Good morning, everyone, both here in Brussels in the room with us and all people watching us online. Welcome to the Proximus Group Capital Markets Day. The agenda of today includes several presentations by the members of the management committee. We will be covering both the domestic and the global segment, and we foresee a small break in between those two. At the conclusion of the presentations, we will open the room here for the Q&A, so please hold on to your questions until that moment. I think with that, I can hand over to our first presenter, Stijn Bijnens, the CEO.
Well, a warm welcome to all of you. I'm now six months into the job as Group CEO, and for me, it's a privilege to present our, like, five-year plan that I've built together with this incredible team here, also sitting in the front row, and that you will meet today. Let me start with giving a broader overview of the Proximus Group, and then we will go further in detail. As most of you know, the Proximus Group is a combination of two businesses, each operating in different markets and also having different challenges. First, Proximus Domestic, where we have a leading telco position in the Benelux, in B2C, with strong brands, Proximus, Mobile Vikings, Scarlet, but also Tango in Luxembourg. In B2B, we address both telco and IT.
Of course, we also have a wholesale division. Next to that, Proximus Global helps customers connect, protect, and engage digitally through three strong brands: BICS, Telesign, and Route Mobile. Proximus Global represents about 10% of our group EBITDA. Domestically, we're in great shape, eh? From a network or leading network, we cover more than 40% fiber coverage in the street at the moment, and from a 5G perspective, indoor, we're over 90%. We're growing to 97 this year and 99 in 2027, and Geert will passionately talk about his fantastic network later today. We're also strong in NPS, definitely in B2C, we have very strong NPS numbers, and also in B2B. I still think we can do better in B2B, but I'll come back to that later during the talks.
From a market share perspective, although a lot of competition, we were able to maintain our market share, sometimes improve a little bit over the last three years, both in broadband internet, TV, although it's a declining market, we were able to gain market share, and postpaid stayed stable. These foundations have enabled us to grow the number of customers. In internet, we're still growing, mainly also driven by our early mover advantage in fiber. Postpaid, we've been growing over 100,000 net adds over 25. Also in convergence, you all know that bundles are very popular in the Belgian market. This brought us to services revenues? In 2025, we grew 0.4%.
Despite the impact of the deconsolidation of Be-Mobile and the loss of the football contract, we were still able to grow our services revenue. OPEX stabilized, and I'm also very pleased with the Q4 OPEX evolution, and we had strong EBITDA growth of almost 2%. Proximus Global, as I said, unites the strength of BICS, Telesign, and Route Mobile to elevate digital communications. Our new Proximus CEO Seckin, here in front of me, will tell you more just after lunch for the future direction of Global. As most of you know, Global is facing some headwinds and integration challenges: declining voice and P2P voice, SMS, but also international one-time passwords that were traditionally done through SMS are moving to cheaper omnichannels like email.
We had some integration issues, mainly at the go-to-market and delaying some go-to-market synergies. Since my arrival over summer, we reset Proximus Global to get it back on track, on a positive track, we hired a wonderful guy from the industry. We reviewed the guidance and outlook, since the new outlook, we also delivered upon that. We took a non-cash impairment in Q4, we're creating optionalities for future value creation, you will hear more around that. My first contact with you was on the Q3 results, we gave an updated guidance, I can proudly say that we hit on all guidance metrics, particularly in the organic free cash flow, we were able to overperform with about EUR 30 million of organic free cash flow.
Looking forward, I think the next five years it will all be about execution. I like to talk about the jobs to be done, and basically, we have four jobs to be done, and I wanna take you through them. Three domestically and one at the level of Global. First one, sustain our telco leadership and grow IT. We deliver on nationwide gigabit access for everybody domestically. Drive efficiency through simplification. Global needs to focus on returning back to growth, and by doing so, that will create optionality for future value creation. The first one, to sustain telco leadership and profitably grow IT, we have clear priorities across residential and business. By focusing on staying the reference operator for telco services, increasing our NPS, and grow revenues going forward.
This leads to a financial ambition to keep Domestic EBITDA stable between 2025 and 2028. The second job to be done is deliver nationwide gigabit access in the long term, and that's really our commitment. This view, as well as this view in you see on the map, as well as all further communication today, are assuming we land the collaboration deals in the north and the south, and Geert will tell that picture in more detail. The target of getting to this nationwide gigabit access map of 2035 is a combination of on rollout of fiber and smart collaboration deals. This approach helps us rationalize our rollout of CapEx, optimizing market share, filling rate, and realizing, of course, savings.
There will be the third job to be done is all about efficiency, and there will be a strong focus on simplifying operations. Simplifying starts basically with simplifying the organizations. We've already taken some steps, and we're taking further steps, mainly in the domestic B2B area, to further simplify our structure. Being in the company for six months, I was already surprised how many automations and how many real AI cases are already implemented within Proximus. They're just not proof of concept, they're really operationally active, creating measurable results, like reduced customer contacts, thanks to Proximus Assistant. In 25, it was -12% by better quality of devices, certified Wi-Fi installation, the Proximus+ app.
We push for self-installation where technically feasible, so the self-installed increased 78% in 2025. We avoid back-office tasks by better tooling in the back end and better training of the people who are working there. On the right-hand side, AI is also an accelerator for workload reduction. Proximus AI Assistant processes 100% of residential customers, and already today, about 20% of these cases are fully resolved end-to-end by AI. At the network level, when AI can predict a network incident before it occurs, it is about 50% cost reduction. In 2025, about 15% of all issues were already automatically predicted by AI, and our target in 2026 is about 20%. Of course, within Proximus, many of our people, especially in the frontline of staff, rely on our AI Assistant to help resolving questions.
Like in 25, over 1.4 million questions were resolved automatically by our AI tooling in active, and we're improving every day. In the coming five years, we will translate these workload efficiencies into reduction of FTE, and here are the number at the level of the SA. We also have affiliates, but we all know that flexibility in affiliates is higher. I'll mainly talk about what we're gonna do at the level of SA. It's the mother company, the historic Belgian telco entity. We're current with about a little less than 8,000 employees. We will make smart use of retirements and only replace one into three leavers. It's a simple algorithm for the business. For every three people that leave, we hire one new employee.
This allows us to do, avoid significant transformation cost. It will be done step by step. We're also not announcing a social plan, we will just do it according this algorithm, using the specific age pyramid. Of course, the most important thing is about reskilling and upskilling. AI will change the way we work the next five years, not only at Proximus, it's all about reskilling and upskilling. We will have a strong program and emphasis on that, and I think it's kind of the most important thing to realize these numbers going forward is... Of course, AI also amplifies and makes our people stronger in doing that.
You will learn later today that you have to look at Proximus kind of in a 10-year window. This is also the view of these of our specific age pyramid of the company. The first five years, we will have 800 people at the level of the Sr. who will go on their very deserved retirement. After 30, between 31 and 35, we will have another 1,400 people that will go on retirement, bringing us supplementary optionality to reduce internal workforce cost in a non-disruptive and cost-effective way. Our three jobs to be done domestically are translated into a new strategic framework. We call it Amplify. You know, an amplifier in the music industry, basically, with less input, you can create more output. That's what the plan is.
Fewer people, fewer CapEx, more customers, more customer satisfaction, more free cash flow. We have the plan with three focus areas, with six pillars? We amplify our customers by doubling down on our strength in residential and profitably grow enterprise and public markets. We amplify our infrastructure by keeping the best fixed and mobile network, but also building sovereign and resilient digital infrastructure. We'll amplify our future by reimagining the way we work, but also by delivering edge compute. The sixth pillar, and I can talk hours about that passionately, but Nancy didn't give me the time slot. It's all about edge compute. Our network will become your computer, so AI will now become physical. Robotics, and AI will get distributed. I don't think all AI workloads will be central.
In the physical AI world, these workloads will move closer to the action, that means edge compute, I think all large telcos own the real estate to serve distributed AI going forward. Finally, Proximus Global, the 4th job to be done, we want to focus on realigning the portfolio with market segments, secondly, improve the go-to-market execution. We are confident that by accomplishing this, we will get back to growth, back to growth also helps creating optionality for future value crystallization. Seckin will present you this strategy. It's a different strategy. It's called Elevate, you will hear that just after lunch. To conclude, our group embarks on a two-stage growth path. I talked about a 10-year window.
The first stage, by 2030, we will bring our organic cash flow to around EUR 400 million, mainly driven by controlled CapEx decline and our own fiber rollout matures, of course. Beyond 2030, there are three key elements that will support further free cash flow growth: a substantial increase in retirements, as I explained; a significant drop in customer CapEx, because you have the build phase till 2030, you still need to do the customer connect, the drop cables, but that will also slow down in the second phase; but also the copper phase-out by 35, will bring structural OpEx and CapEx savings. This is kind of the picture we want to present today. You will hear much more detail, and I'm happy to introduce to Jim to talk about B2C.
Thank you, Stijn. Good morning, everybody. I'm Jim Casteele. I'm leading the B2C segment at Proximus, and I'm really happy to explain to you how we're gonna continue to grow by sustainably differentiating as part of our Amplify strategy. No surprise, of course, if I say to you that the Belgian telecom market is a mature market. We continue to see some growth opportunities, volume-wise, on internet and mobile postpaid, while at the same time our digital TV and fixed voice volume business is declining. This has allowed, on a value side for the market, a growing market until 2024.
In 2025, with the arrival of the fourth entrant, which has put pressure on mobile market value, we have seen a stabilization of the total market value in residential in Belgium as a result of that. As mentioned, Digi, the fourth entrant, arrived in Belgium in December 2024, early 2025. Of course, at the Proximus Group, we were ready for that arrival, and we executed on our strategy, which in the, in first hand, consisted in making sure that we adapted the portfolios of our three brands in the right way. We also wanted to make sure that we didn't react too fast, we wanted to react as we always do, managing both volume and value at the same time.
Scarlet and Mobile Vikings were the first brands to react. At the same time, we also decided for Scarlet, which is our low-cost challenger brand, we didn't want to change the price points of that brand too fast, so we stuck to our EUR 8 entry price point, even though competition was present with more aggressive price points. Next to that, of course, we also wanted to make sure that our customers stayed satisfied with everything that we bring to them, so we put a lot of focus on loyalty, on customer experience, and on retention activities. Finally, we also made targeted actions both in sales and in marketing to make sure that we sustained the volume growth in the market.
As a result of that, we have seen, however, that customers have become more price sensitive. We do see also a shift in our A/B brand mix in our customer base. The good news is that we haven't seen a real increase in churn, so it's more in the acquisition dynamics that you see that customers are now more choosing for B brands, rather than A brands. This has resulted in a change in our customer base on mobile postpaid of about two percent point, people moving from the Proximus premium brand to our challenger brands, Scarlet and Mobile Vikings.
In this competitive market, I'm really happy that we have been able to continue to grow also in 2025, which was visible in the quarterly results that we presented this morning. If you look at it over a longer period, over the last three years, you can see that we have been able to grow our internet customer base with about 12% over the period, which is a CAGR of 3%, which is above market growth, which was a CAGR of about 1%, as you saw earlier. Also on mobile postpaid, we have been able to grow our base with 15% over the last years, which is a CAGR of 5%, which is also above market growth, where the CAGR was about 3%.
Thanks, to this growth of our customer base, we have also been able to continue to grow our services, revenue with a CAGR of 4% over the period, which again, if you think about what you saw earlier, is above market. That means that we have been able to grow faster on the market, both on volume and on value, by executing in the right way our multi-brand strategy. At the same time, also, of course, price increases continue to stay an important element in our value management approach. Also there, I'm happy to say that the price increase that we did in January 2026 has again landed well with our customers.
