So, good morning. Hello, everyone. It's a pleasure to have you all here. My name is Juan Ignacio Galleano. I'm the Investor Relations Director at Prosegur. The purpose of this event is basically to deep dive into the business strategy objectives and the financial figures and the economics of the business. And it will be structured as follows. First, Jaime, CEO of Prosegur Alarms and President of MPA, will walk you through his presentation, followed by Maite, who will give you a detailed and deep dive on the figures and the financial information of the business. And then we will have the Q&A session. So please hold on to your questions until we get there. And I will give you further instructions later on for those, especially for those who are online. So now, without further ado, I'll leave you with Jaime. Jaime, the floor is yours.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Prosegur Alarms Investor Day. As Juan Ignacio was saying, the purpose of today's session is to run you through our strategy and also the financials, in a moment in which the industry is becoming very hot. I think you all know that our friends and competitors went public a few weeks ago. Hopefully, we'll get some time to share with you what we're doing and explain to you our strategy and where we want to get. First of all, I'm gonna share with you some details about our market and how this industry works. Hopefully, this will help you understand a bit better what we're trying to do.
This industry, this alarms industry market, is a very peculiar one because it's very push-driven in a sense that there's a strong correlation between how much we invest in advertising, marketing, and go-to-market and the growth potential and the penetration of each of our markets. So there is sort of a virtuous circle in which the more players invest in the country to get new customers, the higher the growth potential of that market, we can see. So in this slide, you see that everything starts by some customers realizing that they might have a need for security and peace of mind. Some customers don't even know that that's a need they have. So that's where our marketing and brand awareness investment starts. So it is very important for us to start investing more and more in marketing in a smart way.
We'll get to those details later, but once customers realize that they have a need, then the purchasing process starts, and that's where we need to put our commercial engine in place to make sure that we capture as much of that growth as possible. If we are successful, and once we are successful, then we get new clients. That means that we get more visibility on the street. You see more of our signs on the street and houses and businesses, and that also helps us accelerate further the growth and the need for our products and services, so you will have to listen to advertising and commercials telling you how your neighbor has an alarm and you don't have an alarm. So that sort of triggers the need for you to have an alarm as well and feel safer. You have also the same security level as anyone else has in the market.
So that, again, brings new clients and that brings new marketing potential and investment. So you sort of feed that virtuous circle. And we've seen, again, in all of our markets that once we do that, we do that well, then the level of the penetration and the growth starts growing and growing and accelerating. So if we now look at our markets specifically, we have a chart here where you can see the penetration of our markets. And that's why we feel that we have a tremendous opportunity in front of us at Prosegur, because in all of our markets, we see a lot of potential to increase penetration. Even in Spain, where we've grown the penetration in the last 5 to 10 years, thanks to our partnership with Telefónica as well, we still have way below the penetration levels that we see in other more developed markets like the U.S.
We don't have the Nordics on this slide, but they would also have higher penetration levels. So we trust that we can actually double the penetration, which would mean that we could have tremendous growth potential for us and for the market as well. So we're not entering as other industries are into where price wars were. But we have growth potential for all the players. Actually, we've become very good at seizing higher market share, higher new market share than our competitors. If we look at other regions like Portugal or even Latin America, the opportunity is even bigger. We have, again, a very good position to capture that growth and to keep growing the business. Also, because on this slide, you can see our market positioning.
This is also very relevant. Coming back to my point before, the more visible you are and the higher awareness of our brand we get, the easier for us is to keep growing. Being number one or number two in mainly all of our markets, except for Chile, where we're getting to number two now, I think helps us a lot and gives us and puts us in the best position to keep growing because customers consider us when they look for an alarm. Since we trust that, we believe that many, many more customers are going to look for an alarm. There are not too many players that we can actually consider other than the first two, three players in each of the markets. All the others are also important. This is a very fragmented industry. But actually, 80%, give or take, of new customers actually go to number one or number two players. So actually, we're very well positioned to capture that growth.
This was a little flavor about our market. Let me go now through our strategy. Actually, we're gonna run you through all the end-to-end value chain of our business. I'm gonna explain to you now what we're doing and what our plans are for each of those verticals of our value chain. But before we start, I think one very relevant point that I wanted to share with you today is that this is a finance-driven model. So there are two things that I'm gonna talk a lot, a lot about today. One is the obsession we have for returns. And second is the obsession we have for the customer experience. So those are the two main things that really keep me awake at night if I had to say two only. Finance, and returns is because, as you're very well known, this is a business in which we need to make quite a large upfront investment.
So that means that acquiring new customers, there are a lot of new customers, as I said, but acquiring them means that we need to invest in marketing and many other things that I'll go through now. But there's a large upfront investment, which we're happy to make because returns will come during the next years if we manage to keep customers for a long period of time. And if we manage to enlarge and expand margins and make customers happy so they're happy to keep paying this service for us for a long period of time. So those are the main two things that are relevant to us at Prosegur Alarms. And everything we do, we measure. We look at the returns, call it NPV, call it payback, call it return, call it whatever financial metric you wish. But we look at them not only for acquisition, but for any other project that we do.
Actually, when we look at the acquisition strategy, which is actually one of our main investments in terms of CapEx, in terms of SAC, subscriber acquisition cost, we look at that by channel, by customer, by offer, by anything you can think about. Because on this business, the average doesn't tell you much. It's much more relevant to actually look at anything you do, any new customers you acquire. If you acquire a new customer and that customer leaves within the first two years, you're actually not making a good return. So you need to look at each of your customers to make sure that all of them, not only on average, but all of them or most of them stay with us for a long period of time and we get high margins.
So that was something that I wanted to share with you because actually that's probably something that we've slightly evolved from the last couple of years' strategy, which will come on the coming slides, and we'll let you know what we're doing there. But that's something that I personally believe that we need to keep working on. And I'm very obsessed on the return and the financials. If I go to the strategy now, you can see here again the whole end-to-end value chain, starting by the product that we define and we keep investing on new products and developing our roadmap, then once you have the product, you need to take it to the market, so marketing comes and then commercial strategy, and then once you have the client, what's the most important thing? You need to make it happy.
You need to make them happy. You need to improve their customer experience, so again, that's the second thing I said that is one of our obsessions, and then, of course, to make customers happy and to be more efficient, you need to be. You mean, you need to be operationally more and more efficient, and you need to take advantage and make the most of all new technologies that you can apply to our business operationally-wise. On this slide, you can see that each of those parts of our value chain, we measure again with financial and operational KPIs. You call them churn. We want to retain customers as long as possible. You call it margin in terms of service margin or EBITDA margin. You want to be efficient in the way that you expand margins through time.
And for that, we need to make customers happy. So we need to offer them more products and services, upselling and those things. So you increase the ARPU, the average revenue, per user. And we are working very hard to keep costs under control. So we, as I said, expand margins year- over- year. And you'll see later when Maite shares with us the financials that that's one of the things that we are planning to do in the coming years, in our numbers. And also, subscriber acquisition cost, even if this is, an industry that we like it or not, you need to invest upfront. And we're invested upfront, upfront, and we're ready to invest upfront. We need to keep SAC, subscriber acquisition cost, under control. And we need to make sure that the less we invest upfront, of course, the easier it gets to make a return on that, on that money that we invest.
So we're also considering, and we'll talk about some initiatives later, also considering how to do that and how to optimize our upfront investment. And everything we do, we do it to grow our customer base. So growing in terms of new clients, but growing in terms of free cash flow optimization. So those two things are important. It's not only new clients that we measure, which we value a lot, and we track that a lot, and we have plans to keep growing the number of customers. But we also need to look at the free cash flow, at the cash flow optimization and growth. So let me now go one by one. If we start by the product, everything starts by having a robust and strong and innovative product in this industry as in any other.
