Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Proximus Conference Call on the Q3 2022 Results. For your information, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Nancy Goossens, Director, Investor Relations. Madam, please go ahead.
Thank you and welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us. As usual, we will start this webcast by an introduction by the CEO, Guillaume Boutin. 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. Please go ahead, Guillaume.
Thank you, Nancy, and also welcome from my side to this conference call covering the Proximus third quarter results. Similar to our previous sessions, I will take you through some of our key achievements, the progress we made with respect to Inspire 2022 strategy, and of course, a quick overview of the third quarter performance. Let me start with some of the key achievements over the past month. Overall, I'm very pleased with our trajectory, especially our group revenue, which was up by 7.8% and direct margin up by 4.9%. Year-on-year growth rates we have not seen for a long time and the continued positive EBITDA trend in spite of inflationary cost pressures. These results emphasize the good performance of our domestic activities and our unique exposure to international markets.
I will get back to this later, but overall, we have kept a strong commercial performance and have again taken some meaningful steps in our strategy with some of these listed on the left side. This slide sums it up for the third quarter from a financial perspective, with revenue and direct margin up for all three segments. Our group EBITDA was also up by 0.6%, with once more BICS closing another strong quarter. The strong results prove we have been doing the right things and we continue to progress on our strategy. To start with, I'm really proud that we set again the pace in Belgium by introducing the 10 Gbps fiber technology across five cities this week and nationwide by next summer. It's a CapEx slight upgrade as the network we built was already 10 Gbps ready.
All in all, just a smooth process on the active layer. This achievement demonstrates without question the technological superiority of our Proximus networks. As illustrated by the launch of our 10 Gb per second offer, we continue to innovate and bring adapted customer proposals. This will in turn further support our NPS results for which we have already today booked a very nice progress. Earlier this year, we launched new skinny offers with both Proximus Access and the Mobile Vikings Internet offer, clearly addressing the evolving customer needs in certain segments. We have seen a good uptake for both while we are retaining these customers within our Proximus family. Turning to our ongoing fiber rollout, today we are already rolling out fiber in 77 cities and municipalities, and we are right on target to reach our ambition of 22% coverage by the end of the year.
Our fiber footprint continues to grow at a strong pace at end-September 1,124,000 homes and businesses passed with fiber, of which 93,000 were added during Q3, a significant step up from twelve- months back. In the context of our ambition to cover the country with gigabit networks, I am delighted that Proximus, Ethias, and the German-speaking Community of Belgium have concluded the first public-private partnership in Belgium, a perfect solution to bring fiber towards more rural regions. The newly created JV, GoFiber, will cover almost all 4,000 households of the German-speaking Community of Belgium. Customer demand for fiber remains high. We added 27,000 active fiber lines over the past quarter, bringing the total fiber park to 220,000. With these customers bringing typically higher ARPC and lower churn levels.
Also, the migration rate improved further, with now 68% of our copper customers having moved to fiber one year post the commercial launch. In the field of mobile experience, we are playing a leading part in the development of 5G in Belgium. In the business domain, we successfully tested 5G network slicing in cooperation with Ericsson. This achievement further paves the way for a dedicated handling of business-critical applications in an enterprise environment. In the sustainability domain, we are taking many measures to reduce our carbon footprint, and we want this to lead to significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions and becoming net zero across our whole value chain by 2040. Therefore, we can be proud of Proximus being the first large Belgian company and the third telco worldwide to have SBTi validated targets. Moving on now to our Q3 results and starting with the Domestic segment.
Over the past quarter, our customer base continued to grow for internet and mobile postpaid in spite of an intensified competitive environment. For TV, we noted, especially during the back-to-school season, a lower take-up rate while our skinny offers were showing good traction. Overall, our Flex offering continued to do well with an additional 49,000 customers that opted for one of our Flex packs in the third quarter. The traction of multiple offers remains an important revenue driver for residential unit, which closed a very good third quarter with its total revenue growing by 3.0% from the year before. This was largely driven by an increase in its customer services revenue. For the services part of the residential unit, we have posted in total a +2.8% growth, sequentially improving from a 1.6% organic growth in the second quarter.