Despite the increased price sensitivity, we haven't seen a significant increase in churn, as you can see on the slide here as well. Of course, fiber plays an important role in driving this commercial success. As you can see here, we have tripled our fiber customers over the period to about 730,000 fiber customers, residential and business.
Even more importantly for me is that we also have also been able to grow the filling rate of our fiber network with 10% from 23% end of 2022, to 33% end of 2025, which shows that we are able to fill the fiber network faster than here it is deploying new fiber plugs, because you know, that we are still deploying fiber in a lot of the country, and so we're able to fill it faster than we are rolling out new fiber plugs. Of course, being able to do that is largely also thanks to the fact that we migrate 70% of our copper customers to fiber the first year when fiber becomes commercially available. Next to that, fiber also plays an important role when it comes to acquisition.
We do see a big uplift in market share acquisition in the zones where we have fiber available. Between 2022 and 2025, fiber acquisition has now a 26 percentage point higher share in our acquisition volumes versus 2022. We also see that we have customers that are more satisfied, because, of course, fiber is a much better technology than copper. When we compare like for like customers on copper and fiber, we have 20% less churn. Next to those volume drivers, we also see that fiber drives a lot of value. We have also on fiber customers, a EUR 5 ARPC increase versus our copper customers.
Bringing this all together means that we have tripled our fiber park over the period, but we have quadrupled the contribution of fiber in our revenues as well. Next to a fiber, of course, also our multi-brand strategy plays an important role in driving these results.
As Stijn already mentioned before, we have on the Belgian market three very strong brands: Proximus, which is our premium trusted brand, which will always bring the best connectivity, with an NPS of 18 on our convergent customers, Scarlet, which is our low-cost challenger brand, focused on no-frills solutions for our customers, with an NPS of 20, stable in 25, which is also quite strong in a year where a new entrant, which was price aggressive, has arrived on the market, Mobile Vikings, which is our digital challenger brand, focused on digital natives, mainly offering internet and mobile, which has an NPS of 46, which is the best NPS of telco in Belgium.
These three brands are also well-positioned to make sure that every brand covers a part of the territory for our customers. As you can see in the services revenue mix, Proximus, as a premium brand, still contributes to the majority of our services revenues, then Scarlet and Mobile Vikings taking the rest of the mix. Looking ahead, of course, we want to continue to grow on the revenue sides. We will do that by making sure that we are the preferred partner for every generation, empowering our customers to seize any digital opportunity through a best-in-class brand portfolio. We will continue to build that best-in-class brand portfolio by working on four priorities. The first priority is making sure that we are close to our customers. The second priority is continuing to lead in connectivity.
The third priority is emotionally connecting with our customers through our digital platforms. The last priority is, of course, continuing to make sure that we cover all the price points in the market. I'm now gonna zoom into each of these priorities to give you a bit of more feeling of how we are gonna execute on that coming forward. The first priority, customers, customer intimacy, being close to our customers. Of course, we will make sure that we deliver great customer experiences by leveraging all the capabilities that AI and digital brings. Stijn already referred to that as well. We will also augment these experiences with premium human interactions where they create value. If you look today, customers are very satisfied with our technician interventions and with our salespeople.
More than 90% customer satisfaction when they interact with our technicians or our salespeople in the shop, but also our chatbot gets an 80% satisfaction rate. As part of our Amplify priorities to be close to our customers, we want to be even more hyper-personalized in all the marketing campaigns that we do, so that we are relevant to our customers, that our customers feel that we understand their needs. At the same time, of course, we know that it will also improve the performance of the campaigns. Next to that, we want to increase the customer experience on the different interactions that we have by leveraging on AI tools and also proactively solving issues.
For instance, in sales, we are helping our salespeople to create better service to our customers by using AI in training and coaching. We are also, as Stijn already mentioned, helping our call center agents to answer faster questions to our customers by using GenAI on the knowledge base. We're proactively solving issues here, we'll come back on that later as well, to avoid that customers actually face an issue. As mentioned, we also want to use human interactions to create additional value in interactions that are valuable for our customers.
For instance, our technicians, when they visit customers at home, for the Proximus brand, we do additional effort to show the premiumness of the brand by doing Wi-Fi checks at different locations in the home, but also by explaining the products that we have, by installing the Proximus Police application on the smartphone of our customers. We're also revamping our retail stores, so that they also can showcase the premium feeling of the brand to our customers. Our second priority, of course, is to continue to lead in connectivity, building on what we have already today, the best 5G and fiber networks. Today, we already have 31% of our customers on fiber, internet customers on fiber, and we see that those customers have a much higher satisfaction.
The NPS score of a fiber customer versus a copper customer is 19 points higher. Here, it has also been deploying 5G. Today, we have a 90% fiber, sorry, indoor coverage on 5G. Going forward, in our Amplify priorities, of course, that leadership and connectivity is crucial for the premiumness of the Proximus brand. We're gonna continue to invest in these networks to make sure that we continue to offer the best fiber and 5G experience to our customers. At the same time, we also want to make sure that the Proximus brand continues to lead in terms of premiumness linked to connectivity on the brand itself, and we know that other operators are gonna start to deploy fiber as well.
We're gonna keep that brand leadership by continuing to innovate, with new services that are relevant, for our customers. For instance, we were the first operator in Belgium to launch Wi-Fi 7 tri-band technologies, which helps to create a premium indoor experience for our customers as well. Next to leading in connectivity itself, we also know that customers are more and more confronted with cyber risks. We also want to help our residential customers, to be able to trust, the digital world, not only when it comes to, cybersecurity, but also making sure that people can enjoy everything that is possible on the digital world in a peace of mind, both children and parents.
Also there, we're gonna continue to work on, so that we're not only leading with the best connectivity, but also with connectivity that you can trust. The third priority in building that best-in-class brand portfolio is emotionally connecting with our customers through our digital platforms and our loyalty programs. Today, we have already 88% satisfaction on our Pickx TV application. We have 21% of our Proximus customers that are actively engaging on our loyalty program, and we have one million users on the Proximus+ application. Tomorrow, as part of our Amplify priorities, we all know that the digital TV world is in transformation.
We want to make sure that we're not only delivering the best experience for people that want to watch linear TV together with streaming applications, but we also want to be relevant for customers that are only doing streaming applications. You're gonna see us moving there as well. Proximus+ will become also the trusted channel for all the communications that you do with Proximus. I mentioned just before that more and more consumers are concerned with cyber threats and phishing calls that they get, so we're gonna position Proximus+ as a channel that you can trust for whatever communication you have with us as a brand.
Last, of course, we are gonna continue to grow the loyalty program, so that we're not only present in the daily life of our customers in the living room, on the smartphone, but also in physical experiences that our customers can get. The last fourth building block in building our best-in-class brand portfolio is, of course, making sure that we cover all the price points in the market. It's actually here, where we bring everything together and where we define the value for money of each brand. Today, as already mentioned before, with Scarlet, we have an EUR 8 entry price point on mobile. Mobile Vikings has launched a EUR 25 unlimited mobile data plan with additional 5G tiering to create additional value, and we have today 65% of our revenues through our convergent customers.
As part of our priorities for Amplify, of course, in a market, where a new entrant comes and where we see an increased, traction on the B brands, we want to further strengthen the premiumness of the Proximus brand. We're gonna do that by building on the three priorities I explained before and making sure that in the right execution of those priorities, customers feel that the Proximus brand has a premiumness and has value for money on the price points that we have on that brand. Of course, we're gonna be ready, to act to any market changes that we see by executing on the multi-brand toolbox, just like we have, been doing so far.
Bringing this all together, we have the ambition to continue to grow in an intense competitive environment, making sure that we further grow the NPS of our brands, making sure that we maintain the solid market shares that we have today in the market, so that we can continue to grow our services revenue. There, we have the ambition to grow with 1% CAGR over the coming three years. This concludes the B2C strategy as part of our Amplify strategy, and now I give the word back to Stijn.
Thank you, Jim, and congratulations with your great results. I think you had more net adds in 2025 than the new entrant, so congratulations. In B2B, I've been spending all my life and my professional career in B2B, everything that has to do with the IP layer and above, and I'm happy to introduce to you our B2B strategy going forward. In B2B, domestically, we're active in both telco and IT, both in public and private sectors. Market dynamics are different? Telco is in structural decline due to traditional services like voice, and IT is a growing market. Currently, as some of you know, going through a slower period, but I strongly believe that the IT market that we address in the Benelux, is expected to grow with a CAGR of about 6%.
We focus on cloud, data and AI, public sector modernization, and of course, cybersecurity, whereas the broader IT market will not show those growth rates. Customer expectations are changing. As you can see on the slide, it's moving more to outcomes, where traditional IT telco is a technology push or IT, a time and means engagement. It's moving to outcomes, but there's also increased need for digital sovereignty, data privacy. Customers also want fewer suppliers, because they don't want any pinpointing, so all these managed services need to smoothly together, and we have a broad portfolio of doing that. We can also orchestrate these services, and customers want more blueprinted solutions going forward.
Within Proximus, service revenue has remained stable over the last three years, but the IT part of our B2B business has been growing from 23%- 26%, and these numbers on the slides are normalized for the divestment of Be-Mobile. IT services we provide are primarily driven by cloud, smart networking, like SD-WAN and cybersecurity. Our 2030 B2B ambition is to be the most trusted partner in the Benelux, delivering integrated telco and IT solutions that empower enterprises and public institutions to turn digital complexity into clear, measurable impact. We're moving our organization a little bit from a portfolio-based organization, technology portfolio, to a customer based organization, closer to the go-to market.
You will have the flip from IT telco to customer segments, SMEs, typically the companies below 200 employees, and Proximus NXT, addressing the corporates and of course, the government. Let's talk about SME. We can achieve our SME ambition, starting from very strong foundations: customer intimacy, we have strong channels, we have network leadership, and we have a solid portfolio today. We must address two key challenges. We need to go back to growth by sustaining our telco core while accelerating IT revenues. Secondly, we have to adapt to these shifting expectations of the SME customers. We have to respond to rising demand of IT/telco convergence, which includes the growing needs of cloud, data, and AI, and cybersecurity, for which these SMEs typically lack internal expertise. We will achieve this by adapting both our portfolio and sales channels.
From a portfolio level, we will continue building IT-integrated telco bundles, like Business Flex+, that we launched, but we will also include relevant SME-focused IT services like cybersecurity, cloud, AI, but also more and more collaboration tools. From a channel perspective, today, we have two distinct channels: exclusive telco agents that sell telco, and we have ClearMedia that goes through IT partners selling IT. What we're gonna do now is activate both channels. We will keep those two channels, but ensure that they each sell the full mix of IT and telco solutions, so we can accelerate that channel strategy. Let's move to the second segment of B2B, that's Proximus NXT. Also here, we start from strong foundations to capture market growth.
We're the only Belgian provider combining top-tier telco and kind of a broad IT suite: connectivity, cloud, cybersecurity, digital workplace, advanced networks. We're also already together today, the trusted local partner for private and public organizations, and we already pioneered on sovereign cloud before everybody started talking about, like, the venture we have in Luxembourg with Clarence. To grow profitably, also here, what are the three key challenges? We have to shift from technology selling to outcome-based services aligned with evolving customers' expectations. We have to strengthen our portfolio as the most trusted our position as the most trusted national player in cyber resilience and critical infrastructure. Finally, we have to improve our sales effectiveness and profitability. it's like it's, of course, extremely important. Our next strategy will be built on three pillars.