These industries changed a lot in the last few years, since video becomes more and more relevant, since artificial intelligence becomes more relevant and something that we have in our day-to-day, in our homes and in our businesses, and since many of the things are progressing and changing so rapidly, we need to keep investing heavily on new products, and we need to make sure that we have actually the best product in the market, so in order to do that, there are a few things that we look at. First is customer usability. In order to improve that, we have two things that we want to do and we've been working on. One is the application, the app that we offer our customers to get connected to our service. It's called Smart, and we're investing quite a lot of money and efforts on having the best-in-class app for our customers.
Not only because the experience is better, but also because it's actually the main tangible asset that we have for our customers to realize how good our service is. They can interact with their service and products at home through their mobiles anywhere they are, and they can do many other things through the app. For example, the second thing is the self-service that they can get through the app. So even if we have all the means to work for our clients remotely from our call center, monitoring centers, and all those things, we trust and we believe, and we've experienced that customers value a lot what they can do on their own. So what they can actually, if they want to change the password for entering into the house or the code or whatever, if they can do it on their own and they don't need to call our call center, it's good for the customers because the experience is better.
It's good for us because we don't need to invest in getting more and more calls in our call center as long as we keep growing our customer base, for example. And many other things that customers can do through the app, and other self-service initiatives are very relevant in the way that we think about our roadmap evolution. And the second thing, of course, is innovation. We need to keep innovating in the core of the product, meaning we want to make our alarm more and more secure. And that means that we're gonna add more cameras, sensors, detectors, and many other devices to make homes and businesses safer and safer. And we keep thinking on what else can we do to add to our core product, to provide the best service and make everything we protect safer.
Second, as I was saying, is video. Video, not only for businesses. It started being very valued by businesses in the beginning, but nowadays video is very relevant for homes as well. And it's, it's, it's a core part of our service. So we offer all our clients and customers video capabilities so they can look at what's going on in their houses. And we can start doing things with artificial intelligence to improve the service that we provide, video-based, meaning pets. We have solutions that help us make our customers' life easier if they have pets. We can recognize people, faces, objects, and we can make our service more efficient by identifying that certain things are probably not real alarms or dangers. And some of the things, because we can recognize a burglar or a thief trying to enter into a house, we know that that's a real alarm and that we need to act much faster.
And artificial intelligence is only starting now. So we'll see more and more developments on that area. I'll let you know in a minute how we are planning to do that. Of course, future launches. Not everything is covered by our core system. We have many other initiatives outside of the home, beyond the home. We have also smart home initiatives that we're about to launch. You'll see and hear some more in the coming quarter or two quarters because we're planning to launch new, new, value propositions to the market in, in 2026. That keeps going. We still believe that the core of our business is the security part of the alarm, but there are many other things that can be done.
The only thing is that, just to be clear, we can discuss in the Q&A later. The only thing is that since we see such an interesting potential growth potential in the core business, we're not too much obsessed with entering into adjacent other things as of today, because we still believe that customers need to first cover their basic needs security-wise. So this is the roadmap strategy that we will follow in the coming two to four years. And how are we planning to do that? We had a very interesting debate in the last couple of years regarding build versus buy. So everything that we are developing and that we have on our roadmap, we could do it ourselves or we could do it through partners. And on this slide, you see how others are doing this.
So the small players that don't have enough scale or investment capacity. They can only take off-the-shelf products from other providers, from third parties, and integrate them with no change to those, no special benefits, no differentiation. On the other hand, you see, the largest players of the industry who a few years ago decided to build everything in-house, which probably five years ago was a good decision, but we trust, and that's why we've come to this own strategy. We believe that a combination of build and buy, a hybrid strategy here, is what will make us unique and what will give us the opportunity to have the best product in the industry in the coming years. So we are partnering with some players in the industry. We have some here today with us. So thanks for joining.
We're partnering with two specific companies who are best-in-class global leaders in what we want to do. We're not a hardware company. So that's not what we want to do. We don't want to become a hardware company. So we don't want to create and invest in capacities to become a hardware company. That's a different business. We're a service company. So we're not investing in hardware, and we trust that we reached an agreement with the best-in-class global leader for video as well. Because since I said before, video is becoming more and more important, and artificial intelligence is becoming more and more relevant, and there are players in the industry, global industry, which are bigger and probably better than any security player can be on those things.
So we again reached an agreement for the coming years with two specific partners to work together on those two things. And what we are going to keep, which is important, is that we are gonna keep our technological stack. We're gonna control our technology stack end-to-end. So we're gonna decide how we integrate things, what other things we have in our tech stack. And we're going to integrate these things, these parts of the end-to-end value chain into our tech stack. But we're not losing control of that, which was one of the things that obsessed us in the negotiations and in the debate that we had two years ago. And we're also keeping some sort of flexibility to adapt what we need to adapt and keep what we need to keep. So those things were very important for us to keep.
And on top of those things, we're getting new things, which is why we believe that this is a winning strategy. So we're getting best-in-class solutions and innovation capacity. We're working with people who invest millions and millions more than all other security industry players. So we can get the benefit from those things. And we are getting some period of time for exclusivity. So if we want to become different, we cannot work with someone who is going to actually sell the same thing to all other players in the industry. So we sign an agreement in which we get around two years of exclusivity, which we trust is going to make us different. And the last thing that we're getting, which was not only what we were looking for, but it's also important for our business, is that we're getting savings.
We're getting around 20% savings in year four and five of this agreement compared to what we were paying before this agreement. We're getting the best of both worlds, the innovation and the cost benefits. Once we have the product developed, we need to go to market. First thing we need to do in the market is we need to invest in marketing, as we were saying, right? On this slide, you see three things that we are planning to do. We already started doing those, and we will keep doing those in the coming years. One is that we're gonna keep investing in branding. We keep investing in branding and growing double-digit our marketing investment because we trust that that's the way to capture and seize that growth that we discussed on the first slide.
Second thing is that we want to become more and more efficient funnel-wise, meaning that conversion ratios are very important. Actually, once you get a new lead coming from your brand investment, the conversion ratio is 60%, 60 higher than any other lead that you can get, you could get through other means. So brand investment, second, you need to optimize the funnel, not only the brand investment, but also anything you do in the funnel. So, for example, we've been experiencing in some of our markets some contactability and reachability issues with some of our clients in the industry. You know that regulation is changing. So customers are not always as easy to contact as they were in the past, and we're working hard on those things.
For example, we're incorporating new channels to do that, WhatsApp and other remote channels to make sure that we don't lose any lead because to us, that's something very important to again be very efficient and capture all that growth. The third thing we're doing from a marketing perspective, which is or might be something that we are evolving compared to last strategic plan of Prosegur Alarms, is that we are very obsessed now to capture high-value customers. I said before in the first slide that the market is growing and that this is a push market. If you push too hard, it might be counterproductive. It might mean that you get customers who are not willing to be with you for a long period of time.
So we need to be very, very precise in how you market these services and how you target new clients to get customers who are willing to stay with you for a long period of time. And that will for sure reduce the chance. Of course, that will also mean that you will get customers who are willing to pay more, get more services, more cross-selling, more value-added services. And we're also working on that. But sign-ups are probably one of the things that we want to work on in the last few months to optimize that. In the past years, we were probably kickstarting the commercial engine. Now we need to make sure that that commercial engine and our sales force targets the right customers so we get the best returns possible.
In terms of value proposition, if we keep talking about the marketing strategy, we want to improve our value prop to the market, so we're working on a few things that are also very relevant and linked to what I described before when we were trying to get the best customers possible, so first thing that we're working on is we're simplifying our value proposition to the market. We were coming from an industry and ourselves, as part of the industry, we were selling with quite a complex value proposition in the past. I think Movistar Prosegur Alarmas started this journey two three years ago, simplifying the offer, making it more transparent to the customer and having less offers that we can sell to the customers, but best offers that we can sell to each of our customer targets.