The revenue increase is driven by a growing number of conversion customers, with a conversion revenue up by 8.1% year-on-year. Thanks to this ongoing move of customers' conversion solutions, typically at higher ARPC, and thanks to the indexation of our prices, the overall ARPC grew by 3.5% from the year before. For our business unit as well, we continue to see resilience, and we closed the third quarter with a +3.7% revenue growth. We had a good quarter for product revenue, thanks to some catch-up in previously delayed customer installations triggered by the global supply chain issues. More importantly, our B2B unit continues to manage well the balance between growing new services and the erosion in legacy voice.
Taking a closer look at the business services revenue, all services combined, the trend remains roughly the same, with, for Q3, a slight overall decline of 0.6%. In the mix, we achieved good growth for fixed data services, mainly resulting from a higher internet ARPU, and for mobile services, thanks to a growing customer base. Reflecting the ongoing transformation in B2B, we also grew high-value recurring IT services with especially a good performance in smart mobility and cloud. This was, however, offset by lower one-shot IT services revenues and the ongoing fixed voice erosion. Finally, our wholesale unit, for which the revenue from fixed and mobile wholesale services was up by 17.3%. This was offset by the headwinds on internet co-interconnect revenue with, however, no meaningful impact on margin.
This brings me to the total domestic revenue, for which we achieved a 3.6% growth for the third quarter. As for the domestic operating expenses, we continued to face a significant impact from increased inflation, especially on the wages, which we are now indexed five times since October last year. As illustrated on the chart, we have been able to offset part of the inflationary effects thanks to cost efficiency programs. The remainder of the cost increase mainly reflects customer-related OpEx and cost related to the ongoing company transformation. Moving to the result of our international segments and starting with another strong quarter for BICS. BICS continued its double-digit EBITDA increase, driven by direct margin growth in all three service groups. Mobility and messaging, but also legacy services benefited from a strong summer travel catch-up post-COVID.
Growth services continued to post an excellent performance in cloud services as well. TeleSign continued its strong commercial trajectory of the last quarters. Commercial indicators such as the net revenue retention rate remained at solid levels with 120% for Q3 and continue to see the momentum to be supported by strong sales bookings up by nearly 90% from one year back. Overall, these results reflect the success of the strategic course the company has taken to reinforce its position in the digital identity and communication markets. This brings me to the group results. With inflation being at top of everyone's minds, we have summarized the main exposures and mitigating actions on this slide, starting with our inflation-based price increase.
The exposure to rising energy costs for this year was quite limited, and for 2023, we are now more than 90% hedged with the average price level below 160 EUR per megawatt hour. The main exposure is on our wages, which we are partially offsetting through our ongoing cost program and a lower headcount base. As for the CapEx, inflation effects are being well managed in the total envelope, and for the long-term debt, we have hedged the 2024 and 2025 interest rates. As illustrated on the slide, the first nine months delivered strong results with all three segments growing revenue overall leading to a 0.6% growth in group EBITDA. Our CapEx remains fully in line with our projections with the year-on-year increase largely resulting from our fiber investments.
This brings me to the free cash flow over the first nine months of 2022. As shown on the graph, the two main drivers of the lower free cash flow year-on-year remain the higher cash out for CapEx and an unfavorable year-on-year evolution of business working capital needs. Overall, I'm very pleased with our trajectory over the first nine months of the year, and we're confident to end the year 2022 with domestic revenue excluding terminals to grow around 2%. For our group EBITDA, we expect to be at the upper range of the outlook we gave in July. Our other outlook metrics remain unchanged.
