Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to KPN's Q2 2022 earnings webcast and conference call. Please note this event is being recorded. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. We will be facilitating a question and answer session towards the end of today's prepared remarks. If you'd like to ask a question, you may do so by pressing star one on your telephone. I will now turn over the call to your host for today, Reinout van Ierschot, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin.
Thank you, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to KPN Q2 and half year 2022 results webcast. With me today are Joost Farwerck, our CEO, and Chris Figee, our CFO. As usual, before turning to our presentation, I'd like to remind you of the Safe Harbor on page 2 of the slides, which also applies to any statements made during this presentation. In particular, today's presentation may include forward-looking statements, including KPN's expectations with respect to its outlook and ambitions, which were also included in the press release published this morning. All such statements are subject to the Safe Harbor. Let me now hand over to our CEO, Joost Farwerck.
Thank you, Reinout, and good afternoon, everyone. Our Accelerate to Growth strategy was launched in November 2020, and we are now halfway through the execution of this ambitious three-year plan. Today's results show our continued good progress on our strategy, despite the changing macroeconomic environment. The key highlight for the quarter was the performance of the business segment, which saw growth in service revenues for the first time in more than a decade. This, combined with solid mass market service revenue growth, supported our overall group service revenues. Within the mix, we see positive signs in wholesale, in business, and consumer mobile. Consumer fixed shows a bit of a dip, but we are confident that the performance will improve going forward.
We rolled out fiber to 102,000 households, or if one were to include Glaspoort joint venture, 150,000 households in the Q2 . Moreover, we now have more retail customers on our fiber than on the copper footprint, a milestone moment for us. Our efforts in modernizing the mobile network continue to pay off. For the fourth time in a row, we've been recognized as the best mobile network in the Netherlands. While we, like many organizations, see an impact from rising costs due to inflation, we also see encouraging group service revenue developments in this quarter with the mentioned B2B inflecting to growth earlier than expected. Ultimately, this underpins our confidence in our ability to maintain healthy margins and growing free cash flow looking into the future.
Driven by our solid performance and successful execution of our strategy in the H1 of this year, we raised our 2022 guidance to at least EUR 2.4 billion of EBITDA after leases and free cash flow of approximately EUR 850 million. As you know by now, our compelling strategy is centered around three clear pillars, to leverage and expand our superior networks, to grow and strengthen our customer footprint, and to simplify and streamline the operating model. Over the last year and a half, we've delivered significant progress on all three pillars and remain confident that this strategy will continue to create long-term sustainable value for all our stakeholders. Let's now take a look at the first pillar of our strategy, our best-in-class networks.
In the Q2 , we've made solid progress and rolled out fiber to 102,000 households versus 75,000 in Q1. Together with the joint venture with APG, Glaspoort, we rolled out fiber to 150,000 households, and we now cover approximately 44% of the Netherlands with fiber, and we expect to reach approximately 80% of Dutch households by the end of 2026. Once we reach that point, we expect CapEx to drop to a much lower sustainable level. As we continue to roll out fiber, our growing fiber footprint will result in an improved customer base for retail and wholesale. In fact, we now have more retail customers on the fiber network than on copper. Fiber service revenues, and this number is growing rapidly, driven by a growing base and attractive ARPU.
All in all, fiber is clearly at the heart of our strategy to create long-term value for all stakeholders. On mobile, we are proud that Umlaut once again and for the fourth time in a row recognized our leading mobile network. With this recognition, we retain our position as the best mobile network in the Netherlands with the highest up and download speeds, best coverage, and the fastest 5G in the Netherlands. Let's now move to the second pillar of our strategy. Adjusted consumer service revenues decreased by about 1% year-over-year. On the one hand, we see consistent mobile service revenue growth and the continued success of our fixed mobile convergence strategy. On the other hand, fixed service revenues were a bit lower.
Consumer fiber broadband revenues showed continued growth, while copper and legacy maintained its anticipated decline. Customer satisfaction remains one of our top priorities, and it has been pleasing to see our efforts pay off in this area. Now let's take a deeper look into our Q2 KPIs. Our retail fiber base increased by 34,000 new customers and now exceeds the copper base. Like I said, an important milestone for us. This should provide support to start to grow our broadband base. Broadband net add showed a temporary decline as we witnessed a brief period of increased competition following the successful launch of our Viaplay proposition. Our fixed ARPU remains broadly stable at EUR 52. The service revenue trend is weaker than seen in previous quarters, and on the one hand, this is due to an anticipated decline in legacy services, fixed calling, lower voice traffic.
On the other hand, this is due to the successful migration to Viaplay, which causes a shift from gross to net revenue reporting, but has no impact on margin. We continue to see solid trends in mobile. Our postpaid base increased by 33,000, and our postpaid ARPU was broadly stable. Combined, this led to a 1.4% growth in the mobile service revenues. Now let's move to B2B. I'm very pleased with the performance of our business segment, which inflected to growth, a bit ahead of schedule. B2B adjusted service revenues grew almost 2% year-on-year in the Q2 . SME is the main driver of growth, driven by solid commercial momentum in both broadband and mobile.