And we keep working on that to simplify our offer and have the best offer possible. On top of that, we are working on increasing the value adds that we could bring to the market. So our response, we call it Acuda service, is becoming more and more popular and more and more relevant, but many other things that we want to do to improve our value-added services. As I said before, differentiation is key in this market. So even if it's very fragmented and we normally compete against one or two other players in the market, differentiating from our other competitors in the market is very relevant for us. So that's why we keep also innovating in our products and services.
So we have, for example, on this slide, we see the ContiGo, which is another service or product that we offer to our customers so they feel safe when beyond the home, when they're not at home and they could activate the buttons, so they can actually call for help if they have an issue outside of the home. And the last two things that we have on this slide is revenue expansion and adjacent developments. As I said before, we have, we are very lucky because this industry is growing and we have a lot of potential in front of us, but we don't wanna neglect that there are other opportunities that we're working on and that we will include to our value proposition in the next strategic plan. Right.
So we discuss about the product, we discuss about the marketing strategy, and now we need to go to the market and sell. So, as I was saying before, the last strategic plan for Prosegur Alarms was about starting the commercial engine. This is something that Movistar Prosegur Alarmas did probably 2021, 2022. And, at the rest of the group, we've done that in the last couple of years. And we were very successful selling more and more. You will see the numbers later, but we actually double and triple, depending on the market, the number of new ads that we got in the last couple of years. Having said that, it was not only about selling more, it was also about optimizing the channel mix. So in Movistar Prosegur Alarmas, we had Telefónica, which was a new channel for the business and was very successful.
So what we did in the Rest of the World is that we looked for other partners to do the same. So we looked for what we call third parties, dealers, and depending on the market, we have different strategies and different partners. But the purpose of that was to get new channels to compensate our, to optimize our channel mix, to be able to reach customers that we would not be able to reach otherwise with our own channels, because you know that our main own channel was door-to-door, and that's limited. That's not as scalable as some of the other things that we are doing now. And also, these new channels are variable in the sense that we pay commissions when they sell.
That gives us the flexibility to do more or less or reduce the risk that we run when we want to go to a new market or a new city or a new branch. So we can do it with other partners who already have the presence there. And if they sell, we're lucky, we get more customers and we operate them. And if they don't manage to sell, we lose nothing. So that's something that we've been doing in the last two years, starting to look into these other channels. And as you can see here, this is something that we want to keep in the coming years as well. It's working very well. It has a lower SAC, it's variable. We get to tap into top markets for us, and that's something that we will keep doing in the coming years.
And the other thing that we've been working on, and I think we've been already quite successful in some of our markets and not in all of them, and that's something that we need to keep working on in the next strategic plan, but it's our telesales own platform. So I remember when I joined Prosegur a few years ago, no one was selling an alarm remotely. And I actually asked the team at the time, can we do it online? I think doing that end-to-end online is very difficult, but I think doing that, starting with an online strategy with marketing investments, digital investments, but then closing the sale through a call, that we've proved that is possible, not only possible, but it's also very efficient because it's much cheaper.
Actually, we have a methodology now that allows us to know exactly how many new leads we need to give to our door-to-door sales teams so they have enough opportunities to work on, but we make them work on their own opportunities as well. That's something that it is very important for us because it's not only the company providing our door-to-door sales with opportunities, it's also these sales force looking for their own opportunities and bringing more and more clients. Part of the other leads, we close them through telephone. Sometimes customers don't want to buy through telephone, but when they do and when we can do it, I think this is something that is very relevant for us to keep SAC under control and be able to sell more and with less costs.
And I said at the beginning of my presentation that there were two things that were very important. One was the return and the financial metrics that we track and we follow. The other one was the customer experience. To us, this is a real obsession. And here we have the end-to-end customer journey, and on each touchpoint, we have plans to enhance, improve, the customer experience because that's the main driver to make customers stay with us longer and be happier and be ready to acquire new products and services from us, and that will have a positive impact in our margin. And this is same as with marketing. This is a virtuous circle that we truly believe that is going to help us get more resources to keep investing on our own business.
From the moment in which we acquire new customers to the moment in which we serve the customer, and actually up to the moment in which the customer leaves, we have a clear plan, strategy with metrics, KPIs to see how we improve and affect the customer experience. For example, in the subscription, one of our mantras is that we do what we say and we are transparent. Some of our competitors actually are very closed in the way that they show the offer. They don't publish prices. They don't say what customers are going to pay. Then they send someone to the customer home, and then they finish the offer and sign the contract on that moment. Actually, even after that moment, sometimes customers realize that they are paying something different to what they thought they were going to pay.
This is something that we never do. We are very transparent with our customers, and that's something that we want to keep doing because we believe that even if we probably miss one or two sales, the ones we get are gonna stay with us for a long period of time and are gonna be happy customers, then installation, so once you sell the customer, you need to install in their homes, so it is very important to do it right and to do it at the first time, so you don't need to keep going once and again to customers' houses and homes or businesses to finalize the installation because that leaves customers with a very bad customer experience feeling, so we are very obsessed and we track the first visit work that we do.
So we don't need to come back to the customer home again. In terms of billing, this is very key as well because it is a critical moment for the potential churn that you can get if you do the billing wrong or if you collect wrong. I think this is one of the things that, of course, customers do not tolerate. So it is very important that you do that correctly. And to be very frank and humble, in the last two, three years, we had some issues there because we changed our CRM, and I'll go to those details later, but that had an impact. Luckily enough, I think we can say that that's already passed and that we now have a solution that works perfectly fine, and that's gonna have a positive impact in the future.
Hopefully, numbers in the future will not suffer as we did, somehow suffer in the past. Then we can keep going through the customer value chain. In terms of usage maintenance, you don't go and visit twice to the customer to do the same thing, to change the batteries or to do those things. You need to do it once and you need to do it right. Customer service. When you call to the customer center, to the call center, you need to make sure that all calls are solved in the first call. First call resolution is critical and many other things that we're doing. In terms of activation, you also get the benefit to decide what channel you use to activate your customers. Many things, as you can see, to impact the customer experience.
Since this is so, so important, we have a lot of initiatives and we have a lot of KPIs that we track and follow and monitor, and at the right-hand side of the page, you can see the results of that strategy and of those efforts that we've been putting, so we are best- in- class. We're number one in Trustpilot and in Google My Business, which are two of the main platforms to assess the customer experience, our customers can tell you and can tell everybody what they think about your business, so we've been working hard to become number one on these parameters, and I think we're very successful. We've been very successful and we'll keep improving in the coming months. Actually, I'll leave you now with a video. These are the results from last month. Actually, in the video, you can see that we had a, even a lower, ranking. We had 4.807, and that was like three, four months ago. We keep improving month by month. I invite you to follow those two platforms because we will keep improving. I'll leave you now with the video.
[Foreign language] Pues encantado de poder mostraros cómo estamos innovando para mejorar la experiencia de nuestros clientes y cómo la tecnología y la IA nos está ayudando a conseguirlo. Los cambios ocurren tan deprisa en alarmas que es importante parar y entender qué es lo que estamos logrando, ¿verdad? Sobre todo porque esos cambios no solo suponen un antes y un después para nosotros, sino también para nuestros clientes. ¿Qué cambio dirías que está revolucionando la experiencia de nuestros clientes en alarmas?