We will reinforce our portfolio, particularly around sovereignty and edge compute, and Geert will also talk a little bit about our ex, edge compute ambitions and advanced networking security solutions, service integration, it's called SIAM services, and our portfolio will also be completed by leveraging our internal AI knowledge externally. We will also upgrade our sales effectiveness by focusing on solutions adapted to specific market segments, including, of course, mission-critical infrastructure. Finally, we will improve our cost structure by blueprinting our existing solutions, optimizing operations, and leveraging our nearshore and offshore capabilities that we already have in place. This ambitious plan, however, will take some time. We therefore are launching a kind of two-year transformation program in B2B to implement a future-proof Benelux organization, enabling these convergent offerings....
We see the defense sector also as an integral part of our mission as the reference national player in Belgium. Our ambition would be to be the trusted partner that secures, connects, and guarantees sovereignty, building on our unmatched national assets and strong references, offering various services, including cybersecurity, sovereignties, resilience, and service integration. Thanks to this strategy, we sustain our solid position in B2B telco market and reinforce our IT position in both the segments SME and NXT. So post-transformation, we aim for an improved service revenue trend, and this will lead to about 1% B2B services CAGR between 2025 and 2028. Thank you, and I now hand over to Geert to talk about the network part.
Thank you, Stijn. A cable problem. Yes, well, look like this. Yeah, I hope this works. Sorry for this. Yeah, voila, we're there. Good morning, as well on my behalf. I'm Geert Standaert. I'm heading the network unit. Before I talk a bit about the years to come, I just first wanna take a look where we stand today. Indeed, on mobile, we could maintain our number one experience leadership, so we're very happy with that. We're even more happy that as well in the fixed domain, we're now recognized as the best, most reliable fixed network. Of course, that is thanks as well to the leading position we have in fiber deployment. 42% of coverage in fiber, 2.6 million homes that we pass in fiber.
Jim referred to it, fulfilling rate of 33%. With respect to our strategic partnerships, what is a bit of status? Well, in the north of the country, end of last year, we had the market test, and there the BCA, Competition Authority, Belgian Competition Authority assessment is ongoing. In the south, end of last year, we signed an MOU with Orange, and there we're at this stage further interacting on long-form negotiations with Orange. With respect to these strategic partnerships, maybe a bit to do a deep dive on that. What is the scope? What are these partnerships about? Let me start with Flanders. Flanders, that is about 3.6 million homes. The scope is not in the dense. In the dense, we are building at full force in fiber.
I'll show you some more data about that later on, but the collaboration is about what's happening beyond the dense area. First, in Flanders, the mid dense is about two million living units. The idea we have there is that we as Proximus, through Fiberklaar, 100% owned by Proximus, we build 40% of that two million in fiber, and that Wyre will build 60%. Afterwards, there is a kind of a migration commitment, engagement in between Proximus and Telenet. Telenet will be moving its customers to Fiberklaar. Proximus will move its customers to the Wyre footprint. In addition, the rural is about 700K homes in Flanders. There, we will move our customers to HFC, and of course, there will be some other technologies possible, like fixed wireless access.
In Wallonia, we have a bit a like setup, but there the dense Wallonia is more about 1.8 million of homes that we have there. 450,000 homes, dense zone, which is out of scope. Again, the collaboration is beyond. There you see that with respect to the mid dense and where we do the fiber deployment, a lot is being done through our GV Unifiber, which is 50% owned by Proximus. We further extend the fiber rollout that we're doing there with about an additional 200K, and which is split in between half built by Proximus, half built by Orange, and then we have HFC in the rural zone.
Here again, there is a commitment, a kind of migration commitment, commercial agreement, that Orange will move its customers on the Unifiber footprint and/or Proximus fiber footprint, and reversely, Proximus will use the Orange fiber built in the extension there, and also move customers to the HFC rural zone. Of course, there is still the Brussels region, the Brussels region is about 700 living units that is completely considered as dense footprint. If we look at and we project ourselves a bit 10 years further, how will Belgium look like? If we do our standalone rollout, we assume that these collaboration agreements come in place, 80% of the Belgian premises will have access to fiber by 2035. I'll show you what it means by 2030.
Here, it's 80%. You see there, the map, the dark gray or dark purple, that is where fiber will be available. If you see at the right-hand side, that is 80% of the living units in fiber, and that is on a geographical area of about 36% in square kilometers. 36% of geographical area represents 80% of living units in fiber. The remainder, the 64% of the geographical area, is then the 20% where we will look at accessing HFC and also some fixed wireless access. It shows as well that geographical picture shows as well that going beyond the 80%, of course, becomes more costly to build.
To give you an idea with respect to the meters of trenching that you have to do to pass a home, with fiber, it's times four versus the mid-dense, when you want to do this in the rural. In Belgium, it is as such that subsidization is quasi close to zero. We have one exception, that is the German-speaking Community at the far right of the Belgian map, and where some subsidization was foreseen, and where Proximus is fully rolling out this region in fiber. What that means then from a customer's point of view, for our Proximus customers, this means that by 2035, they have full gigabit access. Full gigabit access, 30% in the dense area, fully on Proximus' own fiber.
Mid-dense, that's about 50% of our customers, for a big part on own fiber Proximus footprint, including GVs, and then a part on third-party fiber. In the rural, that 20%, there we go. Some subsidized fiber, German-speaking Community is in there, mostly going on HFC, and then combined with mobile fixed wireless access technology. If we bring that a bit closer to today, then we talk about 2030, what does it mean for us? What do we have to do in the fixed domain? We are today at about 42% of fiber coverage. We keep our rollout speed still at a pretty high volume in the upcoming three years to move that up from 42%- 60%. You see a bit the different colors there. The dark purple, that is the dense.
In the dense areas, we're quasi 85% is done today. There it's about finalizing completing those footprints and bring them to 100%. Then you see the focus is mostly, as of now, rolling out in the mid-dense. If we take that target into account of the 60%, well, in the mid-dense, 40% today is done, and the rest we will mostly do in the 3 years to come, where we keep the volumes, the construction volumes, you see around the 350 K per year that we will be adding.
On top of that, if the partnerships will crystallize, materialize, well, on top of that, you see here in the pink colors, the access that we will be getting because others, third parties, Wyre and Orange, will be deploying as well fiber in certain footprints. We will get access to these footprints for our customers. We get access to HFC, and that makes then that by the end of 2030, 95% of our customers have that gigabit access. With, of course, the shift that we're doing to fiber, we also want to outphase our copper network. There, we're going to accelerate substantially the level of outphasing in the years to come.
When everything is finalized, this will bring a yearly saving of EUR 120 million. Three things are behind. There is the power consumption, no longer needed, roadworks, no longer needed, and of course, maintenance, that today we have to do still on that network, is fully gone. On that EUR 120 million by 2030, 30% of those savings should be achieved by 2030, we're now going to go in an acceleration 6x, 7x of what we have been doing so far on copper outphasing. On AI, of course, AI also very important to us because next to bringing the best experience, network experience on mobile and fixed, we want to be the most efficient network operator.
Our focus is here at this moment on fiber, because our future network on fixed is fiber. On this fiber network, Stijn referred already to it, we're putting all the focus on operate and run, making that as efficient as possible. We have an agentic framework today in place. Our ambition is that 99% of the customer incidents, they are seen predictively or proactively, but at least the customers should not contact us. We see it before the customer will react. Indeed, predictive, we have now 15% already in predictive, and of course, we will make that evolve to higher numbers. Meaning that in average, we see the problem two weeks in advance.
If you see a problem two weeks in advance, it means it's not a priority one case on which you have to jump immediately, but that you can plan in advance, and by planning in advance, of course, you get to the savings of about 50%. Often, there is still a field technician, of course, needed, to go on site to repair things and et cetera, but you can just plan that in a more efficient way. I wanna tell you here that where before it took us about, with all the tooling that we had before AI, about 30 minutes per incident to pinpoint where the problem was located, today, we run that through the AI in two minutes. In two minutes, we know, okay, high probability that the problem is there.
Of course, there, what we're looking now at is also a digital assistant that can interact with the operation field technicians, so if they go on site, that they're even better guided, but also can still further, interact. We see that as a bit our first area of autonomous, because of course it's a nice domain where you can go for excellent customer experience, improved NPS, while you're making your full operations as well more efficient. On mobile, we were always number one in mobile experience. We really want to keep that like that, and there are two big elements that will help us to sustain in that mobile leadership. First of all, we have great spectrum assets, which are differentiating assets versus competition.
Second, what we are doing, we're doing the swap, where we're going together with Orange, we do the consolidation of the mobile networks. At the same moment, we are launching 5G. At the same moment, we're also moving to full European technology, end-to-end on the access, on the core, on the transport. It means that we're moving our number of mobile sites, macro sites, I'm talking here, from the 3,800 that we had till 4,600, and on top, we can activate a differentiated mobile mobile spectrum. In addition, it's not only about the network itself, but like in the fixed domain, we were the first with tri-band and Wi-Fi 7. Here, we're leading as well the pack with innovation.
With 5G slicing, we're extremely active in this domain on mobile private networks. By the way, we have a full 5G core migration that also will be finalized in 2027. We have supremacy in also not outdoor antennas, but also indoor, and together with the technical teams, I can tell you, daily focus on usage experience, getting the small things out of the system, and making sure that we bring the best experience to our customers. On top of this connectivity, you have everything that has to do with cloud. Of course, we have been, yeah, delivering on direct routes towards the cloud providers and the public clouds and the private clouds that are out there. Recently, we launched our one product, which is a universal CPE product that we can bring at the customer premise.
There, it's a box where we can bring compute at the customer edge, but at the same time, where you just can activate virtualized network functions. Just, you pick it out of the cloud, and you activate your routing capabilities, your firewalling capabilities. Indeed, we're looking more and more now at what is in the middle and what is our network edge. When we deployed our network, yeah, we needed real estate that is out there. We have hundreds of technical buildings that are out there, thousands of mobile antennas, 10 thousands of optical cabinets, where we have space, where we have fiber, and where we have energy. What we're looking now with different innovation projects is, what is the power we can get out of those assets?
Like Stijn said, we believe that indeed, that AI will become physical, but if that AI becomes physical, what do you need? You need, of course, excellent mobile experience as well. If we think about the mobility cases, you need that upload, you need that download, but you need as well your compute closer by for latency and other elements. Innovative project, which makes us very exciting about it, and it's fun also. We're looking what we can do there. On top, Network APIs became stronger and stronger because interoperability is there, standardization is there. Of course, we as Proximus, we play as well our part.
A lot was on fraud prevention, but with the capabilities that the network can deliver, it will move as well to guaranteed quality with slicing, but also network on demand, capacity on demand, where you can say, between that hour and this hour, I just want to activate a higher speed, upload speed, et cetera. Things like that, we're looking at to make that possible. What does this mean for us in the next coming five years? Keeping the competitive advantage. Throughout 2030, we should remain number one on mobile, number one now as well on fixed with fiber. We built ourselves our own fiber coverage, the 60%.
We deliver a 95% gigabit coverage, we want to become the best as well on efficiency, managing our network in the most efficient way, not only on the CapEx and the reduction that you will see on the CapEx, but also with respect to running costs. With that, I hand over to Nancy.
That was already a preview, 'cause we. Now we're gonna take a small break for lunch. We will be back at 12:45. The presentations will resume then. We will continue then with the global part. We'll see you later. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. We will now proceed with the rest of the presentations. I kindly invite Seckin, the CEO of Proximus Global.