Alongside SME, also our Tailored Solutions business increased, while the LCE service revenues are still in decline, the overall trend is also moving in the right direction. This keeps us well on track to inflect LCE in the H1 of next year. The NPS on business remains positive. It was a bit impacted in part by the volatile economic environment. Nonetheless, we are still leading in the Dutch market as customers continue to value KPN for stability, reliability, and quality of our networks and services. As mentioned, across the board, we are seeing improving revenue trends. If we would strip out Tailored Solutions in the B2B revenues to give a good indication of our core telco performance, our business service revenues increased by 1.3% compared to the previous year. That's supporting our strategy.
In wholesale, service revenues increased 7% in the Q2 , supported by our open access policies. Year- to- date, we added 43,000 postpaid SIMs and 18,000 broadband lines. On the topic of regulation and the ACM, there's not much new to say at the moment. As you know, we've published our voluntary open access model for the future with adjusted wholesale tariffs, which was used for the consultation period. This consultation has been concluded, and we expect the final decision from the ACM to be announced this quarter. With this, let me now hand over to Chris to give you more details on our financials.
Thank you, Joost. Let me now take you through our financial performance. Let me start by summarizing some key figures for the Q2 and for the H1 of the year. Our adjusted revenues increased 1.4% year-over-year, driven by growth in wholesale, business, consumer mobile, and non-service revenues. Second, adjusted EBITDA after leases increased 1.1% year-on-year. Our EBITDA margin remained broadly stable at 45.3%. In the Q2 , cost savings from further simplification and digitization of our company were partly offset by inflationary effects, such as wage indexation and rising energy costs. This all translated into EUR 30 million of net indirect OpEx savings. Third, our free cash flow increased 35% year-on-year compared to the H1 of 2021.
This was mainly due to higher EBITDA and lower CapEx as a result of intra-year phasing. More on the underlying cash developments later in this presentation. Finally, our ROCE, return on capital employed, continues to develop positively and increased to 170 basis points, 12%, driven by both increased operational efficiency and a more efficient balance sheet. Since we've managed to grow our business service revenues and already deliver sustainable mass market service revenue growth for a number of quarters, we will now focus on the total group service revenues to illustrate the performance of KPN. Total group service revenues growth accelerated and increased to 1.4% compared to last year. This was supported by solid mass market service revenue growth and the inflection of our B2B service revenues.
This is all very important proof points of our strategic progress towards achieving sustainable top-line growth for the group. Wholesale continued to show solid growth with service revenues up 7% year-on-year, driven by both broadband and mobile. Business service revenues grew by about 2%, driven by continued strong performance in SME and project timing in Tailored Solutions, while the trend in LCE is gradually improving according to plan. In Consumer, our total service revenues declined by 1%. Within the segment, mobile service revenues continued to grow and recorded a 1.4% increase. In fixed, fiber service revenues exceeded those of copper and effectively outstripping the decline. However, the growth of total consumer fixed service revenues was still offset by declining legacy services, less voice traffic, and the accounting effect for content packages that we mentioned before.
As a result of this, we reported a decline in fixed consumer service revenues of -2.2%. For the remainder of the year, we still expect to see some technical headwinds, but we are confident that the trend in consumer fixed will gradually improve, supported by our implemented price adjustments and commercial improvements. By the end of Q1 next year, we'll see the lapping of the accounting effect. Overall, we're confident that our group service revenues will continue to grow during the remainder of the year. Our adjusted EBITDA grew by 1.1% compared to last year, despite a tough comparison base. As a reminder, last year, our EBITDA was positively impacted by an intellectual property rights benefit, an IPR benefit, that provided a tailwind of nearly 1%.
Our improved EBITDA performance was driven by solid service revenue growth and lower indirect costs, partly offset by EUR 25 million higher direct costs. Factors for this increase were the impact of higher non-service revenues, such as handsets and hardware sales, third-party access costs, which is Glaspoort, and a change in service revenue mix in B2B. Our personnel expenses decreased by EUR 12 million, despite the CLA increase, which was implemented in the summer of last year. This reflects a structural shift in personnel efficiencies due to the digitization of KPN, as well as some natural attrition. Ongoing efficiency improvements also helped lower IT/TI expenses. This was partially offset by other OpEx, which rose mostly on higher energy costs.
In total, our indirect cost base reduced by EUR 30 million as our ongoing efficiency program gains are offset by inflationary pressures on energy and labor costs that occur across the industry. At EUR 408 million, our free cash flow in H1 was substantially higher than last year, and our cash margin over revenues improved to almost 16%. This improvement was mainly a result of a few factors, namely EBITDA growth, lower CapEx due to inter-year phasing, and lower cash interest paid. These were partly offset by smaller effects around the phasing of working capital and some higher cash taxes. All in all, we started the year very well in terms of cash generation, though of course, we will not see a 35% growth rate for the remainder of the year.