[Foreign language] Sin duda, la manera que tenemos de gestionar las interacciones y el feedback de nuestros clientes. Y es que recibimos muchos inputs de los clientes en las diferentes interacciones, en vuestras escritas, en el call center. Hasta hace poco, esta tarea de entender a nuestros clientes era francamente tediosa, imposible de medir con los parámetros tradicionales, y eso sin contar los comentarios de texto libre. Inviable ser capaces de entender y reaccionar a tiempo, lo que impedía atender a las necesidades de nuestros clientes, o al menos hacerlo en un tiempo razonable. Imposible anticiparnos. Sin embargo, desde la introducción de la inteligencia artificial generativa, podemos procesar miles de interacciones y transformarlas en información procesable e insights en tiempo real.
[Foreign language] Y con eso podemos saber el sentimiento del cliente en el momento en el que ocurre. Gracias a ello, podemos tener una visión completa y actualizada. Podemos saber los temas que generan satisfacción y, además, tenemos mucha información de las tendencias casi al instante. La diferencia es enorme. Ahora los temas se organizan automáticamente por categorías con un scoring de sentimiento asignado. Podemos saber si el cliente está satisfecho, frustrado o confundido y reaccionar rápidamente. Emiliano, ¿qué tal todo por Chile? Justo hoy vamos a hablar de cómo aplicar la inteligencia artificial a las llamadas. ¿Por qué no nos lo cuentas tú mismo? Encantado. Lo hacemos a través de nuestro modelo de Speech Analytics, capaz de analizar todas las llamadas y conversaciones de nuestros canales de atención.
[Foreign language] Nos dice si una llamada ha terminado bien, si hubo tensión o si el cliente efectivamente se sintió acompañado. Y no solo eso, es un sistema que aprende con el tiempo. Detecta patrones de voz, palabras clave y tonos que indican satisfacción o malestar. Nos da una visión infinitamente más completa que el modelo de encuestas. Gracias, Emiliano. Y así podemos detectar si una interacción genera insatisfacción y así poder reajustar el protocolo, reasignar el caso y no solo nos ayuda a solucionar el problema en el momento, sino también poder abordarlo de manera proactiva. La escucha activa en redes sociales es clave a día de hoy. Por eso aplicamos esta misma tecnología para entender lo que dicen nuestros clientes en cada una de las plataformas. La IA analiza los comentarios de Prosegur y de la competencia y nos ayuda a diseñar acciones por país.
[Foreign language] Eso nos da una ventaja competitiva clara. Nos muestra cómo nos perciben, qué debemos mejorar y ya lo que estamos haciendo bien. La revolución es tan clara que esto se implementará en el resto de países. De hecho, los resultados son incuestionables: clientes más escuchados y valorados y respuestas más rápidas y precisas. Y una satisfacción que no deja de crecer. Hemos visto un aumento positivo en la fidelidad y la recomendación de nuestros servicios, lo que demuestra que escuchar a nuestros clientes tiene un impacto positivo. Al final, la tecnología no sustituye la empatía, la potencia.
Being customer experience is one of our main pillars for our strategy and main, competitive advantage and differentiation. That's one thing that we keep working on. As you can see on the video, we actually use artificial intelligence to assess everything we do with the client and to improve there. If we go and talk now a little bit about our operational strategy, the last couple of years were years in which, as I was mentioning before, we wanted to fix the basics and tidy up the house a little bit. So we had to change our CRM. We had a very old one which was becoming obsolete, and we changed the CRM in all nine countries. So that was quite a project which, at some point, had some impacts on, unfortunately, customer experience and collections and billing, and we suffered that a little bit in all countries. But during the last year, we managed to keep everything under control.
We have all new clients coming now with a consistent database, and we don't have issues between what we were expecting to build a customer and what the customer was built and what he had on the contract that he had signed. So that was a very important thing. The other things that we did, as I said before, is that we worked on the smart application to evolve the things that we can do through the smart through the app. And also one very important thing that was probably more about fixing the basics and tidying up the house was that we moved to the cloud, our monitoring centers and the smart application as well. So we renew all the technology and infrastructure to make ourselves scalable and capable of acquiring more and more, more and more customers.
We were reaching a limit in which we were almost not able to grow further, and with this few things that we did, we're ready to address and face the coming strategic plan with many more guarantees that will be successful, so what do we want to do now, so we didn't really transform our operation as much as we wanted in the previous strategic plan since we were doing those other things, but now we want to transform the operation. We want to use more AI in the operation as we saw in the video, more examples of that, and I'll tell you about that on the next slide. We want to make sure that the technical team, the installation, the call center, monitoring center, is transformed and that we incorporate new processes.
We review all the processes with new technologies, new systems, the CRM and many other things that we're changing to make sure that we transform the experience of our customers. We want to bring new challenge, new channels on board, WhatsApp, as I said, remote channels, and some other things to improve our operation. We're working on infrastructure unification, so that means that we are going to probably consolidate a few of the things that we do in different countries in fewer countries, especially in Latin America, where we don't need to have so many operations divided or scattered in all those countries, so we'll consolidate some of those operations in fewer countries with some projects that we have in mind.
Billing and collection re-engineering, we talk about that a little bit, and that's critical for the churn reduction and for making our customers happier. That was something that did not work as well in the past, and we already fixed the main problems, but we want to transform and evolve that thing because this is very important. And that's one of the main touch points in which you need to be 10 out of 10 with your customers. And that we will have in mind. And value selling operation, we want to, as I was saying before, sell value. We want to have all the operation systems, processes to be able to attack the market in the smartest way possible.
So those things we'll see in the numbers that Maite will share with you in a minute because those will mean that we will have happier customers paying a bit more, but especially cost control and efficiency and customer experience. And here, last but probably not least, we have a few examples of projects we're working on AI related. This attacks the whole end-to-end value chain of our business. So you can see here a few examples of our go-to-market and selling, capabilities and also some projects about our operation. So the way we work with AI is very specific in this company. First of all, we've rolled out AI tools to all our employees so they can work in their own projects and they can, we call it do internal tests. So they bring new ideas to the company, to things that they believe we can improve.
If those things and ideas are things that we can invest on and that have a business case and a real impact on KPIs, we start doing proof of concepts. And if the proof of concept works well, then it's where the real investment and the high investment comes to bring real products to the market, to the operation. And then we industrialize and then we do projects to make that available not only to that specific team, but for all countries in all teams that we have in which we operate. Here you have a few examples regarding both the sales and the operations teams and some things that were already discussed in the video and some other things that we're working on to reduce churn, to increase the sales, to reduce the cost, to improve the customer experience and so on and so forth. With this, I'll pass to Maite to share with you the financials.
Thank you very much, Jaime. We already have been analyzing the market, the strategy, and let's now go to analyze the financial figures. First of all, I'm going to explain you four different concepts because I think that it's going to be quite useful to understand the next numbers. The first one, I'm going to speak about the service cash flow. The second one is going to be about the replacement cash flow. The third one about the recurrent cash flow, and the fourth one about the growth cash flow. As you could see, I am all the time speaking about cash flow. Why? Because, as Jaime mentioned, this is a finance-driven business. Internally, we manage in terms of cash flow, not in terms of P&L, as we do with the rest of the businesses.
In this regard, if we start with the first concept, the service cash flow, I'm going to explain how it's calculated. It's quite easy. Just we have to take the service margin and we have to multiply by 12 times the 12 months that has a month. If you want to have the full service cash flow, you will just have to multiply by the total client base. A lot of you, you already have been speaking with me about the EBITDA pre- SAC, the EBITDA pre- SAC. The service margin is the EBITDA pre- SAC. Internally, we always speak about the EBITDA. We include the depreciation of the CapEx. Today, we will see that I'm going to explain you also, we are going to speak about the EBITDA pre- SAC. I will provide you also that percentage.
