. And of course, being able to do that is largely also thanks to the fact that we migrate 70% of our copper customers to fiber the first year when fiber becomes commercially available.

Next to that, fiber also plays an important role when it comes to acquisition. We do see a big uplift in market share acquisition in the zones where we have fiber available. And between '22 and '25, fiber acquisition has now a 26% points higher share in our acquisition volumes versus '22. And we also see that we have customers that are more satisfied because, of course, fiber is a much better technology than copper. And so when we compare like-for-like customers on copper and fiber, we have 20% less churn. Next to those volume drivers, we also see that fiber drives a lot of value.

We have also on fiber customers a EUR 5 ARPC increase versus our copper customers. And so bringing this all together means that we have tripled our fiber park over the period, but we have quadrupled the contribution of fiber in our revenues as well. Next to fiber, of course, also our multi-brand strategy plays an important role in driving these results. As Tien already mentioned before, we have on the Belgian market 3 very strong brands: Proximus, which is our premium trusted brand, which will always bring the best connectivity with an NPS of 18 on our convergent customers. Scarlet, which is our low-cost challenger brand focused on no-frills solutions for our customers with an NPS of 20, stable in '25, which is also quite strong in a year where a new entrant, which was price aggressive has arrived on the market.

And then Mobile Vikings, which is our digital challenger brand focused on digital natives, mainly offering Internet and mobile, which has an NPS of 46, which is the best NPS of telco in Belgium. These 3 brands are also well positioned to make sure that every brand covers a part of the territory for our customers. And as you can see in the services revenue mix, Proximus as a premium brand still contributes to the majority of our services revenues and then Scarlet and Mobile Vikings taking the rest of the mix.

Now looking ahead, of course, we want to continue to grow on our revenue side, and we will do that by making sure that we are the preferred partner for every generation, empowering our customers to seize any digital opportunity through a best-in-class brand portfolio. And we will continue to build that best-in-class brand portfolio by working on 4 priorities. The first priority is making sure that we are close to our customers. The second priority is continuing to lead in connectivity. The third priority is emotionally connecting with our customers through our digital platforms. And then the last priority is, of course, continuing to make sure that we cover all the price points in the market. I'm now going to zoom into each of these priorities to give you a bit of more feeling of how we are going to execute on that coming forward.

So the first priority, customer intimacy, being close to our customers. Of course, we will make sure that we deliver great customer experiences by leveraging all the capabilities that AI and digital brings. Tan already referred to that as well. But we will also augment these experiences with premium human interactions where they create value. If you look today, customers are very satisfied with our technician interventions and with our salespeople, more than 90% customer satisfaction when they interact with our technicians or our salespeople in the shop, but also our chatbot gets an 80% satisfaction rate.

As part of our amplify priorities to be close to our customers, we want to be even more hyper-personalized in all the marketing campaigns that we do so that we are relevant to our customers, that our customers feel that we understand their needs. And at the same time, of course, we know that it will also improve the performance of the campaigns. Next to that, we want to increase the customer experience on the different interactions that we have by leveraging on AI tools and also proactively solving issues.

For instance, in sales, we are helping our salespeople to create better service to our customers by using AI in training and coaching. We are also, as Ken already mentioned, helping our call center agents to answer faster questions to our customers by using Gen AI on the knowledge base. And we're proactively solving issues. He will come back on that later as well to avoid that customers actually face an issue. But as mentioned, we also want to use human interactions to create additional value in interactions that are valuable for our customers.

For instance, our technicians, when they visit customers at home for the Proximus brand, we do additional effort to show the premiumness of the brand by doing WiFi checks at different locations in the home, but also by explaining the products that we have by installing the Proximus B application on the smartphone of our customers. And we're also revamping our retail stores so that they also can showcase the premium feeling of the brand to our customers. Our second priority, of course, is to continue to lead in connectivity, building on what we have already today, the best 5G and fiber networks.

Today, we already have 31% of our customers on fiber, Internet customers on fiber, and we see that those customers have a much higher satisfaction. The NPS score of a fiber customer versus a copper customer is 19 points higher. Ger has also been deploying 5G. So today, we have a 90% fiber -- sorry, indoor coverage on 5G. So going forward, in our amplify priority, of course, that leadership in connectivity is crucial for the premiumness of the Proximus brand. So we're going to continue to invest in these networks to make sure that we continue to offer the best fiber and 5G experience to our customers.

At the same time, we also want to make sure that the Proximus brand continues to lead in terms of premiumness linked to connectivity on the brand itself. And we know that other operators are going to start to deploy fiber as well. So we're going to keep that brand leadership by continuing to innovate with new services that are relevant for our customers. For instance, we were the first operator in Belgium to launch WiFi 7 tri-band technologies, which helps to create a premium indoor experience for our customers as well.

Next to leading in connectivity itself, we also know that customers are more and more confronted with cyber risks. And so we also want to help our residential customers to be able to trust the digital world, not only when it comes to cybersecurity, but also making sure that people can enjoy everything that is possible on the digital world in a peace of mind, both children and parents. So also there, we're going to continue to work on so that we're not only leading with the best connectivity, but also with connectivity that you can trust.

Then the third priority in building that best-in-class brand portfolio is emotionally connecting with our customers through our digital platforms and our loyalty programs. Today, we have already 88% satisfaction on our Pickx TV application. We have 21% of our Proximus customers that are actively engaging on our loyalty program, and we have 1 million users on the Proximus Plus application.

Tomorrow, as part of our Amplify priorities, we all know that the digital TV world is in transformation. So we want to make sure that we're not only delivering the best experience for people that want to watch linear TV together with streaming applications, but we also want to be relevant for customers that are only doing streaming applications. So you're going to see us moving there as well.

Proximus Plus will become also the trusted channel for all the communications that you do with Proximus. I mentioned just before that more and more consumers are concerned with cyber threats and phishing calls that they get. So we're going to position Proximus as a channel that you can trust for whatever communication you have with us as a brand. And then last, of course, we were going to continue to grow the loyalty program so that we're not only present in the daily life of our customers in the living room on the smartphone, but also in physical experiences that our customers can get.

And then the last fourth building block in building our best-in-class brand portfolio is, of course, making sure that we cover all the price points in the market. It's actually here where we bring everything together and where we define the value for money of each brand. Today, as I already mentioned before, with Scarlet, we have an EUR 8 entry price point on mobile. Mobile Vikings has launched a EUR 25 unlimited mobile data plan with additional 5G tiering to create additional value. And we have today 65% of our revenues through our convergent customers.

As part of our priorities for Amplify, of course, in a market where a new entrant comes and where we see an increased traction on the B brands, we want to further strengthen the premiumness of the Proximus brand. We're going to do that by building on the 3 priorities I explained before and making sure that in the right execution of those priorities, customers feel that the Proximus brand has a premiumness and has value for money on the price points that we have on that brand.

And of course, we're going to be ready to act to any market changes that we see by executing on the multi-brand toolbox, just like we have been doing so far. Bringing this all together, we have the ambition to continue to grow in an intense competitive environment, making sure that we further grow the NPS of our brands, making sure that we maintain the solid market shares that we have today in the market so that we can continue to grow our services revenue. And there, we have the ambition to grow with 1% CAGR over the coming 3 years.

And this concludes the B2C strategy as part of our Amplify strategy. And now I give the word back to Stijn.

Thank you, Jim, and congratulations with your great results. I think you had more net adds in '25 than the new entrant. So congratulations. In B2B, I've been spending all my life and professional career in B2B, everything that has to do with the IP layer and above. And I'm happy to introduce to you our B2B strategy going forward. And in B2B, domestically, we're active in both Telco and IT, both in public and private sectors. But market dynamics are different. Telco is in structural decline due to traditional services like voice. And IT is a growing market.

Currently, as some of you know, going through a slower period. But I strongly believe that the IT market that we address in the Benelux is expected to grow with a CAGR of about 6% because we focus on cloud, data and AI, public sector modernization and of course, cybersecurity, whereas the broader IT market will not show those growth rates. But customer expectations are changing.

As you can see on the slide, it's moving more to outcomes where traditional IT Telco is a technology push or IT time and means engagement. It's moving to outcomes, but there's also increased need for digital sovereignty, data privacy. Customers also want fewer suppliers because they don't want any pinpointing. So all these managed services need to smoothly together, and we have a broad portfolio of doing that.

We can also orchestrate these services and customers want more blueprinted solutions going forward. And within Proximus service revenue has remained stable over the last 3 years, but the IT part of our B2B business has been growing from 23% to 26%. And these numbers on the slides are normalized for the divestment of B-Mobile. IT services we provide are primarily driven by cloud, smart networking like SD-WAN and cybersecurity.

Our 2030 B2B ambition is to be the most trusted partner in the Benelux, delivering integrated telco and IT solutions that empower enterprises and public institutions to turn digital complexity into clear measurable impact. And we're moving our organization a little bit from a portfolio-based organization, technology portfolio to a customer-based organization closer to the go-to-market. So you will have the flip from IT Telco customer segments, SMEs, typically the companies below 200 employees and Proximus Next, addressing the corporates and of course, the government.

So let's talk about SME. We can achieve our SME ambition starting from very strong foundations, customer intimacy. We have strong channels. We have network leadership, and we have a solid portfolio today, but we must address 2 key challenges. We need to go back to growth by sustaining our telco core while accelerating IT revenues. And secondly, we have to adapt to the shifting expectations of the SME customers.

We have to respond to rising demand of IT Telco convergence, which includes the growing needs of cloud, data and AI and cybersecurity for which these SMEs typically like internal expertise. So we will achieve this by adapting both our portfolio and sales channels. From a portfolio level, we will continue building IT integrated telco bundles like Business Flex Plus that we launched. But we will also include relevant SME focused IT services like cybersecurity, cloud, AI, but also more and more collaboration tools. From a channel perspective, today, we have 2 distinct channels. exclusive telco agents that sell telco, and we have clear Media that goes through IT partners selling IT. What we're going to do now is activate both channels.

We will keep those 2 channels, but ensure that they each sell the full mix of IT and telco solutions. So we can accelerate that channel strategy. Let's move to the second segment of B2B, that's Proximus Next. Also here, we start from strong foundations to capture market growth. We are the only Belgian provider, combining top-tier telco and kind of a broad IT suite, connectivity, cloud, cybersecurity, digital workplace, advanced networks. We're also already together today, the trusted local partner for private and public organizations. And we already pioneered on sovereign cloud before everybody started talking about like the venture we have in Luxembourg with Claros.

To grow profitably, also here, what are the 3 key challenges. We have to shift from technology selling to outcome-based services aligned with evolving customers' expectations. We have to strengthen our portfolio as the most trusted -- our position as the most trusted national player in cyber resilience and critical infrastructure. And finally, we have to improve our sales effectiveness and profitability it's, of course, extremely important.

Our next strategy will be built on 3 pillars. We will reinforce our portfolio, particularly around sovereignty and edge compute. And Geert will also talk a little bit about our edge compute ambitions and advanced networking security solutions, service integration, it's called SAM services. And our portfolio will also be completed by leveraging our internal AI knowledge externally.

We will also upgrade our sales effectiveness by focusing on solutions adapted to specific market segments, including, of course, mission-critical infrastructure. And finally, we will improve our cost structure by blueprinting our existing solutions, optimizing operations and leveraging our nearshore and offshore capabilities that we already have in place. This ambitious plan, however, will take some time. We, therefore, are launching a kind of 2-year transformation program in B2B to implement a future-proof Benelux organization, enabling these convergent offerings. We see the defense sector also as an integral part of our mission as the reference national player in Belgium.

Our ambition would be to be the trusted partner that secures, connects and guarantee sovereignty, building on our unmatched national assets and strong references, offering various services including cybersecurity, sovereignties, resilience and service integration.

Thanks to this strategy, we sustain our solid position in B2B telco market and reinforce our IT position in both the segments, SME and NEXT. So post transformation, we aim to -- for an improved service revenue trend, and this would lead to about a 1% B2B services CAGR between '25 and '28. Thank you.

And I now hand over to Geert to talk about the network.

Thank you, [ Stijn. ] Good morning as well on my behalf. I'm Geert Standaert. I'm heading the network unit. And before I talk a bit about the years to come, I just first want to take a look where we stand today. And indeed, on mobile, we could maintain our #1 experience leadership. So we're very happy with that. But we're even more happy that as well in the fixed domain, we're now recognized as the best, most reliable fixed network.

And of course, that is thanks as well to the leading position we have in fiber deployment, 42% of coverage in fiber, 2.6 million homes that we pass in fiber. Jim referred to it, the filling rate of 33%.

With respect to our strategic partnerships, what is a bit the status? Well, in the north of the country, end of last year, we had the market test. And there, the BCA Competition Authority, Belgian Competition Authority assessment is ongoing. In the South, end of last year, we signed an MOU with Orange. And there, we are, at this stage, further interacting on long-form negotiations with Orange. Now with respect to these strategic partnerships, maybe a bit to do a deep dive on that, what is the scope? What are these partnerships about?

Let me start with Flanders. Flanders that is about 3.6 million homes. The scope is not in the dense. In the dense, we are building at full force in fiber. I'll show you some more data about that later on. But the collaboration is about what's happening beyond the dense area. And first in Flanders, the mid-dense is about 2 million living units. The idea we have there is that we, as Proximus through Fiberclar, 100% owned by Proximus, we build 40% of that 2 million in fiber and that wire will build 60%.

Then afterwards, there is a kind of a migration commitment, engagement in between Proximus and Telenet. So Telenet will be moving its customers to Fiberclass. Proximus will move its customers to the wire footprint. In addition, the rural is about 700,000 homes in Flanders. There, we will move our customers to HFC. And of course, there will be some other technologies possible like fixed wireless access.

In Wallonia, we have a bit a like setup, but there, the dense Wallonia is more about 1.8 million of homes that we have there. 450,000 homes, Don, which is out of scope. Again, the collaboration is beyond. There you see that with respect to the mid-dense and where we do the fiber deployment, a lot is being done through our JV Unifiber, which is 50% owned by Proximus. We further extend the fiber rollout that we're doing there with about an additional 200,000 and which is split in between half built by Proximus, half built by Orange.

And then we have HFC in the rural zone. So here again, there is then a commitment, a kind of migration commitment, commercial agreement that Orange will move its customers on the Unifiber footprint and our Proximus fiber footprint. And reversely, Proximus will use the Orange fiber build in the extension there and also move customers to the HFC rural zone.

Then, of course, there is still the Brussels region, but the Brussels region is about, yes, 700 living units that is completely considered as dense footprint. Now if we look at and we project ourselves a bit 10 years further, how will Belgium look like? If we do our stand-alone rollout, and we assume that these collaboration agreements come in place, Well, then 80% of the Belgian premises will have access to fiber by 2035.

I'll show you what it means by 2030. But here, it's 80%. You see there the map, the dark gray or dark purple, that is where fiber will be available. And if you see at the right-hand side, that is 80% of the living units in fiber, and that is on a geographical area of about 36% in square kilometers. So 36% of geographical area represents 80% of living units in fiber. The remainder, the 64% of the geographical area is then the 20%, where we will look at accessing HFC and also some fixed wireless access. It shows as well that geographical picture shows as well that going beyond the 80%, there it, of course, becomes more costly to build.

To give you an idea with respect to the meters of trenching that you have to do to pass a home with fiber, it's times 4 versus the mid-dense when you want to do this in the rural. Also in Belgium, it is as such that subsidization is quasi close to 0. We have one exception that is the German-speaking community at the far right of the Belgian map and where some subsidization was foreseen and where Proximus is fully rolling out this region in fiber.

Now what that means then -- from a customers' point of view, for our Proximus customers, this means that by 2035, they have full gigabit access. full gigabit access, 30% in the dense area, fully on Proximus own fiber, mid-dense, that's about 50% of our customers for a big part on own fiber Proximus footprint, including JVs and then a part on third-party fiber in the rural, that 20%, there we go some subsidized fiber, German-speaking community is in there, mostly going on HFC and then combined with mobile fixed wireless access technology.

Now if we bring that a bit closer to today, and then we talk about 2030, what does it mean for us? What do we have to do in the fixed domain? Well, we are today at about 42% of fiber coverage. We keep our rollout speed still at a pretty high volume in the upcoming 3 years to move that up. from 42% to 60%. And you see a bit the different colors there, the dark purple, that is the dense. In the dense areas, we quasi, 85% is done today.

So there, it's about finalizing, completing those footprints and bring them to 100%. And then you see the focus is mostly as of now, rolling out in the mid-ense. And if we take that target into account of the 60%, well, in the mid-ands, 40% today is done. And the rest we will mostly do in the 3 years to come, where we keep the volumes, the construction volumes, you see around the 300,000, 350,000 per year that we will be adding.

