Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Proximus conference call. For your information, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the con-call over to Nancy Goossens, Investor Relations Lead. Please go ahead.
Thank you and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us. We will start the webcast with an introduction by the CEO, Guillaume Boutin, using the presentation we have published on the website. After that, we will be turning to your questions. For the Q&A, we are joined by the CFO, Mark Reid, the residential segment lead, Jim Casteele, the business segment lead, Anne-Sophie Lotgering, corporate affairs lead, Dirk Lybaert, and the CEO of BICS, Matteo Gatta. They will be taking your questions in a moment, but first, Guillaume will take us through the highlights of today. Guillaume, please go ahead.
Thank you, Nancy. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome from my side to this webcast covering the results of the first quarter of 2023. For the next 10, 15 minutes, I will cover the subjects on the slide. We start with some highlights of the quarter. We started the year with strong revenue growth for the group, earned by 5.9%, with both our domestic and international segments contributing to this achievement. At the same time, we are coping with the anticipated inflationary impact that accumulating the first quarter 2023, leading to a decrease by 3.5% for the group EBITDA, in line with our expectations. On the commercial front, we continue to deliver some good momentum in spite of higher competitive promotional activity. In a market for which the growth is moderating.
The first quarter also marks the start of a new Bold 2025 strategy. I will zoom in on a few achievements later in this presentation. We have gone through our Bold strategy extensively in the CMD of Jan, with the six key pillars as shown on the slide, with fiber remaining a key component of our strategy. Compared to end 2022, fiber works have started in an additional 13 cities, meaning today we have fiber works going on in 106 Belgian cities and municipalities. In the Brussels region, we have now crossed the 60% milestone and also S-way. The fiber machine is going at high speed, ready to add 10% of coverage annually for the next few years. In March, nearly 1.5 million homes were passed with fiber.
So far, this is largely the result of the Proximus standalone rollout. As we have set out in our CMD this year, our fiber partners will be gradually picking up the pace. On top of the EUR 1.5 million I just mentioned, Fiberklaar and Unifiber have today a final fiber in the street for over 220,000 homes, which will boost the fiber home passed as soon as the POPs are activated. Traction for fiber is strong. In terms of active customers on fiber, we have been growing our base with 36k over the first three months, bringing the total now to 288k customers. Really good growth, which is also reflected in the growing network churn rate of 24%, as was shown on the previous slide.
On this slide, we give you some insight for the one concrete example of a fiber build. Here we are zooming on Braine-le-Comte, a small town not that far from Brussels. Obviously, it's limited scale, not to be extrapolated, but nonetheless, a nice example on how we achieved in nine months' time to end build the network and to migrate 75% of our copper customers and gain four percentage point of market share. As such, for this town, we are outperforming the overall average of 2% spinning churn we showed at the capital markets day. As part of our strategy, we also capture value through our multi-brand approach. We have three existing brands addressing all customer segments in the market and all driving conversions. In this view, the recent acquisition of edpnet will further complement our customer segmentation.
The offering of edpnet is mainly appealing to the segment of tech-savvy cord cutters and gamers looking for high-quality product specifications at a favorable price. We'll keep edpnet as a separate entity in our group, so it continues to offer its services in an independent way. Our multi-brand approach is also a strong driver to manage the value within our residential unit with the Mobile Vikings and Scarlet brands providing complimentary offers and keeping customers within the Proximus family. In high inflationary conditions, we have reviewed our pricing upwards at two occasions in 2022 and on the 1st of January 2023. As illustrated on the first chart, the impact on churn of these price increases remained overall mitigated. Note that the churn is also including movements between our brands. From a group perspective, the impact is even lower.
If we take Internet, for instance, the year-on-year increase in churn was closer to 0.5 percent point, all brands included. Back to the chart. In terms of net adds, you see the price changes have not prevented us to continue our solid conversion customer growth. The overall support for the ARPC has therefore been a meaningful driver of our revenue growth. The successful implementation of pricing approach has been very helpful to compensate in part the inflationary cost effects on our company. We've been informing our customers of a new price adjustment that will be effective on the first of July, with roughly a 4% increase for impacting residential customers.