If we strip out the CapEx delta, which we see as temporary, we still see solid underlying growth in free cash flow and solid improvement in margins. Finally, we ended the quarter with a strong cash position, absorbing the final dividend payment over 2021 and part of our share buyback program. On slide 19, we report our return on capital. KPN's focus to create long-term value is evidenced by a strong return on capital employed. Our ROCE improved 170 basis points year-on-year to 12%, and has moved up continuously due to both increased operational efficiencies and a more efficient balance sheet. For the coming years, we see scope to further optimize our return on capital as part of our continuous pursuit to deliver long-term shareholder value creation.
We continue to have a strong and resilient balance sheet at the end of June. As a result of our bond redemptions and other corporate actions we took last year, the average cost of senior debt improved by 26 basis points over the year. In Q2, our net debt increased by EUR 238 million compared to the previous quarter, driven by the final dividend payment in April and our ongoing share buyback program. This is partly offset by the free cash flow we generated during the quarter. Our leverage ratio now stands comfortably at 2.3x EBITDA, well below our ceiling of 2.5, and we further enhanced our interest cover. The acceleration of growth of our cash margins, structurally and organically, increased our flexibility around capital deployment. Total liquidity remained robust at the end of the quarter.
It now consists of EUR 1.6 billion in cash and short-term investments and a fully undrawn revolving credit facility. This all covers debt maturities for the next 2.5 years. Reassured by our current financial performance and good strategic progress, we raised our 2022 guidance to at least EUR 2.4 billion of EBITDA and a free cash flow of approximately EUR 850 million, with CapEx remaining stable at EUR 1.2 billion. As of the 22nd of July, KPN had bought back 37 million shares for an amount of EUR 122 million and completed 41% of our 300 million share buyback program. To summarize, solid progress has been made in achieving the strategic objectives first formulated in November 2022, in spite of the increased challenges brought about by the economic environment.
We see a sustainable trend for group service revenue growth with positive signs in wholesale, business, and consumer mobile. Consumer fixed showed a dip, but we are confident that the performance and trend will improve going forward. Our EBITDA and cash margins continue to develop favorably, and we feel confident about the cash generating ability of our group. To me, KPN demonstrates healthy margin, earnings, and cash flow resilience in these turbulent times. Our fiber rollout rate has maintained a good pace and has proven an attractive return profile. With this, KPN has now put itself on a path towards sustainably growing revenues, EBITDA and free cash flow, and a corresponding growth in shareholder returns. In summary, we are strategically on track, remain soundly financed and are delivering on our objectives.
As such, driven by our solid H1 performance and good execution of our strategy, we raise our 2022 guidance. Thank you for listening. Let's turn to your questions and back to Reinout.
Thanks, Chris. We will start with the Q&A session right now. As usual, please be reminded to stick to two questions each. Operator over to you, please.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will start the question and answer session now. If you'd like to ask a question, you may do so by pressing star one on your telephone. First question comes from Luigi Minerva from HSBC. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning and thanks for taking my questions. The first question is about the free cash flow 2022 upgrade. I was wondering if you can help us disaggregate the upgrade between what's happening above the EBITDA and what's happening below the EBITDA. So the drivers of the free cash flow upgrade, essentially. You mentioned improving trends in B2C in the H2 of the year. If you can perhaps you know go more deeply and elaborate on that, you know particularly on the fixed line side. Thank you.
Yeah, Luigi, let me take the first question on free cash flow. The reasons behind the upgrade. Well, you know, obviously we're ahead of track in terms of our cash growth. In the H1 of the year, we delivered about EUR 100 million more free cash flow. Again, we won't grow at this pace going forward, but if you peel the onion, you can see our EBITDA is growing. I think even the cash portion of EBITDA is growing, so the delta provisions, technically speaking, is less than last year or favorable. So the amount of cash earnings is going up, that's one. Secondly, there was in the H1 year a slight drag on working capital. I think that we see that fade away in the H2 of the year. Thirdly, on restructuring charges.
We had some restructuring charges in the H1 of the year, which really were the echo and result of the restructurings that were done in last year. Last year's restructurings caused a payout in this year. In this year we see more FTE reductions from natural attrition, so, you know, cheaper, there's no restructuring charges. To meet a combination of, you know, cash earnings going up, so EBITDA going up, but a higher cash proportion of EBITDA, you see some more support from working capital in the H2 of the year, combined with low restructuring charges. I think also in interest rates, I see some small OpEx opportunities. That together drives, you know, a good development of our free cash flow in terms of euros, but also in terms of margins.
Yeah. On the developments in consumer. In consumer, we show service revenue development of -1.1% in this quarter. First, briefly, mobile service revenues are developing well for the fifth quarter in a row. Strong growth, 1.4% growth on revenue, but also the base is growing, so that's all well. The broadband developments are good. The inflow on fiber is strong, and that's very important for us that now our fiber base is larger than our copper base. Revenues total on broadband, kind of flat, a -3,000 in the base, which is of course not good.