As a last but one point, I'm also pleased to announce to our shareholders the board of directors approved the interim dividend over the accounting year 2022 with a 0.5 EUR growth dividend per share to be paid on the 9th of December 2022. To end this presentation, before turning to your questions, something to put in the agenda for next year. Monday the 16th of January, we will be holding a CMD to present you our strategy over the next years with Inspire 2022 now coming to an end. I am really looking forward to welcome all you on the 16th of January, either in our Brussels headquarters or virtually. With this, I have covered my introduction, so we can now turn to your questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining the Proximus Q&A session. If you wish to ask a question, please press the code zero 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 microphone or headsets when asking your question. If your question has been answered, you can remove yourself from the queue by dialing zero two. We have the first question from Ben Lyons from Credit Suisse. Sir, please go ahead.
Good afternoon, and thank you for taking my questions. The first one I think is just on cost. The price of the energy hedge looks pretty reasonable for FY 2023. Now given the visibility on the hedge, could you quantify what kind of step up we should forecast for next year? Likewise, for the personnel costs, if we assume that there's another indexing at the end of the year, what should we be forecasting for the step up in personnel costs? The second question would be just on ARPU. It seems there's about a one percentage point positive impact quarter-over-quarter on conversion and fixed only. Are you seeing any downside from the Mobile Vikings broadband package? It just be good to see what you're seeing in the market. Thank you.
Hey, Ben. Sorry, we've got some.
That's better. Okay. Hey, Ben, thank you for the question. I'll address the question on cost. In terms of the overall energy position, yeah, we're pleased that we've got up to kinda 90% hedged for 2023. You can effectively think of a kinda low- to kinda mid-double-digit million EUR cost increase year-over-year in that range. Obviously, we've still got some exposure because of the unhedged piece, but that's the way I would think about it. In terms of the wage inflation, again, the majority of our internal wages are exposed to, at this point, three further indexations of 2% on each occasion. Those will take place right now in February, May and August next year.
Those can vary in terms of the timing, depending on the level of inflation and how that affects the index in the country. But that's basically the way I would think about it. On ARPU, Jim, do you wanna take that?
Ben, thank you for the question. This is Jim speaking. On Mobile Vikings and the impact of Mobile Vikings on RPC, the price points of Mobile Vikings are much closer to the price points of Proximus when you compare it, for instance, with Scarlet as a challenger brand. We also are already actively present with Mobile Vikings on the fiber network, which is also quite an interesting RPC upside to the basic prices that we have on Mobile Vikings. Overall, even though, of course, as you have seen on TV, we do see a slight increase of cord cutters in the base. We continue to see a very healthy traction on triple play and quadruple play offers overall. Structurally, the RPC increase that we have been seeing over the last quarters, we are convinced that you can continue to expect them going forward.
Got it. Thanks a lot.
Thank you. Next question from Nicolas Cote-Colisson from HSBC. Sir, please go ahead.
Yes, thank you. Hi. First question is your strategy regarding the balance sheet, because you've decided to leverage a couple of years ago, with eventually, as a consequence, dividend coverage that would wait for CapEx normalization. My question, I think, is what's your feeling at this stage? Obviously, it's to the board to decide, but are you still okay with the fact that dividend coverage can wait? I have a follow-up. I may let you answer the first one.
I think in the current environment, to have a healthy balance sheet is quite important, and I think this is something that we are looking at very carefully. I think we don't want to over leverage the company, that's for sure, and we want to keep that healthy balance sheet going forward, and that's a discussion we'll have with the board. You know that we have that new three-year strategic cycle that needs to be presented to the board and also validated by the board and then presented to you early next year. That it will be part of the discussions.
In the meantime, can we have an update on the network sharing with Orange Belgium? Because we see currently you are getting more CapEx on that side of things. Any indication on how the J curve looks like against the initial plan, and when savings could be seen? Thank you.