Thank you very much. Hello, everybody. I hope you enjoyed the lunch and managed to find some strong coffee. My name is Seckin Arikan. I've been in the company for four months, but I can tell you it feels like years. It's been a busy four months. Proximus Global is a very young company. We launched it in January 2025. If you look at it, we build it on the three very strong brands. They have been around globally since 2004, 2000, 2005. If I look at our product portfolio, I would like to start with a little bit, explain to you what we do. It builds on three segments: connect, engage, and protect.
It's very likely that if you are sending an SMS to your loved one, in Asia or Africa, wherever they are in the world, outside of the country, it will go through one of our backbones. Or if you are making a phone call from here to U.S., we will probably connect you. We call it P2P voice. Or if you are roaming, 50% chance that you are roaming, data roaming on our network. That's our Connect portfolio. We are one of the largest in this area. Second part of our business is Engage. It's basically around the CPaaS portfolio. What we do is to enable the enterprises to engage with their customers in an omnichannel environment, meaning that SMS, email, WhatsApp, RCS, whatever you call it, the channel that you know, we enable it.
The last part of our portfolio is protect digital identity. Thanks to our Telesign organization, we are one of the leaders in this area. If I look at it, this picture from the entity point of view, our BICS company is very active in connect and engage area. Route Mobile is very active in engage and connect area, and you will see Telesign very active in engage and protect areas. Since I started, I keep getting the same question, so I thought that maybe I should answer it before I get this question from you later today in the Q&A. I've been asked several times: "Hey, Seckin, you are the new CEO. Can you comment on the challenges that the global organization has faced?" That four months that I've been around, that makes me feel like a couple of years.
I've been talking to our customers, but mostly I'm talking to our organization as well. I traveled around the world talking to our employees to get their feedback. I divided the challenges into two parts. One of them, I call it market challenges, the other one, the internal challenges. We see quite a big decline in the SMS OTP, basically the one-time password. I came here to Belgium a couple of months ago. I'm setting up my Netflix account. Netflix doesn't send SMS anymore. To confirm my password, they send me an email. The minute that Netflix sends an email instead of an SMS, they cut their cost by 95%, depending on the country. Some of our largest customers around the world, they are moving away from SMS OTP.
They are trying to optimize their cost, especially if they are not sensitive to conversion rates. If you are a e-commerce giant, every sign-on is important for you, then you don't care about the cost of that sign-on. If you are Netflix, for example, your subscription is already secured, you are just activating another TV, then you will be very, very cost sensitive. We also had a problem in industry, and we still have it. We call it AIT, artificially inflated traffic. Bad actors pumping the traffic, SMS OTP traffic, towards the very high rate destinations through our networks, ours and our competitors, and generating lots of revenues on the back of the enterprises, and they are benefiting from it. There is a big fight that we are also actively participating together with our customers to reduce this traffic as much as possible.
There is no way to predict how much this traffic is. We estimate that 30% of the SMS OTP has been historically, AIT traffic. We have to stop it. It's hurting our enterprises. Enterprises are using as an excuse to run away, move away from the SMS channel. Our traditional portfolio, P2P, voice, and SMS, I mean, you travel all around the world, I'm sure. You, you use your phone less and less. You move to the other channels to be able to reduce your roaming charges. That's in a traditional, declining business as well. Depending on how much you are exposed to these markets, of course, the impact will be much larger or lower. In Proximus Global, we are very much depending on the international SMS traffic.
International SMS traffic is very much around the SMS OTP. You work with some of the global enterprises, they use you to send SMS OTPs to different destinations. The marketing channels are normally very much domestic, while the SMS OTP traffic is very international. If you are depending on the international traffic as we are depending, then we are hit a little bit more. The P2P voice and SMS, it has been in declining market and it will continue to decline. Our job on the left-hand side, on the market challenges, is actually to get ready for it. We cannot, in great extent, influence it, but we need to be ready to tackle those challenges. On the right-hand side, internal challenges, we rush the transformation. That's my very quick estimation.
I've been in charge of very complex transformation projects, where we created large organizations, involved a very large number of employees to do this transformation, and it took years to complete these transformations. In Proximus Global, we took three companies, we created one management layer. We put all of the companies under one management very quickly, securing, clarifying the roles, setting the right priorities. When I started, my first two weeks, I was invited to a presentation where I was presented 13 IT projects to integrate our IT systems, everybody will have the same mail addresses, or CPaaS platform consolidation or CRM consolidations.
I was looking at it and thinking, "If we are busy with these 13 projects, what is it that we are not doing for our customers?" We see it in 2025 performance, that complex organization and lack of focus and trying to do too much with the limited resources, also, we dropped the ball with our customers. Our job is to fix it. We can fix the ones on the right-hand side, internal challenges. It is completely in our hands. It will require that we go back to the basics in 2026, then fix the job every day. On the left-hand side, again, we just need to get ready for it, because these challenges, we will, in the market, we will continue to face. What is it that we do?
If you're an enterprise, you're engaging with your customer in any shape or form, it's very likely that you will be interested in our services. If you are pushing some promotions, we use our campaign management to push those promotions regardless of the channel that you prefer. If you are doing registration of verification of your customers, you send us the name of the customer, phone number, we check if there is a bot or it's a real person. If they are making some purchase, you can send it to us, and then we will verify and then give a credibility score. How likely that purchase, the person behind of purchase is a real person? If you are delivering, logistic company, you are delivering your goods, we can help you to push those notification messages.
One last example what we do. I'm gonna move into a little bit more details. In our Protect portfolio, we have one customer. They are in the online ticketing business. Basically, they sell online tickets. If you want to go and buy, I don't know, Taylor Swift concert tickets, you will probably go and buy it from them. They were struggling with two things. One of them is the quality of the SMS. They are sending lots of SMSs to their subscribers. The hit rate, success rate was relatively low. The second thing is that people are opening lots of fake accounts to be able to buy high volume of tickets, so they can sell it in the second-hand and et cetera. We partnered with them.
They use our Protect suite, so we have drastically reduced the fake accounts, fraudulent accounts, but we also improved their SMS delivery rates. Thanks to our big connections with the telcos, we have hundreds of telcos that we can reach directly instead of sending all the traffic via other aggregators. In Engage portfolio, in one of the countries that we operate, we partner with the local metro organization. They were struggling with the ticketing. People are going to the metro stations, they are queuing up to buy tickets. They wanted to digitalize it. We put small QR codes. The people in the country, in the city, they go with their phones, they open the camera, read that QR, opens their WhatsApp. In that WhatsApp, you can just chat to a bot, you can buy your tickets.
The tickets are delivered to your WhatsApp, and then the payment, if you wanna configure your payments, we connect it to your WhatsApp. Everything is done via WhatsApp. We issue around 200,000 tickets a day. Four million people are using that metro every single day. In our Connect portfolio, where we work with the mobile operators around the world, voice traffic is in decline. Our customers are looking way to keep the quality of the voice, which is important for their customers, but they also want to look for ways to reduce their cost. We take over as a outsourcing, we manage all their voice or SMS traffic, and then we offer them good quality with lower OpEx. When my team and I, we look at our strategy, of course, we look at it from all different angles.
We look at it from the trends, we look at it from the competitors, what they are doing, our internal capabilities. We look at it from the go-to-market capabilities. We have so many options to go to a market. I mean, I spoke about the international customers, domestic markets that we have, partners, we go directly or we do self-services. I brought only one slide here. I think it's an important slide, and I hope it's gonna answer some of your questions, what the task is in front of me and my team to execute. These are our product portfolio on a lower level. The size of the bubbles shows the direct margins that we have. You can see, on the left-hand side, you see the relative market share.
It's very, very difficult to find an accurate market share, what we do is that we look at our biggest competitor or the biggest player. If we are not the biggest player in that market, we look at the biggest one, we compare ourselves to the biggest one. If, let's say, if Twilio is the biggest one in the engage area, we compare our market share to Twilio, normally they go out and they say, "Hey, this is our market share." We can see that P2P SMS and P2P voice and SMS we have very high market share and relatively high direct margins as well, they are in declining market. If you look at the data roaming, the market is still growing, single digit, we have very good DM contribution there.
The challenge that we have, the task that we have in our hands, is to farm the upper side of this, optimize our OpEx and CapEx investment, start moving money as fast as possible to the positive market growth areas. We got the products, we got omni-channel. Today, we are already selling it in different parts of the world. We need to scale it, and then we need to get it ready to grow that product to be sold in domestic markets in a larger volume. Network API is another one. I'll come back to this one. This is another way that we are showing the portfolio. You can see the market growth in different area.
It's very difficult for us when we talk about the average growth, it's actually very, very difficult for us to give you the correct picture of how the market is growing. Network API, I don't know if you have been hearing about the Network API. If you are following the CPaaS industry, I'm sure lots of my competitors, our competitors, talk about the Network API. These are the set of APIs based on the CAMARA standards, and now it's they are being released. Next five years, 20 more APIs are coming to the market in high coverage. Depending on the analyst reports that you read, the market is huge. I think we took the most pessimistic one here. Not to set the expectations low, but to just to give you a perspective, EUR 5 billion-EUR 7 billion in value by 2022.
If you look at the McKinsey reports, they are estimating EUR 30 billion. We don't know how much it will be, but we know that it will be quite large. We launched our Network API platform back in October, a month before I joined. We already secured 92% coverage in India. Yesterday we sent out our press release. We onboard our first paying customers. They are not gonna contribute to our bottom line the coming two, three years. That's an investment that we are doing for the five years ahead, and this is the part that this company is very, very good at. Route Mobile, through Route Mobile, we are very connected to the Indian market with the operators, and we are very quick at onboarding the local operators in our platform.
Thanks to our domestic sales capabilities, we go and we talk to the enterprises, and we switch them to the Network API. In this specific case, it's a silent authentication. Another way to authenticate the customers, much better user-friendly. With the help of the BICS organization, where we have more than 500 MNO connections, we will scale it. Next week, when we are in MWC, we have quite a large number of discussions with the MNOs all around the world. They are probably going to see how we are able to monetize the Network APIs, and they are going to put pressure on us to onboard them as quick as possible. We can do it because of the strengths of BICS and strengths of Route Mobile.
I didn't talk about Telesign. If I look at the Telesign, actually, Telesign is one of the first companies that have been selling these Network APIs for many, many years. The only difference is that they did not sell the CAMARA API. The Telesign is one of the pioneers in this area when it comes to silent authentication, SIM swap, and other APIs. Our job is to unite those three companies and build on the strengths. Okay, I'll go into the details a little bit, what it is that we are going to do. Our connect portfolio is building on Network API, P2P voice, messaging, and data roaming. Two of them are in decline, sorry. Voice and messaging in decline, data roaming is slightly increasing. Network APIs, we are going to build this market. It's already being built.
We see lots of outsourcing deals in the P2P voice, especially. As the volumes are dropping, the operators are trying to consolidate or trying to exit this or make it somebody else's problem. We see lots of opportunities there, but we also see lots of consolidation opportunities there. It's a volume game. The more volume that we have, the better margins that we are going to do. Our strategy is to farm this portfolio as much as we can to optimize our OpEx and CapEx, and we are going to stay a leader in the data roaming. We are now investing in the 5G standalone as the operators are rolling out the 5G standalone. We are gonna build our network API success from India to 15 more markets coming years.