We like to grow, not to decline the base, but that's more or less a temporary dip as a result of commercial performance. Also, competition was aggressive on a discount following our Viaplay proposition in the Q1 . In the Q1 , we showed a growth of +7,000, and as a result of that, we now do a -3,000. With our current strategy, the price increase the first of July, the new lineup we introduced in October, I'm confident we will improve that trend looking forward. Fixed decline service revenues is -2%, which is a result of a shift in accounting for content packages.
The Viaplay I just mentioned, that's something we introduced, but we only account for that net. Viaplay is the equivalent for Ziggo Sport. For customers interested in Formula 1, in the past, we had to offer Ziggo Sport, resell Ziggo Sport. Now we have our own package with Viaplay, and that we account for in a different way. That is all anticipated on. We also see customers doing less on fixed voice, which is a result of the package we introduced and also unlimited mobile. Also that we anticipated on. All in all, a temporary dip, I would say. Looking forward, I'm confident that we will improve the trends.
Thank you both.
The next question comes from Mr. Andrew Lee from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Nothing, guys. Listen, I don't think we had really expected you five years ago that you'd be delivering B2B growth faster than consumer. I feel guilty about pressing on with questions about consumer, given you've achieved that growth now. I just wanted to dig a little bit deeper in your answer to the previous question from Luigi around the improvements that you're gonna get, you know, both in terms of your fixed line price rises in July, and then mobile in October. If we were to strip out the inflation level and try and think about the structural growth outlook in your consumer business, it was a bit slower this quarter.
You know, what are your ambitions or beliefs in the structural growth of your consumer business, you know, not just next quarter, but over the next year or two? What's driving that improvement, if you do see an improvement? Second question was just on the fiber overbuild of your network. What progress are you seeing from those overbuilders? You know, as you've accelerated your fiber rollout, are you seeing other fiber builders accelerate too, or are they slowing? Any kind of color of what you're seeing will be helpful. Thank you.
Well, I'll start with the second question. Overbuilt is something we try to avoid. Although having said that, in a small country like the Netherlands, if more parties start to roll out fiber, so every now and then we meet each other in a certain region. It's especially KPN scaling up, and together with our joint venture, we'll do more than 500,000 households per year in a market of 8.5 million households in total. It is mainly KPN accelerating. Of course, we also see other initiatives, and the largest one is DELTA rolling out fiber, first of all in their own footprint, and secondly, every now and then they pop up in our areas.
Yeah, we move into an area with a market share of average 30-38%. For us, we start immediately to sell and to build at the same time. Other initiatives try to first aggregate customers because they start on a market share of zero sometimes. We have a bit of a benefit there. Of course we look at competition, but for us, the most important thing and the target we have is to speed up our own rollout as efficiently as we can, and I'm therefore happy with the results. Until today, not that much of overbuild in the Netherlands, I must say. That's on the fiber part. Yeah, B2C, I understand where you're coming from. Of course, that is a very important segment for us and especially the broadband part.
I think to be honest, that we have a very good strategy, and we're making progress. The move to fiber is doing good. The ARPU on fiber is much better than on copper. Of course we don't like a minus in our revenue trend. I'm confident that we will improve that. We anticipated on it a bit by introduction of Viaplay. We also see a bit of a faster decline on the traditional voice, which is fixed telephony. That's a logical result of everything we're doing ourselves. I see it as a temporary thing, and I'm really positive on the future of our broadband consumer business with everything we're doing at this time.
Maybe I should add a few things on, Joost Farwerck. If you look at our fixed business, right? We've got a decline in legacy that costs about EUR 1 million- 1.5 million per quarter. That will be there that we have to absorb. If you look at the broadband business, as said before, fiber is now bigger than copper. That creates, you know, positive, you know, better churn net add dynamics. Net adds in the previous quarter were down because of, you know, commercial intensity in the market and our XS4ALL migrations. As far as we can see, they have normalized by now. If you look at the last 2-3 quarters on average, we did about 3,000 net adds per quarter in Q4, Q1 and Q2, if you look through the fluctuations.
We should certainly be able to do that again without disrupting the market or being overly aggressive. We should be able to get to, you know, positive net add developments because of, you know, the fading of these headwinds, the fact that fiber is bigger than copper. I think our TV proposition is now stronger. We've got, you know, certainly equal to or the upper hand when it comes to content. Finally, when you look at fiber sales, it's good to know that about a third of our new sales in fiber is now at 1 gig. So customers are actually buying higher speeds, which should support, you know, the revenue per customer. So that next to price increases, we see upgrades of clients to higher packages.
On a revenue per address, you know, a fiber household tends to pay about 5-6 EUR a month more than a copper household. All those dynamics together will point to improving trends. That will not be there next quarter, but the trend will start to gradually improve. That gives us some more confidence. To the first part, I mean, we're rolling out KPN plus Glaspoort together, about 600,000, you know, fiber connections in the year, which is, you know, I think more than all our competitors together. That should also alleviate any overbuild pressure and secondly, support our fiber revenues.