Yeah, Nicolas. In terms of, yeah, you're seeing the ramp up, so that's, you know, normal. That's the expected progression of that program. That's in line with what we were expecting. In terms of when the savings come through, we started to, I think we said previously that we'd start to see some of those savings come through 2023, 2024. That's still generally the direction we expect those savings to come in.
When you say 2023, 2024, so it means it's not completely sure it can be 2023, right?
It'll be minor in 2023. They'll start to see some benefits in 2023, but the main savings programs will come through in 2024, 2025. That's probably the way I would model it.
Okay. Sorry if I take a bit more time. On the 10 Gb offer, or in another way, I was a bit surprised that you are launching a 10 Gb offer now and not trying to make a bit more the possible progression in your packages in the coming years. What's the rationale to be so fast at offering the full-fledged fiber?
Jim, we'll come back on the way we want to monetize that speed, and you're gonna see, you know, it's really well thought through and we're gonna monetize that speed advantage. But it's really to, you know, to be perceived as the undisputed product leader as it comes to internet connectivity. You know, we lived 15 years without a product superiority on the internet. We had product superiority on mobile, but not on the internet. 15 years, it's a long period of time. Now we can prove to everyone that the best internet connectivity with the fastest connectivity is with Proximus. I think there is no reason to wait for that as we want.
As you know, we are a challenger in the north of the country, and we want to win shares. This is what you see in the momentum of the company. It will be, of course, monetized, but we want, in terms of perception, in terms of branding, to be considered as the best product, especially in the north of the country, where we used to be lagging behind in terms of product quality, speeds and capacity. Now, this is the opposite. We are leading. We are 10 times faster than our competition, and that is here to stay for, you know, for a long period of time.
I would, you know, and that's on your side this time, and I think it's super important to claim that superiority and of course to monetize it. Jim will come back to that. I think in terms of perception, in terms of branding, this is super important to claim that type of speed.
Maybe on the monetization. Of course, this 10 Gb offer has been announced as a pre-registration offer. We're not disclosing price points at this moment. Just to give you an idea on how we have been looking at this in the past, and I think it will also give you some hints on how you can look at it in the future. Today on copper, our maximum speeds are 100 Mbps. The first price points on fiber are EUR 5 more expensive than on copper. There you get 350 Mbps speeds.
When you want to go from 350 to 1 Gb, which is for the moment, the top commercial speed available, you have to add another EUR 11 on top of that. That already gives you an idea on how we are currently monetizing the different capabilities that technology is bringing. Of course, as Guillaume says, we will continue to do this going forward. We will definitely also monetize the 10 Gb offer that we're gonna put on the market later.
Okay, thank you very much.
Thank you. Next question from Emmanuel Carlier from Kempen. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. The first one is on pricing. Could you share your thoughts on pricing moving into 2023? The second one is on the TV losses. Is this something that you see continuing in October? In other words, do you believe this is a structural trend, or do you believe it is a kind of cyclical element due to the soft macro environment? Then the final question is on the fiber rollout. Could you just give an update on the number of fiber homes you expect to build in 2022 and 2023? Because it looks like the speed is a bit slower than initially expected.
On pricing, I'll start. Value management, as you can see in our numbers, is something we know how to do. I think we did two price increase this year, one first of January and one in first of May. At the same time, you see that our ability to continue improving NPS is still there, and also to limit the churn effect on those price increases. I think we have very good skills to pass on those price increases. I think you could expect us to continue in that direction, depending on the evolution of the macroeconomic environment. On TV, Jim will answer the question.
On TV, Emmanuel, indeed, we continue to see pressure on digital TV going forward. This is on the one hand a combination of a changing customer behavior in a small segment of the market, but also the more difficult economic context. As you know, to capture this new demand in the market, as Guillaume already mentioned as well, we launched this year our Flex offer combining internet and mobile on the Proximus brand, but also with Mobile Vikings, we are present in that market. As a consequence, we do see some pressure on the TV volumes.