So if we move now to the replacement cash flow, the replacement cash flow is calculated just by multiplying the churn rate and the SAC, the subscriber acquisition cost, the cost that we need to incur to acquire a new client. When we multiply this churn rate by the SAC, what we obtain is the cash flow that we need to incur to maintain the same client base that we currently have. So from the service cash flow, if we subtract the replacement cash flow, what we are going to obtain is the recurrent cash flow. The recurrent cash flow is a cash flow that we use for the rest of the things, for growing, for paying taxes, for paying CapEx, for paying others interest if we have a debt. The recurrent cash flow, it's also important, and I'm going to move to the next concept, the growing cash flow, because there is a ratio that I would like to highlight, but because it's important to understand the debt in this business.
As Jaime has mentioned, for growing, we have a lot of SAC, we have a lot of acquisition cost, and we also have a lot of publicity to invest. So this what makes is it increase our debt. So when we calculate, when we divide the growth cash flow divided by the current, the recurrent cash flow, if the number that we obtain is higher than 100%, it means that what we are doing is that we are taking on into debt to growth. If it's lower, it means that we are not going in debt to growth. So here, this is key because we have to be controlling the debt all the time. Why? Because if not, the recurring cash flow, instead of for growing, it's going to be dedicated to pay interest. So that's why even some of our competitors, they need to do specific financial things so that they could reduce their debt, because if not, the debt is going to kill you. So now let's move to the numbers. I'm going to start with MPA.
In this regard, I'm going to speak about the evolution across the different years because here you can really analyze how the strategy has a real impact in the numbers. I'm going to start from the first phase. I have split it in three different phases. The first one started when we signed the joint venture with Telefónica in February 2020. If you could see in three years from 2020 till 2022, we more than doubled the number of clients that we had. This was mainly because we did very aggressive promotions, aggressive commercial discounts that what it made was that it just not only doubled the number of clients that we had, but it also increased a lot the churn rate, achieving 14.1%, the highest we had ever had.
We also increased, it also made us increase our debt. Why do we, why did we did this strategy? It was mainly because we were launching our new brand, Movistar Prosegur Alarmas. We just keep pushing the market so that all of, all Spain could know our new brand, Movistar Prosegur Alarmas. In 2023, we started changing our strategy. Here we were more focused on stabilizing the main indicators. For example, as you could see, in three years' time, we reduced our churn rate till having the churn rate that we have now, 8.9%. Even we improved our ARPU. As you could see, this is the unit recurring cash flow. The ARPU increased to EUR 83 in four years. You will have also to divide it in by 12. Look what happened at the beginning.
The CAGR even was negative in the recurrent unit cash flow. Here you can really, really appreciate how the strategy that we were dealing with has a direct reflection. You can directly see it reflected in numbers. If we move now to where we are now and to our new strategic plan, now we are going to be focused on growing. We will continue growing 8% CAGR, higher than how the market is going to grow. We will continue to focus on our debt. Now, the debt that we have, the net debt EBITDA ratio that we have is 3.8 times in MPA. In the third Q of 2025 and 4 Q 2025, it has been the first time where we have generated positive cash flow.
So if I go back to what I was mentioning about the ratio of growth cash flow divided by the recurrent cash flow, till the third Q of 2025, that ratio was higher than 100%. In 2024, it was around 138%, what means that we were going into debt to grow. But now that has changed. Our strategy has changed in 2020 for 2025 till, and for this next strategic plan. Our focus is going to be always lower to 2.5 times so that in 2029, we could achieve 2.3 times. So you could say if your limit is 2.5 and you are going to achieve 2.3, what are you going to do with the remaining cash flow? So we will see. The boards will decide if it's going to be, just for good full growth, for a shareholders' dividend or whatever.
If I move into the service margin here, we are going to achieve a 63% service margin. This one was the one that I was previously mentioned. The EBITDA pre- SAC is this 63%. If we exclude the depreciations coming from the CapEx, the figure should be 64%, 1% more. If we move now to the rest of the countries, to the what we call it Rest of the World or ROW, here I am not going to explain the evolution across the years, mainly because here what you are observing is the consolidated figures of seven different countries. And each country has different strategy in a different moment. So it has not too much sense to analyze it globally.
I am going to be more focused on the last part, on phase three, which is our strategic plan. Here we will continue growing. We are going to grow in a CAGR of 6%. We will try to achieve in 2030 600K client portfolio. And we will continue growing also in the recurrent cash flow in a CAGR of 11%. Here, as you know, the Rest of the World countries, they do not have debt. They are autonomous in the cash flow that they generate. The cash flow that they have is the cash flow that they can use for growing. The group is not going to provide them more cash flow for growing, just if they grow inorganically, not organically. So here, that's why they can't afford growing super fast, because for that, you really need a lot of debt and the group is not going to provide it. So the debt that they have is zero. If we move into the margin, the service margin that we are going to achieve in 2029 is 51%.
This one again is the EBITDA pre- SAC. If we go to the EBITDA pre- SAC, without excluding the depreciation of the CapEx, it's 4% higher. We will be in 54%. So, here I would like just to highlight also that our focus is going to continue growing, but always controlling the type of the growth. We want it to grow with a very tight churn rate so that our debt could not rise. And this is all from my side. I will turn the presentation back to our Alarms CEO, Jaime, so that he could provide you the financial, the final takeaways.
Thank you, Maite. So basically those are the numbers, which, as you saw, maintain the focus on growth, but on profitable growth and on profitability and with a very tight control of our cash flow and debt levels. One other important thing that Maite passed very quickly through is that, with those churn levels, if we manage to reduce the churn levels that we saw in the previous slide, by reducing that churn to get to the same level of new customers, of total customer base, you need to reinvest less, as Maite said in the beginning, in replacing the customers that you lost. So that saves a lot of money for the group.
So that reduces the debt level and that also gives us more leeway to keep growing and to look for those profitable customers that we want to look for. So final remarks from my side, as we discussed today, we want to have the best- in- class product and for that we have a clear roadmap and we have the best partners in our hybrid strategy to build those products. We want to improve and invest in our go-to-market strategy. That means that marketing is going to become even more important in the coming years in terms of brand awareness, investment, and in terms of helping us define the best high-value offer that we want to bring to the market. We want to, as I said, improve the customer experience. So that to us is absolutely critical.
That's why we have all those KPIs and metrics that we track very closely to improve month after month. With these numbers, I think, since Maite talked about MPA first and then Rest of the World, just to aggregate the numbers, we'll become a 1.5 million company in 2030. We are today 1 million company. As you know, we announced that a few months ago. We're planning to increase by 50% by 2030 the number of customers that we serve. With, as I said, and Maite remarked with a lot of focus on profitability on each of the customers that we acquire and retain, and of course on debt control. We become self-sustainable in terms of growth and in terms of what we want to invest in this business, which is a very interesting one.
In terms of margins evolution, following that strategy of improving customer experience and improving ARPU at the same time as we control our costs, we are enhancing and improving our margins up to 63, which is 64 if we look at excluding depreciation, and 51, which would be 54 excluding depreciation as well. That's on average an improvement of around three point something basis points end to end, which is something that again is going to leave us lots of cash flow and debt control and money that we can use to keep investing on the business. The last figure could not be other than the free cash flow that we are planning to generate, the cash flow that we're planning to generate. If we look at that in terms of recurring cash flow, meaning that if we stopped the growth machine, we would be generating almost EUR 250 million by 2030, 2029, excuse me. So that's the conclusion of the presentation. I think now I'll pass you to Juan Ignacio, which will run the Q&A. Thank you.