To give you one example, Flex S, including Internet, TV, and mobile, will increase by EUR 3, so from EUR 67 to EUR 70, keeping our pricing competitive compared to the competitions. For our corporate offers, we'll activate the contractual inflation-based price indexation. Many of our customers will also be benefiting from more value. Aligning our mobile offers with increasing data needs of customers, we have recently announced the new mobile portfolio that we are launching next week. New subscribers to this offer will benefit from a significant increase in the amount of data allowance, and for more customers will be able to benefit from 5G speeds. Overall, the portfolio will strengthen our competitive position in the Belgium market. Within our Bold 2025 strategy, data security, cyber defense, and privacy protection are essential.
The launch of our sovereign cloud portfolio with Microsoft and Google will offer our customers all the advantages of the cloud while ensuring the necessary levels of security, a sovereign cloud at EU terms. Turning to another topic at the heart of our Bold 2025 strategy, sustainability. We are delighted to have signed up to the Brussels Green Deal last week, as part of which we will ensure more efficient and green parcel delivery. Besides further reducing our own emissions, we want our suppliers to act accordingly. Indeed, today, the so-called Scope 3 emissions account for 80% of our carbon footprint. To this end, we have reviewed our supplier code of conduct and are now requesting existing and new suppliers to demonstrate the future of circularity and zero waste approach to measure their own emissions and use renewable energy.
Going a bit more in detail now for our Q1 results and starting with the domestic segments. Our domestic operations continue to be supported by our conversion offers. We grew our customer base further for internet, effecting the success of fiber and also for mobile postpaid in spite of the intensified competitor promotions. For TV, we managed to contain the net decrease of our customer base. Zooming in our residential unit, which closed a strong first quarter, sorry, with revenue for services up by 4.7%. In total, the revenue was up by 5.9% with the launch of new high-end devices, driving a significant revenue increase in terminals.
The residential customer services revenue benefited from a strong increase in ARPC, up year-on-year by 5.3%, supported by price indexations and by the ongoing move from customers to conversion offers. Our business unit closed a strong quarter with revenue up 6.2%, with again, a very good quarter for product revenue, thanks to a further catch up in previously delayed custom installations due to global supply chain issues. More importantly, our B2B unit managed to prevail the balance between growing new services and the erosion of legacy voice, resulting in a 0.8% revenue growth for its total services.
Over the first three months of the year, the B2B unit achieved again good growth for fixed data services as well, resulting from a strong increase in internet ARPU up by 7.5% while keeping the internet base stable in a competitive setting. As for IT services, both recurring and one-shot services were up year-on-year, with amongst others, clouds, advanced workplace, and security recurring services closing a strong quarter. Finally, our wholesale unit for which the revenue declined by EUR 8 million is mainly the result of the ongoing interconnect headwinds with, however, no meaningful margin impact. This brings me to the total domestic revenues, for which we achieved a 4.8% growth for the first quarter, with services revenue growing by 2.7%. Turning now to the domestic operating expenses.
We anticipated, inflationary cost effects on wages cumulated with in total six automatic wage indexations impacting the first quarter. Electricity costs were up from the previous year. Thanks to our ongoing cost efficiency program, we could in part offset this inflationary cost headwind, overall resulting in our OPEX up by 8.3% for Q1. This brings me to the total domestic EBITDA, which was down by 3.4%, with a higher cost in part offset by the increase in direct margins. For our international segments, BICS and Telesign, we are pleased as well on how they have started the year. Executing on their respective growth strategies, they contributed significantly to the direct margin growth of the group.
Following a very strong 2022, BICS closed the first quarter of 2023 with growth for all three services, with especially good performance on the core mobility services and high cloud volumes. In spite of the inflation impact on the wages of BICS, the EBITDA increased year-on-year by 15%. Telesign too achieved for the first quarter continued growth with revenue up for both communication and digital identity services. Furthermore, in digital identity, Telesign launched the Silent Verification product, which was released in 14 markets. With investments in growth strategy increasing the operating cost, the Telesign first quarter EBITDA was down by EUR 3 million. It brings me to the group results. This slide sums it up for the first quarter with a strong group revenue increase leading to a 3.3% growth in direct margin, supported by all three of our segments.
The group EBITDA was down by 3.5%, with mainly the domestic segment impacted by the inflation-driven cost increase. The CapEx for the first quarter of 2023 totaled EUR 312 million. As illustrated on the chart, the fiber-related investment accounting for 26% of the total, with our own fiber build coming down from its peak in 2022, where the CapEx to connect and activate our fiber customers increases. Moreover, the mobile network consolidation led by MWingz is ongoing, with CapEx incurring following the pace of the mobile site consolidation. In parallel, the first quarter included some timing effects on IT and content investments.