At the same time, for us, it's of course very important that we are also present in that part of the market so that we can capture customer demand in that segment as well. I think at the same time, let's not forget that digital TV remains a very, very relevant product for the big majority of the market. We remain convinced that everything we do with Pickx and our Android TV decoder approach, where we are combining a strong local TV offer with OTT bundling, remains the best strategy to keep customers on our local TV platform.
Thank you. Next question from David Vagman from ING. Sir, please go ahead.
Yes, good afternoon everyone, and thanks for taking my questions. First is on the costs, let's say cost savings, for next year. Or should we be thinking about cost mitigating measure that you could take, and I mean on top of what has already been announced, and could you be quantifying what is doable or new programs that you might have? Then, second question is on also on pricing for 2023. What is, generally speaking, your philosophy, let's say compared to inflation? Do you put yourself a bit at a discount or in line?
On the ARPU evolution, next to inflation, price increase, could you give us roughly speaking how should we be thinking about the, let's say, the success of your skinny bundles, Mobile Vikings, Scarlet, and you said you mentioned cost cutting. How could this play also the price increase on one hand, and then the, maybe the downselling on the other hand? Thank you.
David, let me take the first question on cost. In terms of outlook for next year, we're clearly not guiding or giving that at this point. We'll come back to that in January in the Capital Markets Day. In terms of, you know, I think we've talked a little around what we've got in kind of our sights already. We, you know, in terms of our EUR 400 million gross cost saving program. We continue to look at that in ways that we can expand the scope, speed the realization of that.
The kind of areas that we're you know we continue to look at that is you know in the energy space so in terms of the kind of the network usage the office usage the the building the phasing of the building infrastructure that we have. The building footprint so we obviously have our headquarters building change program beginning to start. Discretionary spend is clearly something that we would you'd expect us to look at. In terms of HR levers we continue to be very focused on internal and external and you've seen our kind of FTE numbers continue to progress south. I think that's something that we're very specifically kind of managing.
Continually looking at, you know, the efficiencies and the speeding up of efficiencies in terms of the customer journey, transaction type, cost savings. Again, you'll see that in our deck. We've been very successful with that. In both ways, in terms of reducing those transactions, therefore taking costs out, but also making those transactions digital in a way that they're more valuable to the customer and the customers are returning us very favorable feedback through our NPS scores. I think we've got, you know, a number of programs. Those programs will continue to look at this pace of rollout, the scope of rollout, to help us mitigate the inflationary pressures that everyone is feeling.
On the pricing strategy for 2023, for the future, of course I won't disclose anything for 2023, but I think I try to answer the question, you know, just before. I will try to say it again. I think we know how to do it, but we do it the right way, because we value manage, but at the same time we increase the satisfaction of our customers, and this is the way we look at it. I think if you can value manage, but at the same time increase your NPS, I think this is the right things to do. You can expect us to continue in that direction.
And that maybe to finish with your last question. As you know, Scarlet has been part of our multi-brand strategy for several years now, so I don't expect changes in that respect. And for Mobile Vikings, as already explained, the price points of Mobile Vikings are much closer to the price points of our Flex range. Especially when you think about the opportunities of monetizing fiber in the segment of Mobile Vikings, which are typically the more tech data lovers really creates opportunities to further drive value as well. When you think about RPC, we are convinced that we're gonna be able to continue to grow as we have been doing over the last quarters.
Okay. Thank you very much, all.
Thank you. Next question from Joshua Mills from BNP Paribas Exane. Please go ahead.
Hi guys. Thank you for taking the questions. The first one I had was just related to the working capital, and we've been quite upfront about talking the unfavorable impacts, referring to business working capital. I just have to get a bit more information about what that headwind is actually coming from in real terms. It looks like it hasn't improved year-over-year. This is something which is more structural, and we should be thinking would be another incremental headwind for 2023. Or is it just related to specific projects this year which may fade away? So that was my first question, please. Maybe we'll stick with that one.