Thank you, Jaime. So now it's the Q&A session. We are running a little bit late, but we're going to try to answer them all, the questions that you may have. So a little bit of instructions here for those who are present, just raise your hand and just make the questions. Previously state your name and the company, please. For those who are online, just submit the questions through the platform and we're going to read them here out loud so that we can answer them here directly. Okay. First question here. [Foreign language] Presentamos a Diego. ¿Qué van a introducir? Diego. Sorry. Before I am going to introduce Diego, Diego is the CEO of MPA. So every question related to MPA or the Spanish business, he will be, he's the man to answer them. So, that's it. Now, yes, please.
My name is Enrique Yáguez, Bestinver Securities . I have three questions. The first one is for Maite. In the Analyst Day of last year, you pay a careful attention to M&A opportunities, even highlighting firepower for them. And in this Analyst Day, you didn't pay such closer attention. So my question is, are you reconsidering the inorganic growth landscape of opportunities, taking into consideration the change in the CEO as well? I don't know if it is related or not. And what are your views on this regard? Second, obviously is Telefónica.
After the meaningful changes in the company strategy, including the CFO this morning, so how do you foresee your relationship with this company and to which extent keeping a stake of 0.86% in the company is key in order to have a clear understanding of your operations? And third is also an obvious question. Taking the IPO of Verisure and the KPIs that you presented today, what do you think will be a fair discount, if any, versus them in order to consider a potential disposal in the business? Thank you.
Thank you, Kike. In terms of M&A, I know that in the previous analysis day that we did one or two years ago, we spoke about Italy, we spoke about Ecuador, we spoke about Germany, and we spoke about Mexico. Now, we are with a new CEO. We are still open to M&A. We are already analyzing some of those countries that I already mentioned. Some of them we already forgot about them, like Ecuador or Mexico. Others we are working on that. Even we are working in some partnerships in other countries that even we didn't mention. We will see in the next results presentation, maybe not in the full year's one, but maybe in the first Qs or second Q, we could provide more information in that regard, but as I always say, the M&A, you never know.
It's like maybe you think that you're going to close it today and tomorrow, you're not finally signing. In terms of Telefónica, I, we are aware of all those changes. We went to the capital market day of Telefónica a few weeks ago. And it is true that the yield that Telefónica is providing now is much lower than the yield that we used to have. Now I think that it's around 3.something% and it used to be close to 7%. So here I am going to speak as a shareholder of Telefónica, because in terms of the how we work between in MPA, between Telefónica and Prosegur, it's the idyllic relationship, because we really have a very, very good relationship. Even maybe Diego later could explain it or go further in that regard.
But in terms of shareholders, we really do not want to have Telefónica shares. Our goal, we have a higher yield in our businesses, so it has no sense having those shares. But we will have to see the moment. Why? Because now the share price of Telefónica, I have it here, is like EUR 3.71, EUR 3.489, and we bought it at EUR 5.6. So we do not want to lose a very big amount. So we will see finally what we are going to do. But yeah, it's we are not going to keep it forever. In terms of IPO of Verisure, and what they have, the multiple that they have paid for Verisure, I think that even with the figures that I was showing late before, we have like two different scenarios. We have South America and we have Europe.
I think that Europe, Spain, and Portugal, they are the same type of quality of customer portfolio. So I think that we could be very close to the multiples that they have. It is true that South America is different, mainly because we have countries with a very small number of subscribers. So the scalability is very difficult to achieve it. The one that Verisure or other competitors have, no? So I think that we, you cannot compare exactly the same because it's not the same. So that's why even our EBITDA pre- SAC or our service margin is going to be 50%-55% when in, for example, in Spain, we are going to have a 64%.
So it's just because they are a completely different markets, but not because of the possibilities or the penetration capacity that we have. It's just because we do not have that scalability. We will work on that and we will work also in some operative efficiencies so that we could achieve a better margin, but there is still a lot of work to be done there, but I think that Europe, as I mentioned in the last results presentation, I think that we really have we could be on the similar prices as what they have received in the IPO.
And Juan Ros from ODDO BHF. I was just looking at last year's presentation and the targets you provided for MPA and from ROW. And I think MPA targets, they seem like, you know, pretty much the continuation you provided until 2027. So 2030 targets, they seem in line with what you were providing before. If anything, maybe slightly more ambitious. But then the Rest of the World targets, they seem a bit off. Maybe you're pushing back one or two years, the delivery you were expecting, a year ago. So my question is, what are you observing in those regions? What's the reason for pushing slightly backwards those targets? Thank you.
I'm going to answer because I was the only one in the analyst day. So here it is true that in MPA, it's even slightly better. So it's even better than what we release in the analyst day. The Rest of the World geographies, they are lower, mainly because we have changed our strategy. We do not want to grow at any price. We want to grow with very good quality of clients. We want to grow. I don't know if you could remember when I have been speaking the MPA evolution, across the years, that at the beginning, when you started doing a lot of promotions, discounts, and things like that, your churn rate starts increasing, but also your debt. So, what we need to do is to fix the basis. That is what we have been doing during 2025, as Jaime was mentioning with the changes in our CRM, in our billing process, and so on.
And now what we have to do is we have to continue growing, but growing with common sense, growing with a very, very good quality of a client base and with a very controlled churn rate. So we prefer to have a lower churn rate with less growth, but with a lower churn rate and a better service margin than having a higher number of subscribers, but with a higher churn rate or a higher service, lower service margin.
Álvaro here. Yeah. Can I go ahead? Okay. Thank you for taking my questions. If I may, I'm going to do a couple. First one, before entering in the figures, I would first like to clarify your strategic positioning, because from last year's event, one of the main messages was to stick to the current offering, that is residential intrusion, rolling out, entering a new offering such as smart locks, senior care, or lower cost offerings through certification and so on. So, well, also maintaining this technological hybrid approach that you also mentioned.
So, in that case, I see Prosegur somewhere like in the middle between do-it-yourself, lower cost offers and premium segment, currently led by Verisure. So my question is whether with the change of CEO, you keep this same positioning and market positioning, both in Iberia or rest of the world, whatever, and trusting the tech you adopt from third parties to catch up well in this premium segment? Or any comment on how you see both the low cost and more premium pressures from both sides evolving and where does Prosegur lay in that mix? And then, if I may, a second topic I would like to ask is regarding other agreements. We're told we're under discussions to replicate the Movistar Prosegur Alarmas strategy to enter other markets through equity and ventures, which we've seen it's been a clear success.
So if you could share with us if you have made any progress in that front. And then a last one, addressing the guidance you provided. You forecasted a decline to 8.8-8.4% churn in MPA. Just to clarify, as a follow-up, if that only refers to the trade-up in customer quality, as you just mentioned, or if there's something else you can do there and how that compares to the 7% churn of Verisure, how can you do in that front? And also in the Rest of the World, you are also improving the churn more aggressively when we were told that churn was even higher in Latin America. If you could explain that trend as well.
I'll take the first one if you want, since it's regarding our market positioning. So basically, the strategy we want to follow is that we want to become a best- in- class and a premium player on the core security market, core alarms, security market, meaning that we want to have the best- in- class security product and alarm product. On top of that, we're working to bring new services and adjacent products that we can add to that one to improve the market that we can tap to sell more things to our existing customers, to do cross-selling, bundling, and things that will improve our ARPU, our margins, which would reduce our churn because customers would become more loyal because they have more products.
But for sure, we don't want to be trapped in the middle of the do-it-yourself players and the ones we saw at the right-hand side of that slide. That slide was meant to explain the technological approach to how you want to build those capabilities. But for sure, position will remain as a premium company and as a premium service, and that will be reflected in the ARPU and the price that we'll ask our customers to pay to us for those services.
Okay. In relation to the rest of the questions, in terms of joint ventures that we could do with other different companies in other different countries, we are super open because we are very happy with how the joint venture with Telefónica has evolved. If we could do it tomorrow in Brazil, we will do it. If we could do it tomorrow in Germany, we will do it. But unfortunately, it's not so easy. So, we are trying to do something, and if we finally get it, you will know it in the future results presentation. In terms of churn, when this 8.4%, if we.