This brings me to the free cash flow for the first quarter, and as shown on the graph, besides the effect on the mid-EBITDA, the main drivers of the lower free cash flow year-on-year are tax-related payments, higher cash for paid CapEx, and the payment of interest on spectrum rights. The free cash flow move is effective in our net financial position, all in all in line with our projections for the year. Continuing on our expectation for 2023 and based on the first quarter financial results and our best estimates for the remainder of the year, we reconfirm the guidance for 2023 for all metrics as shown on the slide. With this, I have covered my introduction, so we can now turn to your questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining this Proximus Q&A session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad and you will enter the queue. After you are announced, please ask your question. We kindly ask you not to use microphones or headsets when asking your questions. We'll take our first question from Roshan Ranjit from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Afternoon, everyone. Thank you for the questions. I've got 2, please. Firstly, on the CapEx, we saw a step up this quarter from Q1 last year. Again, I appreciate there is volatility from quarter to quarter. This pickup didn't necessarily match the increase in the fiber coverage that we saw this quarter. Is it possible just to build down into that a bit more and maybe give the mix between actual build and maybe connection CapEx? Is it possible to get a blend of within the full year guidance, what we should be assuming for connection CapEx as well, please? Secondly, on the KPIs, Guillaume, as you said, the TV trends have been contained this quarter.
Are you seeing customers move from the main Proximus brand to the Mobile Vikings offer after launching that convergent offering during last year? Thank you.
Roshan, let me take the CapEx question to start with. CapEx for Q1 was pretty much exactly in line with where we expected it to be. As you said, the fiber build on our own balance sheet is effectively peaking. Actually we're on the downward trend from a CapEx build perspective. What you saw in Q1 was a, you know, a reducing of the homes passed the construction CapEx, as you alluded to. Actually, and again, it gets back to relating to our top line, our success to monetization, is there is an increase in, and you can see that on our CapEx slide, in terms of the connection CapEx.
That will continue for the remainder of the year as again, the monetization of fiber continues. We don't provide guidance of the exact levels, but I think Q1 will give you the kind of general direction where things are, things are moving on. In terms of the other mix in Q1, we also had a specificity in Q1 around the signing of content agreements on various content suppliers. That is really kind of quite lumpy in terms of the CapEx phasing of that. That was really the other element of why you possibly saw Q1 higher than it was in the previous year.
Question on TV trends and the link to Mobile Vikings. As you know, Proximus also has an offer that is relevant for the cord cutter segment, as we call it, where we have a combination of internet and mobile, also on the Proximus brand. People that are thinking about stopping their TV subscription, they don't have to move to another brand within the Proximus group. Of course, we continue to execute on our multi-brand strategy, but more from a segment proposition point of view. There's no link to TV trends and Mobile Vikings.
That's really clear. Thank you.
Thank you. We'll move on to our next participant, Nicolas Cote-Colisson from HSBC. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Oh, thank you. Just to follow up on your comment on the internet churn, because it seems that you have more convergent customers, but I wonder how much trading down you're facing when prices are going up sharply. You just answered on the TV side of things with cord cutting. Can you see a lot of appetite for clients to move to cheaper offers, excluding TV as well? Then, another, I would say, regular question from me is on the fiber regulation. Obviously, you can't speak on behalf of the regulator, but how much engagement do you have with them to help shaping the regulatory framework to come for fiber? Have you started discussing with them? Any color on that would be highly appreciated. Thank you.
Jim again. Maybe on the, on the first question. We don't see people or customers trading down on their internet offer because of price increases or inflation. What you do see indeed, and as said by Guillaume, we have been able to contain this in Q1, but you see a continuous pressure on TV. For me, this is more from a relevance perspective, less from a pricing perspective.
That part we expect to continue to see. Linked to price increases, of course, people that are hesitating might get the final push on TV. If you look on the other products, mobile and internet, we really don't see any impact on the price increase on downgrades to cheaper offers.
Okay. Thank you.
Just to add to that, if you look at the NPS evolution, if you compare to Q3, Q4 last year and Q1 this year, the NPS for corporation customers at Proximus is flat. Despite the fact that we have increased the price. It's a good sign that we can continue to lend, you know, price adaptation the right way. On fiber regulation, I think, as I said last time, the work of the BIPT, the regulator started.
You know, they have a lot to do in 2023 and to first design the framework for the fiber rollout and the way they would address the access, the cost to access that fiber network, once the framework is designed. You know, we have started to interact with them. It's going to be a, you know, a lengthy process. It's not like it's going to be announced. The outcome of that, the result of that discussion will be not announced before end of this year, beginning of next year. It would take some time, but super important discussions that are happening at the moment.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. We'll move on to our next participant, David Vagman from ING Belgium. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yes. Hi. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for taking my question. First one, on broadband. Can you describe the dynamic at play in the net adds? On the one hand, the fiber activation keep on improving. On the other hand, the net adds were good, but maybe a bit weaker than we expected. That's my first question. The second is on mobile net adds. What do you make of your performance in Q1, and what should we basically expect for the coming quarter? Thank you.
David, thanks for the question. Jim again. Maybe first on internet. We are actually very pleased with our internet results for the first quarter, if you compare with other. I think there we really did a good result. We see the impact of fiber. If you want to understand the impact of fiber, actually, we continue to see what we explained during the capital market day, where after 12 months, we have an increase in market share of two percentage points in the areas where we're deploying fiber. We continue to see that also in Q1, we can confirm what we have observed there.
For us this is really something that we think was a very good performance for the quarter. Indeed, on postpaid, was a bit more difficult this quarter. This is also the reason why we announced our new portfolio that we're gonna launch as of Tuesday. This more difficult performance was mainly linked to either long-lasting or lifetime promotions from competition that were impacting a bit our performance. Even then, I would say that despite that very intense competition, we were still able to grow our postpaid customer base with 9,000. Indeed, it was softer than the previous quarters.
Thanks. Thanks very much.
Thank you. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one. We'll move on with our next participant, Martin Hammerschmidt from Citi. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yeah. Thank you for taking my questions. Mine are also two, please. The first one is, I'll try to square so the new price increase and the revenue guidance, also this +1% to +3%. I'm trying to understand what does +1 mean versus +3 for the EBITDA? In other words, if one plus revenue growth does that translate to the same -3% on EBITDA versus a +3%? If so, why is that? Is that literally just terminals growth? The second one is on the free cash flow phasing.
I know you don't guide on free cash flow, do you think on an underlying basis that free cash flow for 2023, so excluding any divestments or acquisition, that free cash flow for 2023 should be positive, as I think consensus suggests? Should that inflection only take place next year, and we should see negative free cash flow on an underlying basis for 2023? Thank you.
Martin, thank you for the question. Firstly on your, on the guidance question. I think, you know, we talked a little bit about this at the Q4 results. You know, we've given, I think, you know, a broad range. I think, part of that, as we explained then, is around the terminals and products because we guide fully and kind of full fat revenue in 2023. That's, that's a little bit about why the range is where it is and also the resulting economics through to EBITDA. Clearly, you know, we're, we're early in the year. I think Q1, we felt, you know, very good performance.
We're, you know, super confident about the overall guidance that we've reiterated today. That's where we are on guidance. In terms of free cash flow, you're right, we don't, we don't guide. In terms of Q1, I think we were exactly where we expected to be from our free cash flow projections. That's right there.
When you, and as you rightly say, we will see, as we get out of this year, the sale of the building, of our headquarters building, crystallizing in Q4, and therefore free cash flow from that building will come in that time period. In terms of what we feel, you know, in terms of is it positive, we feel that consensus is right around the correct mark, including the sale of the building. That should hopefully give you some guidance on or some help on where we are on free cash flow for the full year.
That's clear. Thank you.
Thank you. We'll move on with our next participant, Yemi Falana from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe if I start on the competition side of things. It feels like you're performing pretty well from a growth perspective, both domestically and internationally. Focusing in on the domestic business where you're seeing relatively resilient NPS despite the price rises, could you maybe talk about how competitive intensity has trended as we start the second quarter? I know we're only a month or so in, but it'd be great to understand how that's evolving. It does seem like there's a bit more pressure on the mobile side, interested in any thoughts you have there. That's question one. Question two would be more around the free cash flow generation. As a number of folks been on this call, it feels like connection-based fiber CapEx could remain high for some time.
Given that and your kind of your longer-term guidance to keep leverage relatively stable, are there any asset sales that you're considering incremental to the building sale plans for Q4 this year? Is that a more longer term, kind of back-end loaded towards the end of the Bold 2025 strategy? Thank you.
On the competition intensity, I think we saw, as Jim explained, a very intense competition, competitive market Q1 on mobile with long lifetime promotions coming from competition. We were not, you know, playing that game on our mobile on the offers. That said, we don't expect Q2 to be more problematic compared to what we have seen in Q1 to the, you know, to the contrary, because we're gonna have the tailwind of a new portfolio that should help us to be more competitive without having to be too aggressive in terms of promotions. We are quite confident that Q2 is going to be a better quarter in terms of mobile postpaid performance.
On the remarks, you want to take the free cash flow?
Let me take on free cash flow. Yemi, just in terms of free cash flow, as I said, you know, there's nothing new in Q1 on free cash flow. We were in line with our expectations in terms of the phasing of that. As you said at Capital Markets Day, you know, our guidance includes the sale of our headquarters building that's gonna take half place in the second half of this year. We have no other plans that we're at the point of disclosing for any other asset sales. I wouldn't expect that for 2023 at this point.
Very clear, guys. Thanks for answering my questions.
Thank you. We'll take our next participant, Nuno Vaz from Societe Generale. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Just three quick questions from my side. First one is just a clarification about the 4% price rises in July. Is this restricted just to the Proximus brand or would the Viking and Scarlet brands be included? If you could give us a breakdown of how these price rises would be for each brand. If the answer is no, wouldn't you expect a bit of a trade-down given the price rise is only on the Proximus brand versus the other brands? Second question on specifically on labor costs, because these have been rising significantly. Why have you not sort of opted for a more significant transformation plan like you've done in the past to reduce staff?
Why do you feel like the current level of staff is ideal? Why not a more significant severance? Final question is just on the mobile side, because these new mobile plans have a significant increase in data. Would this not require more investment in mobile network to increase capacity than potentially what you were expecting before? Would be interesting to hear your thoughts on that. Thank you.
Nuno, Jim speaking. On the first question, the price increase that we're gonna do in July is only on the Proximus brand. I would like to nuance maybe also the idea of price increase because it's actually also coming with better mobile data specs and a better performance on the 5G network of Proximus. It's not a price increase as such. It's more for me an improvement of the product specs combined with indeed higher pricing. It's different versus what we have done in January. This is indeed only on the Proximus brand, not on Mobile Vikings, not on Scarlet.
We don't expect any changes on the dynamics of the brands because this is really also in line with our multi-brand strategy, where we want to position Proximus really as a premium brand where we create much more value for money. The move that we do in May creates a lot of additional value in terms of amount of mobile data versus the price increase that we're doing. As Guillaume said as well, this is also gonna help us in the coming months to perform better versus the market who have done a similar move over the last month.
In addition, I think post the price increases of and Telenet, and VOO, and Orange, and Proximus. You know, if you, if you put yourself in, you know, the 1st of July, we still gonna be, you know, well-positioned in terms of portfolio compared to competition, which gives us, you know, good confidence that we'll be able to land those price increases quite well.
On the labor issue, I think maybe I'll take you back to the overall, you know, program that we've been working on now for several years. We have a EUR 450 million efficiency program. Then the large part of the labor restructure was behind us, and we believe that's the, you know, that's the right thing. We've got EUR 200 odd million in front of us, and we're focused on a range of programs which we think operationally makes the most sense in terms of addressing our overall operating cost base. We are continuing to focus on workforce and we, you know, there are. I think we were down 50 FTE internally in the quarter.
We're also very conscious in terms of the external workforce, where we're deploying, you know, where we can, where we can take credit for benefit from efficiencies on external workforce. We're super focused on that plan. I think in terms of the progress of that program, we announced Capital Markets Day, we were looking at around EUR 106 million in savings in Q1, in terms of progress in Q1. Sorry, EUR 106 million full year. In terms of progress for Q1, we're right in the runway to achieve that number for full year. That's where we are.
On the mobile data, on the change of the mobile data offering, you know, nothing material to be expected compared to what we had in mind in terms of the growth of the data that was foreseen in our networks. You know, we were planning for that. It's a normal evolution to put, you know, more for more, more data for the same price or more data for a little more. That was really, you know, long-term plan of our network.
It's fully embedded, in, you know, the CapEx, or the investment we had planned to make sure that we still provide the best user experience for our customers, and we stay in the lead also in terms of, mobile, product experience.
Thank you very much for the detailed answers.
Thank you. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one. There are no more questions in queue. We will therefore hand over the call to Nancy Goossens. Sorry, we have one more question from Joshua Mills, BNP Exane. Sorry. I would now like to hand over the call to Nancy Goossens from Investor Relations Lead for closing comments. Thank you.
Very much all for joining us. Should there be follow-up questions, you can contact the IR team. Thank you. Bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.