Josh, thank you. Yeah, I mean, in terms of business working capital this year, the vast majority of the year-over-year change is related to timing. Primarily the 2021 phasing, which was significantly favorable in terms of various payment timing. That's really the way you should look at it. I don't think you should think of additional structural headwind that flows into the future years. I think that's the way I would look at it, if that helps.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Next question from Roshan Ranjit from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Afternoon everyone. Thank you for the questions. Got three quick ones. Firstly on the B2B segment, I think you have another quarter of, as you mentioned, the catch up from supply chain issues which drove a nice improvement in the top line for the unit. When do you see that, I guess, unwinding, and should that continue into Q4 or have you kind of, I guess, caught up now with that demand? Secondly, Mobile Vikings, you previously said that the synergies should start contributing from Q4. Is that still the case and, I guess, you know, is there a scope to bring forward some of those synergies? Lastly, just looking at your fiber rollout, and again, I appreciate there is daily volatility from quarter -to- quarter.
If I look at the implied, I guess, CapEx per home, this quarter has seen, I guess, another pickup in that cost per line. Are you seeing any upwards pressure on the CapEx, I guess maybe, probably likely in terms of wages on the civil works, but anything on the equipment side which you can point to? Thank you.
Yeah, Roshan, l et me take the Mobile Vikings questions. It's fairly straightforward. The majority of Mobile Vikings synergies are already in the numbers. We migrated the customers to our network in late Q1. So the synergies have been flowing through since Q2. We continue to kind of optimize that business, but I think the material value of those synergies are already in our numbers. In terms of fiber CapEx, I think we've talked a little bit about this before. The Proximus build has, you know, we've got long-term contracts in with our suppliers, both on the, you know, securing that capacity and securing materials.
Now, we have been in negotiations with them over the summer and yes, there's some you know augmentation of those costs, but it's not anywhere near the inflation levels that we're talking about. Because again, we're in a long-term partnership with these companies. Certainly, you know, that's the way we're seeing it at the moment. We are aware that you know those inflationary pressures you know have not fully gone away. We continue to kinda work with our partners to make sure that you know we have a long-term relationship that works for both of us.
Yeah. Good afternoon, Roshan. Anne-Sophie Lotgering, responsible for the business segment here in Proximus. To your question about the supply chain and the top line improvement. Indeed, as you've rightly said, in the previous months, we have been impacted by the global supply chain chipset issue. This quarter we have seen a significant, yet partial catch-up of that backlog linked to those delays. Now, what we see as well is the timing of the product deliveries is still extremely volatile, and as you can imagine, it depends on multiple factors beyond our control. What we've noticed as well is that there are different deliveries and catch-ups across different business lines. Depending on the products that we've sold with our customers, this translates to very different backlog catch-ups when comparing countries linked to the difference in product lines.
As you can imagine, we're in constant communication with the suppliers, and we try and mitigate wherever possible. I would say that given the positive evolutions in the past months, we are cautiously hopeful to see a continuation of this positive trend to materialize in the coming months.
Great. That's helpful. Thank you. Mark, if I could just quickly follow up. You mentioned a small augmentation of cost. Is that both on the labor side and on the equipment side, or is that more focused on one?
Yeah. It's primarily the main negotiation had been on the labor side that we've seen some, you know, discussions. Again, on the equipment side, again, we've had longer term contracts and so, you know, as I said, the benefit of having these contracts is that, you know, we have those contractual rights and but, you know, it's a negotiation at the end of the day given the inflationary headwind everybody's feeling. We're trying to manage that the best we can. So far, you've seen no impact or in our kind of 2022 numbers.
I think the other thing you can, you know, think about in terms of the fiber deployment is that, you know, there's an ongoing program to look at the deployment efficiency, you know, and making sure that we're optimizing that. As we get to, you know, as we're now at scale, we're learning all the time, again, in partnership with our JVs as well, in terms of the best way to deploy a certain area. That kinda gives us, you know, better ways to deploy at lower cost. We get effectively, you know, scale synergies of being able to. Those can help us offset the inflationary impacts or have so year to date so far.