If you want Diego to answer the churn on Spain, [crosstalk] because I think this is.
Yes, it's just Spain. Perfect. Is the churn rate? Why the churn rate is 8.4% and why Verisure is saying that is lower? I think that is because the way of how Verisure calculated. No, no, I'm sure because the churn.
That's one point. And the other point is unless I know that the churn from Verisure is a blended one. So comparing all the countries. So you're not comparing like for like. This is the Spanish ratio. I don't know the Verisure churn rate in Spain, but I guess it will be slightly higher than the 7.4 that they publish. Anyway, our aim in Spain is very clear: to be the best in customer satisfaction and that will come having, why not, better churn level than them. That's the plan. They do publish 7.4, not 7.0, but still better than ours.
But the blended one.
The blended.
Yeah.
And the last question in relation to the Latin American churn rate. This one is higher because, and I think that you already mentioned it in your explanation. We have two types of clients. We have residentials, homes, houses, and we have businesses. In the better is to go in residentials. Why? Because the business is more is weaker because if the business if there is a crisis or if the economy is not doing well, the business is going to close. So the alarm will be a churn, will become a churn. So, in South America, in some countries, we really have a high business alarms clients. So that's why the difference, because we in terms of residential is quite similar. So that's why we need to push more the residential type of clients instead of the business type of clients.
Here, Álvaro, please. You had it.
Hi. Álvaro Lenze from Alantra. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to understand on your, on your strategy of customer experience. You mentioned some things that from the outside, I don't know if the industry is not providing it, but it seemed quite basic stuff like not messing up with the billing and allowing the client to change the password through the app or having video. That doesn't seem too complicated. I really don't mean this as criticism. I'm just trying to understand whether providing this is what has allowed you to go down from the 14%, which was quite high, to 9% or is, are those changes what are going to push you down to 8.4%. Because it really didn't strike me as something that it's really differentiated. It's just listening to the client and doing some basic things that we would have expected had been done already. Again, not as criticism, just as just trying to understand.
And then if you do this and you try to focus on the premium market and we would expect there to be slower growth. You have provided a little bit slower growth, but still quite substantial growth. But you haven't mentioned much about your pricing strategy, because if your product is not superior and you are going to go for the premium client, you need to entice him somehow. So I want to understand where do you expect your service to be priced to target that kind of clients. Thank you.
I don't know if you want to get the first one and I'll come to.
Spain, actually, you know that the sweet spot of the market is premium. So high value, high price, our main competitor is Verisure and we are fighting every day. So our positioning is clearly in the premium side of the market. That's what we do. And regarding the customer experience question, which I do understand and I do see where you're coming from and it makes sense. I think the hard part of this business is to acquire a new customer. Once you acquire a new customer, if you don't mess up, then you'll get a client for 15 years. Especially because, compared to other industries like telco, there is a price war. There is no way that you can grow. So the only way you can grow market share is by stealing and fighting against other players. Here you have a very healthy market growing a lot.
Then if you don't again mess up and your pricing is well set and according to the service that you provide, then normally what happens is that competition would go and tap into new markets. It would not come to steal your customers and you would not go straight to steal the customers, especially in the top two players, sorry, in each of the countries. Then if you compete against second tier, then we're normally very good at gaining market share from getting the customers because our products and services are much better and advanced in terms of technology, in terms of innovation, in terms of service itself.
No, and in relation to your second question about the pricing strategy, here we are not going to, as we did in the past with promotions and discount rates and commercial discounts and so on, be so aggressive in any of the countries where we are, not just in Spain, that maybe is the closest, and maybe even you were analyzing or watching the publicity. We will just do it if we need to launch a new brand, just because it's the only way to make you to have a name in a country. So, maybe there will be some specific promotions of something, but they are not going to be so aggressive.
Follow-up question, if I may. I don't know if this yeah a follow-up question, if I may. When thinking about keeping a client relationship long-term and your client customer retention, I just wanted to understand how your partnership with Movistar because the churn rates at the telecom company are much higher. Do you see clients that churn maybe go to change their fixed broadband from Movistar to Orange? Do they switch the alarm or do they stay? And also you have mentioned to approach the market, relying more on third-party channels. Is that a potential threat to the capturing and retaining the client and the customer experience since you no longer have control of the entry of that client?
Actually, it's a good question. Thinking in customer from Telefónica and Prosegur, so altogether, actually the best churn ratio comes from customer using both the alarm and Fusión products. So that meaning that the quality of this customer is super high and that's good for us. So it's helping actually to decrease the blended churn ratio. And we are not worried that they can switch the company. Of course, we have customer from Telefónica, but also we have customer from the rest of the operators in Spain. That's not an issue.
I think one interesting thing that we can do with Telefónica is that they can share with us some customer base that we can attack, but we don't bundle the services together. So that means that they don't get a single bill with both services. So when they change telecom providers, they might decide to change alarms providers as well, but that doesn't necessarily happen and we don't see that really happening in the market. Actually, we tend to bundle, even if we don't bundle with a single billing, but we tend to sell together more with fixed than with mobile. The fixed churn ratio is much lower than the mobile. It's actually comparable to ours; it's around 8% or thereabouts.
Fusión customers?
Regarding the channels and the loss of control, if you want, what we do, because that's something that happened in Spain and you can elaborate on Spain if you want now, Diego, but that also happened; that debate we had it for other countries. So what we do is that once they sell the customer, the ones who install and the ones who sign the contract in the customer's home is us. So that way we control the quality and the experience of the customers that we onboard. And Spain, I think.
No, it's exactly the same. So regardless the channel that the customer came in, we control the full customer life cycle.
I don't know if there's a, Kike, one other question
Regarding the service margin expansion to how much it relies on operational leverage, which I think it should be the bulk of it, and how much on cost savings from your new operational excellence program. And the second, on capital allocation, Maite, you mentioned that you are not willing to take a debt in Rest of the World except there is M&A opportunities. Why do you think it's cheaper and less risky to grow inorganically rather than organically?
I'm going to start with the second question. I think that organically is cheaper to grow, but it depends on the price of the inorganic. For example, we have just bought some connections in Argentina and it was cheaper buying the connections; they were like 5K clients, but it was cheaper buying this M&A than doing it organically. But this is a very, very strange situation. In general, inorganically is more expensive. So that's why we prefer to continue growing organically. If there is something inorganically, I think that maybe even if we introduce into a new country, it's going to be buying something very small so that later on we can continue growing, step by step.
It's not going to be trying to buy, I don't know, 300, 600K subscribers in Italy. No, we are not going to do that. If we do it, it's going to be inorganically, but very, very something very small so that we could keep going and growing organically in that country, and I've forgotten the first question. It was about the service margin.
Expansion. [Audio distortion]
I'll take this one if you want. Yeah, we're doing both things. We're actually reducing the cost structure in terms of what we do and how we do it, using new technologies. And actually, one of the main investments that we did in the last couple of years or three years actually in Spain was the CRM replacement. So that took us a few months and years, and we had to invest there. Then the transformation program that we have is gonna make us more efficient and we're gonna consolidate a few teams in certain areas or countries where we feel are cheaper and we can operate better.
The third lever if you wish is the ARPU expansion as well. We're working on the ARPU expansion, twofold if you want. One is because we're reducing discounts, and we elaborated on that in our presentations. But second, because we're adding value-added services, we're adding new products and services that we want to incorporate and cross-sell to our existing customer base.
Okay, I have two questions here online. One for Maite and the other for Diego. The first one for Maite, it's Marta Fernández. She says, as you mentioned, EBITDA pre-SAC equals the service margin, which is expected to rise to 63% in 2020 by 2029 in MPA. Why do you include depreciation and amortization in this figure? I thought it was just revenues subtracted the service cost. That would be the first question. And the second question for Diego, it's what's the expected unitary acquisition cost for MPA in the upcoming years?
So in relation to the first question, because so far, it's 15. I'm not going to extend in my accounting knowledge, but more or less, trying to, the acquisition cost of an alarm, 35% of the cost is booked as an asset. The rest of it is booked as a cost in our P&L. Which type of cost? Installation cost, commercial cost, equipment cost. Those are the three main ones. Okay.
So in the acquisition cost side, my question would be, the short answer is gonna be pretty stable in the coming years. But when you look at the acquisition cost, basically you have three main areas. The first one is the channel mix. So depending on the channels, the acquisition cost might be higher or lower. The second area is efficiency. So we looking for efficiency so you can do cheaper. And the third one is, as Jaime said before, as the time goes by, we tend to install more devices. And of course, the higher the number of devices you install, the higher the SAC will be. So the short answer is pretty stable. But combining these three points.
That's great. And here's a follow-up question for MPA, but also for RO. It's what's the split among variable cost and fixed cost? In the service cost part, what's the split between variable and fixed?
Variable and fixed within the service cost?
Yes. Approximately.
I think that's a very good one, and that's actually a very long debate that we always have because when we look at the growth, we need to analyze what's actually fixed so we can dilute fixed costs and improve margins. So that relates to the question Enrique was asking before. I would say, and keep me honest, you both, but I think around 33, one third of the costs of our service cost is fixed, which means that that's also why some of our other competitors with greater scale have been able to dilute those fixed costs and increase margins, which is something that we'll for sure be doing in the coming two, three years.
That's great. So there's online, no more questions. I don't know if here one more, okay? I guess that would be the last one because we are running out of time, okay?
Hello, I'm Manuel Lorente from Banco Santander. My first question is regarding the growth prospects that you have outlined. There was a slide regarding the new mix. My first question is regarding from those different channels, the expected growth. It's going to be from this mix towards telesales, third parties. From the growth that you're expecting, which one is coming from the different channels approximately?
On that slide, which related to RoW, Rest of the World, you could see that the third-party channels and the telesales, which are the channels that are cheaper, are the ones that we are planning to grow the most. So our door-to-door sales force will remain pretty stable and those other two will be the ones that will be growing.
Okay. And then again on that growth, from the side of the cost per new subscriber, Diego mentioned that you were expecting more or less to be stable. And in the Rest of the World, it's also the same trend. And what about the revenue per new subscriber?
So SAC wise, it is a bit difficult because if we talk about that in euros, we have Argentina and other countries which make it difficult. But net net, we're reducing SAC in the coming years through that strategy that we just discussed, regarding the channel mix, which helps us control and reduce the SAC a little bit. Also, we mentioned the agreement we have with the technology partners, which will bring around 10%-20% savings regarding the equipment. Part of it, as Diego mentioned, will reinvest to install more things in the customer's house. So it's not that we're gonna reduce that amount by 20%, unfortunately. But that brings me to your other question, which is the ARPU, because we're improving and enhancing and enlarging the equipment that we install. And since we're following a lower discount strategy and a premium pricing strategy, we'll see ARPU coming up in all markets, in local currency in the coming years.
Okay. So since, let's say, growth, it's going to come from new channels, okay, new ways of selling to the client. That's, that has any issue because you're expecting at the same time to move toward the higher part of the value chains. So are you sure that you can move to this premiumization trends by selling through these channels? It's something that you have worked out that you have addressed?
No, it's a very good question. I think third-party channels are probably more difficult to be used to tap those high-value customers. What we're doing is that we're letting those channels sell to sort of the same customers that we were selling before, which, by the way, we're not that different to the ones that we want to target since we're skimming the upper part of the pyramid in terms of value. But also telesales is an own channel, so we can use that channel to keep selling to the higher-value customers.
And the door-to-door, we will be using to tap those specific, highest-value customers, especially because they normally need a visit to acquire a new product or services because they have bigger houses, because they have bigger businesses. And those for sure need a face-to-face visit, a face-to-face assessment, security assessment. You need to go, tell your new customer where they need to put all the cameras, all the detectors, all the sensors. So those will be for sure reserved by the own door-to-door sales force.
Okay. Now I have a question for Maite or Diego. For the ones that we have been in this chair for many years, we have been hearing that a partnership similar to the one that we have signed with Telefónica in Spain might come in other regions. So Diego, why don't Telefónica sign a same type of agreement with Movistar in other geographies?
Well, Maite said before, no? I think Prosegur is willing to do it or to replicate the Prosegur, the MPA model in other countries. So it's but it's not easy. It's not so easy. I don't know. The short answer, I don't know that will happen in the future. Of course, I think I know Prosegur is open. Telefónica has just launched the new strategy. Let's see in the coming months if they are open to replicate the model in other countries.
But also, if I may, I've been in the MPA board for five years now, and I've been discussing with some of our colleagues from our internal M&A team with Telefónica's M&A team. And, and I think one interesting thing that happened is that Emilio Gayo was the one pushing, I think himself for this JV in Spain. He now probably has more power in Telefónica. We discussed many opportunities in Latin America because where footprint was mainly overlapping in Latin America. They sold Hispam and Latin America business in the last two, three years.
So it didn't make sense for them to do a JV and then exit the market. But we still have some conversations and, and who knows what would happen because for us, it makes sense. I think for Telefónica, it makes sense. You need to combine all interests and incentives, and you need to find the right partner to do these things. It is a very successful JV, but it's not as easy as Maite was saying. It never happened in other industries and with other telcos. So we need to find the best way and the best partner and the best country and the best incentive that we can align.
Just, sorry, the last one from my side, here in Portugal.
Sorry, just to add one more point to Jaime. If you look at this type of, let's say, partnering worldwide, you will only find MPA in Spain and let's see NOS in Portugal. Anything else? So you don't have any other example worldwide.
That's why, yeah.
That's because it's not so easy. That means it's not that easy.
Okay. And again, just my final one, according to your competitors, looks like there is an amazing opportunity from artificial intelligence-driven type of stuff. They are mentioning that average call per subscribing is reducing by an amazing 20% from AI-related issues or in terms of, customer, let's say exclusion. So the ones that, I mean, they improve roughly 13 percentage points the way they address the correct type of guy to address the proper time at the platform. So, are you already benefiting from those, let's say, issues from AI? Or is just something that you are starting to walk?
I think we do have a lot of projects already live. I think we have the monitoring center in which we assess all the alarms that we receive in the center. And instead of having lots of agents looking at the screens, we have either artificial intelligence looking at what's going on in their homes and then passing only the real alarms to the agents so they can actually trigger the response. We have the call center number of calls reduction as well, as you mentioned. We have virtual agents helping our agents in the call center to bring the best response and answer to each of the calls and reducing the time that we invest in each of the calls. So I think we're pretty much advanced on those things. I don't know if you have more examples,
but no. So we have a pretty big funnel today of AI projects. The basic idea is some of them are related to how to improve the efficiency in the workplace. And that's the easy part. We are already collaborating with Microsoft mainly. And as Jaime said before, also we have around six, seven projects, much more focused on improving the customer experience. Of course, they are longer because they are more complex, but we are working on that and we will see the ARC, the alarm receiving center is a good one. We are now testing the final phase of the project and hopefully in the coming weeks we'll improve significantly the way we monitor the alarm and the signals from customers. That's just one example, but we have a few already being tested.
I think we are really past our time here. We're gonna move to have some coffee or perhaps something to eat so we can continue answering your questions up there. So, again, this is it for today. So thank you all for coming.