When it comes to the Engage portfolio, it's all about shifting the traffic from SMS to omni-channel. It's all about reducing the dependency to OTP, to marketing use cases. It's all about moving away from the international traffic to domestic traffic. We have a company in Peru and Colombia, and we acquired them through the Route Mobile. Last years, they are local company, they operate in that two countries mainly. Last year, their financial results are completely different than our global results. They have performed very well, growing both the top line and then the margins, because they are not depending on the international traffic. They are very much working with the local banks, local, organizations, and then the impact, overall impact that we have seen in the market, they have not been impacted.
We are going to invest in seven more countries in 2026, increasing our sales people there. We got the back offices, we got the engineering teams in all around the world in different locations. We need more boots, the people that will go to the enterprises to sell it. Another part that we are investing is the partnership ecosystem. Lots of business that we get via the partners. We go and list our products in different partners' platforms, and then they bring customers. We are gonna start prioritizing this one. Protect portfolio. This is again, coming from the Telesign, and Network APIs is bringing lots of different capabilities. One of them is the device status.
For example, you are in a call, you have your AirPods on, and it's a long call, you are bored, you wanna check your bank account, you just click the button. The bank checks via the telco operator that actually you are in a call, you are talking to somebody. It's very likely that a fraudulent event takes place while somebody is in the call, because the fraudulent people are talking to you to say that, "Hey, please, you need to transfer money. I'm calling from here," and et cetera. Your bank shows a sign that says that, "If anybody is telling you that it is us calling you to transfer money, it is not. Please do not transfer the money." That's what we call a device status. That's something that we are starting to sell. In our product portfolio today, we have three different products.
One of them is Phone ID. We basically check the person if he or she is the person that they claim to be. The second one is what we call intelligence product. That is basically, we give you some kind of a credibility score. The third one is the Verify. That comes from the Engage side of the family as well. We sell it, that pro portfolio, separately. Today, what we are doing is that actually we are combining them, building our platform to go to the customers as one product, so we can actually manage their protect their networks as a solution. Elevate 2030, this is the name that we have selected, because for us, it goes back to the basics and getting the job done every day.
We need to improve our execution, we need to elevate our financial performance, and we need to elevate overall the satisfaction for our customers and the employees. We decided to go with the Elevate 2030 strategy name. We are the connectivity leader in the market, and we will remain as the connectivity leader, and we are going to extend this leadership with the help of the Network APIs. We will continue to engage our enterprise customers, and then help them offer omnichannel experience to their customers. We will continue to build on our trust, and we will enable our enterprises to protect their networks. We are not coming up with a drastically different strategy.
For us, it's all about execution, deciding what it is that we are going to do, as well as what it is that we are not going to do. Our mission, our North Star, how my organization is going to prioritize every day, what they do. We enable seamless global connectivity and trusted engagements to power the world's interactions. We are not starting from zero. 20 years of history is giving us the basics to be successful. Today, we are detecting over 20 fraud attempts every second. We are carrying 50% of the world's roaming traffic. We carry 160 billion messages over all of our channels. For us, it's getting down to the basics and executing well to get to this mission. Before I make my summary, I want to show you this slide.
This is one of the slides that I show to Stijn and our board. We are three companies. We come from different places, we have different cultures, those cultural differences are actually giving us the strength. My job, the job of the leadership team that I have, to unite them. You see some overlaps, you also see lots of the complementary capabilities here. BICS is extremely successful in what they do, especially towards the telcos, they are able to globally build businesses. Not many companies can do it. Technically very strong, engineeringly very strong. India, Route Mobile, they are crazy, very innovative. If you have not seen their earnings report we released a couple of weeks ago, please take a look at it. They are very good at talking about the use cases.
There are lots of use cases that they are pushing in India in a very digitalized economy. I spent eight years in U.S.. I cannot even compare India and U.S. when it comes to digitalization. India is far ahead. We are using their capabilities to innovate. We are using their digital-first economy and learn from there, and then building on their low-cost, high-quality engineers to scale this business. Of course, Telesign. They work with some of the highest market cap companies in the world. They are very good at building solutions. These network APIs that now everybody's talking about in the market, Telesign has been working with those APIs for years. Phone ID is built on the SIM swap. It's coming out as a rebranded network APIs. Our company has been selling it. My job is to unite them, build on the strengths.
For us, 2026 is execution year. We will go back to the basics and then finalize the integration. In order to do it, we actually identified seven key battles. Those seven key battles is gonna help us improve our go-to-market, enable us to do better cross-sell over the different entities, and get better quality leads for our businesses. We will also unite our culture using core values. We are aggressively allocating our OpEx from the farming areas to the growth areas. We confirm our 2026 guidance from EUR 100 million-EUR 120 million EBITDA, and we will start growing our business again from 2027. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Seckin. For those who don't know me, I'm Nicolas Gaertner, CFO at Interim here at Proximus Group, and I look forward to take you through the financial implications of our new five-year plan over the next 15 minutes. I'll first start by taking you through our 2025 results. I'll do that rather briefly, as I trust you've all seen the releases this morning. I'll then turn to more details of our financial ambition going forward, including our capital allocation strategy. Let me start with the key takeaways for full year 2025. Stijn briefly touched on this earlier this morning, but look, in short, we delivered in line or above guidance on nearly all metrics, really.
Domestic revenues were stable year-over-year, and domestic EBITDA grew by 1.9% year-over-year, both fully in line with guidance, and driven as Jim touched on as well, by continued very strong commercial performance, as well as strict cost control, in an increasingly competitive market, as you know. On Global, EBITDA landed as per the expectations we had set a couple months ago, and as covered by Seckin and Stijn. When it comes to CapEx, we landed in line with guidance at EUR 1.25 billion for the year, and we generated EUR 130 million of organic free cash flow over the period, again, outperforming guidance in that case by about EUR 30 million.
As you know, we also made significant progress on our asset sales program, we divested for about EUR 450 million of assets in the course of 2025 alone, which led to a total free cash flow of approximately EUR 480 million over the year. Finally, on net debt, we landed at approximately 2.7 times EBITDA, which is slightly better than guidance that had been set at 2.8 times EBITDA, as you'll remember. Now zooming in briefly on Q4, a little bit more specifically. It's worth calling out, firstly, that Q4 was pretty materially impacted by the sale of our subsidiary, Be-Mobile, as you know, which closed in early October 25.
We've added a few call-outs on this slide to show like-for-like achievements, essentially normalizing for that sale. In short, revenue would have been stable like-for-like over Q4, much in line with Q3, had it not been for the divestiture, and EBITDA would have grown by 3.1% for the quarter. Even accounting for the divestiture of Be-Mobile, we grew EBITDA by 2.3% over the quarter, which is our best quarter of the year and our best quarter in quite some time as well. Again, that was really driven mainly by one, residential top-line performance, but also OpEx efficiencies, which in Q4 more than offset, you know, inflationary and other cost increases impacts.
On B2C, you've heard Jim talk about it. It's also worth highlighting another very strong quarter on mobile and internet net adds, which has been a trend that's been going on all year, really. On Global EBITDA decline, pretty much in line with the expectations at 19% year-on-year for the quarter, we landed the year at -9.3% in line with the guidance we had set a few months ago. On Group EBITDA, we essentially were stable in Q4. We grew by nearly 1% for the year. CapEx and reported free cash flow, I touched on the prior slide. I won't dwell on this any more than that. Looking ahead to the future now.
Over the 25- 28 period, we will ensure that our domestic EBITDA remains stable in an increasingly competitive market. On global, as communicated previously and just now again, by Seckin, we expect EBITDA to return to growth by 2027. On group CapEx, we expect it to decrease down to EUR 1.2 billion by 2028, and organic free cash flow to gradually improve from 2026 and onwards. Looking out now to 2030, we will reduce the CapEx further to below EUR 1 billion, and our free cash flow will increase to approximately EUR 400 million. Let me walk you through a little bit some of the component parts of our EBITDA, of our domestic EBITDA trend, in the coming three years.
In short, as I mentioned, we will deliver stable EBITDA in an increasingly competitive market, by growing services revenue and maintaining strict cost control, over our OpEx. We expect services, revenue to grow by approximately 1% CAGR over that period, driven really high level by two things: continued, strong performance on B2C, which will be driven by value management and sustaining our market shares, in that segment, as well as, B2B IT services, growth. As you know, IT services revenue comes at a slightly or at a lower margin than traditional telco. In addition to that, we will continue adding new customers, but also migrating existing customers onto, our JV Unifiber in the south of the country.
Both of these elements come at a cost, which means that we expect direct margin to grow at a slower pace than revenue over that time period. Moving on to costs, I'll actually spend a few minutes talking about our efficiencies program on the next slide. What I'll say here is, we expect or we commit to delivering EUR 180 million of efficiency over the next three years, and for those efficiencies to mostly offset inflation-related impacts, as well as other OpEx, 'cause we are spending more OpEx on cloudification, transformation, and obviously customer-related OpEx. Again, we expect those efficiencies to mostly offset those increases in cost over that period. This will all translate, as I mentioned, into a broadly stable EBITDA over the coming three years.
Let me say a few more things about our EUR 180 million efficiency program. Stijn touched on this earlier this morning. It will really be mainly driven by workforce savings, right? What we are going to leverage on the workload side of things has been addressed by my colleagues, Geert and Jim. To give you a couple of examples, we will continue accelerating the automation of as many customer interactions as we can, leveraging all our digital channels. That's one good example of efficiencies that we intend to deliver. Also, and Geert touched on this at length, we intend to continue leveraging predictive fiber repair and maintenance capabilities to reduce interventions and rework and just become more efficient in general in that space.
This will enable us ultimately to only replace one out of three levers from Proximus SA over the coming years. On external workforce now, we will continue to take headcount down, and we also intend for a number of external workforce-type roles to be insourced in low-cost locations, at about 50% lower unit cost, which will also drive material savings over the coming three years. Finally, on non-workforce, we expect further savings from a variety of areas. Some examples include vendor and sourcing rationalization, and we will, of course, continue to decommission legacy platforms and duplicate systems, which will drive further savings.
On global, I think Seckin very articulately took us through the details of his strategy over the coming years just 10 minutes ago. I won't dwell too much on the details here other than to remind ourselves that we will get this business back into growth by 2027, with 2026 remaining a year of transition. Seckin talked a lot about, you know, some structural issues on the market, but also internally that need to be fixed. That will not happen overnight, and we'll need the year 2026 to start getting our ducks in a row and to get back into growth in the following year.
We still commit to delivering, as we said in November, EBITDA of between EUR 100 million and EUR 130 million over 2026. Turning back now to some group numbers, let's talk a little bit about our CapEx spend. Our CapEx essentially peaked last year in 2025, when we spent approximately EUR 1.36 billion of CapEx over that period. Basically, after landing at approximately EUR 1.25 billion this year, we expect CapEx to slowly decrease to EUR 1.2 billion by 2028, and ultimately to below EUR 1 billion by 2030. Looking maybe at the larger component parts of our CapEx spend, I think, first of all, it won't surprise you to know that currently, the largest bucket remains our fiber build.
Fiber build peaked in 2022 in actuality, and will decrease materially by 2030 with both our standalone footprint, but also Fiberklaar footprint having nearly completed the build by then. You can see this material step-down between 2028 and 2030 relating to this fiber build schedule. On customer CapEx, I think Jim touched on it this morning. You know, it's all great to build a fiber network. You ultimately need to, you know, migrate and connect those new customers to your network. Customer CapEx will remain elevated over the period, and it will only start to materially decrease post-2030. You don't see that on the graph, but that comes after 2030.
It's worth saying that in the meantime, we are materially reducing, you know, the unit cost of interventions, et cetera, via efficiency programs, increased use of DIY, et cetera, around that customer CapEx. We are keeping it under control over the coming years. On mobile peaked in 2024, essentially for two reasons: we were completing our network consolidation, also still spending material amounts on 5G deployments. Now, network consolidation, in particular, will be nearly finished by the end of this year, we expect mobile CapEx to decrease from 2026 relatively materially, and then to have a slowly decreasing trend thereafter. Probably the other interesting call-out on this slide is Global.
I mean, as we've said before, Global tends to be an asset-light organization. You can see it clearly on this slide. The CapEx required to run this business is relatively modest. We don't foresee any material changes in those trends in the coming years. Before I move on to the group free cash flow projections over the period, I did want to spend a few minutes to highlight a few elements that will temporarily impact our working capital in the coming years, tied really to our fiber build set up with our JVs, but also to the collaboration agreements that we intend to close. There's probably, you know, three elements here to think about.
One, the first one is our prepayment of network rank, network renting, referred to as IRUs. Now, essentially what these are, these are upfront payments to ultimately reduce longer-term recurring costs. Obviously, these come at a higher cost in the short term, but they are very much value accretive for the company over the long run, as you're materially reducing your recurring payments in the future. The way to think about those is the negative working capital impact will carry on for a number of years. We expect it to stop around 2032, and then over time, these will reverse, obviously, as in terms of working capital impact. Second element is we will continue making equity injections into our Unifiber and GoFiber JVs.
The third element is relating to collaboration-related incentives that will also contribute over the coming years to temporary working capital fluctuations. Moving now to how this all translates into free cash flow generation over the coming three and five years. I'll turn your attention to the right-hand side of the slide, which shows a little bit of a walk between those two periods. Between 2025 and 2028, as we mentioned, we expect domestic EBITDA to be broadly stable and our CapEx to reduce slightly, and these elements will essentially offset our working capital changes, including some of the elements I referred to on the prior slide. Between 2028 and 2030, our group CapEx will land to below EUR 1.1 billion, sorry, as we discussed earlier.
This, combined with the growth that will be delivered by our Proximus Global business, will translate into a free cash flow of approximately EUR 400 million by then. You'll notice on the left-hand side of the slide, and as I touched on earlier, that we expect our free cash flow to gradually improve from 2026- 2028. Moving on now to how this translates into our shareholder remuneration policy. We aligned the dividend policy closer to expected free cash flow going forward, to ensure sounder balance sheets and enabling room for value-accretive business initiatives going forward.
What that means is, we intend to return a gross dividend per share of EUR 0.30 over the results 2026, EUR 0.40 per share over the results 2027, and EUR 0.50 per share over the results 2028, all payable in one installment, in April of the following year, in essence. With this new dividend policy, we expect to stay comfortably, within the 2.5-3 times net debt to EBITDA range, according to the S&P definition, which will ensure we maintain a solid credit profile, and preserve access to attractive funding costs over the period. We have a solid debt maturity profile, as you can see here, both in terms of cost and tenor.
We have almost no maturities before 2028, and almost all, if not all, our outstanding debt is at fixed rates and at a weighted cost of debt of approximately 3.2%, with our average debt maturity at seven and a half years now. Putting it all together, let me give you a summary of the kind of short-term guidance and longer-term ambition. For 2026, we expect underlying domestic services revenue and domestic EBITDA to remain broadly stable, adjusting for the sale of Be-Mobile in 2025. On global, as mentioned, we expect to deliver EBITDA between EUR 100 million-EUR 130 million.
We expect our CapEx to land between EUR 1.2 billion-EUR 1.25 billion, organic free cash flow to land up to EUR 100 million in 2026, and for our net debt to EBITDA ratio to land at approximately 2.8 times EBITDA. Looking out now to the 2028 time horizon, we will deliver 1% CAGR on our domestic services revenue line. Our domestic EBITDA will be kept stable across the period. Global, we'll get back into growth from 2027, as we've discussed. CapEx will get close to EUR 1.2 billion by 2028, which means we will gradually be improving our organic free cash flow from the 2026 base.
Over that period, we also expect for our net debt to EBITDA ratio to remain below three times EBITDA. Finally, looking out to 2030, our CapEx will end below EUR 1 billion by that time horizon, and our organic free cash flow will grow to EUR 400 million by 2030. With that, I'll hand it back to Stijn for closing remarks.
Thank you, Nick. I started my intro this morning, with saying it's the next five years all about execution. I talked about four jobs to be done, three at domestic, one at global. At the domestic side, I tried to convince you that you have to look at Proximus in the 10-year window, because after 30, there's still five years of declining CapEx with the, with the copper phase-out and with the connections towards the customers, coming down. I hope my team convinced you that the Amplify plan for the next five years, will get these jobs done and that I have the leadership to do that.
At the global level, Seckin gave you an insight into the business and the challenges, also what we need to do to bring it back to growth. Once global is growing again, I do think we can look at optionality for value crystallization for our shareholders. This will bring us, in 2030, in a position where our ambition is to generate EUR 400 million free cash flow. Thank you, I'll ask my team now to come back on stage to go to the Q&A session. Nick, okay.
Indeed, now we're ready for the Q&A. If we have here in the room questions, please raise your hand. We will bring you a microphone. If you would just kindly state your name and company before asking the question. Thank you. Yeah, Paul, maybe.
Thank you very much. It's Paul Sidney from Berenberg. Just a couple of questions, please. Just on the dividend policy, can you talk us through the thought process for changing the dividend policy, particularly as the medium-term targets published don't seem to be a material deviation from what the market was expecting? Is there any expected M&A? Are you creating firepower for potential deals going forward? Just adding to that, what's the attitude of the government, and what were the discussions with the government that led to that change in the policy? Secondly, you're guiding domestic EBITDA stable over the next three years, despite slight service revenue growth and the EUR 180 million efficiency gains. I just wondered, could you outline what else is going on within the guidance? Is there an expectation that competition picks up?
What am I missing?
Okay, I'll take the first one. About dividend, yes, together with the board, we defined a new dividend policy. It's basically based on the fact that we wanna align the dividend with the free cash flow, which is, it's a very healthy thing to do. There's nothing else behind that. It, of course, gives us, given the leverage ratio, still some opportunity for growth initiatives, but we will communicate then those when they happen, basically. Of course, this has been discussed with our majority shareholder. According to my conversations, they are fine with it. They do understand that we're going through this period of finalizing the fiber build-out and that, yeah, we should stay in a very healthy position going forward.
The government also stated that they do see Proximus as a strategic asset. I think digital sovereignty is becoming much more, also on the political agenda, and we have the ambition to be the national champion in that in Belgium. Compared to your second question on services growth compared to that. Yes, we do a lot on OpEx reduces through synergies. We've explained those in details, but there are also some headwinds in OpEx, like cloudification and also the sales of assets in the past. It's nice when you sell them, but you get some OpEx back into that. That's one of the effects, I'll give Jim the stage on the competitive environment.
On competition, of course, we have been looking at what has happened in in other countries, especially in Spain, and we have used that as some kind of reference, adding on top of that, internal data on market service that we have done on our three brands and how they compare to competition.
With that in hands, we are confident that we can realize that 1% service revenue growth that I presented in my part. Yes, of course, we know that with the fourth entrant, competition will be more intense. I think we have shown in 2025 the way we have been managing that, and we're confident with the strategy that we have in place, that we can maintain our market shares and continue to grow with 1%. That's the plan.
Thank you. Could I just have a quick follow-up? 'Cause I think you made a really good point on digital sovereignty. Just a quick one, and linked again to the dividend policy and the government's attitude. Has there been a real change in the way the government looks at Proximus, in terms of are you now?
... as critical infrastructure rather than just.
company to beat up every 15 years with spectrum costs?
I'm only in the job, the last six months, but I do feel a strong interest with my interactions with the shareholders. I do think, yeah, digital infrastructure and everything that's going on geopolitically, the governments around Europe are looking also for sovereign solutions and kind of portability in the whole cloud discussion. It's a topic everywhere. You also see it in other countries, I think we're in a strong position to capture some of that growth. Yeah.
Thank you very much.
Maybe to David here on the second row. Yeah.
Thank you. David Vagman from ING. First question on the wholesale costs, and let's say, the speed of the migration of your client from copper to fiber, in particular on the JVs and, let's say, the network for which you will have to rent. Could you quantify how much of wholesale cost to expect on a normalized, let's say, level, and when that would happen? That's my first question.
You take it, Geert? Yeah.
Yeah. Of course, the migration speed on other networks is actually a bidirectional migration commitment. Which means that if we have commitments to migrate customers from our copper network to fiber network of competitors, then in the other way around, there's also commitments from them to migrate to our fiber network, typically in fiber cloud and Unifiber areas. In that sense, part of that cost is balanced between revenues on the wholesale side and additional impact on direct margin on the retail side. I think that's also something that definitely you need to take into account.
Of course, I'm not gonna go into the details of what contractually is being negotiated, but I think you need to take that into account and not only look at the downsides, but of course, in those deals, there's also an upside.
Sure. When should the fiber, let's say, investment would be down by 2030, though I understand that some footprint, like Wyre, they expect to end in 2036? It takes time to migrate, to close the copper, et cetera. When should we expect to have the full wholesale cost? I understand wholesale revenues, by when should we have a normalized level?
I think, Nick already mentioned that a bit in his part, that, until 2030, the main impact, on direct margin on the, on the retail side is on Unifiber footprint, so in our own JV. That the ones on the collaboration zone, the bigger impact is beyond 2030.
Yeah. The value of the collaboration deals are in the outer years, the next five years, it doesn't make a lot of difference.
Okay, thanks very much. Then, another question on, let's say, on the copper phase-out, savings.
You've mentioned the, I think the 1,400 employees retiring. Actually, is there any overlap between the person retiring and then the copper phase-out savings?
In the sense that you would have technicians who are retiring, working on the copper maintenance, et cetera, so.
Yes, of course, you have, Geert can add on my intro. Of course, there are still a lot of people working on the copper. It's also very physical in the street, it's all about reskilling and upskilling, so there's a lot of mobility to give you an idea, last year, about 2,000 of people changed jobs within the organization. We're already best in class in this mobility, and it will be critical going forward to keep the upskilling, and in the next 10 years, really match what's going on in terms of retirements, keeping the knowledge and a sound mix of automation and tasks that will remain in people's hands, Geert? Yeah.
Yeah, maybe to add on that, operating a fiber network shows to be cheaper than operating a copper network. We have first indications of that, but of course, the first ones. There is a substantial difference, there, and that, of course, will help over time, because of course, there is first that migration effort to do.
Okay, thanks. Last question on Proximus Global. Could you quantify... I see we've seen some bridge, we can kind of deduct the impact I think a bit on free cash flow, what could happen to 2028 and then to 2030. Could you give more granularity on the EBITDA and free cash flow objective or targets implicit for Proximus Global?
... I'll take that one. I think at this stage, as I said, we're very confident to deliver EBITDA between EUR 100 million and EUR 130 million this year, and to start growing from 2027. At this stage, we don't wish to give a whole lot more guidance in terms of the the outer years. As you know, there's a big job to be done at Global. It's a rather volatile business. We'll come back probably in a few quarters to give you a bit more color around that.
Okay. It's correct that when we look at the free cash flow bridge or waterfall chart, to see that you have a free cash flow outflow to 2028?
In general, obviously, as you know, this year will be a year of reset. Even in this year of reset, our Global business remains free cash flow accretive, and that will be the case going forward. Obviously, we do expect that free cash flow accretion to increase over time out to 2030.
Okay. Thank you.
Here in the second row. I think it was Michiel, I'm not sure. Yeah.
Yes. Hi, Michiel Declercq from KBC Securities. Two questions on the Global business. In 2024, you gave some concrete targets for the Global business. Now you're a bit more prudent. There is no outlook for 2028. You do expect improvement for 2027, what makes you confident that you will see an improvement in 2027? Because how I look at it from the presentation is that you still expect structural headwinds in the SMS market. I'm just wondering, yeah, your benefit there in other OTT players is a bit more limited compared to competitors, I would assume. Just wondering why you're so confident that profitability should improve there.
As a second question, in the latest Capital Markets Day, you mentioned that an IPO at some point was on the table for this business. I think the situation has changed a bit. Do you still think that you're the right owner for this asset going forward?
Let me start on. Seckin can comment on the portfolio mix between omni-channel and SMS and the shift during the next two years. I can only add that apart from the portfolio mix and the transition the market is going through from a digital messaging point of view, I also think one of the drivers is sales execution. I think in the integration, we kind of lost contact and sight on the customer. It's a B2B business. I've spent all my life in B2B. The customer is not a persona, like say, in gym business. It's a real person, and you have to be very close to your customers. I do think Seckin has a lot of experience in B2B sales. He was the best sales guy at Ericsson worldwide, having the T-Mobile account.
I'll hand it over, and I'll come back to your second question. But, yeah.
Okay, thank you. Thank you, Stijn. I mean, if you look at the CPaaS business, regardless, whatever analyst report that you are looking at, it's growing very healthy overall. We use the Mobile Square as a reference from 2025, EUR 55 billion, that market is gonna grow EUR 89 billion by 2030, around 13% year-on-year growth. If you put the Network APIs on top of it, we spoke about it earlier, and AI, I didn't even touch the AI part of it, that growth, ambitious scenario, goes up to 20%. Why do I feel comfortable or the confident is that 2026, we believe that we are going to win those key integration channels. We are gonna enable our sales organization to start selling, cross-selling our portfolio. Some of the...
If I want to be extremely optimistic, and I'm being very cautious now, I mean, please take a look at the Route Mobile report, the one that we just released. You can actually see the good sign when you focus on the domestic market, when you work very closely with your enterprises, they started to grow their EBITDA business. Again, we need to make this shift very, very quickly from the, if you remember my chart, the dependency on the P2P SMS and P2P voice and messages towards the omni-channel. We believe that we are gonna stabilize the business in 2026, go back to the basics and fix it, and we will start seeing growth from 2027.
Come back on IPO, I wasn't there, but in terms of value crystallization, I started this morning with saying Proximus Group is two distinct, two different businesses with little synergies, we're a conglomerate. I know what it means. As an analyst, you do some of the parts, we get a holding discount. That's how it works. Should we own Global in the end? I don't think so, we're also not in selling mode. The next 2 years, we will focus on execution, because I think it's in the best interest of our shareholder to look for the right moment. Let's first recreate value, execute on this optionality.
It's clear. Thank you.
Yeah. Maybe... Yeah, Dhruva, just behind, and then we go to-
Thanks very much. It's Dhruva from UBS. Just a few questions. First is just a simple financial one. I think in terms of CapEx, you've guided for it to come down to EUR 1.2 billion from EUR 1.25 billion for 2026. My understanding is that this doesn't include the football rights and potential renewal there. Just would be curious to see what's driving that decrease for next year and going forward. Secondly, just on the fiber cooperations, a lot of what was talked about in terms of the networks was assuming that these cooperations come through. I was just wondering if from your talks with the BCA, if you've had any sort of indications that.
... well, we've always wanted it to come sooner rather than later, but if there's any new indications that this is going to happen, and just whether both the Flanders and Wallonia cooperations are being discussed simultaneously, or it will be Flanders first and then Wallonia? The final one, just in terms of competition, I think Digi, in their recent results call, mentioned that they are looking to increase their fiber footprint by another 100,000 homes this year. Do you think most of the impact from Digi now is in the base already? If they're only rolling out another 100,000 fiber homes, and Belgium's primarily converged, do you see some upside to domestic service revenue growth, given that the market sees annual CPI-related inflationary price rises?
Okay, let's take the CapEx first. Yeah.
I'll start with the CapEx. I think as I, as I explained, you know, the... You talked about the first step down, I guess, between 25 and 28. Really, there's obviously a lot of moving parts in our, in our CapEx, as you will expect. The main element really that's coming down in the coming two, three years, as I touched on, is mobile. We've completed, we're about to complete, I think, by the end of the year, the consolidation with our as part of our joint JV with Orange, as you know, and that's probably the biggest driver in the coming years overall. Obviously, as I touched on, from 28- 30, the biggest driver becomes obviously the fiber deployment, completion.
That's, that's how to think about it on the, on the CapEx front.
Yeah. Concerning the deal, there's no update from the BCA. Of course, I understand that everybody asks, "Why does it take so long, huh?" It's a very complex multi-party negotiation, it's also uncharted territory, huh? We have a competition authority who's also into telecom and talking about telecom remedies. Cooperation creates a lot of value, and it's all about how do you fairly distribute that value between the consumer, that's what the competition authority is, between us and Wyre Telenet, and between others who ask for remedies. That's very complex. It's also in my interest, and it's my job, and also the shareholders' interest, to defend our piece of the cake, and it's complex. Concerning timing, yes, the north is in front of the south, so it's kind of a serial process.
Then, to come back on the question on Digi. As already mentioned, of course, we take certain assumptions in our plan, which are based on what we know externally is being communicated, then we did some benchmarking to see what happens in Spain. We also looked, of course, in our own customer base and in Belgium, how do people react on that? That's the starting point of the plan that we built. Of course, we're gonna continue to manage this in the way that I've managed it also in 2025. If we see opportunities to do better, of course, we're gonna take those opportunities.
Now, keep in mind also that service revenue is influenced by growth of customer base, but also by the changing AB brand mix that we just discussed as well, which of course, we try to manage as good as we can by making Proximus more premium than it is already today. Then we have the impact of declining TV business, declining fixed voice business, compensating by conversions. All these elements together, in the mix, allow us to say that we can be confident on the 1% growth over the period. Of course, if situation changes externally, this will influence the ambition that we have set forward. For me, the main message stays like we did in 2025, we really do this volume-value balance.
We're not gonna overreact, but of course, we're gonna continuously monitor to make sure that we continue to also acquire customers. That's a bit the way we manage it.
The gentleman on the fourth row, maybe, yeah, Rick. If you can.
Sorry, first, small detail: Will there ever be Belgian football again on Proximus? The second question: Doing the math for you and your board, it seems to be normal that you adapt the dividend to the free cash flow level. When I see the stock today, it seems that the market doesn't see it as normal. Are they missing something? They, as being 30 years in the stock markets, they always say that the markets are always right, but sometimes they do not understand probably the long story. Because the market is, was really surprised, I think, or some, or I'm missing something.
Let's go to football first.
First, first a small question.
First, a small question on football rights. Of course, just like you, I would love to be able to show Belgian football again on my TV platform to my customers. As we have always said from the start, we will only do this if the financial conditions are correct. We continue to try to get those conditions in the right space, and when they are, we're gonna be happy to distribute Belgian football on our platform.
Yeah. Concerning market reaction, I don't look at the stock price today. It's only one day in life. My job is to create sustainable shareholder value in the midterm, but I do understand that some shareholders are disappointed, but we still have a healthy dividend yield going forward.
Just, maybe continue here, and then we'll move back to the left side.
Yes, hi, Charles-Louis Sempels from BNP Paribas. I just had a first question on free cash flow development. At your last CMD, guidance implied that we would see depressed free cash flow for three years and then step up materially. Today, you're saying pretty much the same thing. Can you give us a bit more detail on how free cash flow should develop in 2027, 2028 after the up to EUR 100 million guidance in FY 2026? Are we talking about a linear progression to EUR 100, EUR 200, EUR 300? Or do we need to wait until 2030 to see a material increase, as slide 22 suggests on your CMD presentation? The second question would be on your competition from Digi.
you discuss the fact that customers have become more price sensitive in Belgium. What kind of ARPU dilution are you assuming from more customers shifting to your Scarlet and Mobile Vikings sub-brands? What percentage of the base are these in absolute terms? Thanks a lot for any clarification.
Thank you.
I'll start with a question on free cash flow. I think you raised two points. Your first was the commitment we had implied in our prior capital markets day event. Indeed, we had shown back then a range over three years, over two different periods, you'll remember. I think for the period 2026-2028, we had shown something in the region of approximately EUR 300 million, and we were implying, you know, obviously a higher exit rate than that. I think the way to think about the major difference between the capital markets day back then and today is global.
You know that our ambitions on Global, for all the reasons we've covered, the external market trend and some of the internal work that needs to be done to get this business back on track, will take time. That's how to think about maybe the exit rate and the difference in implied exit rates last time versus in this, in this new plan. I think the second part of your question was in terms of the growth over the coming years. Look, I think we've explained, up to EUR 100 million for 2026 is our commitment. We do expect it to grow somewhat linearly in the coming years, as we showed on that slide that you referred to, with a more material step-up coming in the outer years of that five-year period.
Yeah. For the second question, of course, we modeled in our plan the Digi in certain assumptions and assumptions on moving from Proximus to our own b-brands. I'll ask Jim to give some more color on that one.
Yeah. I think indeed, like I showed in the, in my deck as well, we have seen in our mobile postpaid customer base a two percent point change over the period. The good news for me is that we see this mainly in acquisition. We don't really see an increased churn on the Proximus brand. It's more people leaving that now take other choices for their new operators than actually more people leaving. I think that's good in terms of management of the base. It also shows to me that when people choose for a provider, price is one element in the debate. It's not the only element. People also look at the quality of the network, the quality of the servicing. Do you have sales shops, yes or no?
What is the loyalty programs behind it? There's a lot of other elements that play beyond price. If you look at the ARPC question that you asked, we still see a lot of people moving to convergence. A lot of people actually bringing more and more products with the same provider, which allows us to continue to grow ARPC from a pure customer point of view. Even on our challenger brands, we're also doing a lot to try to create as much value as possible. For instance, on Mobile Vikings, on fiber, we have tiering in our internet offer, where we have an entry offer, then we offer more expensive products at a higher speed.
We actually see quite a lot of those customers, even though they're on challenger brands, also interested to take not only the entry product, but also the more expensive product. We continue to work also on the value of our challenger brands, to make sure that we manage as good as possible, the value of the base.
Let's move now to the left center. Russell, maybe, and then... Yeah.
Yeah. Thank you. It's Russell from New Street Research. Three questions, if I may, please. On the dividend cut, you said that you wanted to retain flexibility for growth initiatives.
You said you'd tell us about those as and when. Sorry, if I could just ask you about those. Are those organic or inorganic? If they are organic, can you just sort of give us an idea of the kind of projects they might be? Is it sort of something that you think you can invest in tangential to telcos, or is it in a telco industry, or what? I'd be interested to hear about that, please. On the CapEx, second question. On the slide you put up for the 2030, there was still a big chunk of fiber roll in there. You know, if I'm thinking to 2031, 2032 CapEx, should there be another dip down therefore in your CapEx spend as that fiber roll completely finishes?
Sort of related to that, when you gave your copper switch-off savings, it looked as though that was all OpEx, so presumably there's some copper CapEx as well that might fall off, but maybe that's tiny. Then the final question is just on sort of Digi. I mean, it looks to me as though they're kind of pivoting away a little bit from Belgium. They're obviously finding it difficult and expensive to roll out fiber. If, say, one of your competitors were to bid for Digi, so a four to three, would you be supportive of that? How do you think that deal would be received by the regulatory and political community here in Belgium? Thank you.
Okay. Let's start with dividend. Of course, I cannot talk about acquisitions. In organic, of course, there are growth opportunities, mainly in B2B, related to digital sovereignty and edge cloud. We'll see how fast that picks up and what kind of customer projects we will be able to secure. There is growth in domestic telco, but it's not at the communication layer, but the innovation layers on top of it. I do think we will move to the market, AI will create a lot of new things that we don't know yet.
I'm been active in IT all my life, and I do think, agentic AI will be inherently distributed, and compute will also follow that distribution and gives us a unique opportunity because we own the best real estate in Belgium to do distributed AI. The CapEx, the five-10 years, so 30-35. I really like your question because then you have a 10-year view on this, great company. Yes, it's mainly the customer connect, so all the drop cables that still need to bring the fiber from the street into the house, and the more we sign up and the filling rate goes up, this comes down. It's also a once-in-a-generation, CapEx. Also, copper still needs, CapEx, eh?
If there are roadworks, we are we mandatory need to also move the copper when they do the roadworks. Geert can comment on that.
Well, yeah, not a lot to comment on top, because indeed, it's a mix of OpEx, CapEx. Of course, everything which is energy, that is substantial, because of, with fiber, we have a rather passive network. Still a lot of active gear in the street with copper. That's all in OpEx, maintenance in OpEx. If there is a new roundabout, you have to imagine there is n fiber, n copper, and we still have to find other routes to get around the roundabout. There is also still an aspect of CapEx in there.
Concerning your last question, moving from four to three, somebody buying Digi, we will probably not be allowed to do it, but if Telenet or Orange wants to do it, we fully support it if it's possible. I already had also the privilege to have contacts with other CEOs of Telefónica and Orange, and market repair, intra-market repair, and moving from four to three is on top of everybody's agenda. Belgium just went to four, we'll see what happens. Yeah.
Yeah. Can we hear, continue on the left side? Yeah.
Thanks. It's Konrad Zomer, ABN AMRO, Usman Ghazi. I've got two questions. First, on global, and particularly the timing of the synergy benefits. You guide EBITDA down for this year by EUR 40 million-EUR 70 million from 2025, but you expect growth in EBITDA is from 2027 onwards. At the same time, you mentioned in your presentation that the integration of the three businesses will be completed as of this year. What have you assumed in terms of the timing of the roll-on effect, the full-year effect of the synergies that you mentioned at the time of the acquisition of Route Mobile? What's the split between internal synergy efficiencies and the ongoing market growth opportunities that you discussed?
Secondly, on the variable pay of management remuneration, this is for the whole group. Are there many people within the domestic part of your business whose variable pay in LTIPs or STIPs or whatever, parts of them may be bonus remuneration, depends on the performance of the global business? I'm trying to get a feel for. You mentioned, I mean.
Pain, who feels the pain? Yeah.
Yeah, it's obviously one part of the company that offset the other part in 2025.
Yeah.
Hopefully that will reverse at some point. Can you maybe talk us through some of the characteristics there?
Yeah.
Thanks.
In terms of synergies, then I'll ask the planning of Seckin. From a post-mortem point of view, I can also only do the post-mortem analysis, there was about EUR 100 million synergies. EUR 70 million was more at the cost side, EUR 30 million was more at the go-to-market synergy side. The cost side have been realized, the EUR 70 million. The question is whether they were the right cost-cutting or not. I'll give that to Seckin. The EUR 30 million, the go-to-market synergies were not realized. In terms of incentive management for domestic, the STI, there is no global component, but in the LTI, which is more the senior leadership, there is.
Thank you. As Stijn said, we were very aggressive during 2025 when it comes to the OpEx synergies and included several items. One of the larger ones is to exit the employees in the high-cost locations and then move them to the low-cost locations. It was carried out, and, a little bit, in my opinion, with rush and a little bit without hiring the people in the low-cost locations. When Q4 started, we were looking for, I mean, we were announcing it, of course, 100 people. Today, I think we are down to 80 people that we are still trying to hire. Many of those are backfills, the people that we let go in the high-cost locations, now we are trying to replicate them or hire them in low cost.
Of course, it had lots of impact on our performance as well. Ideally, if you are moving jobs from high-cost locations to low cost, you need at least three months, a transition period. We just did it completely opposite. Actually, we had a quite a large gap. That's also impacting our... Not the only reason, but one of the reasons that impacting the some of our cross-selling.
opportunities. In 2026, we are going to finalize the key battles when it comes to the integration. Seven activities that we have highlighted: cross-sell, go-to-market capabilities, investment in the domestic markets, investment in the partnerships. Partnership is gonna take two years to start showing results. Domestic markets is gonna start one year after we start hiring or we finalize the hiring. There are different impacts. We will not track how much of the revenue is coming from the cross-sell or the, from the synergies going forward. We only care about maximizing the DM, and that's what the task of the management team.
Thank you.
Yeah, we have here David.
Thank you. follow up on the, let's say, the countryside, the network footprint on HFC. How fast do you intend to migrate customer from copper to HFC, so on Wyre and Orange Belgium?
Unfortunately, I have to say there that we're still under NDA in those discussions, where that is ongoing, so we can not be specific on the really migration scenario. What was already public were the deployment targets, but those deployment targets were more related to fiber. Of course, HFC is already built, so there you can get quicker access, as you can imagine. Then there are agreements to do that over a number of years.
A very quick follow-up on that one. What is basically in the plan? I would say, if we look at 2030, do you have a significant amount of customer in these areas who are migrated or not? Rough idea.
I think, as Geert said, I think this is confidential. Again, similar to the other discussions, that this has indeed a cost, but it also has an upside. Because it means that on the one hand, on copper, I can move customers from probably a 20, 30 Mb copper experience, to a, to a coax experience. I can, I can step up in terms of customer experience, so there's a commercial upside. Also in terms of copper outphasing, there's also a cost upside, on that side as well. It's never only one element, it's an aspect of multiple things that in the end, will define, what the out, what the output is on cash.
As Geert says, this is still under negotiation, and so it's under NDA, so unfortunately, difficult to comment. Of course, we took all the assumptions in the plan, so what you see here reflects what is currently on the table.
A very quick follow-up on your answer, actually. You said in the plan, I think it's by 2028, you assume stable market share, or is it also for 2030? You could be more bullish, I was going to say, certainly for Flanders. If you can, you know, like you have this leadership on fiber moving to HFC. Is it that you're kind of thinking, "Okay, we will gain market share in Flanders, but we might lose in, I don't know, in Brussels or in Wallonia?
The guidances that you have seen, in terms of revenue, et cetera, goes until 2028. I think we only guide on CapEx beyond 2028. Again, the commercial performance will depend on a lot of variabilities. We just had a question on Digi and three operators versus four operators, which will have a huge impact on the commercial dynamics and the revenue in the market. I think, looking beyond three years, I think on that side, we need to be more agile and pivot as we move. We gave an ambition for the coming three years, but I'm not gonna put an ambition beyond that.
Okay. Thank you.
Yes, we have..
... on the back. Yeah.
Good afternoon, Christophe Schepers of Degroof Petercam. One question, not on the numbers, but on the governance. Looking at your board, currently, there's still quite some involvement of, logically, your majority shareholder, but it's linked, let's say, to politics mostly. Is there any chance that this will alter, given that recently we heard that a local entrepreneur in Wallonia might enter your board? Are there discussions ongoing now with the dividend as well? You might have had the opportunity to have some changes at that level. That would be interesting as well. Thank you.
It's not my job to choose board members, it's the shareholders' job. Of course, we're preparing the AGM and we'll have to renew several board members. Also the chairman, given the law, we're Dutch-speaking, so the chairman needs to be French-speaking by law. We'll see when we publish the agenda with the names, and then I think April 15th, the shareholders can vote. There will be a substantial change in my board.
Okay, that's good to hear. Second question, back to Seckin. Given the you already provided details on how it was run, that it was indeed a rush transition. People were busy internally, that much, not too much externally. Would it also imply that you have currently double costs running, and that gives you, let's say, a little bit of runway from some organically improvement for next year? Is that an optionality there, or is that difficult to assess in numbers?
No, I mean, if the question is that if we have any fat in our OpEx, I mean, we have looked into it quite drastically. We have opportunities to reallocate. We have opportunities to take money from the non-growing areas and questioning every single thing that we have been doing for years, and then start moving that money more aggressively into new growth areas. We are investing in the domestic markets. We are investing in partnership areas, network APIs, and we are increasing our OpEx in 2026, but we are financing most of it by reallocating our OpEx.
Very clear. Thank you.
No more questions? One final one. We just have time for one. Yeah, go.
Yes, Charles Sampier from BNP Paribas, and I had a quick question regarding your FWA strategy. How do you see this product over the next years? Which kind of demographics, areas are you targeting with this product? If you could give us some more color as well on ARPU impact, that'd be very good. Thanks.
Yeah. Indeed, I think FWA is definitely a technology that we are looking at. Now, from my perspective, this is just a technology to deliver products to my customers, just like we do today with our Flex+ product that we deliver on fiber and on copper, and in the future, also on HFC. For me, it's more a technology to enable solutions that we sell. Of course, the upselling potential that you have will depend on the technology that you use. On fiber, I can differentiate on speed, I can sell packages that are more expensive. On FWA, I'm gonna have also some level of flexibility, but I'm probably not gonna be able to put 8 gigabit symmetrical product on the market, it's gonna influence a bit that side.
We're not intending to sell an FWA product to our customers. We are selling internet to our customers, and then I'd use the technologies that Geert puts at my disposal to bring them to our customers.
Wanna add something, Geert?
Maybe to add on this, of course, you've seen that our plan is there's still also the partnerships, and that means that we get access to other type of Gb technologies. But in some cases, that is not always sufficient, and we. There are holes in the networks. There are, for example, expensive outliers. And where we go and deploy fiber, sometimes to pass some homes, the cost is so high that you need to reflect on alternatives. It's a mix of different things, where we believe we need it as well as a complementary technology to complement what we're doing on fiber and third-party fiber and HFC.
We're already doing FWA in B2B, because in B2B, it's more common to have backup lines, and FWA is it's becoming common practice to be the backup line. Yeah.
Okay, I see we have one final question here.
Ah.
Justin.
Yeah. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity yet again. It was actually just a follow-up on that, because on FWA, because obviously in those rural areas where you are gonna be wholesaling the HFC network, you know, that's a big cost for you. Are you not incentivized to try and push FWA quite heavily in those regions to minimize your wholesale costs?
Of course, when we make a kind of a collaboration deal, there are some elements in there with respect to balancing things. That is part of the negotiation that is ongoing. Of course, what I'm saying, expensive outliers, holes in the network, et cetera, that is more cross footprint, and it's not only linked to rural. It's a combination of those two things that we're looking at. Yeah.
Right. That concludes the Q&A session, and with that, also the Capital Markets Day. Thank you all very much for your presence here in the room and all for your questions as well. As usual, should there be any follow-up questions, you can reach out to the investor relations team. Either Bart or myself are happy to help you out with that. Thank you again, and enjoy the rest of your afternoon.