Understood. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Next question from Yemi Falana. Sorry. From Goldman Sachs. Just go ahead.
Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. It appears that the dividend and long-term strategy will wait until January, so I look forward to that. My first question would be on the weaker economic back-backdrop. It seems that that's driving some consumer spend down. Are you seeing any effects in the rest of the business, high levels of bad debt, for example? Secondly, on the FTTH cost advantage, given you're at nearly 20% country coverage on fiber, are you already beginning to realize some of that structurally lower network costs? And when do you expect the lion's share of that benefit to be captured within financials? And then thirdly, maybe if I wrap up on the international business with TeleSign, growth here continues to impress.
It appears that that's more than just market growth in digital identity, for example. Maybe if you could touch on some commercial initiatives that are driving traction among your customer base, and given you're still investing in R&D and the go-to market, how do you think about the durability of the growth that you're seeing, given you're at kind of 20%+ on a constant currency basis at present? Thank you.
I think on the dividend and long-term view, I think I give you have noted the date on your agenda is the 16th of January next year. You know, I'm also looking forward to that discussion with you. On the bad debt, I think we don't see much at the moment. We have weekly interaction with the teams to look at that because I think it is something that we have to watch and to monitor. For the moment, I think we are quite confident on the trends, both on the consumer and the enterprise segments. I think there is
You will see at some point some, you know, customer adaptations to the macroeconomic evolution. In Belgium, we are a bit more protected because of that indexation of salaries. People are probably compared to other markets sometimes helped. Of course, you know, the shield for the energy is not the same compared to other countries. There is, you know, good thing and bad thing about indexation and the way the country is managing the macroeconomic environment. For the moment, you know, we don't see material effect or significant effect of increasing bad debt levels.
As Jim said, I think we are confident that we can manage and continue to see the nice evolution that we see in ARPC for customer base. On the fiber, on the 20% coverage and the low we see today, lower cost, can we already capture that in the financials? I think this is something we will fully share during the capital market day. Because I think this is really the way you should look at a fiber investment that also needs to be fully explained. That will be one of the main focus of the discussions around the capital market day.
I think we will, you know, give you way more information at that moment. On TeleSign, I think, again, if you look at the SPAC deck that we issued in late last year, I think we are fully on track on all business drivers. We are exactly executing on the plan that we shared, and there is a lot of details in that plan. The only thing that is not tracking according to plan is the peak funding, because we see that we can deliver the results at with a way lower peak funding for the company. Then we're gonna be able to deliver the same kind of growth, but having less investment to be made.
That's really the good news about the way we are executing our TeleSign plan. You see a lot of investment. We expand geographically. We hire a lot of people. We are launching new geographies. The go-to-market traction is there. We are also making some investment in the R&D, the product, the platforms. You know, as planned, I would say, we are investing in the go-to-market, in the product, and then in the geographical expansion. I think what we want to deliver is really the plan that we shared during the IPO process.
Very clear. Thank you.
Thank you. Next question from Martin Hammerschmidt from Citi. Sir, please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for taking my question. I'd like to come back to the shareholder remuneration topic. I know you give us more, much more color on the sixteenth. Maybe in the meantime, could you just walk us through your thought process when deciding on the level of the dividend for the next three years? Do you factor in, sort of, the current share price and the current yield? Or are you more inclined to say, well, yield is just a function of the share price, and fundamentally there might not be a reason to touch it given you have, like, low leverage. In that context, how do you think about share buybacks at these levels? My second question would be coming back to free cash flow.