Now on top of that, if the partnerships will crystallize, materialize, Well, on top of that, you see here in the pink colors, the access that we will be getting because other third parties, wire and orange will be deploying as well fiber in certain footprints, and we will access with our -- get access to these footprints for our customers. And also, we get access to HFC. And that makes then that by the end of 2030, 95% of our customers have that gigabit access. With, of course, the shift that we're doing to fiber, we also want to outphase our copper network.

There, we're going to accelerate substantially the level of out phasing in the years to come. When everything is finalized, this will bring a yearly saving of EUR 120 million. Three things are behind. There is the power consumption, no longer needed, roadworks, no longer needed. And of course, maintenance that today we have to do still on that network is fully gone.

On that EUR 120 million by 2030, 30% of those savings should be achieved by 2030, and we're now going to go in an acceleration time 6, 7 of what we have been doing so far on copper out phasing. On AI, of course, AI is also very important to us because next to bringing the best experience, network experience on mobile and fixed, we want to be the most efficient network operator.

Our focus is here at this moment on fiber because our future network on fixed is fiber. And on this fiber network, Stijn referred already to it, we're putting all the focus on operate and run, making that as efficient as possible. We have an Agentic framework today in place. Our ambition is that 99% of the customer incidents, they are seen predictively or proactively. But at least the customer should not contact us. We see it before the customer will react.

Indeed, predictive, we have now 15% already in predictive. And of course, we will make that evolve to higher numbers, meaning that in average, we see the problem 2 weeks in advance. If you see a problem 2 weeks in advance, it means it's not a priority 1 case on which you have to jump immediately, but that you can plan in advance. And by planning in advance, of course, you get to the savings of about 50%.

Often, there is still a field technician, of course, needed to go on site to repair things and et cetera, but you can just plan that in a more efficient way. Also, I want to tell you here that where before it took us about -- with all the tooling that we had before AI, about 30 minutes per incident to pinpoint where the problem was located.

Today, we run that through the AI in 2 minutes. So in 2 minutes, we know, okay, high probability that the problem is there. And then, of course, there, what we're looking now at is also a digital assistant that can interact with the operation field technicians. So if they go on site that they're even better guided, but also can still further interact. We see that as a bit of our first area of autonomous because, of course, it's a nice domain where you can go for excellent customer experience, improved NPS while you're making your full operations as well more efficient.

On mobile, on mobile, we were always #1 in mobile experience. We really want to keep that like that. And there are 2 big elements that will help us to sustain in that mobile leadership. First of all, we have great spectrum assets which are differentiating assets versus competition. And second, what we are doing, we're doing the swap, where we are going together with Orange, we do the consolidation of the mobile networks.

At the same moment, we are launching 5G. At the same moment, we're also moving to full European technology end-to-end on the access on the core, on the transport. And it means that we're moving our number of mobile sites, macro sites, I'm talking here from the 3,800 that we had till 4,600. And on top, we can activate a differentiated mobile spectrum. In addition, it's not only about the network itself, but like in the fixed domain, we were the first with tri-band and Wi-Fi 7. Here, we're leading as well the pack with innovation.

So with 5G slicing, we're extremely active in this domain on mobile private networks. By the way, we have a full 5G core migration that also will be finalized in '27. We have supremacy in also not outdoor antennas, but also indoor. And together with the technical teams, I can tell you, daily focus on usage experience, usage experience, getting the small things out of the system and making sure that we bring the best experience to our customers.

On top of this connectivity, you have everything that has to do with cloud. Of course, we have been delivering on direct routes towards the cloud providers and the public clouds and the private clouds that are out there. Recently, we launched our one product, which is a universal CPE product that we can bring at the customer premise. There, it's a box where we can bring compute at the customer edge, but at the same time, where you just can activate virtualized network functions.

Just you pick it out of the cloud and you activate your routing capabilities, your firewalling capabilities. But indeed, we're looking more and more now at what is in the middle and what is our network edge. When we deployed our network, yes, we needed real estate that is out there. We have hundreds of technical buildings that are out there, thousands of mobile antennas, 10,000s of optical cabinets where we have space, where we have fiber and where we have energy. And so what we're looking now with different innovation projects is what is the power we can get out of those assets.

And like Stijn said, we believe that indeed that AI will become physical. But if that AI becomes physical, what do you need? You need, of course, excellent mobile experience as well. If we think about the mobility cases. You need that upload, you need that download, but you need as well your compute closer by for latency and other elements. So innovative project, which makes us very exciting about it, and it's fun also. So we're looking at what we can do there. On top, network KPIs became stronger and stronger because interoperability is there, Standardization is there. There, of course, we -- as Proximus, we play as well our part.

A lot was on fraud prevention. But with the capabilities that the network can deliver, it will move as well to guaranteed quality with slicing, but also network on demand, capacity on demand, where you can say between that hour and this hour, I just want to activate higher speed, upload speed, et cetera, things like that, we're looking at to make that possible. So what does this mean for us in the next coming 5 years, keeping the competitive advantage.

Throughout 2030, we should remain #1 on mobile, #1 now as well on fixed with fiber. We built ourselves our own fiber coverage, the 60%. We deliver a 95% gigabit coverage. And we want to become the best as well on efficiency, managing our network in the most efficient way, not only on the CapEx and the reduction that you will see on the CapEx, but also with respect to running costs.

And with that, I hand over to Nancy.

That was already previewed because we -- so now we're going to take a small break for lunch. We will be back at 12:45. So the presentations will resume then, and we will continue with the global part. We'll see you later.

[Break]

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. We will now proceed with the rest of the presentations, and I kindly invite Seckin, the CEO of Proximus Global.

Thank you very much. Hello, everybody. I hope you enjoyed the lunch and managed to find some strong coffee. My name is Seckin Arikan. I've been in the company for 4 months, but I can tell you it feels like years. It's been a busy, busy, busy 4 months. Proximus Global is a very young company. We launched it in January 2025. But if you look at it, we build it on the 3 very strong brands, and they have been around globally since 2004, 2005.

If I look at our product portfolio, I would like to start with a little bit explain to you what we do. It builds on 3 segments: Connect, Engage and Protect. It's very likely that if you are sending an SMS to your loved one in Asia or Africa, wherever they are in the world outside of the country, it will go through one of our backbones or if you are making a phone call from here to U.S., we will probably connect you. We call it P2P voice or if you are roaming, 50% chance that you are roaming -- data roaming on our network. That's our Connect portfolio. We are one of the largest in this area.

Second part of our business is Engage. It's basically around the CPaaS portfolio. What we do is to enable the enterprises to engage with their customers in an omnichannel environment, meaning that SMS, e-mail, WhatsApp, RCS, whatever you call it, the channel that you know, we enable it.

And the last part of our portfolio is Protect digital identity. Thanks to our Telesign organization, we are one of the leaders in this area. If I look at this picture from the entity point of view, our BICS company is very active in Connect and Engage area. Route Mobile is very active in Engage and Connect area, and you will see Telesign very active in Engage and Protect areas.

Since I started, I keep getting the same question. So I thought that maybe I should answer it before you -- I get this question from you later today in the Q&A. I've been asked several times, Hey, Skin, you are the new CEO. Can you comment on the challenges that the global organization has faced? So that 4 months that I've been around that makes me feel like a couple of years, I've been talking to our customers, but mostly I'm talking to our organization as well. I traveled around the world talking to our employees to get their feedback. I divided the challenges into 2 parts.

One of them, I call it market challenges, the other one, the internal challenges. We see quite a big decline in the SMS OTP, basically the onetime password. So I came here to Belgium a couple of months ago. I'm setting up my Netflix account. Netflix doesn't send SMS anymore to confirm my password, they send me an e-mail. The minute that Netflix sends an e-mail instead of an SMS, they cut their cost by 95%, depending on the country. So some of our largest customers around the world, they are moving away from SMS OTP.

They are trying to optimize their cost, especially if they are not sensitive to conversion rates. If you are an e-commerce giant, every sign-on is important for you, then you don't care about the cost of that sign-on. But if you are Netflix, for example, your subscription is already secured, you are just activating another TV, then you will be very, very cost sensitive. But we also had a problem in industry, and we still have it, we call it AIT, artificially inflated traffic.

Bad actors pumping the traffic, SMS OTP traffic towards the very high rate destinations through our networks, ours and our competitors and generating lots of revenues on the back of the enterprises, and they are benefiting from it. And there is a big fight that we are also actively participating together with our customers to reduce this traffic as much as possible. There is no way to predict how much this traffic is, but we estimate that 30% of the SMS OTP has been historically AIT traffic, and we have to stop it. It's hurting our enterprises and enterprises are using as an excuse to run away, move away from the SMS channel.

Our traditional portfolio, PTP, voice and SMS I mean, you travel all around the world, I'm sure you use your phone less and less. You move to the other channels to be able to reduce your roaming charges. That's in a traditional declining business as well. Depending on how much you are exposed to these markets, of course, the impact will be much larger or lower.

In Proximus Global, we are very much depending on the international SMS traffic. International SMS traffic is very much around the SMS OTP. You work with some of the global enterprises, they use it to send SMS OTPs to different destinations. The marketing channels are normally very much domestic, while the SMS/OTP traffic is very international. So if you are depending on the international traffic as we are depending, then we are hit a little bit more.

Also, the P2P voice and SMS, it has been in a declining market, and it will continue to decline. So our job on the left-hand side on the market challenges is actually to get ready for it. We cannot, in a great extent, influence it, but we need to be ready to tackle those challenges.

On the right-hand side, internal challenges, we rushed the transformation. That's my very quick estimation. I've been in charge of very complex transformation projects where we created large organizations involved a very large number of employees to do this transformation, and it took years to complete these transformations. In Proximus Global, we took 3 companies.

We created one management layer. We put all of the companies under one management very quickly. Securing, clarifying the roles, setting the right priorities. When I started my first 2 weeks, I was invited to a presentation where I was presented 13 IT projects to integrate our IT systems. Everybody will have the same mail addresses or CPaaS platform consolidation or CRM consolllations. I was looking at it and thinking, if we are busy with these 13 projects, what is it that we are not doing for our customers? And we see it in 2025 performance that complex organization and lack of focus and trying to do too much with the limited resources also we dropped the ball with our customers.

Our job is to fix it. We can fix the ones on the right-hand side, internal challenges. It is completely in our hands. It will require that we go back to the basics in 2026 and then fix the job every day.

On the left-hand side, again, we just need to get ready for it because these challenges, we will -- in the market, we will continue to face. So what is it that we do? If you're an enterprise, you're engaging with your customer in any shape or form. it's very likely that you will be interested in our services. If you are pushing some promotions, we use our campaign management to push those promotions regardless of the channel that you prefer.

If you are doing registration of verification of your customers, you send us the name of the customer phone number, they check if there is a boot or it's a real person. If they are making some purchase, you can send it to us and then we will verify and then give a credibility score, how likely that purchase, the person behind those purchase is a real person or if you are delivering logistic company, you are delivering your goods, we can help you to push those notification messages. One last example of what we do, then I'm going to move into a little bit more details.

In our Protect portfolio, we have one customer. They are in the online ticketing business. Basically, they sell online tickets. If you want to go and buy, I don't know, Taylor Swift concert tickets, you will probably go and buy from them. They were struggling with 2 things. One of them is the quality of the SMS. They are sending lots of SMSs to their subscribers. The hit rate -- success rate was relatively low.

The second thing is that people are opening lots of fake accounts to be able to buy high volume of tickets, so they can sell it in the secondhand and et cetera. We partnered with them. They use our Protect suite. So we have drastically reduced their fake accounts, fraudulent accounts, but we also improved their SMS delivery rates, thanks to our BIS connections with the telcos. We have hundreds of telcos that we can reach directly instead of sending all the traffic via other aggregators. -- in Engage portfolio. In one of the countries that we operate, we partnered with the local metro organization. They were struggling with the ticketing.

People are going to the metro stations and then they are queuing up to buy tickets. They wanted to digitalize it. We put small QR codes. The people in the country, in the city, they go with their phones, they open the camera, read that QR, opens a WhatsApp. In that WhatsApp, you can just chat to both and then you can buy your tickets. The tickets are delivered to your WhatsApp and then the payment -- if you want to configure your payments, we connect it to your WhatsApp. Everything is done via WhatsApp.

We issue around 200,000 tickets a day. 4 million people are using that metro every single day. or in our Connect portfolio where we work with the mobile operators around the world. voice traffic is in decline. Our customers are looking way to keep the quality of the voice, which is important for their customers, but they also want to look for ways to reduce their cost. So we take over as outsourcing. We manage all their voice or SMS traffic, and then we offer them good quality with lower OpEx. So when my team and I will look at our strategy, of course, we look at it from all different angles.

We look at it from the trends. We look at it from the competitors, what they are doing, our internal capabilities. We look at it from the go-to-market capabilities. We have so many options to go to the market. I mean I spoke about international customers, domestic markets that we have partners. We go directly or we do self-services. I brought only one slide here. I think it's an important slide, and I hope it's going to answer some of your questions, what the task is in front of me and my team to execute. This is our product portfolio on a lower level.

The size of the bubbles shows the direct margins that we have. You can see -- and on the left-hand side, you see the relative market share. Since it's very, very difficult to find an accurate market share, what we do is that we look at our biggest competitor or the biggest player, if we are not the biggest player in that market, we look at the biggest one.

And so we compare ourselves to the biggest one. If -- let's say, if Twilio is the biggest one in the Engage area, we compare our market share to Twilio because normally, they go out and they say, "Hey, this is our market share. So we can see that A2P SMS and P2P voice and SMS is we have very high market share and relatively high direct margins as well, but they are in declining market. If you look at the data roaming, we are -- the market is still growing single digit, and we have very good DM contribution there.

So the challenge that we have, the task that we have in our hands is to farm the upper side of this, optimize our OpEx and CapEx investment, start moving money as fast as possible to the positive market growth areas. We got the products. We got the omnichannel. Today, we are already selling it in different parts of the world. We need to scale it and then we need to get it ready to grow that product to be sold in domestic markets in a larger volume. Network API is another one. I'll come back to this one.

So this is another way that we are showing the portfolio. You can see the market growth in different areas. So it's very difficult for us. When we talk about the average growth, it's actually very, very difficult for us to give you the correct picture of how the market is growing. Network API, I don't know if you have been hearing about the network API. If you are following the CPaaS industry, I'm sure lots of my competitors, our competitors talk about the network API.

These are the set of APIs based on the camera standards, and now they are being released. Next 5 years, 20 more APIs are coming to the market in high coverage. And depending on the analyst reports that you read, the market is huge. I think we took the most pessimistic one here, not to set the expectations low, but to just to give you a perspective, EUR 5 billion to EUR 7 billion in value by 2022. If you look at the Mackenzie reports, they are estimating EUR 33 billion. We don't know how much it will be, but we know that it will be quite large.

We launched our network API platform back in October, a month before I joined. We already secured 92% coverage in India. And yesterday, we sent out our press release. We onboarded our first paying customers. They are not going to contribute to our bottom line in the coming 2, 3 years. That's an investment that we are doing for the 5 years ahead.

And this is the part that this company is very, very good at. Route Mobile, through Route Mobile, we are very connected to the Indian market with the operators, and we are very quick at onboarding the local operators in our platform. Again, thanks to our domestic sales capabilities, we go and we talk to the enterprises and we switch them to the network API. In this specific case, it's a silent authentication, another way to authenticate the customers much better user friendly.

Now with the help of the BICS organization, where we have more than 500 MNO connections, we will scale it. Next week, when we are in MWC, we have quite a large number of discussions with the MNOs all around the world. They are probably going to see how we are able to monetize the network APIs, and they are going to put pressure on us to onboard them as quick as possible. We can do it because of the strength of BICS and strength of Route Mobile. I didn't talk about Telesign. But if I look at the Telesign, actually, Telesign is one of the first companies that have been selling these network APIs for many, many years. The only difference is that they did not sell the Kamara API.

The Telesign is one of the pioneers in this area when it comes to silent authentication, SIMSweb and other APIs. So our job is to unite those 3 companies and build on the strengths. Okay. I'll go into the details a little bit what it is that we are going to do. Our Connect portfolio is building on network API, P2P voice, messaging and data roaming. Two of them are in decline -- sorry, voice and messaging decline, data roaming is slightly increasing and network APIs, we are going to build this market. It's already being built.

We see lots of outsourcing deals in the P2P voice, especially. As the volumes are dropping, the operators are trying to consolidate or trying to exit this or make it somebody else's problem. We see lots of opportunities there. But we also see lots of consolidation opportunities there. We have a platform, it's a volume game. The more volume that we have, the better margins that we are going to do. So our strategy is to farm this portfolio as much as we can to optimize our OpEx and CapEx. And we are going to stay a leader in the data roaming.

We are now investing in the 5G stand-alone as the operators are rolling out to 5G stand-alone. And we are going to build our network API success from India to 15 more markets coming years. When it comes to the Engage portfolio, it's all about shifting the traffic from SM to omnichannel. It's all about reducing the dependency to OTP to marketing use cases. It's all about moving away from the international traffic to domestic traffic. We have a company in Peru and Colombia. We acquired them through the Route Mobile.

Last year, they are a local company. They operate in that 2 countries mainly. Last year, their financial results are completely different than our global results. They have performed very well, growing both the top line and then the margins because they are not depending on the international traffic. They are very much working with the local banks, local organizations and then the impact -- overall impact that we have seen in the market, they have not been impacted. We are going to invest in 7 more countries in 2026, increasing our salespeople there. We got the back offices.

We got the engineering teams in all around the world in different locations. We need more boots, the people that will go to the enterprises to sell it. Another part that we are investing is the partnership ecosystem, lots of business that we get via the partners. We go and list our products in different partners' platforms and then they bring customers. So we are going to start prioritizing this one. Protect portfolio. This is again coming from the Telesign and network APIs is bringing lots of different capabilities.

One of them is the device status. For example, you are in a call, you have your air pods on and it's a long call, you are board. you want to change your bank account, you just click the button. The bank checks via the Telco operator that actually you are in a call. You are talking to somebody. It's very likely that a fraudulent event takes place while somebody is in the call because the fraudulent people are talking to you to say that, hey, please, you need to transfer money. I'm calling from here and et cetera. Your bank shows a sign that says that if anybody is telling you that it is us calling you to transfer money, it is not. So please do not transfer the money. So that's what we call the device status. That's something that we are starting to sell.

But in our product portfolio today, we have 3 different products. One of them is phone ID. We basically check the person if he or she is the person that they claim to be. The second one is what we call intelligence product that is basically we give you some kind of a credibility score. And then the third one is the verify that comes from the Engage side of the family as well. We sell that portfolio separately.

Today, what we are doing is that actually we are combining them, building our platform to go to the customers as one product, so we can actually manage their -- protect their networks as a solution. Elevate 2030, this is the name that we have selected because for us, it goes back to the basics and getting the job done every day. So we need to improve our execution. We need to elevate our financial performance, and we need to elevate overall the satisfaction for our customers and the employees. So we decided to go with the Elevate 2030 strategy name.

We are the connectivity leader in the market, and we will remain as the connectivity leader. And we are going to extend this leadership with the help of network APIs. We will continue to engage our enterprise customers and then help them offer omnichannel experience to their customers. And we will continue to build on our trust, and we will enable our enterprises to protect their networks. We are not coming up with a drastically different strategy.

For us, it's all about execution, deciding what it is that we are going to do as well as what it is that we are not going to do. Our mission, our North Star, how my organization is going to prioritize every day what they do. We enable seamless global connectivity and trusted engagements to power the world's interactions. We are not starting from 0. 20 years of history is giving us the basics to be successful.

Today, we are detecting over 20 fraud attempts every second. We are carrying 50% of the world's roaming traffic. We carry 160 billion messages over all of our channels. So for us, it's getting down to the basics and executing well to get to this mission.

Before I make my summary, I want to show you this slide. This is one of the slides that I showed to Stijn and our Board. We are 3 companies. We come from different places. We have different cultures. But those cultural differences actually giving us the strength. And my job, the job of the leadership team that I have to unite them. You see some overlaps, but you also see lots of the complementary capabilities here. BICS is extremely successful in what they do, especially towards the Telcos, and they are able to globally build businesses. Not many companies can do it. technically very strong, engineering very strong.

India, Route Mobile, they are crazy, very innovative. If you have not seen their earnings report we released a couple of weeks ago, please take a look at it. They are very good at talking about the use cases. There are lots of use cases that they are pushing in India in a very digitalized economy. I spent 8 years in U.S. I cannot even compare India and U.S. when it comes to digitalization. India is far ahead. Now we are using their capabilities to innovate. We are using their digital-first economy and learn from there and then building on their low-cost, high-quality engineers to scale this business. And of course, Telesign. They work with some of the highest market cap companies in the world. They are very good at building solutions.

The network APIs that now everybody is talking about in the market. They have been -- Telesign has been working with those APIs for years. Phone ID is built on the SIMS rep. Now it's coming out as a rebranded network APIs. Our company has been selling it. My job is to unite them, build on the strength. So for us, 2026 is an execution year.

We will go back to the basics and then finalize the integration. And in order to do it, we actually identified 7 key battles. Those 7 key battles is going to help us improve our go-to-market, enable us to do better cross-sell over the different entities and get better quality leads for our businesses. We will also unite our culture using core values. We are aggressively allocating our OpEx from the farming areas to the growth areas. We confirm our 2026 guidance from EUR 100 million to EUR 120 million EBITDA, and we will start growing our business again from 2027.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Seckin. So for those who don't know me, I'm Nicolas Gaertner, CFO at Interim here at Proximus Group. And I look forward to take you through the financial implications of our new 5-year plan over the next 15 minutes.

So I'll first start by taking you through our 2025 results. I'll do that rather briefly as I trust you've all seen the releases this morning. And I'll then turn to more details of our financial ambition going forward, including our capital allocation strategy. So let me start with the key takeaways for full year 2025.

Stein briefly touched on this earlier this morning. But look, in short, we delivered in line or above guidance on nearly all -- on all metrics, really. Domestic revenues were stable year-on-year and domestic EBITDA grew by 1.9% year-on-year, both fully in line with guidance and driven, as Jim touched on as well, by continued very strong commercial performance as well as strict cost control in an increasingly competitive market, as you know.

On global, EBITDA landed as per the expectations we had set a couple of months ago and as covered by Seckin and Stijn. When it comes to CapEx, we landed in line with guidance at EUR 1.25 billion for the year, and we generated EUR 130 million of organic free cash flow over the period, again, outperforming guidance in that case by about EUR 30 million. As you know, we also made significant progress on our asset sales program, and we divested for about EUR 450 million of assets in the course of 2025 alone, which led to a total free cash flow of approximately EUR 480 million over the year.

Finally, on net debt, we landed at approximately 2.7x EBITDA, which is slightly better than guidance that had been set at 2.8x EBITDA, as you'll remember. So now zooming in briefly on Q4 a little bit more specifically. It's worth calling out, firstly, that Q4 was pretty materially impacted by the sale of our subsidiary, B-Mobile, as you know, which closed in early October '25. So we've added a few call-outs on this slide to show like-for-like achievement essentially normalizing for that sale. So in short, revenue would have been stable like-for-like over Q4, much in line with Q3, had it not been for the divestiture. And EBITDA would have grown by 3.1% for the quarter.

Now even accounting for the divestiture of V-Mobile, we grew EBITDA by 2.3% over the quarter, which is our best quarter of the year and our best quarter in quite some time as well. And again, that was really driven mainly by, one, residential top line performance, but also OpEx efficiencies, which in Q4 more than offset inflationary and other cost increases impacts. On B2C, you've heard Jim talk about it, but it's also worth highlighting another very strong quarter on mobile and Internet net adds, which has been a trend that's been going on all year really.

On global, EBITDA declined pretty much in line with expectations at 19% year-on-year for the quarter, and we landed the year at minus 9.3%, in line with the guidance we had set a few months ago. On group EBITDA, we essentially were stable in Q4, and we grew by nearly 1% for the year. CapEx and reported free cash flow, I touched on, on the prior slide, so I won't dwell on this any more than that. Looking ahead to the future now. So over the '25 to '28 period, we will ensure that our domestic EBITDA remains stable in an increasingly competitive market.

On global, as communicated previously and just now again by Sachin, we expect EBITDA to return to growth by 2027. On group CapEx, we expect it to decrease down to EUR 1.2 billion by 2028 and organic free cash flow to gradually improve from 2026 and onwards. Looking out now to 2030, we will reduce the CapEx further to below EUR 1 billion, and our free cash flow will increase to approximately EUR 400 million.

Let me walk you through a little bit some of the component parts of our domestic EBITDA trend in the coming 3 years. In short, as I mentioned, we will deliver stable EBITDA in an increasingly competitive market by growing services revenue and maintaining strict cost control over our OpEx. So we expect services revenue to grow by approximately 1% CAGR over that period, driven really high level by 2 things: continued strong performance on B2C, which will be driven by value management and sustaining our market shares in that segment as well as B2B IT services growth.

Now as you know, IT services revenue comes at a slightly -- at a lower margin than traditional telco. And in addition to that, we will continue adding new customers, but also migrating existing customers onto our JV, Unifiber in the south of the country. And both of these elements come at a cost, which means that we expect direct margin to grow at a slower pace than revenue over that time period.

Moving on to costs. I'll actually spend a few minutes talking about our efficiencies program on the next slide. So what I'll say here is we expect or we commit to delivering EUR 180 million of efficiency over the next 3 years. And for those efficiencies to mostly offset inflation-related impacts as well as other OpEx because we are spending more OpEx on cloudification, transformation and obviously, customer-related OpEx. So again, we expect those efficiencies to mostly offset those increases in costs over that period. This will all translate, as I mentioned, into a broadly stable EBITDA over the coming 3 years.

So let me say a few more things about our $180 million efficiency program. Sean touched on this earlier this morning. It will really be mainly driven by workforce savings, right? What we are going to leverage on the workload side of things has been addressed by my colleagues, Kirt and Jim. So to give you a couple of examples, we will continue accelerating the automation of as many customer interactions as we can, leveraging all our digital channels.

So that's one good example of efficiencies that we intend to deliver. Also, and Gil touched on this at length, we intend to continue leveraging predictive fiber repair and maintenance capabilities to reduce interventions and rework and just become more efficient in general in that space. This will enable us ultimately to only replace 1 out of 3 levers from Proximus SA over the coming years.

On external workforce now, we will continue to take headcount down. And we also intend for a number of external workforce type roles to be in-sourced in low-cost locations at about 50% lower unit cost, which will also drive material savings over the coming 3 years. Finally, on nonworkforce, we expect further savings from a variety of areas. Some examples include vendor and sourcing rationalization. And we will, of course, continue to decommission legacy platforms and duplicate systems, which will drive further savings. On global, I think Seckin very articulately took us through the details of his strategy over the coming years. just 10 minutes ago. So I won't dwell too much on the details here other than to remind ourselves that we will get this business back into growth by 2027 with 2026 remaining a year of transition.

Seckin talked a lot about some structural issues on the market, but also internally that need to be fixed. That will not happen overnight, and we'll need the year 2026 to start getting our ducks in a row and to get back into growth in the following year. We still commit to delivering, as we said in November, EBITDA of between EUR 100 million and EUR 130 million over 2026.

Turning back now to some group numbers. Let's talk a little bit about our CapEx spend. So our CapEx essentially peaked last year in 2025 when we spent approximately $1.36 billion of CapEx over that period. And basically, after landing at approximately $1.25 billion this year, we expect CapEx to slowly decrease to EUR 1.2 billion by 2028 and ultimately to below EUR 1 billion by 2030. Looking maybe at the larger component parts of our CapEx spend.

I think, first of all, it won't surprise you to know that currently, the largest bucket remains our fiber build. Now fiber build peaked in 2022 in actuality and will decrease materially by 2030 with both our stand-alone footprint, but also Fiberclar footprint having nearly completed the build by then. And so you can see this material step down between '28 and 2030 relating to this fiber build schedule.

On customer CapEx, I think Gil touched on it this morning. It's all great to build a fiber network. You ultimately need to migrate and connect those new customers to your network. So customer CapEx will remain elevated over the period and it will only start to materially decrease post 2030. So you don't see that on the graph, but that comes after 2030. It's worth saying that in the meantime, we are materially reducing the unit cost of interventions, et cetera, via efficiency programs, increased use of DIY, et cetera, around that customer CapEx. So we are keeping it under control over the coming years. On mobile, mobile peaked in 2024, essentially for 2 reasons.

We were completing our network consolidation, but also still spending material amounts on 5G deployments. Now network consolidation, in particular, will be nearly finished by the end of this year. So we expect mobile CapEx to decrease from 2026 relatively materially and then to have a slowly decreasing trend thereafter. Probably the other interesting callout on this slide is global. I mean, as we've said before, global tends to be an asset-light organization. You can see it clearly on this slide.

The CapEx required to run this business is relatively modest, and we don't foresee any material changes in those trends in the coming years. So before I move on to the group free cash flow projections over the period, I did want to spend a few minutes to highlight a few elements that will temporarily impact our working capital in the coming years, tied really to our fiber build setup with our JVs, but also to the collaboration agreements that we intend to close. So there's probably 3 elements here to think about. One -- the first one is our prepayment of network renting referred to as IRUs.

Now essentially, what these are, these are upfront payments to ultimately reduce longer-term recurring costs. So obviously, these come at a higher cost in the short term, but they are very much value accretive for the company over the long run as you're materially reducing your recurring payments in the future. So the way to think about those is the negative working capital impact will carry on for a number of years. We expect it to stop around 2032.

And then over time, these will reverse, obviously, working in terms of working capital impact. Second element is we will continue making equity injections into our Unifiber and Go Fiber JVs. And the third element is relating to collaboration-related incentives that will also contribute over the coming years to temporary working capital fluctuations.

So moving now to how this all translates into free cash flow generation over the coming 3 and 5 years. I'll turn your attention to the right-hand side of the slide, which shows a little bit of a walk between those 2 periods. So between '25 and '28, as we mentioned, we expect domestic EBITDA to be broadly stable and our CapEx to reduce slightly. And these elements will essentially offset our working capital changes, including some of the elements I referred to on the prior slide. Then between '28 and 2030, our group CapEx will land to below EUR 1 billion, sorry, as we discussed earlier.

And this, combined with the growth that will be delivered by our global business will translate into a free cash flow of approximately EUR 400 million by then. You'll notice on the left-hand side of the slide, and as I touched on earlier, that we expect our free cash flow to gradually improve from 2026 to 2028. So moving on now to how this translates into our shareholder remuneration policy. So we aligned the dividend policy closer to expected free cash flow going forward to ensure a sounder balance sheet and enabling room for value-accretive business initiatives going forward.

So what that means is we intend to return a gross dividend per share of EUR 0.30 over the results '26, $0.40 per share over the results '27 and $0.50 per share over the results '28, all payable in one installment in April of the following year in essence. So with this new dividend policy, we expect to stay comfortably within the 2.5x to 3x net debt-to-EBITDA range according to the S&P definition, which will ensure we maintain a solid credit profile and preserve access to attractive funding costs over the period. So we have a solid debt maturity profile, as you can see here, both in terms of cost and tenor. We have almost no maturities before 2028.

And almost all, if not all of our outstanding debt is at fixed rates and at a weighted cost of debt of approximately 3.2% with our average debt maturity at 7.5 years now. So putting it all together, let me give you a summary of the kind of short-term guidance and longer-term ambition. So for 2026, we expect underlying domestic services revenue and domestic EBITDA to remain broadly stable, adjusting for the sale of B-Mobile in 2025.

On Global, as mentioned, we expect to deliver EBITDA between EUR 100 million and EUR 130 million. We expect our CapEx to land between EUR 1.2 billion and EUR 1.5 billion. organic free cash flow to land up to EUR 100 million in 2026 and for our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio to land at approximately 2.8x EBITDA.

Looking out now to the 2028 time horizon, we will deliver 1% CAGR on our domestic services revenue line. Our domestic EBITDA will be kept stable across the period. Global get back -- we'll get back into growth from 2027, as we've discussed. And CapEx will get close to EUR 1.2 billion by 2028, which means we will gradually be improving our organic free cash flow from the 2026 base.

Over that period, we also expect for our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio to remain below 3x EBITDA. Finally, looking out to 2030, our CapEx will end below EUR 1 billion by that time horizon, and our organic free cash flow will grow to EUR 400 million by 2030.

So with that, I'll hand it back to Stijn for closing remarks.

Thank you, Nick. I started my intro this morning with saying it's the next 5 years all about execution, and I talked about 4 jobs to be done, 3 at domestic, 1 at global. And at the domestic side, I tried to convince you that you have to look at Proximus in the 10-year window because after 30, there's still 5 years of declining CapEx with the copper phaseout and with the connections towards the customers coming down. And I hope my team convinced you that the Amplify plan for the next 5 years will get these jobs done and that I have the leadership to do that.

At the global level, Seckin gave you an insight into the business and the challenges, but also what we need to do to bring it back to growth. And once global is growing again, I do think we can look at optionality for value crystallization for our shareholders. And this will bring us in 2030 in a position where we -- our ambition is to generate EUR 400 million free cash flow.

Thank you, and I'll ask my team now to come back on stage to go to the Q&A session.

So indeed, now we are ready for the Q&A. So if we have here in the room questions, just please raise your hand. We will bring you a microphone if you would kindly state your name and company before asking the question. Thank you.

It's Paul Sidney from Berenberg. Just a couple of questions, please. And just on the dividend policy. Can you talk us through the thought process for changing the dividend policy, particularly as the medium-term targets published don't seem to be a material deviation from what the market was expecting. Is there any expected M&A? Are you creating firepower for potential deals going forward?

And just added to that, what's the attitude of the government and what were the discussions with the government that led to that change in the policy? And then secondly, you're guiding domestic EBITDA stable over the next 3 years despite slight service revenue growth and the EUR 180 million efficiency gains. I just wondered, could you outline what else is going on within the guidance? Is there an expectation that competition picks up? What am I missing?

Okay. I'll take the first one. About dividends, yes, together with the Board, we defined a new dividend policy. It's basically based on the fact that we want to align the dividend with the free cash flow, which is a very healthy thing to do. There's nothing else behind that. It, of course, gives us, given the leverage ratio, still some opportunity for growth initiatives, but we will communicate then those when they when they happen basically. Of course, this has been discussed with our majority shareholder and according to my conversations, they are fine with it. They do understand that we're going through this period of finalizing the fiber build-out and that, yes, we should stay in a very healthy position going forward.

The government also stated that they do see Proximus as a strategic asset. I think digital sovereignty is becoming much more also on the political agenda, and we have the ambition to be the national champion in that in Belgium.

Compared to your second question on services growth compared to that. So yes, we do a lot on OpEx. OpEx reduces to synergies. We've explained those in details. But there are also some headwinds in OpEx like cloudification and also the sales of assets in the past. It's nice when you sell them, but you get some OpEx back into that. So that's one of the effects.

And I'll give Jim the stage on the competitive environment.

Yes. So on competition, of course, we have been looking at what has happened in other countries, especially in Spain, and we have used that as some kind of reference, adding on top of that internal data on market surveys that we have done on our 3 brands and how they compare to competition. And so with that in hand, we are confident that we can realize that 1% service revenue growth that I presented in my part.

So yes, of course, we know that with the fourth entrant competition will be more intense. I think we have shown in '25 the way we have been managing that. And we're confident with the strategy that we have in place that we can maintain our market shares and continue to grow with 1%. So that's the plan.

Can I just have a quick follow-up? I think you made a really good point on digital sovereignty. Just a quick one and linked again to the dividend policy and the government's attitude. Has there been a real change in the way the government looks at Proximus in terms of are you now viewed as critical infrastructure rather than just this company to beat up every 15 years with spectrum costs?

I'm only in the job the last 6 months, but I do feel a strong interest with my interactions with the shareholders. So I do think digital infrastructure and everything that's going on geopolitically, the governments around Europe are looking also for sovereign solutions and kind of portability in the whole cloud discussion. So it's a topic everywhere. You also see it in other countries. And I think we're in a strong position to capture some of that growth.

So David Vagman from ING. First question on wholesale costs and, let's say, the speed of the migration of your clients from copper to fiber, in particular, on the JVs and, let's say, the network for which you will have to rent. So could you quantify how much of wholesale cost to expect at a normalized, let's say, level? And when that will happen? That's my first question.

You take it.

Yes. So of course, the migration speed on other networks is actually a bidirectional migration commitment, which means that if we have commitments to migrate customers from our copper network to fiber network of competitors, then in the other way around, there's also commitments from them to migrate to our fiber network, typically in fiber cloud and Unifiber areas.

And so in that sense, part of that cost is balanced between revenues on the wholesale side and additional impact on direct margin on the retail side. So I think that's something that definitely you need to take into account. Of course, I'm not going to go into the details of what contractually is being negotiated. But I think you need to take that into account and not only look at the downside, but of course, in those deals, there's also an upside.

Sure. And when should the -- because I think you've said that the fiber, let's say, investment would be done by 2030. Now I understand that some footprint like wire they expect to end in 2036. So it takes time to migrate to close the copper, et cetera. So when should we expect to have the full wholesale cost? And then also I understand the wholesale revenues by when should we have a normalized level?

So I think Nick already mentioned that a bit in his part that until 2030, the main impact on direct margin on the retail side is on Unifiber footprint, so in our own JV and that the ones on the collaboration zone, the bigger impact is beyond 2030.

The value of the collaboration deals are in the outer years, the next 5 years, it doesn't make a lot of difference.

Okay. And then another question on, let's say, on the copper phaseout savings. So you've mentioned, I think the 1,400 employees retiring. Actually, is there any overlap between the person retiring and then the copper phaseout savings in the sense that you would have technicians who are retiring, working on the copper maintenance, et cetera.

Yes, of course, you have -- and here can add on my intro. Of course, there are still a lot of people working on the copper. It's also very physical in the street. But it's all about reskilling and upskilling.

So there's a lot of mobility. To give you an idea, last year, about 2,000 of people change jobs within the organization. So we're already best-in-class in this mobility, and it will be critical going forward to keep the upskilling and in the next 10 years, really match what's going on in terms of retirements, keeping the knowledge and a sound mix of automation and tasks that will remain in people's hands.

Yes. So maybe to add on that, operating a fiber network shows to be cheaper than operating a copper network. And so we have first indications of that. But of course, the first ones, but there is a substantial difference there. And that, of course, will help over time because, of course, that is first that migration effort to do.

Okay. And last question on Proximus Global. So could you quantify -- I see we've seen some bridge, so we can kind of deduct the impact, I think, a bit on free cash flow, what could happen to 2028 and then to 2030. But could you give more granularity on the EBITDAaL and free cash flow objective or targets implicit for Proximus Global?

So I'll take that one. So I think at this stage, as I said, we're very confident to deliver EBITDA between EUR 100 million and EUR 130 million this year and to start growing from '27. This is we don't wish to give a whole lot more guidance in terms of the outer years -- as you know, it's -- there's a big job to be done at Global. It's a rather volatile business. We'll come back probably in a few quarters to give you a bit more color around that.

Okay. But it's correct when we look at the free cash flow bridge or waterfall chart to see that you have a free cash flow outflow to 2028?

So in general, obviously, as you know, this year will be a year of reset. Even in this year of reset, our global business remains free cash flow accretive, and that will be the case going forward. And obviously, we do expect that free cash flow accretion to increase over time out to 2030.

Hill from KBC Securities. Two questions on the global business. So in 2024, you gave some concrete targets for the global business. Now you're a bit more prudent. There is no outlook for 2028. You do expect improvement for 2027, but what makes you confident that you will see an improvement in 2027? Because how I look at it from the presentation is that you still expect structural headwinds in the SMS market.

So I'm just wondering, yes, your benefit there in other OTT players is a bit more limited compared to competitors, I would assume. So just wondering why you're so confident that profitability should improve there? And then as a second question, in the latest Capital Markets Day, -- you mentioned that an IPO at some point was on the table for this business. I think the situation has changed a bit. But do you still think that you're the right owner for this asset going forward?

Let me start and Seckin can comment on the portfolio mix between omnichannel and SMS and the shift during the next 2 years. I can only add that apart from the portfolio mix and the transition the market is going through from a digital messaging point of view, I also think one of the drivers is sales execution. I think in the integration, we kind of lost contact and sight on the customer. It's a B2B business. I've spent all my life in B2B.

The customer is not a persona like in gym business, it's a real person, and you have to be very close to your customers. And I do think Seckin has a lot of experience in B2B sales. He was the best sales guy at Ericsson worldwide, having the T-Mobile account. So -- but I'll hand it over, and I'll come back to your second question. But...

Okay. Thank you, Stijn. I mean if you look at the CPaaS business, regardless whatever analyst report that you are looking at, it's growing very healthy overall. We use the mobile square as a reference from 2025, EUR 55 billion. That market is going to grow EUR 89 billion by 2030, around 13% year-on-year growth. If you put the network APIs on top of it, we spoke about earlier and AI, we didn't -- I didn't even touch the AI part of it, that growth ambitious scenario goes up to 20%.

And why do I feel comfortable or confident is that 2026, we believe that we are going to win those key integration channels, we are going to enable our sales organization to start selling -- cross-selling our portfolio. Some of the -- if I want to be extremely optimistic, and I'm being very cautious now, I mean, please take a look at the Route Mobile report, the one that we just released.

You can actually see the good sign when you focus on the domestic market, when you work very closely with your enterprises, they started to grow their EBITDA business. But again, we need to make this shift very, very quickly from the -- if you remember my chart, the dependency on the A2P SMS and P2P voice and messages towards the omnichannel. So we believe that we are going to stabilize the business in 2026, go back to the basics and fix it, and we will start seeing growth from 2027.

To come back on IPO. So I wasn't there. But in terms of value crystallization, I started this morning with saying Proximus Group is distinct -- 2 different businesses with little synergies. So we're a conglomerate. I know what it means. As an analyst, you do sum of the parts and then we get a holding discount. That's how it works. Should we own Global in the end, I don't think so. But we're also not in selling mode. So the next 2 years, we will focus on execution because I think it's in the best interest of our shareholders to look for the right moment, but let's first recreate value and then execute on this optionality.

It's Druva from UBS. Just a few questions. First is just a simple financial one, I think, in terms of CapEx, you've guided for it to come down to EUR 1.2 billion from EUR 1.25 billion for 2026. My understanding is that this doesn't include the football rights and potential renewal there. So just would be curious to see what's driving that decrease for next year and going forward?

And then secondly, just on the fiber cooperations, a lot of what was talked about in terms of the networks was assuming that these cooperations come through. So I was just wondering if from your talks with the BCA, if you've had any sort of indications that this is -- well, we've always wanted it to come sooner rather than later, if there's any new indications that this is going to happen and just whether both the Flanders and Wallonia cooperations are being discussed simultaneously? Or it will be Flanders first and then Wallonia?

And then the final one, just in terms of competition. I think Digi in their recent results call mentioned that they are looking to increase their fiber footprint by another 100,000 homes this year. But have -- do you think most of the impact from Digi now is in the base already? If they're only rolling out another 100,000 fiber homes and Belgium is primarily converged, do you see some upside to domestic service revenue growth given that the market sees annual CPI-related inflationary price rises?

Okay. Let's take the CapEx first.

CapEx I think as I explained, you talked about the first step down, I guess, between '25 and '28. Really, there's obviously a lot of moving parts in our CapEx, as you will expect. The main element really that's coming down in the coming 2, 3 years, as I touched on, is mobile. We've completed -- we're about to complete, I think, by the end of the year, the consolidation with our -- as part of our JV with Orange, as you know. And that's probably the biggest driver in the coming years overall. Then obviously, as I touched on from '28 to '30, the biggest driver becomes obviously the fiber deployment completion. So that's how to think about it on the CapEx front.

Yes. Concerning the deal, so there's no update from the BCA because I understand that everybody asked why does it take so long. So it's a very complex multiparty negotiation. It's also unchartered territory. We have a competition authority who's also into telecom and talking about telecom remedies. So cooperation creates a lot of value, and it's all about how do you fairly distribute that value between the consumer, that's with the competition authorities, between us and wire Telenet and between others who ask for remedies and that's very complex. It's also in my interest and it's my job and also the shareholders' interest to defend or piece of the cake, and it's complex. Concerning timing, yes, the north is in front of the south. So it's kind of a serial process.

And then to come back on the question on Digi. So as already mentioned, of course, we take certain assumptions in our plan, which are based on what we know externally is being communicated. And then we did some benchmarking to see what happens in Spain. We also looked, of course, in our own customer base and in Belgium, how do people react on that. And that's the starting point of the plan that we built.

Of course, we're going to continue to manage this in the way that I've managed it also in 2025. So if we see opportunities to do better, of course, we're going to take those opportunities. Now keep in mind also that service revenue is influenced by growth of customer base. but also by the changing AB brand mix that we just discussed as well, which, of course, we try to manage as good as we can by making Proximus more premium than it is already today.

And then we have the impact of declining TV business, declining fixed voice business compensating by conversions. And all these elements together in the mix allow us to say that we can be confident on the 1% growth over the period. But of course, if situation changes externally, this will influence the ambition that we have set forward. So -- but for me, the main message stays like we did in '25. We really do this volume value balance. We're not going to overreact. But of course, we're going to continuously monitor to make sure that we continue to also acquire customers. So that's a bit the way we manage it.

Sorry, first, small detail. Will there ever be Belgian football again on Proximus? And then the second question, doing the math for you and your Board, it seems to be normal that you adapt the dividend to the free cash flow level. But when I see the stock today, it seems that the market doesn't see it as normal. Are they missing something? Because they -- as being 30 years in the stock markets, they always say that the markets are always right, but sometimes they do not understand probably the long story. So because the market was really surprised, I think or I'm missing something.

Let's go to football.

So first, a small question on football rights. So of course, just like you, I would love to be able to show Belgian football again on my TV platform to my customers. But as we have always said from the start, we will only do this if the financial conditions are correct. So we continue to try to get those conditions in the right space. And when they are, we're going to be happy to distribute Belgian football on our platform.

Concerning market reaction, I don't look at the stock price today. It's only 1 day in life. My job is to create sustainable shareholder value in the midterm. And -- but I do understand that some shareholders are disappointed, but we still have a healthy dividend yield going forward.

[ Josh Mills ] from BNP Paribas. I just had a first question on free cash flow development. At your last CMD, guidance implied that we should -- we will see depressed free cash flow for 3 years and then step up materially. Today, you're saying pretty much the same thing. So can you give us a bit more detail on how free cash flow should develop in 2027, 2028 after the up to EUR 100 million guidance in FY '26?

Are we talking about a linear progression to EUR 100 million, EUR 200 million, EUR 300 million? Or do we need to wait until 2030 to see a material increase? -- as Slide 22 suggests in your CMD presentation? And the second question would be on your competition from Digi. You discussed the fact that customers have become more price sensitive in Belgium. What kind of ARPU dilution are you assuming from more customers shifting to your Scarlet and Mobile Viking sub-brands? What percentage of the base are these in absolute terms?

So I'll start with the question on free cash flow. So I think you raised 2 points. Your first was the commitments we had implied in our prior Capital Markets Day event. So indeed, we had shown back then a range over 3 years over 2 different periods, you'll remember. I think for the period '26 to '28, we had shown something in the region of approximately EUR 300 million, and we were implying obviously a higher exit rate than that. I think the way to think about the major difference between the Capital Markets Day back then and today is global.

You know that our ambitions on global for all the reasons we've covered, the external market trend and some of the internal work that needs to be done to get this business back on track will take time. So that's how to think about maybe the exit rate and the difference in implied exit rate last time versus in this new plan.

I think the second part of your question was in terms of the growth over the coming years. Look, I think we've explained up to EUR 100 million for 2026 is our commitment. We do expect it to grow somewhat linearly in the coming years as we showed on that slide that you referred to with a more material step-up coming in the outer years of that 5-year period.

For the second question, of course, we modeled in our plan the VG in certain assumptions and assumptions on moving from Proximus to our own brands, and I'll ask Jim to give some more color on that one.

Yes. So I think indeed, like I showed in my deck as well, we have seen in our mobile postpaid customer base, a 2% point change over the period. The good news for me is that we see this mainly an acquisition. We don't really see an increased churn on the Proximus brand. So it's more people leaving that now take other choices for their new operators than actually more people leaving. So I think that's good in terms of management of the base.

It also shows to me that when people choose for a provider, price is one element in the debate. It's not the only element. People also look at the quality of the network, the quality of the servicing. Do you have sales shops, yes or no? What is the loyalty programs behind it. So there's a lot of other elements that play beyond price. And then if you look at the ARPC question that you asked, we still see a lot of people moving to convergence. So a lot of people actually bringing more and more products with the same provider, which allows us to continue to grow ARPC from a pure customer point of view. And even on our challenger brands, we're also doing a lot to try to create as much value as possible.

For instance, on Mobile Vikings, on fiber, we have tiering in our Internet offer where we have an entry offer and then we offer more expensive products at a higher speed. And we actually see quite a lot of those customers, even though they're on challenger brands, also interested to take not only the entry product, but also the more expensive products. So we continue to work also on the value of our challenger brands to make sure that we manage as good as possible the value of the base.

It's Russell from New Street Research. Three questions, if I may, please. On the dividend cut, you said that you wanted to retain flexibility for growth initiatives. And you said you'd tell us about those as and when. But sorry, if I could just ask you about those, are those organic or inorganic?

And if they are organic, can you just sort of give us an idea of the kind of projects they might be? Is it sort of something that you think you can invest in tangential to telcos? Or is it in the telco industry or what that would be interested to hear about that, please?

And then on the CapEx, second question, on the slide you put up for the 2030, there was still a big chunk of fiber roll in there. So if I'm thinking to 2031, 2032 CapEx, should there be another dip down, therefore, in your CapEx spend as that fiber roll completely finishes? And sort of related to that, when you gave your copper switch off savings, it looked as though that was all OpEx. So presumably, there's some copper CapEx as well that might fall off, but maybe that's tiny.

And then the final question is just on sort of Digi. And I mean, it looks to me as though they're kind of pivoting away a little bit from Belgium. They're obviously finding it difficult and expensive to roll out fiber. If, say, one of your competitors were to bid for Digi, so 4 to 3, would you be supportive of that? And how do you think that deal would be received by the regulatory and political community here in Belgium?

Okay. Let's start with dividend. Of course, I cannot talk about acquisitions. But in organic, of course, there are growth opportunities mainly in B2B related to digital sovereignty and edge cloud. So we'll see how fast that picks up and what kind of customer projects we will be able to secure. So there is growth in domestic Telco, but it's not at the communication layer, but innovation layers on top of it.

And I do think we will move to the market -- that AI will create a lot of new things that we don't know yet, but I've been active in IT all my life, and I do think agentic AI will be inherently distributed and compute will also follow that distribution and gives us a unique opportunity because we own the best real estate in Belgium to do distributed AI. The CapEx, the 5 to 10 years, so 30, 35, I really like your question because then you have a 10-year view on this great company. Yes, it's mainly the customer connect.

So all the drop cables that still need to bring the fiber from the street into the house. And the more we sign up and the filling rate goes up, this comes down. It's also a once in a generation CapEx. And also, copper still needs CapEx. If there are roadworks, we are -- we have mandatory need to also move the copper when they do the roadworks, but here can comment on that.

Not a lot to comment on top because indeed, it's a mix of OpEx, CapEx. Of course, everything which is energy that is substantial because with fiber, we have a rather passive network, still a lot of active gear in the street with copper. That's all in OpEx, maintenance in OpEx. But if there is a new round about, you have to imagine there is fiber and copper, and we still have to find other routes to get around the roundabout. So there is also still an aspect of CapEx in there.

Concerning your last question, moving from 4 to 3, somebody buying DG, we will probably not be allowed to do it. But if Telenet or Orange wants to do it, we fully support it if it's possible. So I already had -- also the privilege to have contacts with other CEOs of Telefonica and Orange and market repair, intra-market repair and moving from 4 to 3 is on top of everybody's agenda, but Belgium just went to 4. So we'll see what happens.

It's Konrad Zomer, ABN AMRO ODDO. I've got 2 questions. First on Global and particularly the timing of the synergy benefits. You guide EBITDA down for this year by EUR 40 million to EUR 70 million from 2025, but you expect growth in EBITDA from 2027 onwards. At the same time, you mentioned in your presentation that the integration of the 3 businesses will be completed as of this year. What have you assumed in terms of the timing of the roll-on effect -- the full year effect of the synergies that you mentioned at the time of the acquisition of Route Mobile?

And what sort of -- what's the split between internal synergy efficiencies and the ongoing market growth opportunities that you discussed?

And then secondly, on the variable pay of management remuneration, this is for the whole group. Are there many people within the domestic part of your business whose variable pay in LTIPs or STIPs or whatever parts of the maybe bonus remuneration depends on the performance of the global business. I'm trying to get a feel for -- you mentioned. who feels the pain. Yes. And it's obviously one part of the company that offset the other part in 2025, and hopefully, that will reverse at some point. But can you maybe talk us through some of the characteristics there?

In terms of synergies, and then I'll ask the planning of Seckin from a post-mortem point of view, and I can also only do the postmortem analysis, there was about EUR 100 million synergies, EUR 70 million was more at the cost side. 30 million was more at the go-to-market synergy side. The cost side have been realized, the EUR 70 million.

The question is whether they were the right cost cutting or not, I'll give that to Seckin. But the EUR 30 million, the go-to-market synergies were not realized.

In terms of incentive management for domestic, the STI, there is no global component, but in the LTI, which is more the senior leadership there is.

Thank you. So as Stijn said, we were very aggressive during 2025 when it comes to the OpEx synergies and included several items. One of the larger ones is to exit the employees in the high-cost locations and then move them to the low-cost locations. And it was carried out a little bit, in my opinion, a bit rush and a little bit without hiring the people in the low-cost locations.

When Q4 started, we were looking for -- I mean, we were announcing it, of course, 100 people. Today, I think we are down to 80 people that we are still trying to hire. Many of those are backfills, the people that we let go in the high-cost locations, and now we are trying to replicate them or hire them in low cost. Of course, it had lots of impact on our performance as well. Ideally, if you are moving jobs from high-cost locations to low cost, you need at least 3 months a transition period. We just did it completely opposite.

Actually, we had quite a large gap. And that's also impacting our -- not the only reason, but one of the reasons that impacting some of our selling opportunities. So in 2026, we are going to finalize the key battles when it comes to the integration, 7 activities that we have highlighted, cross-sell, go-to-market capabilities, investment in the domestic markets, investment in the partnerships. Partnership is going to take 2 years to start showing results.

Domestic market is going to start 1 year after we start hiring or we finalize the hiring. So there are different impacts. We will not track how much of the revenue is coming from the cross-sell or from the synergies going forward. We only care about maximizing the DM, and that's what the task of the management team.

A follow-up on the let's say the country side, the network footprint on HFC. So how fast do you intend to migrate customers from copper to HFC, so on wire and Orange Belgium?

Unfortunately, I have to say there that we're still under NDA in those discussions where that is ongoing. So we cannot be specific on the really migration scenario. But what was already public were the deployment targets, but those deployment targets were more related to fiber. Of course, HFC is already built. So there, you can get quicker access, as you can imagine. But then there are agreements to do that over a number of years.

A very quick follow-up on that one. What is basically in the plan, I would say. So if we look at 2030, do you have a significant amount of customers in these areas who are migrated or not? -- rough idea.

I think, as Geert said, I think this is confidential. Now again, similar to the other discussions, this has indeed a cost, but it also has an upside because it means that on the one hand, on copper, I can move customers from probably a 20, 30 megabit copper experience to a coax experience. So I can step up in terms of customer experience. So there's a commercial upside.

And then also in terms of copper out phasing, there's also a cost upside on that side as well. So it's never only one element. It's an aspect of multiple things that in the end will define what the output is on the cash. But as Geert says, -- this is still under negotiation, and so it's under NDA. So unfortunately, difficult to comment. But of course, we took all the assumptions in the plan. So what you see here reflects what is currently on the table.

And a very quick follow-up on your answer actually. You said in the plan, I think by 2028, you assume stable market share? Or is it also for 2030? You could be more bullish. I was going to say certainly for Flanders. -- if you can -- like you have this leadership on fiber moving to HFC. So is it that you're kind of thinking, okay, we will gain market share in Flanders, but we might lose in, I don't know, in Brussels or in Wallonia?

So the guidance that you have seen in terms of revenue, et cetera, goes until 2028. I think you only guide on CapEx beyond 2028. Again, the commercial performance will depend on a lot of variabilities. We just had a question on Digi and 3 operators versus 4 operators, which will have a huge impact on the commercial dynamics and the revenue in the market. So I think looking beyond 3 years, I think on that side, we need to be more agile and pivot as we move. And so we gave an ambition for the coming 3 years, but I'm not going to put an ambition beyond that.

One question, not on the numbers, but on the governance. Looking at your Board, currently, there's still quite some involvement of logically your majority shareholder, but it's linked, let's say, to politics mostly. Is there any chance that this will alter given that recently, we heard that a local entrepreneur Wallonia might enter your Board. But are there discussions ongoing now with the dividend as well, you might have had the opportunity to have some changes at that level that will be interesting as well.

It's not my job to choose Board members. It's a shareholders' job. But of course, we're preparing the AGM and we'll have to renew several Board members, also the Chairman, given the law, Dutch speaking. So the Chairman needs to be French speaking by law. So we'll see when we publish the agenda with the names. And then I think April 15, the shareholders can vote. But there will be a substantial change in my Board.

Okay. That's good to hear. Second question, back to Seckin. Given the -- you already provided details on how it was run that it was indeed a rush transition. People were busy internally that much, not much externally. Would it also imply that you have currently double costs running and that gives you, let's say, a little bit of runway from some organic improvement for next year? Is that an optionality there? Or is that difficult to assess in numbers?

No, we -- I mean, if the question is that if we have any fat in our OpEx, I mean, we have looked into it quite drastically. We have opportunities to reallocate. We have opportunities to take money from the nongrowing areas and questioning every single thing that we have been doing for years and then start moving that money more aggressively into new growth areas. So we are investing in the domestic markets. We are investing in partnership areas, network APIs. And we are increasing our OpEx in 2026, but we are financing most of it by reallocating our OpEx.

No more questions. One final one. We just have time for one...

Yes. Charles Par from BNP Paribas. I had a quick question regarding your FWA strategy. How do you see this product over the next years? Which kind of demographics areas are you targeting with this product? And if you could give us some more color as well on ARPU impact, that would be very good.

Yes. So indeed, I think FWA is definitely a technology that we are looking at. Now from my perspective, this is just a technology to deliver products to my customers, just like we do today with our Flex Plus product that we deliver on fiber and on copper and in the future also on HFC.

So for me, it's more a technology to enable solutions that we sell. Of course, the upselling potential that you have will depend on the technology that you use. On fiber, I can differentiate on speed and so I can sell packages that are more expensive.

On FWA, I'm going to have also some level of flexibility, but I'm probably not going to be able to put 8 gigabit symmetrical product on the market. So it's going to influence a bit that side, but we're not intending to sell an FWA product to our customers. We are selling Internet to our customers. And then I use the technologies that puts at my disposal to bring them to our customers.

So maybe to add on this, of course, you've seen that our plan is there's still also the partnerships, and that means that we get access to other type of gigabit technologies. But in some cases, that is not always sufficient, and we -- there are holes in the networks. There are, for example, expensive outliers and where we go and deploy fiber, sometimes to pass some homes, the cost is so high that you need to reflect on alternatives. So it's a mix of different things where we believe we need it as well as a complementary technology to complement what we're doing on fiber and third-party fiber and HFC.

And we're already doing FWA and B2B because in B2B, it's more common to have backup lines and FWA is it's becoming common practice to be the backup line.

Okay. I see we have one final, final question here.

Thank you for allowing me the opportunity again. It's actually just a follow-up on that because on FWA because obviously, in those rural areas where you are going to be wholesaling the HFC network, that's a big cost for you. So are you not incentivized to try and push FWA quite heavily in those regions to minimize your wholesale costs?

So of course, when we make a kind of a collaboration deal, there are some elements in there with respect to balancing things. So -- but then again, that is part of the negotiation that is ongoing. Of course, what I'm saying, expensive outliers, holes in the network, et cetera, that is more across footprint. It's not only linked to rural. So it's a combination of those 2 things that we're looking at.

Right. That concludes the Q&A session. And with that, also the Capital Markets Day. So thank you all very much for your presence here in the room and all for your questions as well. As usual, should there be any follow-up questions, you can reach out to the Investor Relations team, either Bart or myself are happy to help you out with that. So thank you again, and enjoy the rest of your afternoon.

Hello, and welcome to the Proximus Q3 2025 Results Conference Call. My name is Sergey, and I'll be your coordinator for today's event. Please note, this conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand you over to your host, Nancy Goossens, Investor Relations lead, to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Proximus Third Quarter Results Webcast. We will begin with our presentation, and it is my pleasure to introduce our new CEO, Stijn Bijnens, who will walk you through today's highlights. Our CFO, Mark Reid, will then present the financial results. A Q&A session will follow with Jim Casteele, the consumer market lead also participating.

Handing over now to Stijn for the highlights. Please go ahead.

Also, welcome from my side. I'm honored to present my first round of Proximus results to you today. As you have seen in our published report this morning, Proximus continued its robust domestic performance despite the intense competitive environment. This is reflected in both another strong financial and operational quarter. Network leadership remains at the core of the success with 5G coverage now over 85% and fiber in the street covering more than 47% of the Belgian homes and businesses.

We're pleased that the Belgian Competition Authority announced the launch of the market test and our proposed gigabit network collaboration in Flanders, while the negotiations in Wallonia are ongoing. The Proximus Global segment continues to experience challenges related to SMS CPaaS and integration issues, prompting a reassessment of ambitions, which will be addressed later in this presentation. And finally, we concluded the sale of Be-Mobile, keeping us well on track to realize the EUR 600 million asset sales program. Based on the results and current projections, we've updated our outlook, which I'll discuss shortly.

Moving to our key financial results now. For the Domestic segment, we closed the third quarter with stable services revenues. Thanks to a favorable revenue mix, driving higher margins and costs turning stable year-on-year, we closed Q3 with a domestic EBITDA growing 1.8%. For the Global segment, the direct margin was down by 12.2% at constant currency, caused by the headwinds previously mentioned. This resulted in an EBITDA decline of 22.3% despite cost synergy realizations. This brings our group EBITDA to EUR 475 million for the third quarter, a decline by 1%. Our CapEx for the first 9 months was EUR 826 million. And the free cash flow, we ended the first 9 months with EUR 428 million in total. Excluding the proceeds from asset sales, our organic free cash flow was EUR 159 million, a strong improvement year-on-year.

Let's have a look now at the operational results. Despite the intense competition, the operational performance was very strong with mobile postpaid adding 45,000 cards and our Internet subscriber base growing by 12,000 lines. Our convergent base continued its steady growth, adding 12,000 residential customers in the third quarter. The solid commercial performance was supported by the portfolio changes of the Proximus brands, attractive mobile joint offers and the ongoing convergence strategy.

We also continued focusing on innovation and optimizing the customer journey as we launched our new features to help customers onboard via eSIM. Regarding the B2B unit, which closely aligns with my professional background, Proximus holds a robust position in the market today, and we are developing strategies to capture growth opportunities. I'm committed to shape Proximus B2B future and to drive growth, leveraging the strong network assets of Proximus while exploring new layers of innovation. Our focus is on sovereignty and next-generation AI opportunities. To make this happen, we will be collaborating with leading technology partners to validate impactful use cases. We will elaborate on this during the Capital Markets Day in February.

As previously mentioned, the high-quality network is an essential contributor to the success of Proximus. Across Belgium, we have now a total of almost 2.5 million fiber homes, meaning a population coverage of over 41% and including fiber in the Street, we are at 47% coverage. The fiber network filling rate progressed to 33%, up from 30% 1 year back. At the end of September, the base of active fiber customers totaled 684,000, including 39,000 added over the third quarter.

We are pleased with the announcement of the Belgium regulators on the start of a market test assessing our proposed gigabit network collaboration between wire, Telenet and Proximus in France. The market test will conclude on Friday, November 21. At the same time, fiber negotiations in the South are ongoing. As a last point on the domestic side, I would like to highlight the progress made on the disposal program of noncore assets. As was announced at closing, the sale of Be-Mobile was completed early October and leaves us very much on track for the EUR 600 million ambition that we have set for the end of '27.

Turning to the full year guidance. For domestic, we reiterate our outlook given end of July with domestic EBITDA expected to grow up to 2%. This despite the impact of the Be-Mobile divestment and not having renewed the football broadcasting contract with DAZN. Taking into account the ongoing headwinds regarding the Proximus Global segment, we expect the EBITDA of Global to be lower year-on-year by around minus 10%. We have lowered this year's guidance for accrued CapEx to approximately EUR 1.250 billion. This is because the integration of Fiberklaar is leading to more effective and efficient fiber rollout some lower project-related CapEx and less investment needs for Global. This, combined with not having renewed the Belgian football contract leads to organic free cash flow expected to land to around EUR 100 million. And finally, the projected 2025 net debt-to-EBITDA ratio improved to around 2.8. We also confirm our intention to return an interim dividend of EUR 0.30 per share payable on December 5, post final approval of the Board scheduled later this month.

For Global specifically, we have reassessed our growth projections for the coming year. While new growth initiatives have been launched and cost synergy delivery is progressing, high exposure to the legacy P2P voice and messaging and as well as SMS CPaaS is expected to continue having a significant impact. Therefore, the '26 Global ambition is being adjusted. The preliminary review for 2026 indicates Proximus Global EBITDA will be in the range of EUR 100 million to EUR 130 million.

In collaboration with Seckin Arikan, the new global CEO, a strategic plan is being developed with the objective of resuming growth from 2027 onwards. An update on the plan for Proximus Global will be provided at the Capital Markets Day.

I hand over to Mark now for the detailed financial results.

Thank you, Stijn. Let me start by taking you through the financial sections of the domestic business. Starting with our domestic revenue, as illustrated on the chart, services revenue grew slightly. And when including revenue from Terminals and IT hardware, the total revenue remained broadly stable year-over-year.

The third quarter growth was mainly driven by continued increase in the Services revenue of the residential unit. This -- thanks to the January 2025 price indexation and ongoing convergent customer growth. Revenue from Terminals was only slightly lower year-on-year in contrast to the previous 2 quarters. The most valuable part of the residential revenue, customer services revenue is growing by 1.8% with convergent revenue up by 4.5 percentage points year-on-year. The ARPC continued to show a positive evolution, growing 1.2%, including the price indexation effect and the benefit of a continued increase in convergent customers and fiber upselling.

Turning to the business unit. The B2B, the total revenue declined by negative 0.8%, essentially due to a decrease in service revenue of 1.1%, which resulted from the continued headwinds in fixed voice and moderate decline in mobile services. The decrease is partially offset by a 1.5 percentage increase in products revenue.

Taking a closer look at the B2B revenue from services, the third quarter included higher revenue from IT services growing 2.8% year-over-year, driven by growth in recurring services. Fixed data revenue recorded a limited decrease of negative 0.9% year-over-year. This resulted from the decline in traditional data connectivity services, nearly offset by continued strong revenue growth from Internet services.

Despite the competitive intensity, the B2B unit maintains a solid mobile base and sees the mobile revenue decline sequentially stabilizing to 2.1% negative year-over-year. Fixed voice continued its steady decline due to a lower customer base, while value managed through price increases resulted in a sustained positive ARPU trend.

The wholesale business posted a revenue decline of 11.8% due to the ongoing innovation of Interconnect revenue with no margin impact and a decline in Wholesale services revenue by 4.6% from an exceptionally high comparable base from revenue in the prior year.

Moving to Domestic OpEx, which, as you can see, illustrated on the graph, continued its favorable trend and for the first time since several quarters, ended the quarter stable on a year-over-year basis. For the third quarter, inflationary and other cost increases were fully offset by our cost efficiency program. With OpEx stable and direct margin growth, the domestic EBITDA rose by 1.8% in the third quarter.

Turning now to Proximus Global, for which we closed the third quarter with direct margin down 12.2% on a constant currency basis. The product group communications and data was impacted by the ongoing decline in the CPaaS SMS market, especially in the onetime password domain. Moreover, the margin from P2P voice messaging was down, reflecting structural trends in the legacy market. Whereas synergy delivery for Go-to-Market is delayed, we have realized cost synergies successfully, improving the OpEx for Global by 8.4%, again on a year-over-year basis. This could only partially offset the pressure on direct margin and led to a decrease in EBITDA for the Global segment by 22.3% on a constant currency basis.

Turning to Group CapEx, we closed the first 9 months of the year with EUR 826 million compared to the same period last year. CapEx was lower mainly due to reduced customer-related CapEx as a result of, among other things, higher refurbishment rates, increased self-installation rates and improvements in operational processes. Fiber-related expenditures were slightly up with the rollout in dense areas coming down, while Fiberklaar continued expansion in the mid-dense areas. This brings me to the free cash flow for the first 9 months of the year. As illustrated on the graph, the organic free cash flow for the first 9 months of 2025 was EUR 159 million, strongly improving from 1 year back, thanks to lower cash CapEx and growing EBITDA. Our reported free cash flow of EUR 428 million includes the net proceeds from the sales of our data center business and the Luxembourg Mobile Towers.

I'll now turn over to Stijn for the conclusion.

Thanks, Mark. Just five things to conclude. Being just over 2 months in the company, it's clear for me that we have a strongly performing domestic segment, especially the residential unit is in very good shape, considering the changed market structure.

Proximus maintains a solid B2B position, but there's still growth potential, and we are developing strategies to capture it. Secondly, Proximus has incredibly well-performing networks and the expanding fiber network provides Proximus a strong head start. Thirdly, we've been successful in realizing CapEx efficiencies for this year, which is supportive for an improved estimated for the Group organic free cash flow. Fourth, in contrast to the successes domestically, it is clear we have challenges with the global segment and with ongoing pressures anticipated, we have reset as a result, our targets for 2026. And as a final point, we will present our new strategic cycle for the Proximus Group together with the full year results on February 27.

I'm sure you understand that given this context, I'm unable to share insights regarding the strategy at this time. However, we welcome any other questions you might have and are pleased to address them now.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Ganesha Nagesha from Barclays.

A couple of questions from my side. The first one on the global division. So following the recent downward revision to the global segment EBITDA guidance, so could you share like what factors give you confidence in the stability of this outlook going forward? And could you also provide some color on what specific integration challenges that still remain, which impacting the realization of the expected margin synergies?

And my second question on the CapEx guidance. So your CapEx guidance for the current year implies like EUR 50 million savings achieved in the current year. You earlier indicated that the CapEx would remain stable around EUR 1.3 billion over '25 to '27. So do you still see a potential for further savings in '26, '27 as well? Or is this just one-off CapEx savings in the 2025?

Well, thank you for the question. I'll take the first one and give the CapEx question to Mark. About Global, as an initial outcome for a broader planning process, we have done a new estimate for 2026. That has been a bottom-up exercise on a product line basis. So there are product lines that grow, as you know, and other product lines that declined. And in absolute terms, the growing business lines are still smaller than the declining business lines. So at the moment, we think and believe in 2027, there will be an inflection point of that the current smaller business lines that are growing offset the decline. So the business lines that are declining are A2P SMS, B2B voice, and it's offset by business lines that grow like cloud, omnichannel, IoT, travel SIM and digital identity. So we've done that exercise, and that's currently the best estimate we have on the business.

Ganesha, thank you for your question. And on 2025, look, we're pleased with the ability to have kind of taken those CapEx savings and the effect that had on our '25 free cash flow. I think as you -- as Stijn said in the presentation, we're all in the process of co-creating our strategy, and then we'll come back at the Capital Markets Day with the future outlook on CapEx. So I think unfortunately, we have to answer that today. Stijn, do you want to add to that?

Yes. The second part of the first question, on integration issues, it's at different levels, so we had some churn of executive leadership. We strongly believe we have a strong CEO now who comes from the CPaaS market, Seckin. He knows the business. So integration issues are on the one hand in the Go-to-Market, and we're fixing that. Also in the product portfolio, we do understand the challenges are actively improving the operations and the operating model to handle these challenges.

We will now take our next question from Paul Sidney from Berenberg.

I also had two, please. Just firstly, on Global, you've chosen to give the Global guidance for full year '26 today. Should we view this decision as in your intention to set a floor for Global profitability ahead of the February strategic update as you sort of think about how the business looks beyond 2026?

And then secondly, on domestic and Digi appears to be having a little impact in the Belgian mobile market even at the extremely low price points that they've come in at. What are you seeing in the market in terms of Digi maybe revamping their offers or doing something different? And do you expect the other operators also to do anything different going forward?

Paul, thank you for the question. On Global for 2026, clearly, we've done an estimate. We were conscious of the market consensus was higher than what we disclosed today. And therefore, with Stijn and Seckin arriving, we accelerated that kind of bottom-up planning process for that period of '26 and the start of '27. And so that's our estimation, and we're confident with it. It is a fairly wide range at this point, but that's what we wanted to inform the market today. So that's how we thought about updating that specific number. Jim, do you want to take the question?

Yes. So indeed, on Digi, they're in the market with quite aggressive offers. For the moment, I would say that the visibility on their market campaigns is rather limited. That said, the Belgium market since the arrival of Digi has been very competitive with the B brands of the competitors also being active with assertive promotions. So in that sense, I'm really happy to see that our multi-brand strategy with Mobile Viking, Scarlet and Proximus addressing the different price points in the market is delivering on our strategy, not only allowing us to realize again very strong commercial results, but at the same time, also keeping value in the way that we do that, as you have seen in the further growth of our service revenues.

Mark, can I just have a quick follow-up. In terms of when you say growth, returning to growth within Global in 2027, just to clarify, is that revenue, EBITDA, free cash flow or all of the above?

It's at the level of EBITDA.

We will now move to our next question from Roshan Ranjit from Deutsche Bank.

I've got two questions, please. Maybe just touching on the domestic point. Stijn, you mentioned the good performance that you've had and if we look at the KPIs, coupled with the fact that you announced a price increase for ’26, how should we think about kind of the future evolution of your product revamp, sorry? You've been quite successful over the last, I guess, 2 years on those campaigns. What made you kind of choose the products where you have allocated those price increases to? Is that a case of trying to migrate customers away from the legacy products? Or are you still kind of running with those multi-brand options within the Proximus bundle, so the different packs within Proximus. And as an aside, you've got the Scarlet and Mobile Vikings, as you said?

And secondly, we're obviously getting to the end now of the collaboration -- finalization of collaboration in Flanders. Has that given you more confidence or any insights on how the discussions with Orange Belgium in Wallonia is going as well, please? Anything you could say there, very helpful.

So thank you for the question. So I will start with the price increase. So indeed, we continue to do price increases also in January next year. The way we do that is, on the one hand, trying to understand where are the products where price sensitivity is a bit lower. Next to that, of course, we recently launched our Flex+ new convergent offer in April.

And then, of course, when you launch a new offer, you put it at a price point that you think is going to last for a longer period in time. So it's obvious that those tariff plans are not part of a price increase 8 months after launch. I would say, at the same time, what we do is when we do price increases, we also try to do a more-for-more approach, not necessarily always at the same time, but definitely in a short period before or after, depending on market conditions, of course. And so that's how we've been able to manage our price increases over time while keeping our customers satisfied.

Of course, also always looking at the level of inflation as a sort of reference point for those price increases. It's true that we also look at management of the back prices and trying to see if we can leverage price evolutions to move people from older products to newer products, which helps them to simplify your IT systems, but also operationally makes life easier for our salespeople.

And then in terms of future portfolio evolutions, as always, we look at the market to make sure that we stay competitive. As I mentioned also in my previous answer, we do this from a very value-based perspective. So if you see, for instance, October 1, we updated the midrange of the Proximus mobile offer because by doing that, we also anticipate that we can create additional value for the company. And we always look at how the 3 brands are positioned in terms of segments and price points. So that's a bit the pricing strategy that we've been executing on over the last years. And I'm happy to hear that you think this has been successful. So thank you for that.

About your second question about the fiber rollout in Belgium. So the North and the South. In the North, in a few weeks, we will have the outcome of the market test. We're confident in that and that once the black box gets open, we can make a detailed CapEx plan and rollout. In the South, it's kind of 3 months behind that cycle. It's the same cycle where we need to go through. We first need to finalize the agreement with Orange and then go to the market authorities to do that. But we're fully confident that all these deals are on track at the moment with the different timings that I just mentioned.

We'll now move to our next question from Kris Kippers from Degroof Petercam.

Firstly, just going back to Global again. I haven't heard the mentioning of the EUR 100 million improvement in synergies that initially was communicated. Is that a number that could alter now that the scale has changed? Or what should we see in that? And then secondly, classical one perhaps, but I'm quite pleased to see indeed that also on the domestic side, the workforce expenses have been declining. Is this something we should continue -- keep continuing in the quarters ahead? How -- could you guide us a bit more on the reduction in FTEs?

Thanks for the question on Global. So first of all, on Global, I think, again, you've seen from our disclosure today, we -- the operating costs continue to kind of deliver probably a bit ahead of plan. So in terms of our operating cost synergies and our direct COG synergies there kind of as we've said before, I think the cross-sell, upsell synergies that are Go-to-Market related are really alluded to in terms of our integration phasing and that taking a bit longer. Look, I think we'll come back in the Capital Markets Day and allude to that as Seckin kind of gets the grip with what the phasing of that looks like. So I think that's where we are today. But as I said, we're very pleased with the cost synergies there fully on track. The Go-to-Market ones will come as part of the strategy update when we get there.

Regarding the second question on workforce. So we're very pleased about this quarter that OpEx stays flat. We have a strategic workforce planning and management is executing well on that plan. We're currently reviewing things, and I'll come back on that in -- on the Capital Markets Day once we have our strategy crystallized and then we will also give more guidance on that part of our business.

Okay. And then if I just may, just a small follow-up regarding the fiber communication. When the market test would be finished on November 21, do you intend to communicate direct to the market at that day? Or what is the -- what should be the time frame for that? And regarding when, do you provide an update as well?

So when the market test ends on November 21, it's actually the competition authority that has to assess it and analyze it, and they will come with a communication. Once that's done, we can move forward. So it's in their hands regarding communication. And it will be the same process in the South as it are the same people at the authority level.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question is from Michiel Declercq from KBC Securities.

My first one would be on the Global business. So you mentioned that, of course, we have the SMS part that is declining and then I assume the OTT and Digital Identity is growing. Can you maybe remind us what the split of revenue is here or in terms of profitability, given that you mentioned an inflection point in 2027? And as a follow-up on this, of course, the non-SMS business is growing. Can you maybe elaborate a bit on how this compares to competition? Because I see that competitors are also growing. But in terms of market share, are you improving here? Or are you losing customers?

And then the second one is maybe for Spain specifically. You recently joined, of course, from Cegeka, an IT group, of course. But what experience can you bring? And in the beginning, you also elaborated a bit on the opportunities that you see within the B2B. Can you maybe explain a bit what opportunities there are here for to unlock?

Michiel, thank you for that. So I think if you look at our disclosures, you kind of see a little bit about our kind of split of the overall direct margin revenue split between B2B is kind of our legacy voice and messaging business and then CPaaS and data, which is effectively a mixture of traditional CPaaS A2P, omnichannel where you can think of kind of RCS, WhatsApp, Viber, e-mail type products and then Digital Identity, which is more kind of our fraud prevention products.

We don't disclose the mix of that. But clearly, the A2P SMS part of that business is the majority. And as we said, the element that we've been exposed to is we do a lot of international OTP traffic there. The rate of change of that business towards omnichannel was a little quicker than we expected but Proximus Global was always set up to manage that transition. But clearly, the 2 parts of the business are different scales, but we are seeing growth in the omnichannel part, the RCS, WhatsApp, Viber, e-mail part of the business.

And so that is really -- as we start to look forward through the end of this year into this first part of '27, that's really where we see the inflection point of that part of the business starting to be contributed and return us to growth from an EBITDA perspective. I hope that helps. We don't disclose the exact detail. In terms of market share, again, we don't talk about the specific market shares. Clearly, at the moment, in the last couple of quarters, it's been a difficult market for us there. But again, as we effectively get these integration problems behind us and the products and Go-to-Market, we clearly believe that we will have a competitive advantage given the structure of Proximus Global, our cost base and our product portfolio to Go-to-Market and be successful in capturing that growth going forward. Stijn, do you want to take that?

Yes, we should. Regarding the second question, Proximus today is a market leader in B2B at the connectivity level. Of course, we intend to stay that, and it's also due to our strong footprint and network superiority. But there are additional services to be offered that Proximus is currently doing, but I do think there is an opportunity to grow further in everything that has to do in cybersecurity, cloud. I strongly believe in hybrid cloud. So a combination of strong partnerships with the hyperscalers, but also having our own sovereign cloud solution, there is an increased interest. And I think Proximus is in a superior position in Belgium to capture the part -- the growth in hybrid cloud.

Also, AI will go towards the edge. You see a lot of announcements, if you look at NVIDIA and Nokia. So we kind of own the edge real estate in Belgium from a telco perspective. So we see many opportunities. It will take time to capture those opportunities, of course. But I do think we have the team and we will build the organization to unlock that value that we really leverage our telco infrastructure in those new pockets of growth.

There are no further questions. So I'll hand back to your host to conclude today's conference.

Thank you for joining us today, and thank you for your questions. As always, should there be any follow-ups, you can address those to the Investor Relations team. Bye.

Thank you for joining today's call. You may now disconnect.

Hello, and welcome the Proximus Q2 2025 Analyst Conference Call. My name is George, and I'll be a coordinator for today's event. Please note that this conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I'd like to turn the call over to your host today, Ms. Nancy Goossens, Investor Relations lead, to begin today's conference. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining this Proximus results webcast. We will start with our presentation. And as usual, we will address all your questions after that. The presenters of today are the CEO at Interim, Van Acoleyen; and the Group CFO, Mark Reid. And for the Q&A, we are joined by the Residential Lead, Jim Casteele, by Renaud Tilmans for the B2B Telco part and by the corporate affairs lead, Ben Appel.

They will be taking your questions in a moment, but first, handing over to Jan to take you through the highlights for today. Jan, please go ahead.

Thank you, Nancy. Good day, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. Stijn Bijnens, the new Proximus Group CEO, who will be joining us as of September 1 and will be your host for the next round. But for today, I'll be taking you through the main takeaways from the second quarter, after which, Mark will take over for a deeper dive. As you have all seen in our published report this morning, Proximus continued its robust domestic performance despite the intense competition. This is reflected in another strong financial quarter with both domestic service revenue and EBITDA growing year-over-year.

Network leadership remains a key pillar of our strategy with 5G coverage now above 80%. And fiber in the street covering more than 45% of the Belgian homes and businesses. Regarding the fiber negotiations, we are pleased to announce that we have signed an MOU with Orange Belgium, covering a collaboration on fiber in Wallonia and the use of the HFC network in rural zones. For Flanders, significant progress was made during the second quarter, bringing us closer to the next step.

Regarding our global segment, the part of our business faced accelerated headwinds in the CPaaS market besides integration challenges that are impacting the go-to-market. This was only partially compensated by successful delivery of OpEx synergies. As a last point, thanks to the expected proceeds of the sale of BeMobile, we will have achieved our original divestment plan target of EUR 500 million by 2027 already this year and have increased our ambition up to EUR 600 million over the 2023, 2027 period.

Now handing over to Mark for a closer look and starting with the announced update of our full year guidance for '25.

Thank you, Jan. So indeed, before diving into the drivers, let me walk you through the updated guidance we have given this morning for the full year of 2025.

First, on the domestic segment, we have raised full year 2025 domestic EBITDA guidance from broadly stable to 2024 to an increase by up to 2%. This results from a combination of an improved revenue mix with higher service revenue offsetting lower revenue from terminals and from cost improvement. This is why from a total domestic revenue perspective, we expect to remain broadly stable compared to the previous year, so no change there.

Regarding Proximus Global, the headwinds signaled in the first quarter continued and even accelerated with the results over the second quarter and our estimate for the remainder of the year, we reviewed our EBITDA expectations downwards to a year-over-year decline by 5% to 10% in comparison to a 20% growth before despite the successful implementation of cost synergies. I'll get into more detail in a few minutes to explain what the main drivers are and what of course of action is going to be.

The domestic upgrade, combined with a lowered expectation for Global brings us to an expected growth of up to 1% for the Proximus Group. This compares to around 2% previously. The group CapEx and organic free cash flow expectations for the year remain unchanged.

Moving to our key financial results. For the domestic segment, we closed the second quarter with a solid 1.6% increase in service revenue, offset by lower terminal revenues. This more favorable revenue mix drove higher margin, which more than offset the increase in OpEx. As such, we closed Q2 with domestic EBITDA growing by 1.9%. The global segment, the direct margin was down 10.8% caused by the headwinds previously mentioned. This resulted in an EBITDA decline of 5.4% despite strong cost control and synergy realization. This brings our group EBITDA to EUR 491 million for the second quarter, an increase of by 1.2%.

Our CapEx for the first half was EUR 542 million, and the free cash flow we ended the first half with EUR 266 million in total. Excluding the proceeds from asset sales, the organic free cash flow was negative EUR 5 million, a solid improvement year-on-year.

Let's have a look now at the operational results. The second quarter operational performance was again robust with very strong results from mobile postpaid, adding 38,000 cards despite intense competition. The solid commercial performance was supported by the portfolio changes of the Proximus brand and attractive mobile joint offers, following the early changes for the B brand, Scarlet and Mobile Vikings and the ongoing convergence strategy. Our convergent base continued to grow, adding 11,000 residential customers in the second quarter. The resilience of our residential unit in this evolved market structure is underpinned by the multi-brand strategy. Our brand, Scarlet and Mobile Vikings deliver first line of defense against the fourth entrant and other low-end offers in the market.

At the same time, we drive value by positioning the Proximus brand in the premium segment. Thanks to the launch of our fiber-centric Flex+ offers back in the first quarter, the mobile data boost for stand-alone mobile offers in April, we managed to drive further commercial momentum. Network leadership is at the core of our strategy, and we are very proud that we again got the recognition for it, winning the Ookla speed test for the fastest Internet for the first half of this year. In mobile, we crossed another important milestone and now have over 80% indoor 5G coverage. Across Belgium, we now have a total of 2.4 million home fiber homes, meaning a coverage of over 40%. And including fiber in the street, we're even above 45%. Our network filling rate was stable compared to the previous quarter at 33%. At the end of June, we had activated 646,000 fiber customers adding another 38,000 in the second quarter.

As Jan already mentioned earlier on, we made significant progress regarding the fiber negotiations. In Flanders, we have strongly progressed to reach an agreement in principle on the terms of a future collaboration to accelerate the deployment of fiber networks across Flanders. We are working closely with the BCA and BIPT in view of starting a market test in September. What is more is that we have signed last night an MOU with Orange Belgium to expand the deployment of fiber and the access to multi-gig networks in Wallonia. The MOU covers nearly 1.4 million homes in the Walloon region of Belgium. What is excluded from the MOU is the dense areas, counting about 450,000 homes we will continue to deploy with fiber in stand-alone and which is already partly done.

Regarding the mid-dense areas, our JV Unifiber will continue to deploy earlier announced 600,000 fiber homes, so no change in the deployment but Orange Belgium will onboard its customers on this network. In addition, Proximus and Orange Belgium will deploy 200,000 fiber homes split amongst the both of us in low dense areas, and we will be onboarding our customers on each other's fiber network. Note that from a financing perspective, for Proximus, we are looking into different options with the aim to keep this investment off balance sheet. For the remainder of the rural areas, so another 600,000 homes, the MOU foresees the usage of HFC with an option to use superior technology should that become available. This brings a number of clear benefits as listed here on this slide. It will allow for much more efficient CapEx deployment, especially for the rural areas. It will enhance the fiber coverage versus our stand-alone plan and will bring fiber to around 70% of the Walloon region.

Broader fiber means that we will also have the commercial benefits on a larger scale. Clearly, the symmetrical commitments to onboard customers on the fiber networks, we're looking at very high utilization rates. We will also have a solution for the most rural areas of this part of the country, whereby we will be able to offer gigabit access to our customers. This will also enable copper decommissioning at a faster pace. So with this MOU, we have clearly taken a significant step towards a more efficient network deployment. We will keep you informed on further developments as we move into the next phases of this process.

As a final topic for domestic and this time in the business domain, 1 deal that I would want to spend a little time on is it's a really strategic win for Proximus NXT. It's the major contract we won together with Thales, for the NATO. It's a great achievement of the team, putting Proximus NXT on the map as a key player for the digital transformation of defense, offering resilience and secure infrastructure.

Let's do now in on our Proximus Global segment. Despite the good progress that we have made in realizing cost synergies, thanks to a more optimal workforce and cost of sale benefits from optimized routing, we clearly also faced some headwinds. The initial slowdown indications we witnessed in the first quarter more precisely in the CPaaS market have accelerated and affected some segments strongly. We've especially experienced weakness in the SMS CPaaS market with international onetime password affected the most. This, in combination with some operational integration headwinds that are impeding our margin synergy delivery caused a downward revision of the EBITDA outlook for Global. To enhance Global's performance, we have identified some key areas of focus going forward.

For starters to mitigate the impact of decreasing markets, we'll accelerate the development of our growth products. Omnichannel is on the rise, but today, too limit to offset the headwinds. So we're intensifying efforts to overcome integration challenges and accelerate our transformation to omnichannel with a particular focus on market communications to RCS. In addition, we are going to maximize the cross-sell potential we have across global entities and refocus on more profitable customers and growing markets.

And finally, we want to leverage signed partnerships with global to drive more value. In this view, we have also announced organizational changes at Route Mobile with Mr. Rajdip Gupta, Founder and Managing Director, reappointed as CEO. And in addition, a new Global CEO will be appointed soon.

Let's now review the Q2 results. Assuming you have seen the earnings release, I will proceed quickly from this part. Starting with domestic revenue. As illustrated on the chart, services revenue grew by 1.1% when including revenue from terminals and IT hardware. The total revenue showed a slight decline of negative 0.7%. The second quarter growth was mainly driven by sustained strong increase in services revenue of the residential unit. This thanks to the January 25, '25 price indexation and the ongoing convergent customer growth. The growth was partially offset by a decrease in revenue from terminals resulting from lower joint offer volumes. Most value part of the residential revenue customer service revenue is growing by 2.5% with convergent revenue up by 5.4% year-on-year. The APAC continued to show a positive evolution, growing 1.8%, including the price indexation and the benefit from a continued increase in convergent customers and fiber upselling.

Turning to the business unit. For B2B, the total revenue declined by 4.4%, essentially due to a decrease in low-margin products revenues post the very strong first quarter. I remind that we had a record high level of IT product revenues in the previous quarter, which illustrates the high volatility of this part of the revenue. Yet remember, this is with limited impact on the direct margin.

Taking a closer look at the B2B revenue from services, the second quarter included signed growth from IT services growing 1.7% year-over-year, driven by growth in smart mobility services and workplace. Fixed data revenue remained rather stable with a mix, a growing revenue from fixed Internet offset by lower revenue from traditional data connectivity. Despite the competitive intensity, the B2B unit maintained a solid mobile base and sees its mobile revenue decline sequentially moderating following the annualization effect from a large customer loss in 2024, including value management actions. Fixed voice continues a steady decline due to a lower customer base, while the ARPU benefit from indexed pricing.

The wholesale business, we have achieved a sustained growth in fixed and mobile services, up by 6% for the second quarter. This partially offset the decline from low-margin interconnect revenue. The year-on-year revenue decline reflects the further continued volume erosion in traditional messaging. For the domestic OpEx, we report for the second quarter of 2025, an increase of 1.3%, which is a further slowdown compared to the previous quarters. This year-on-year increase was mainly impacted by wage indexations and other inflationary effects, higher customer-related OpEx and strategic transformation issues. This is partially offset by cost efficiencies.

This brings me to the domestic EBITDA, which grew for the second quarter by 1.9% as you can see on the chart, resulting from a good growth in direct margin, partially offset by higher workforce OpEx.

Turning now to Proximus Global, for which we closed the second quarter with a revenue decline of 18.8% with the revenue pressure largely on low-margin business, the direct margin was down 10.8% or 8% decline on a constant currency basis. For the Product Group Communications and Data, direct margin was down 14.8% year-on-year on a pro forma basis. As explained before, this was due to increasing headwinds in the CPaaS SMS market facing significant volume erosion and price competition. Despite the lower revenue in P2P voice and messaging, the direct margin was up by 1.7% year-over-year, driven by an optimization of the direct margin mix.

Successful realization of the cost synergies drove global OpEx down 14.1% year-over-year on a pro forma basis, which has partially offset the direct pressure -- the pressure from on direct margin. The resulting global EBITDA decreased by 5.4% year-over-year on a pro forma basis, which represents a decline of 3.2% on a constant currency basis.

Regarding the group CapEx, we closed the first half of the year with EUR 542 million, and we remain well on track for the outlook we have given for the year at about EUR 1.3 billion. Compared to the same period last year, CapEx is lower, mainly due to cyclicity of TV content contract renewals. Fiber-related expenditures increased year-over-year driven by the consolidation of Fiberklaar while investments related to connecting and activating customers have decreased.

This brings me to free cash flow for the first half of the year. As illustrated on the chart, the organic free cash flow for the first half of 2025 was negative EUR 5 million, strongly improving from 1 year back, thanks to the growing EBITDA, favorable year-over-year impact from working capital and lower cash CapEx. Our reported free cash flow includes the proceeds from the sale of our data center business and Luxembourg Mobile Towers. This brings me to the next topic.

As a last point before turning to your questions, the disposal program of noncore assets, which we launched to support our free cash flow throughout the high investment period is progressing very well. In the second quarter, Proximus Group completed the sale of Luxembourg Towers for a final purchase price of EUR 111 million, and we announced the agreement to sell BeMobile at the enterprise value of EUR 170 million. As such, we achieved our ambition to divest EUR 500 million of noncore assets by 2027, more than 2 years earlier than planned. As we now also have initiated the sales of a range of real estate income of amongst other technical buildings, we no longer need. We raised the total expected proceeds, our total asset disposal program is now expected to bring EUR 600 million by the end of 2027.

This closes my presentation. I will now turn the line open to your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our very first question today is coming from Michiel Declercq calling from KBC Securities.

The first question would be on the global business, quite a big surprise, of course, in the outlook as this would imply a further decrease in the EBITDA and the decrease in the EBITDA in the second half this year. So I'm just wondering, can you give a bit more color on why this sudden shift or this acceleration towards SMS has happened? And do you see this as a as a structural thing? Will it further -- or do you think it will further accelerate going forward? And if you could maybe also comment on how much SMS is now of the total compared to other OTT services that you're providing?

And then the second question would be on the residential mobile. Again, a strong quarter, and it looks like you fully offset the impact from Digi city in the first quarter. Just wondering now that they launched a new commercial offering the first of June, do you maybe see an impact of that again, looking in the month of June specifically? Those would be my questions.

Let me take the first one. So I think we started to see some of this effect on the SMS market, where effectively some of the big kind of OTT players, big enterprise customers were starting to move some of their traffic, their engagement traffic to other channels. And so that was -- we started to feel that, that accelerated in Q2 and effectively 1 of the major impacts in terms of our shift in guidance. I think when we look at it in terms of the rest of the year, those structural elements and some of the integration challenges that we put are fully now reflected in our guidance at the end of 2025.

I think where we think about this, we -- in the structure of Proximus Global, we always were aware that this was happening. And although it's happened a little faster than we expected, Proximus Global has the assets, the products and portfolios to manage this transition away from traditional ATP SMS to omnichannel, RCS, WhatsApp, email, the likes. And so I think we're well positioned to do that. The scale of businesses we haven't disclosed, but there -- as you can imagine, it's slightly bigger on the SMS side than the omnichannel part of our business. And -- but we're fully focused on capturing the growth of the RCS e-mail, the WhatsApp channel, and we have the products and portfolios to do that. And so that's fully part of the Proximus Global's strategy.

And we're taking swift action in terms to be able to capture that. So I think that's the way I would think about it. And as I said, we've reflected the latest trends in our outlook for the year, and we're confident in terms of the guidance we've given. But we understand that it was a swift change of direction, but part of that was this rapid change in SMS. So that's where we are on that first question. Jim, do you want to take the one....

Michiel, thank you for the question. So Jim answering here. So the impact of the -- the new offer of Digi launched the first of June. So the EUR 3 offer is extremely limited on our commercial performance. And then of course, we will closely monitor the market as we always do, but we haven't seen an impact of that new offer on the market.

We will now move to David Vagman of ING.

First 1 on Proximus Global. So I estimate the new guidance implies a 20% drop in EBITDA in H2. So -- can you say whether the 2026 target for Global are basically at risk either in terms of timeline or basically the cut in the guidance because of this faster shift to SMS, disintermediation, difficulty on the integration side. And is there a risk on the -- of a goodwill write-down? So that's my first question.

Then secondly, could you clarify the organic free cash flow message beyond 2025 as communicated in your Q2 2024 the average 2025, 2027 and then 2028 to 2050, it seems you're thinking the consensus has been overestimating free cash flow in the medium term. So maybe you can give more granularity on CapEx or other elements that are not properly modeled.

And maybe as a follow-up to that, how do you do the MOU signed with OBEL and then the change at Proximus Global impact the free cash flow guidance?

David, let me take the first one. In terms of 2026, as I said, the first Q2 results have been slightly disappointment. But again, we have been very swift in terms of taking action in terms of refocus that in terms of the refocus of the team to accelerate what was already in plan in terms of recapturing. some of that shift from SMS to RCS. The teams are very rapidly continuing the progress of that platform and the sales into that channel. So I think in that sense, we're going to pivot fairly quickly on there. In terms of some of the integration challenges, we can get into that if needed. But again, we've taken some actions in terms of the overall organization and some of the other integration challenges in terms of -- certainly on the top line, we are very, very focused and have implemented some turnaround plans there.

So that's -- in terms of what we've done in terms of how you see that going into 2026 again, we believe that the ambitions that we set are continue to be achievable. Again, we're going to appoint a new Proximus Global CEO, and that person he or she will come in, in a very short order, and we expect them to be able to give you a better view of that in due course. So that's where we are on Proximus Global. In terms of organic free cash flow, David, I think last year, we gave a very clear disclosure on in terms of our free cash flow. What we said and say again, you can go back and look at that. We haven't updated it since then. In terms of -- we also said at that time, the fiber deals are incredibly important components of that free cash flow.

And clearly, we're still very much in the discussions. We made a significant step forward today. I hope you agree in terms of realizing those fiber collaboration deals. And so effectively, from our perspective, take a look at those free cash flow disclosures from last year. And then as we get to a point where we can disclose the fiber deals are finished, we'll be able to exactly give you better guidance as we've been saying, certainly for the last couple of quarters. So that's where we are. I don't think we've changed our position at all. And I think it's very clear if you look at our at our free cash flow disclosure from last July on the basis of that point in time. That's where we were. And I think consensus can look at those and do the math on our free cash flow over those period of time. That's that one.

And then last 1 was MOU. So again, on the MOU and OBEL today. I mean, I think, again, as we said, it's a significant step forward in the South. Again, we're still -- it's an MOU stage, and we still have to discuss extensively with the regulator. So I'm sorry, but we're not going to be able to disclose an awful lot more than what is in the earnings release today on the MOUs and certainly not the impact on free cash flow. We will absolutely, as we've promised to come back once those deals are signed, and I hope you understand the commercial sensitivity of that, we have to get them in full and final legal form and get the regulatory approval before we can give you the full detail on the impacts on free cash flow. I hope you understand.

We'll now move to Dhruva Shah of UBS.

It's Dhruva Shah from UBS. Congratulations on the MOU in the South look forward to seeing the update with the market test in September. I appreciate you're not going to give too much more color there. So I have 1 question on Global and then another on the domestic market. So just starting off with Global, yes, any more color you can give us in terms of what the integration challenges you're facing in the go-to-market strategy would be great there. And in terms of the direct margin synergy delivery, what's kind of holding you back there, that would be great.

And just to clarify, are you still confident on the EUR 100 million synergy target then? So that's on Global. And then separately, on domestic, there's been a number of press reports suggesting that Digi have expanded their fiber rollout outside of Brussels and exploring the fiber rollout in other regions. So just keen to get your take on how quickly did you really are rolling out fiber and how meaningfully they're expanding their footprint throughout the rest of Belgium.

Thank you for the question. So on Global, let me give you a little flavor on the integration challenges that we've seen. I mean, you clearly we're aware of some of the management changes that went on in Q1. And as you know, when that happens, that itself has some integration -- it takes some time to get that momentum of certainly some of the material management changes that we saw in Q1. In terms of some other ones and it goes back to your synergy. In terms of the cross-sell synergies, again, we put 3 very successful organizations together in December.

And when you do that, and again, we obviously had a significant ambition on cross-sell. And that, again, when you put those 3 organizations together, we've seen some delay in the ability and execution of effectively getting it the cross-sell. So that's another example. In terms of the -- in terms of our ambition, we clearly believe those cross-sell synergies continue to be realizable, but it's just going to take a little bit more time. And again, as we get the Proximus Global CEO in place, I'm sure he or she will clearly start to articulate when we could see those synergies.

And maybe the last one, operation, again, you saw us sign some very nice deals for partnership across Proximus Group but also Proximus Global. And again, that's another example where these are fantastic deals, they are progressing, but the ramp-up on some of these partnership deals does take a little longer. So I think that's 3 examples where we've seen some integration challenges. But frankly, they're all amicably fixable. And again, as we've been going through the Q2 and seen some of the headwinds, we are refocusing doubled down our efforts in terms of certainly recapturing the synergy value, the ramping of the partnerships, and you've clearly seen us take some action on management to give ourselves some very clear leadership in that direction. So I think that's where we are on those questions. Jim, do you want to take the Digi one.

So Dhruva, thank you for the question. So when it comes to the commercially available fiber footprint of Digi, it's extremely limited. So as you know, we've been deploying fiber for several years now for us, it's really important that the same conditions apply to everybody when you deploy fiber. Next to that, our strategy has always been to make sure that we migrate our customers as soon as possible to that best technology, which means that we can drive customer satisfaction, and we see that very much in our NPS scores for customers on fiber. So this is really, really working.

All our 3 brands, Proximus Scarlet and Mobile Vikings are activated on our fiber network, of course, with a different value strategy behind it. But -- so that's where we are. Digi in terms of commercially available footprint, very limited, important that the same rules apply to everybody. And our fiber strategy is really delivering great results.

We will now move to Roshan Ranjit of Deutsche Bank.

I have 3 questions, please. Firstly, on the domestic side. Mark, you said that there was a good performance this quarter given the backdrop. I think over the last week, we've seen a bit more confidence from your peers in Belgium. Do you think there could be scope for a bit more of a price increase in the market given the kind of step back we have taken over the last 12 months to kind of prepare for the new entrant launches seems they maybe haven't got as much traction as previously thought. I know you guys don't split out the segmentation, but have you seen a mix shift within your 3 brands?

Secondly, on the FTTH build, we saw a bit of a step-up this quarter just to do with the Fiberklaar kind of integration now, what kind of run rates you would be thinking of in the coming years for the fiber build.

And lastly, just going back to the free cash flow. You previously cited working cap as a bit of a drag near-term. This quarter, saw, I guess, the H1 '25 run rate better, more positive than i.e., less negative than what we saw in H1 '24. Has anything changed there on the working cap? Or is it still the same message?

So Roshan, thank you for the questions. So I will start with the first one. So indeed, I think we have seen in Q2 a bit a softer market environment on the low end of the market. I think if you see what we have been doing on the Proximus brand, where we in April, only touched the mid-end of the portfolio, so the EUR 25 and the EUR 30 products, where we increased the value for money only on those products, which is a bit in line with your comment that indeed we try to push value in the market. It has always been the strategy of the Proximus Group from the start to try to keep as much value in the market as possible.

So we continue to work on that strategy. I'm happy to see that other competitors are aiming for the same approach. In terms of price increases, I think there -- we typically do that in January. We have seen our competitors moving again in June and July as well. So there, I think on the A brands, you continue to see a healthy movement to continue to drive value in the market as well. So I think that would be a bit of where I am in terms of value management in the market. When it comes to the segmentation mix within the brands, we have a bit the same approach as we had in Q1. So we didn't really see a big increase in churn or in movements in the market. So that has remained relatively stable. What we do see in acquisition that indeed people tend to choose a bit more the B brands and the A brands before, but it's not creating a fundamental shift within our customer base. So that would be a bit where I am in terms of the value of the mobile market post-launch of the fourth entrant.

Let me take you on the free cash flow we had some inventory cash collection kind of upside. So I think I wouldn't take Q2 as a change in direction on working cap. I think our previous comments continue to stay. On fiber build, we did have a nice quarter. I think with the way I would go for the rest of the year is more look towards a Q1 number on average between each of the quarters for the next couple of years, that gives you the help that you want. That's how I think about it. Does that help?

We'll now move to Paul Sidney calling from Berenberg.

I'll take 2, please. Firstly, on Global. I know we've talked about this a lot already, but just maybe phrasing the question in a slightly different way. And the visibility for investors and analysts on the outlook for the global business has historically been pretty low, and we've tended to rely on your guidance for that business. But -- how can you really give investors' confidence that Proximus now has the necessary visibility and the outlook won't get any worse than the upgraded guidance that you've given today, i.e., sort of what level of prudence have you taken the updated guidance please?

And then just secondly, on Belgium, you've now signed MOUs with your largest competitors rolling up fiber potentially, hopefully, getting access to HFS infrastructure. In your opinion, does this signal a shift in thinking from the Belgian operators, they're finally cooperating in terms of focusing on value, not trying to hit that targets or obsessive our market share in postpaid mobile. Just be very interested to get your thoughts on those 2 areas.

Yes, Paul, let me take on Global. I think we've been trying over the last quarter to give more visibility. And I think we've given certain stats in terms of cash flow of what that business generates. I think, look, I think we got a significant movement on this SMS market. It was -- we started to feel in Q1, and it accelerated in Q2 and certainly set specific segments of that SMS market on international and onetime password. So I think it was a pretty rapid change. But I think what we've captured in our guidance is a level of confidence that we've got for the rest of the year.

So we're confident that we're going to get there. As I said, we have got a product portfolio that can capture the shift I think we're doing everything we can to be able to have that product portfolio suite in the growth areas such as RCS in terms of IoT, in terms of the Protect products we've got available globally to capture that shift needed by the kind of big OTT players. So I think we continue to completely believe in this business. As I said, it is a business that is going through, as you would expect, putting this business together does have integration problems. So there again, we've very quickly pivoted in terms of what we're doing to rectify those integration problems. As I said, we've taken the management changes in terms of the cross-sell, upsell, the sales folks are completely working towards sharing lease and accelerating that.

And then again, on partnerships, partnerships deals is not -- we don't have partnership deals signed, they're signed. It's the ramping of them. And so again, there's a much more close focus on getting those to ramp. So I think we're confident that we're going to get to that guidance to the end of the year. And then clearly, we do have the product portfolio to capture where this market is going, the SMS ATP business and certainly international onetime password, maybe moved a little quicker than we thought, but it's not that we didn't realize this was happening. And again, we're very much strategically placed to capture where the movement of this business is going. So that's where we think on global I think that -- and Jim is going to take the -- yes.

So Paul, thank you for the question. So I think when it comes to the collaboration, I think it's more a signal that the different operators in Belgium, we understand that to deploy fiber in less dense areas that collaboration is the only way to make this financial viable approach. I think I would more link it to that. It has nothing to do with our commercial strategies. Now of course, when it comes to the commercial strategy, I can only talk for the commercial strategy of the Proximus Group. And I think if you look at that, we have always balanced volume and value in the way we approach the market. I think it's also very visible in the way we have executed our multi-brand strategies since the launch of the fourth entrant on the Belgian market, and we will continue to do that going forward, but I can only speak for myself, of course.

Next question will be coming from Joshua Mills calling from BNP Paribas Exane.

I've got 2, please. And I understand the first 1 is probably better to be asked to the incoming CEO, but in his absence, I'd just love if you could explain to us why the Global segment is important to Proximus going forward. Are there actually any synergies between owning these kind of businesses and the traditional telco business model you're running? The reason I ask is, obviously, that the previous CEO, which are involved in mobile, you at 1 point, talked about doing the telecom stats [indiscernible]. I note that in the press release, which you published in June when some of these issues would have been known, the Board of Proximus was fairly vocal about the fact that they wanted to keep improving the international segment.

So in light of these results and the uncertainty, which has been delivered, do you think that there's scope for a reconsideration of a process as well on that front? I think you could answer that would be very helpful.

And then the second question, it just goes back to the MOU signed with Orange Belgium today, and in particular, the decision to build and co-invest in 200,000 homes. Mark, I think at the beginning, you were saying that you would look at off balance sheet financing for 100,000 of the homes that you build. Why is that the preferred strategy now rather than building on balance sheet, what's a relatively small part of the network? And I'm thinking back to the Fiberklaar joint venture, which you set up with EQT, only last a few years, you then brought them out at a significant premium. Why not just consolidate that network build on your own balance sheet?

Let me take the first one, the both. In terms of the Global strategy, the Board continues to be incredibly supportive of that strategy. Why? Because I think it gives us a growth pocket. And again, if you look back at what we -- the history of Proximus Global, we had BICS and Telesign's majority shareholders, we took them fully owned at a very nice multiple. And again, even if you do the multiples today, that is incredible value creation, which we continue to not believe it would be in our share price. Again, we think we did a very good deal with Route Mobile in terms of the cash paid and the reinvestment from the owners. And again, when we put all those businesses together, do they have synergies? Completely. And again, if you look at that business from a free cash flow contribution business, which we shared with you, I think, back in Q1 or maybe Q4, that business continues to throw off very meaningful cash, especially in a moment when we're spending. We continue to spend significant amounts of CapEx in fiber.

So that continues to be the thesis. in terms of -- again, we haven't changed our view. And of course, I can't speak for the new CEO. We haven't changed our view that we would look for monetizing this at an appropriate point in terms of once we get the synergies through. I think the value creation there is significant, right? And again, there's multiple options in terms of what that could look like, but that hasn't changed either. So I think the last trend in the last quarter results have been difficult for sure. And again, as I said earlier, the rapid change on the SMS market, international OTP, it's been difficult, but it's not something we didn't know about and something that has always been our strategy in terms of being able to move to the other elements where these large enterprise customers are using to engage with our customers.

And we have those platforms, we have those services, and we fully intend to be able to capture that growth as the traffic moves there. So I think yes, difficult results in Q2, but absolutely continued belief in the strategy, and it's a very nice business adjacency for Proximus Group. And the longer-term value creation continues. Now I can't speak for Stijn, and he will undoubtedly have his own views, but we'll see when he arrives in September.

In terms of the Orange Belgium, the on-balance sheet, off-balance sheet, as said, we said many times. In terms of Fiberklaar, there was quite a significant motivation on Fiberklaar in terms of being able to get to get to a fiber collaboration deal with Liberty. That would have been significantly difficult with another party around the table. Again, we are -- we've made incredible steps to get close to a deal, but Fiberklaar having another party -- and this negotiation would have made it, in our view, and we said that many times, would have been made it very, very difficult. On top of that, clearly, there's benefits of Fiberklaar we've talked about that, I think, in the last call in terms of the synergy benefits, the financing benefits, et cetera, et cetera, operational benefits. And those are coming through in our numbers today, as I said in Q1. So Fiberklaar was different reasoning and different thesis. And again, that for us was the right decision because we are very close now to this deal with Liberty and getting towards a market test, as we said in the release in September.

In terms of -- in the South, again, we said that multiple times. We didn't intend to take this on balance sheet, and that continues to be our view. It's a smaller amount, obviously, but still -- that's still our view that we will finance that off balance sheet once this deal is finalized. So that's basically the long answer to your questions, hopefully.

And sorry, maybe if I can just take 1 follow-up. I think at the beginning, I know you're not going to give detailed numbers on this, but you mentioned the majority of the messaging business at the moment is done on the legacy channels, i.e., SMS, WhatsApp, et cetera. Just helping us think about that in the model. If I look at Slide #20, the slide showing the split of revenues between -- within your international business and you break it down between communication in data and P2P voice and messaging. Are we effectively saying that -- it's the communication and data sector, which includes the P2P at that level? Yes. So more than half of that EUR 251 million for ATP direct margin is coming from SMS at the moment?

I said the majority of more than -- it's a significant portion of that communication data is the ATP SMS.

[Operator Instructions] We'll now move to Kris Kippers of Degroof Petercam.

First one, still coming back on the item that was not really mentioned in the detail in the press release is indeed still the absence of any deal in the North of the country. Could you share with us more granularity on why it is taking again so much time and that you don't provide a clear timing now on this one?

And then a second question would be, again, I would say, on something where I think there's still potential going forward. If you look at the number of people that were retired, we've now seen 4 quarters of about let's say, between 450 and 400 people leaving the company. However, if you see the rehirings, there, it seems that there is a trend downwards going from, let's say, 360 people in Q3 last year towards now 217. Is that a trend we can expect to continue going forward? And hence, some cost synergies could come increasingly from that? That will be my second question. And then we've got perhaps a follow-up, first these 2 ones.

Sure. Yes. Thank you, Kris. So on the North, again, if you read into the statement, well, actually, maybe why has it taken so long? Again, this is as I just alluded to in terms of having another party around the table, I think it would have been even more complex. But this is a large complex deal. And clearly, Liberty ourselves. We've had very good collaborative negotiations. And as I said, we're very close to that, and we provided guidance that we are -- we've got a view to start a market test in September.

So I think there is a date there. But again, it's -- we're negotiating a substantial deal. There is a lot of facets to that deal. And I said we're close, but we obviously need to get to a point where we both believe that we've got the deal that works for us, and that's what you would expect us to do. So that's kind of where we're at, and I'll leave you on the question on timing to read the statement.

Sorry, Mark. And then just to put it clear, now negotiations are, of course, going towards a deal, a final closing with Orange would imply also then that we would have a kind of a situation whereby both could actually almost go inside in the end, let's say, somewhere towards year-end or early next year?

Kris, there's guidance, right? Clearly, given where we are in the South and given where we are in North, right? These deals continue to be commercially negotiated. So look, I'm not going to give anything more than what we said in our press release. I think it's clear what we said. And so -- and look, I mean, just -- so you're very clear, we are working night and day to get these things done. Because we realize the importance of them. And so you can trust us that we will get this done as quickly as human. On the retiree question, I think, again, I don't know, Jan, do you want to take that or you want to...

Yes, I can take it very briefly. Thank you, Kris, for the question. I think you see indeed that trend reflected in the numbers. I think we take every opportunity to look at workforce efficiencies, meaning that every hiring decision is a considered decision. And indeed, we see in the coming years an outflow related to retirement, and we take to the maximum benefit without risking the customer satisfaction and the quality of our operations.

As we have no further questions at this time. I'll turn the call back over to Nancy Goossens for any additional or closing remarks.

Thank you. Thank you for joining. Thank you for your questions. Should there be any follow-up questions, you can obviously reach out to the Investor Relations team. Have a nice weekend all. Bye.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude today's conference. We thank you for your attendance. You may now disconnect. Have a good day, and goodbye.