Thank you. That's really clear.
The next question comes from Mr. Georgios Ierodiaconou from Citi. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you for taking my questions. I have two, both on OpEx. On slide 17, I just wanted to first go through the direct cost drivers. You highlight higher non-service revenues and B2B service revenue mix, which I guess are not structural, but the Glaspoort access costs are a bit structural. So it would be great if you give us some visibility on how the second half, but also 2023 is expected to develop in terms of the headwinds from that. Also when it comes to the indirect cost, that's my second question. It will be very useful if you can perhaps give us some color on how both the labor and the energy costs are expected to develop over the next year.
I'm guessing there could be some tougher comps there, but I'd be interested to hear your take. Thank you.
Yeah, Georgios, on direct costs, you need the EUR 25 million delta. Not all of this is concerning, as part of it is non-service revenues. Part of it is roaming costs that are flowing in. You see some roaming revenues going up, especially on the wholesale side. Not so much I think consumer and business, but on the wholesale and on data business, we see higher roaming costs. That's roaming revenues. That shows our indirect costs. I think the Glaspoort component in this EUR 25 million is about EUR 5 million order of magnitude. The traditional Glaspoort access costs, that will be, you know, could be doubling next year.
I don't worry too much about those costs, but of course, these are clients that move to fiber that actually, you know, increase our sales, increase our revenues, increase our revenue per month. That's good. Also of course, in Glaspoort, we have a stake in a joint venture, so what we pay more in costs, we 50% own back. It's just below the line. Economically I'm not that worried about it. Although of course it's our challenge to try to compensate those direct costs by higher revenues, but also by increasing or decreasing other costs. I mean, that's a challenge we give to ourselves. When it comes to indirect OpEx on energy, of course it's an important factor. It's an important thing too. We all look at.
In the H1 we spent about EUR 4 million more on energy from last year. I think for the full year you probably double that amount, get to about EUR 10 million more for the full year. We do have locked in most of our spend for this year. I think we're at 90%-95% done on locking in our energy spend for this year, also because we're reducing our energy demands. For this year, we've got pretty good visibility. For next year, the equivalent number is about 65%. We've procured about 65% of our energy cost for next year. Of course, that will lead to an increase in prices.
Of course, we need to see where the energy price lands, but if you look at today's energy price, if that would be the norm for the rest of the year, you'd look at about from 2023 on 2022 about 1.5% of EBITDA headwind in terms of the additional energy costs. Now that's a fair amount of money and it's on us to you know to make up for that by reducing energy demand and reducing costs elsewhere. The task on us is to compensate for that energy cost increase, to compensate for the Glaspoort access cost. We do it through a combination of you know price increases efficiency in the group. As I said, we're running with about 700 less FTEs than last year.
That number, you know, the number of FTE is actually growing. We need to increase our energy efficiency. For this year, EUR 4 million H1 will be about EUR 10 million for the year. Next year, we count with current prices around 1.5% of EBITDA worth of headwind that we should and will be able to compensate. That, that's why we left our guidance for next year unchanged and confirmed. That's kind of the order of magnitude that you need to think about.
Maybe as follow-up, some of your competitors are trying to sign long-term purchase price agreements. In your case, there's obviously a change in technology moving on to fiber. Is that something that hinders perhaps taking a long-term view on some of these contracts? Or is it something you are looking to add over time just to give you more visibility?
Oh, definitely. I mean, of course, as we're reducing our energy consumption as such, I mean moving to fiber is one thing, moving to modern radio access networks is something. Definitely we're looking at reducing our energy consumption as such. Next to that, yes, indeed, we are in continuous dialogues and negotiation discussions with some energy companies on long-term PPA contracts, especially to get access to, for example, to wind, to Dutch wind. It just takes time to build a wind farm. You don't have one overnight. Yes, we are looking into longer-term PPA contracts, and we're focusing really on the generation of Dutch wind. This takes time for these plots to be assigned by the government and then you need to build them, and that is unfortunately not done overnight. On
Very clear. Thank you.
On the fiber thing, fiber network is far more efficient to run than a copper network. Also important in this part is that we move to fiber and switch off the copper network, which is, like I said, far more efficient network also from an energy point of view.
Next question comes from Mr. Keval Khiroya from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. I've got two questions, please. Just firstly, going back on the inflationary impact on OpEx. You just talked about being able to compensate for this elsewhere. Can you elaborate a bit more on what, where you think there may be more headroom to cuts on OpEx more than you planned originally? Obviously for this, you very helpfully guided towards around EUR 50 million cuts in indirect OpEx. I don't know if you're able to kind of give a broad view on how we should think about next year. Secondly, you've had a very impressive performance in wholesale mobile for the past few quarters and growing 16% in Q2 and accounting for roughly half the wholesale revenue growth.
Can you talk a bit more about what's driving that and also how we should expect that trend going forward? Thank you.
On all these costs, Keval, we're running with about 700 less FTEs than before, and natural attrition is quite high. Think about, you know, 50 all people per month leaving the firm. You know, two years ago, there was about 20, so that's doubling. We're, you know, I would almost say, happily riding that wave of allowing ourselves to become more productive, more efficient without spending too much restructuring charges. That's an important point. Secondly, it's continued rationalization of our network. We've migrated our customers from XS4ALL to KPN in the last quarter. That, you know, is an offset of cost. We've shut down our 3G network. We've kept our 2G, we've shut down 3G.
There's a bunch of network and IT changes that we do on the back of simplifications. There is a continuous making, you know, way to make our company more efficient by reducing FTEs. Joost, you wanna add?
Customer process. We have thousands of people in the front line of the company, outside and inside to serve customers. At the end, a company like KPN doesn't need, in the future, operations of 4,000 FTE to run the customer processes. We're moving to a far more digital process. One time, right, zero touch, fiber network. It's very important that we simplify customer process not only to improve net promoter score, but also to reach a far more efficient OpEx level in the front side of the company.
Yeah, this page we're showing you, of course, on page 17, the cost reduction. Of course, if it hadn't been for the energy, we would have been saving about EUR 17 million of cost. Will we make the EUR 50 million? We're gonna get close. Will we exactly make the EUR 15 million-50 million? Not sure. The energy might be messing it up a bit, but we'll for sure make the EBITDA. What you see for this year or next year that we stick to and confirm our guidance. We see some upside in EBITDA this year, but the mix will be different simply because you've got some higher costs and some more pricing upside. Onto wholesale, why is mobile doing so good?
I would say we've got a fantastic mobile network that sells really well also in mobile. We were awarded the best mobile network in the world, it shows. What we're seeing is, I think three things, or two things. Our mobile MVNO clients in wholesale do very well, also because I think the mobile market in the lower end, in the no-frills segment is improving quite rapidly. I mean, prices have developed effectively there, you know, and we see some of our MVNO clients do quite well. Secondly, it's roaming. I mean, our roaming revenues, mostly from international data services that come in also in wholesale mobile.
That's okay. Thank you both.
The next question comes from Mr. Ulrich Rathe from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you. Two questions, that would be the first one on the NPS. On the slide, you showed a bit of a spike in the Q1 on the consumer NPS that sort of then stepped back a little bit in the Q2 . Is there a particular reason for that? How would that evolve from here? The second question is, you're discussing the inflation impact, in particular with the view on cost base, but how about customer behavior? There was a survey published, I think, in June, suggesting that about a third of respondents, so these were consumer respondents, I believe, expressed an intent to cut spending due to inflation. Do you see any signs of that coming through?
What are your expectations for that happening in the remainder of the year? Thank you.
Yeah. On NPS, we, in consumer, show NPS of 17, and in B2B, we show an NPS of 1, which is for a Q2 , to be honest, not that bad. Last year, we did like 14 in consumer, market because the Q2 is always the quarter where we announce the price increase on the first of July. That's not always followed by applause, to put it that way. Q1 was very good, 19. We wanna get back to 19 and above that. It's an important target for the whole company, also when it comes to the bonus scheme of all people in KPN. We're really focused on that.
All in all, taking into account where the market is, where we are, also compared to competition, we improved our position on Net Promoter Score, both on consumer and on B2B. I'm not that worried about NPS, but of course, we just had a call with our own management internally in the company, and we said it's super important that we get back to the level of 19 or above that. All in all, where we are today, I understand the 17 and the +1. The market is much lower, and there's opportunities for us to grow there. On customer behavior, yeah, in consumer market, I think it's super clear that broadband is a primary service we all benefit from.
No one considers to scale down on that connection. In the Netherlands, 80% of the people still work from home, so it's super important to have a good connection. We improved there also on Wi-Fi. We do not see really cutting on our services. Perhaps a bit on fixed calling, which went down a bit faster this quarter than usual. It's not that big of a part of our service revenue anymore. It's quite logical, people make less use of fixed calling nowadays. But all in all, I would say that we do pretty good on the ARPU on households.
Yeah. You know, we need to be very vigilant on this, but also the point. I think if you look at our customers, we tend to have, relatively speaking, a higher, you know, higher income customers at KPN. Compared to other players, our customers tend to be a little bit more disposable income than others. I think that will provide a first, you know, potential shield. If anything, as Joost said, will be probably fixed lines rather than anything else. The other component we look at is payment behaviors. At this point, there's no change in that. We look carefully every month, for example, payment terms on our handset financing, and there's no change there. It's something, Ulrich, that we need to be very focused on and very much, you know, keep a close eye on this.
Beyond cutting down on fixed lines, I think the fact that we tend to have, relatively speaking, higher income customers should support our business, at least on a relative basis.
Very good. Thank you very much.
The next question comes from Mr. Joshua Mills from Exane BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. About two questions. Firstly, just, can you give us an update on your buyback, please? I think over the six months since you announced it, you've executed about 40% of the buyback, and you've got about two weeks left. What sort of happens if the buyback hasn't been completed by seventeenth of August? And then just secondly, just to follow on from your comments on sort of changes in consumer behavior in the B2B segment. Could you give us just a similar color around B2B as well? Are there any signs of sort of weaker economy leading to delays in project or anything?
I appreciate you've obviously just reported a very good B2B performance, but any sort of early indicators we should be aware of? Thank you.
Yeah, Joshua Mills, on the buyback, I'd say it's kind of out of our hands. This happens, we normally mandate an investment bank to continue to procurement without, you know, us being involved. We know the buyback has to be completed by 17th of August. I guess there's a couple of ECM bankers who will have to skip the holidays. That's kind of how I look at it. It can and will be completed by the 17th. We made a pretty clear arrangement with the bank. We're looking at the same numbers as you do. On consumer business, again, no early signs of distress there. I think, you know, most corporate balance sheets these days are quite healthy, whether it's in SME, whether it's in larger corporate, so that's good.
We do see some more price pressure in mobile. When they look at the business segments, mobile volumes are healthy. There's some price pressure, especially in the larger corporate segments. I would expect it not so much to come down to cutting fixed costs, but probably more price pressure on new sales. At the same time, we see employment still healthy, and as long as you know, businesses add new people to their staff, they need mobile phones. I see on the business segment, no payment issues yet. Pretty strong balance sheets. If anything, there will be more price pressure. Again, my crystal ball is as good as yours, so we need to be very you know, focused on this.
Adding on B2B, yeah, we've talked a lot about B2B, how we're going to inflect that part of our service revenues. I think the way we did it on SME, and now we're doing it on LCE, and we did it on Tailored Solutions, is migrating our customers to the future-proof platform and future-proof technology. By doing that, B2B customers rationalize their portfolio. A part of the pressure in the past, over the past 10 years on our top line in B2B, that was the rationalization B2B customers started to do when we started to migrate in hardware, in connections, like whatever. You don't need like 20 ISDN lines, you just need one good fiber connection. There has been a lot rationalized in SME and LCE today.
Therefore, I think there's less opportunity for our business customers to rationalize.
Thank you. It's very clear.
The next question comes from Mr. Polo Tang from UBS. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Thanks for taking the questions. I have two questions. The first one is really just clarification around accounting headwind in consumer. If I'm not mistaken, it was a -EUR 6 million drag in Q2 and -EUR 3 million drag in Q1. Can I understand if the quantum of this drag will grow over the coming quarters as more people take up the Viaplay offer? My second question is really just about business. How specifically should we think about growth in Tailored Solutions going forward? 'Cause I think you called out the benefit in terms of timing of project work and equipment sales. Is this temporary, and should we expect Tailored Solutions to be back in terms of negative growth territory in the coming quarters?
Also, I think from memory within Tailored Solutions, you had one or two large accounts that were loss-making, in this segment, and you're in the process of phasing out these revenues. But is this drag from phasing out these loss-making accounts now over? Thanks.
Yeah. Polo, on the first question, your numbers are completely correct. It was a kind of EUR 6 million drag on the accounting change from the shift from Ziggo Sport to Viaplay. On a side note, if you take the copper and fiber revenues and add back the EUR 6 million, you know, effectively stable broadband revenues. We see this number to be stable from here. I mean, the thing is we launched our Viaplay offer early in Q1, so customers signed up in Q1, so they see the first full effect for a full quarter in Q2. We don't see massive further growth in Viaplay. I mean, if you're not watching Formula 1 by now, probably you won't do it anymore. We think this, the EUR 6 million will be what it is in the coming quarter.
You know, think about the EUR 6 million constant for the coming quarters until it lapses into the next Q1 next year.
Yeah. Polo, and also on Tailored Solutions, you're well informed. We mentioned projects and hardware as a driver, but that is because Tailored Solutions is all about projects and hardware for large customers. For us, the most important part is how to run these projects. As you know, we used to serve large customer in such a way that they came out as bleeders for the whole company. That is not the situation anymore. We fixed all that, and we only make these large project deals for large customers when it's supporting our core business, connectivity or mobile. Otherwise we won't. It's all in a better way, in a healthy shape. I expect that to stay positive.
I'm not sure if it's always will show strong growth like this quarter +5%, but we're doing quite well. We have a good portfolio and also in the coming quarters, I expect growth from there.
Thanks.
The next question comes from Miss Nawar Cristini from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. I have one question, please, in terms of inflation risk on SPH. We see a number of headlines on a global shortage of fiber cable, which is said to be impacting both prices and lead time. When we speak to contractors as well, we understand that margins for fiber deployments are quite stretched, and there is an appetite to negotiate contracts. It'd be good if you could discuss what you see as well on your end and give us a bit of color in terms of the visibility you have on your fiber CapEx envelope. Thank you.
Yeah. Chris, first of all, my reaction would be most part of the fiber CapEx is really related to construction. There's only a tiny part related to the costs on the real fiber. Of course, it's super important that we see the wages will go up. On the fiber itself, I don't expect that much. For us, it's mainly the long-term contracts we do with construction companies on the wages of people. The longer term we make these contracts, the better and the cheaper it will be. On the other hand, it's far more important maybe that we optimize the fiber rollout every quarter.
We innovate in our fiber rollout strategy, anticipating on higher costs on people to make the fiber rollout far more efficient, to go faster and do the connectivity in a household in a more simplified way. Of course it's a challenge, but it's a bit of a balancing act how to cover increase mainly in people cost.
Okay. That's helpful. Thank you.
The next question comes from Mr. Emmanuel Carlier from Kempen. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, good afternoon. Two questions. First of all, on wholesale, I noticed that the growth in broadband net adds was a bit softer in Q2 versus previous quarters. What is the main reason for that? Is that just the market being a little bit slower after the COVID boost period? Secondly, on free cash flow, if I look at your guidance for 2023, it looks like you expect only a limited free cash flow growth. Could you maybe run us through the key free cash flow drivers moving from 2022 towards 2023? Thank you.
Yeah. Well, on wholesale, the little bit slackening off of broadband growth was due to a very, you know, increased competitive intensity in the market. There were a few very intense actions by one of our competitors that affected our net adds and also those of our broadband partners. These competitive actions have been terminated, have stopped, and since then we see like a recovery of the normal pace. To us, it feels like a one-off for 1.5 months, five to six weeks, and then recovers to normal sales. That's a temporary thing. On free cash flow 2023, well, Emmanuel, bear with us. We'll give you the guidance for next year when the next year starts.
Yeah.
In terms of components, good to know that, of course, EBITDA will need to grow. We will pay somewhat higher taxes next year, simply because the way our net operating losses evolve and the use of that evolve. We'll have some headwind from higher taxes next year. Again, we'll try to optimize with the lower interest costs, more EBITDA growth, working capital optimization. Those are the moving parts. For the final number, you have to wait for next year. We'll give you a fully informed and comprehensive guidance for 2023. We saw no reason to.
Okay. Thank you.
There's no reason to reduce it. Let's put it that way. Certainly no reason to reduce it. To confirm it and the exact number, you have to wait for a few months.
Yeah. Okay. Maybe one follow-up on the broadband growth. In some other countries, they have spoken about slower broadband net adds because of the COVID boost period. Is this something you are seeing in the Netherlands as well, or is it a bit difficult to isolate the VodafoneZiggo promotions and then the COVID broadband boost period as well?
I think at the beginning of COVID, we saw a bit of a slowdown in general in the markets. Currently, I don't think COVID plays any role in the broadband developments.
Okay. Thank you.
The last question comes from Mr. Konrad Zomer from ABN AMRO. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good afternoon. My first question is on the fiber rollout. I think that this is the second consecutive quarter where the rollout was slightly hampered by a lack of available people. That is unlikely to ease in the second half. Are you still comfortable with rolling out fiber to approximately 450 homes for the year? My second question is on the B2B segment. Now that growth has returned, is it likely to see an ongoing decline in number of FTE? Because you reduced FTE in the quarter, and I think that in the B2B segment that was the division with the steepest decline in FTE. Is that likely to reverse going forward? Thank you.
Well, on fiber. Listen, okay, 450,000 is the KPN target. On top of that, we do like 100,000-150,000 with the joint venture, Glaspoort. Part of that capacity is also handed over by us to Glaspoort. I'm okay with 100,000 this quarter and of course we have to scale up to 220,000, which we did in Q3 and Q4 last year. It's doable, 450,000, but it's not for us, the most important thing is that we do it in a super efficient and high quality way. Together with Glaspoort, we will reach between 500,000-600,000 households this year.
Especially we also look a bit at competition. Are they scaling up? Until now they are a bit, but we go much faster. All in all, I was not that satisfied with the Q1 , to be honest. This quarter we do much better and I expect the company to further push it. I'm not sure if we're going to make it 450, but I prefer to do it in a decent way than go all out to meet the homes passed target. In B2B, yeah. Well, first of all, I'm very happy with the growth. Of course, yeah, it's the first quarter that we report growth of B2B as a standalone segment. But we aim to continue that, of course.
Being a growth company is much different than being a company focused on cost-cutting only. That is what we communicate to the people and the management as well. Now being in that growth, it's important that we do both because still the margins are much lower in the LCE and the integration part than anywhere else in the company. We're a asset-heavy company. We do high margins, 47%, something like that. It's important to improve margin in B2B. Now we are in a growth part. I think we will always keep on working on the efficiency of the company, and that's also related to FTE reduction following the simplification. Also this year and the coming years, we will keep an eye on the simplification of the company and the FTE reduction.
Okay. It's clear. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Joost and Chris. That concludes today's call. If there's any further questions, please contact the investor relations team. Bye-bye.