I think in the last few calls you mentioned that, working capital and cash CapEx together should have a flat to marginally positive impact this year compared to, sort of, last year. If I look at the working capital outflow in the first nine months now, they imply that in the fourth quarter we need to see sort of a massive inflow in working capital, even if you assume sort of slightly lower cash taxes for this year. Is that still the thinking, or has sort of the third quarter seen somewhat lower working capital benefits than you initially anticipated? Maybe related to that, how should we think about working capital for next year, given sort of the last three years have seen quite substantial working capital benefits, on the cash side? Thank you.
If I answer to your first question, you know, I'm doing you know the capital market a little bit before January. We will have to wait first to explain the strategy and then to see how it translate into the capital structure of the company. I think for that, for those questions, I think it's important to wait till the beginning of next year.
Martin, let me take the free cash flow. I think that what I said last time was the business working capital and the tax would be neutral to positive. That's what we continue to see. In Q4, we do expect that to be significantly positive as given the position we're in today. That's the way to think about it. The timing of tax payments will be favorable in Q4 this year. In terms of 2023, again, it you know look we're gonna come back in the capital markets day and give you a view there. I think it's not the right time to comment on that at this point.
Thank you.
Thank you. Next question from Nuno Vaz from Société Générale. Sir, please go ahead.
Thank you. Good afternoon. I just have three quick questions as well. I think most of the question I have has been covered already. Firstly, on the joint venture that you've recently announced with in the German-speaking community. It's of course a small one, but I was curious about this EUR 1,000 per household subsidy that you've managed to agree with the municipalities and that involves the European Recovery Program. The question here, of course, is if you're trying to extend this subsidy to other potential areas, what sort of work are you doing in the background? What sort of potential is there for subsidies in other regions of your rollout? Second question on B2B, specifically because you're also doing price increases in B2B.
For example, you mentioned a broadband ARPU increase of 4% year-on-year. B2B tends to be a bit more aggressive about cost controlling, especially entering what might be a more recessionary period. We've seen other telco peers have issues with their B2B revenue. Just curious to see what's the competitive environment in B2B and how much price increases you think you can push through in B2B, specifically on telco, before getting some fightback from the companies. Finally, I think you'll probably tell me to wait for the Capital Markets Day, but I was curious about the mobile rollout, the 5G mobile rollout. We've seen Telenet mention that they expect to take around three point five years time.
I was asking for any color you could give us on the 5G rollout, would be interesting. Would you expect a similar timeframe with an acceleration in 2023? Would we expect an increase in CapEx related to this 5G rollout, or would it not be so significant? Thank you.
I'll start with the last one. I think we already shared that we wanted to have you know Belgium covered by the end of 2024. But the amount of CapEx needed for that is not that significant. That's about where we are. On 5G, as you know, we want also on mobile to be market leader and to have that product superiority also for mobile, not only on the fiber. It's really a center for us, and this is the heart of the strategy of Proximus. On the subsidies on the German-speaking community, we like that model. I think this is a very interesting model.
We're gonna own at the end of the day 70% of the network, subsidy from the region, subsidy from Europe. I think that's a model we would love to see a little bit scaling in other part of the countries. You know, we are clearly in favor of this kind of initiatives to be taken by other regions or other part of the country. On B2B, Anne-Sophie?
Good afternoon, Nuno. On B2B, you're right. The market has a certain volatility indeed due to the different trends that we see in the market, of course, the technological evolutions, but also the inflation. This being said, we do apply price increases in B2B, but we do it in a very specific manner. We don't have a blanket price increase approach. What we do is we look at the legacy offerings, and there, and especially the ones that we're migrating away from, we propose price increases. That also enables us to push customers to new solution. Smart pricing is possible in those specific areas, and that's our strategy. It's not an overall blanket price increase approach, but it's very much a targeted price increase approach.
Okay. Understood. Thank you very much.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. We have no more question by phone. Maybe a little reminder, ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. No more question by phone.
If there are no more questions, we can close the call here. Thank you all for joining. Thank you for your questions. If any follow-up questions, you can send them to Eileen or myself. Thank you very much and have a nice weekend. Bye-bye.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes the conference call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect.