Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Proximus Q4 2020 Results Conference Call. For your information, this conference call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Madam Nancy Goossens, Director of Group Investor Relations. Madam, please go ahead.
Yes, thank you. We will start this call with some slides from the CEO, Guillaume Boutin. The first part is what you received actually in the deck this morning. After the introduction, we will go to your questions. For the Q&A session, we have here also Katleen Vandeweyer, the CFO [AI] , Jim Casteele, the Chief Consumer Segment. We have Anne-Sophie Lotgering, the Chief of the Enterprise Segment. Geert Standaert, the CTO. Dirk Lybaert, the Chief Corporate Affairs, and Matteo Gatta from BICS. They will take your questions in a moment, before we get to that, Guillaume, please start with your introduction. Thank you.
Thank you, Nancy. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us on this Q4 conference call. If I go to the next slide. When looking back on 2020, we cannot but stand still for a moment on how exceptional this year has been. During this pandemic, the telecom industry, more than ever, has shown the vital role it plays in modern society. We have kept people and businesses connected every day. Increased calling and the massive number of video meetings has boosted the traffic networks. The sanitary crisis has accelerated digital adoption across all domains and age groups, opening up new opportunities for e-commerce, e-educations, and many other domains. The increased needs for connectivity has also pushed the growth up in the Belgian internet markets. Moving to slide three. Proximus, as a large Belgian company, we were very serious in taking up our societal role.
We have launched several initiatives to support our customers, and the specific actions we took for the most affected industries like education, hospitals, culture, and healthcare, are still ongoing. Now moving to the next slide. It's within this sanitary crisis we have been building on our growth strategies. We launched many initiatives and achieved good progress in our key strategic pillars. We have listed on this page a number of examples around our networks, around our digital transformation, around also the diversification of our activities. Also on our commercial portfolio return that, as you're going to see in a few moments, generated quite a traction on the customer numbers. We have communicated those topics before, some even quite recently, so I will not take you through all of them.
Looking at this non-exhaustive list is however clear that we have been taking meaningful steps in executing our strategy and are preparing the path to return to growth as of 2022. Before our next slide now, before turning to the more financial and operational results, I'd like to highlight some achievements in the sustainability domain I am particularly proud of. Our climate deserves our greatest attention. Here in Belgium, we had probably the warmest week of the history for a month of February. Global warming has become a reality and we have to deal with. For Belgium, Proximus has an important role to play in reconciling the digitization of our economy with these environmental challenges we are facing. We have set the bold vision to make a net positive contribution to a net zero planet, and this by 2030.
To get there, we need to do more good and less bad for the environment, meaning that we need to enable our customers to reduce their carbon footprint through our products and services. This is the Scope 4 on the right side of the slide. At the same time, we also need to do less bad, meaning we need to act upon our total carbon footprint, which includes our own direct and indirect emissions, so Scope 1 and Scope 2, as well as our indirect emissions throughout the value chain, so Scope 3. I truly believe we have an enabling role to play to our society by providing products and solutions that can reduce our customer carbon footprint. We work together with them to develop innovative solutions enabling the decarbonization of our customers' footprint. As such, we can help make positive changes for the climate outside our own value chain.
Turning to the next slide for some achievements. We are proud to have met in 2020 our carbon footprint objective that we set for 2025. We have reduced our emissions by 105 kilotons. While the conditions were obviously quite exceptional, this acceleration proves that real change is within reach. At the same time, our footprint clearly shows we already strongly reduced our own emissions over the last decade. Our ambition is to go beyond our own operations to support our customers, as I said, and suppliers in embracing more sustainable habits. To that extent, we have drawn up our circular manifesto.
This is a commitment of Proximus and the supplier to collaborate in the implementation of projects and initiatives in order to design together sustainable products. We aim to continue the good trend and stay on track towards making a net positive contribution, which is a very bold objective to a net zero planet by 2030. Now moving to the next slide. As a telco, we have an enabling role to play in the [unification] of our society, as I said. Products and solutions that will enable the enterprise and public sector to decarbonize their footprint are, for example, and to be a little bit more concrete, a smart parking app that saves our customers time and fuel, which cuts back CO2 emission. Traffic management systems that track the emission of company cars and optimize their usage. Audio and video conference tools to avoid traveling and especially flying.
Monitoring devices for efficient energy consumption. IoT solutions such as smart buildings, smart cities, smart agricultures to enable better energy management and so on and so forth. Besides the work being done for B2B, we also need to create awareness amongst consumers on how to improve their carbon footprint in their daily life. By teaming up with Doconomy , we have kicked off the creation of an ecosystem of like-minded companies with the ambition to empower our consumers to make them aware of their daily carbon impact. The first objective is to help raise awareness about the urgency of climate change and our shared responsibility to act. Proximus and Doconomy will start by offering Proximus customers digital tools to track their carbon footprint. The second step is to enable them to opt for more sustainable lifestyle.
We are the first telco player in the world to team up with Doconomy and to engage our customers in climate action. Now moving to the next slide. We have set to ourselves the ambition to become truly circular by 2030, and are gradually saying goodbye to the current economic system of take, make, waste. The circular economy is based on the idea of no longer eating up raw materials, but extending their lifespan by reusing, repairing, and recycling them. We have been collecting and refurbishing modems and decoders since 2014. We are granting a second life to 90% of all devices, which corresponds to 2 million refurbishments. 489,000 devices have been prepared for a second life in the course of 2020, and we ambition to do even slightly more in 2021. One material we have been recovering on a grand scale is copper.
In 2020, 994 tons of copper were recovered. That is because we are gradually replacing our copper networks with our fiber network, and we'll come back to that, and we are in the process of outphasing certain buildings. 2020 was a rather exceptional year as we outphased two large buildings, which explains why we have a lower objective for 2021. On this slide as well, I'd like to mention the Don't Miss the Call initiative, which is a large campaign to raise awareness about phone recycling and to motivate people to return their old devices. The valuable and increasingly scarce raw materials can be reused in new phones. Our goal was to collect 100,000 phones in 2020, but then COVID interfered with these plans. Nonetheless, we still collected 65,000 phones, which is an amazing performance over the last past year.
We are extending the campaign in 2021 with the objective to collect 150,000 units this year. Going through to the next slide, let me turn for a moment to our financial and operational results. At first, on the operational results with the customer growth of the group, which is quite solid despite challenging circumstances. Now on slide 10, that is showing that over the past year, we have kept a strong commercial momentum in a very competitive setting, growing our core customer base with a specific focus on value customers, as you can see in the very nice trend that we have on TV customers. I'm very especially pleased that we have been able to show a very nice improvement from the growth we had achieved in 2019. This is true for all our three core products that we are putting on the market.
We have achieved these good results for a number of reasons. First, we are benefiting from the effort that we have done in terms of network investments. The high quality was proved during the confinement and lockdowns with our networks holding up very well in spite of the steep increase in usage. Besides our networks, we offer our TV customers which speaks a wide variety of content. We are, for the moment, the only one to really showcase Disney+, for example, for our customers. We continue to play a content aggregator role. As a last point, but having a very good contribution to our customer acquisition, are the offers that we have launched on the market.
We see for the Proximus brand, a very strong commercial traction for the new convergent offering, Flex, that we have launched on the 1st of July 2020, while our Scarlet brand continues to thrive in the market for cost-conscious customers. Moving to the next slide. With this very nice traction for Flex, we have ended 2020 with 317,000 subscribers for the Flex offer. This success is also driving an increase in our conversion rate, now reaching 60% of all multi-play customers. Flex is also driving a higher number of multi-mobile customers, and hence leading to positive impact on the RGUs, and therefore on the average revenue per customers, which is for the fourth quarter, up by 1.5%. Moving to the next slide.
What is more, is that with the rollout of our fiber network and with the acceleration of this rollout, we also start to see the positive effect of customers signing up for fiber. End 2020, we had a total of 65,000 fiber customers within our consumer segments. As we continue and accelerate the coverage, we see more and more customers coming on the fiber network. Now going to slide 14. Taking a look at our business segment. As you know, the sanitary crisis has made the economic environment quite challenging. In this setting, the enterprise segment has shown quite good resistance in terms of volumes, keeping good growth in its mobile base and keeping its internet base fairly stable. This in spite of competition on the Belgian market, which is heating up for the enterprise segment.
The competitive pressure is mainly shown in the mobile ARPU trend, which besides the effect of COVID-19 on roaming, is also reflecting some ongoing pricing pressure. Moving to the next slide. ICT was also, of course, exposed to the sanitary situation and the impact of the economy. While there was for sure exposure, all in all, the ICT revenues are still headed pretty well in 2020, showing small growth from the prior year and now representing 40% of the group revenues. In some of our key transformation areas, we are gaining traction supported by 5G and IoT developments. Let's now take a quick look at the domestic revenues. Moving to slide 16. Total domestic revenue for 2020 was down by 2.3%. The chart shows the main elements of this decrease.
The first three are, I would say our core revenues, being the revenue, telecommunication services, and ICT from both our consumer and [audio distortion]. This includes the mobile revenues, which were significantly impacted by lower roaming traffic and price increases. If we take out the roaming out revenue from both 2019, still the services revenues would have decreased by 0.6%. [audio distortion] The net driver of the domestic revenue decline was inbound revenue at low to zero, furthermore, roaming in and other product, which had some substitution effects on a year-over-year comparison. This was for domestic revenues. We'll have a look at BICS and TeleSign on the next slide. As we have announced a few weeks back, we have acquired the full ownership of BICS. As a reminder, BICS as a company is in fact composed of two large activities, TeleSign and BICS standalone.
As we explained the day of that announcement, TeleSign is a fast-growing leader in the digital identity space and in the programmable communication space. Its revenue grew over 2020 by nearly 57%, driven by authentication and mobile identity services. BICS standalone direct margin declined by 13.6% over the year, carrying the largest part of the COVID-19 impact. In addition to these adverse COVID-19 effects, the underlying direct margin was further impacted by MTN insourcing process, emphasizing the structural voice revenue decline. In contrast, growth was noted linked to the expansion of BICS activities in the cloud communication business. Moving to slide 18. We have closed the year with a strong reduction of our cost. For the domestic cost, we achieved a 3.9% decrease, of which EUR 45 million is a structural reduction and is largely the results of our headcount program we launched in March 2020.
On top of that, we also had some benefits from COVID-19, which were rather of temporary nature. Putting it all together, this brings me to the group EBITDA on slide 19. Here again, negative effects from COVID-19 have played a significant role in the decline. The group EBITDA for the full year 2020 ended EUR 34 million below the one of 2019, including an estimated negative impact from COVID-19 on our operation for almost EUR 50 million. On the next slide, you can see on the CapEx and investment side on slide 20, we have our fiber rollout that is progressing very well. We ended the year with a total number of 460,000 homes passed, an increase by 69,000 in the last quarter of 2020. As you can see on the chart, we have increased our weekly pace significantly, reaching 5,000 per week in the fourth quarter.
Hence, we are well on our way to realize our announced acceleration of this fiber rollout. On slide 21, you see that increasing our fiber investments, our CapEx for 2020 reached exactly EUR 1 billion, which was slightly above our estimation due to some additional customer CapEx in the last months of 2020, driven by the success of Flex, the fiber uptake, and some win in ICT domains. The normalized free cash flow for 2020 ended at EUR 364 million. As shown on the graph, the main driver for the lower free cash flow level compared to 2019 was the additional cash out related to the headcount programs with especially high cash out for the Fit for Purpose plan. I am slide 23 now. With EUR 836 million of EBITDA minus CapEx, we have delivered upon our guidance for the year.
This in spite of a bit higher than anticipated CapEx as I said before. This brings me to the last part of this introduction. Now looking at 2021 and beyond, now moving to 2025 with the guidance. As we set out during our CMD in March 2020, the year 2021 will be a transformational year for the company. It remains for 2021 still highly uncertain on what will be the level and duration of COVID-19, and what will be the related impact of this sanitary situation. In our assumption, we have anticipated a gradual recovery of roaming volumes in the second part of 2021. This included, we expect the 2021 underlying domestic revenues to remain rather close to the 2020 level, supported by a further customer growth in the consumer market, TV and mobile postpaid base, and a carefully managed transition within the enterprise segment.
For wholesale segment, we expect a continued impact from eroding SMS inbound traffic, but as you know, this has a neutral effect on domestic margins. To build the foundations for our growth trajectory, we anticipate in 2021 some additional expenditures. For our domestic operations, this is related to fiber migration and IT transformations. Also cloudification, which is a trend in the industry, and the rollout of the shared mobile network by MWingz will have a clear effect of increasing OpEx while reducing CapEx, so no impact on the cash. At the same time, we expect less cost benefit from COVID-19 related measures in comparison to 2020. All these elements count for a total of around EUR 50 million of operational expenses that will impact our domestic operations.
This aside, we continue our tight cost control in other areas and work on cost efficiency to further the digitization, automation and simplification of our operations. This brings us to the underlying group EBITDA for 2021, which we expect it to range between EUR 1,750 million and EUR 1,775 million. Our group CapEx is estimated to land close to EUR 1.2 billion for 2021. As we announced at our fiber update in January, we are aiming to double the rollout of speeds of fiber compared to 2020. In addition, we will be investing, amongst other things, in the mobile network as well as in IT transformation. With regards to our debt level, we anticipate that for 2021, our net debt to EBITDA ratio will remain below 1.6x .
This takes into account equity injections in the fiber JVs, the acquisition of the minority shareholders of BICS and of course, the acquisition of Mobile Vikings, pending the approval of the competition authorities. Now moving to slide 26. We confirm our ambition from our Inspire 2022 strategy, bring the domestic operations back to top line and EBITDA growth as from 2022. We also confirm our indirect OpEx ambition for 2022, being a net indirect OpEx reduction of between -1% to -2% CAGR, and this over the three-year period 2020-2022. With digitization benefits coming sooner than expected, this cost objective was already largely reached in 2020. In a view of obtaining structural cost efficiencies, we are shaping up a new company-wide cost program in which we are ambitioning a total of gross cost saving for about EUR 400 million.
Roughly half of this is reflected today with the 2020, 2022 cost objective, and the remainder is to come in the 2023 to 2025 periods. This brings me to my very last point, where I'm pleased to announce that our Board of Directors approved, proposed to the General Assembly to return to our shareholders a gross total dividend of EUR 1.2, of which EUR 0.50 was returned as interim dividend in December 2020. We also reiterate our intention to return over the result of 2021 and 2022, a gross dividend of EUR 1.2 per share to be considered at the floor. With this, I've come to the end of the presentation, so you can now open the line for your questions. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, you may press zero one on your telephone keypad. We have one such question from Mr. David Vagman from ING.
Yes. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Yes. Okay. Thank you. Thanks for taking my question. I've got two main questions. First, concerning your disposal program. Once your MWingz JV is fully operational, so after the integration, and given the very strong appetite from investor and the rich valuation for towers, would you consider selling part of your tower asset or a stake in MWingz? That's my first question. Secondly, on the free cash flow investment in 2020, 2021, could you elaborate on the total CapEx guidance and the equity cash injection for fiber in 2021? I thought there would be a reduction in 2021 CapEx compared to the initial Capital Market Day guidance, and this thanks to the JVs. In the end, you still guide for CapEx close to EUR 1.2 billion, which to me seems a bit on the high side.
Is it related to additional investment, not necessarily fiber-related, or is it simply phasing or customer premise equipment, so market share related? As I said, if you could also quantify the equity cash injection of 2021 and whether this is basically essentially front-end loaded. Thank you.
On your first question, as you said, the focus for 2021 is really to execute on the MWingz joint venture and to really work on the combination of the active mobile network of Proximus and Orange. That's really the focus of 2021. That said, you also know that the regulatory context of the Belgian market is a little bit more unfavorable compared to other markets in terms of towers. That said, I think it's fair to say that all options needs to be kept open and that we will consider that possibility not being a short-term focus for us, but we want to keep all options open. We definitely also work and prepare and do some preparatory work. As I said, we have also operation in Luxembourg that could be a test market for us, on that matter.
We will focus on MWingz, so on the combination of the active part of the network in Belgium and all options are still kept open for the towers in Belgium. I will also start on your second question, then the floor to Katleen. We will start with the CapEx question. I think the EUR 1.2 billion reflects really the acceleration we want to do, first ourselves. You know that we are first rolling out ourselves the more dense areas of Belgium. Indeed, this is ambitious in terms of rollout because we want to roll out 300,000 new rooms next year with our own fiber. That is a very ambitious acceleration. The level of CapEx will be also depending on our ability to reach that very ambitious acceleration of the rollout. I think this is a good investment.
If we can really meet that objective and we'll be happy to reach the EUR 1.2 billion of CapEx next year. Of course, depending on the achievements in terms of FTTH net new homes, the level of CapEx will be adapted.
As to your question on the free cash flow. Looking at the free cash flow consensus, which is EUR 330 million, I don't think we will be that far off. What is the free cash flow composed of? This is of course, the EBITDA minus the CapEx. We have as well several cash outs for the BICS acquisition for Mobile Vikings. We will end the equity injections in the JVs, which should be still quite limited in 2021. We have as well some good news. Some good news related to some timing and tax payments as well less restructuring payments that we will have to pay in 2021 compared to 2020.
Okay. Thank you. You're saying that looking at the left page net economic EBITDA indication that it would remain below 1.6x. This is quite, it seems if we would put ourselves at 1.5x, it could still be quite above consensus, it seems to me. It's not because of some equity cash injection in the JV.
The left edge of 1.6x takes into account of course our free cash flow, but it takes into account as well the acquisitions, to acquire the minority shareholders of BICS, Mobile Vikings and limited injections in the fiber JVs. This is being offset by some timing and tax payments and as well less restructuring payments.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Just to add, as Katleen said, if you look at the consensus on free cash flow today, I think the message was quite clear is that we will not land far off that consensus, in 2021.
Very clear. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. Next question is from Mr. Nicolas Cote-Colisson from HSBC. Sir, please go ahead.
Thank you. Hi, everyone. Back on the EBITDA bridge to 2021. First, can you explain better the EUR 50 million linked to fiber migration, IT transformation, cloudification? Can you be a bit more precise on that? If you also can say if it is impacting the gross margin or is it below that? Secondly, on network sharing, I thought the plan was for OpEx and CapEx incremental cost of EUR 75 million in 2021 to 2023. Has this changed and how does this contribute to the previously mentioned EUR 50 million extra cost? Third and last, what's the impact of fixed and mobile termination rates cuts expected for 2021 and 2022? Was it incremental EBITDA pressure you had to factor in your new guidance? Thank you.
Okay, we'll take your first and your third question. On the first one, on the EUR 50 million linked to fiber cloudification, you can consider 1/3 is one-offs, mostly linked to COVID. One-third is transitory cost for transformation. We are to be boosted our plan to transform our IT systems, and this will be a bump in OpEx, also linked to the CapEx spend on IT transformation. You know that part of your CapEx needs to be as a consequence on your OpEx line for IT transformation. One-third is more structural, linked to fiber migration of customers. It's really customer OpEx. When you migrate a customer from the fiber network to the copper network, you have an OpEx cost associated to the migration, which is going to be starting to be significant in 2021 and will continue on the coming years. Then you have the cloudification effect.
When you are moving to cloud your information system, you are switching CapEx costs to OpEx costs, and of course, with no impact on the cash. The way you are accounting for those cloud-based IT systems has an impact on your OpEx base. Just to summarize, 1/3 transition cost, not to be replicated after 2023. One-third of more structural increase of our cost. As said, our guidance of net decrease of our indirect cost of between -1% to -2% target decrease are between 2020 and 2022 includes all those elements. There is also that to be taken into account. On the FTR and fixed and mobile termination rates, for us, it needs to be very low impact on the direct margin. Only a small impact on the revenue side and no impact on the direct margin.
One question I forgot to answer on the first one. It's mainly below the direct margin, this effect of EUR 50 million. It's no impact on direct margin, mostly below direct margin that you're going to see those EUR 50 million next year. On the network sharing?
On the network sharing, indeed, we do have some investments to make in order to make the mobile network sharing agreement up and running. Those investments are included in the CapEx as well as in the OpEx part. They were included in our guidance, and the numbers haven't changed compared to our previous guidance.
Sorry to follow up on that. Within the EUR 50 million, in the 1/3, 1/3, 1/3, is there anything for this one sharing startup costs?
There is a part included. It's a small part which is included in the temporary impact that we will have for a short period. Of course, once the MWingz is up and running, those costs will disappear.
Okay. Perfect. Thank you, Katleen. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. Next question is from Mr. Emmanuel Carlier from Kempen. Sir, go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. I have two. The first one is on fixed voice. We saw accelerated losses in 2020 year-over-year. The question is, what is driving that? Do you believe that the 2020 trend will continue in the coming years? The second question is about the EBITDA guidance. If we compare consensus with your midpoint of the EBITDA guidance, there is more or less EUR 80 million difference. EUR 50 million is related to the additional expenses, but what is, in your view, the other EUR 30 million that is missing? Thank you.
Good afternoon, Emmanuel. Jim Casteele speaking. Indeed, we see in the consumer segment a declining appetite for fixed voice. This is also why we have launched mid last year our new Flex offer, which is addressing this new trend and is actually also delivering, as Guillaume already mentioned, very good operational results. Going forward for the coming quarters, I don't expect any real changes on this trend. I expect this trend to be similar to what we have been seeing over 2020. What is important for us and what we really look at is the [ARPC], so the average revenue per customer. As you know, our 3P convergent ARPC is around EUR 92, which is much higher than the current average [ARPC] of EUR 59. We still create a lot of value with our 3P mobile Flex solutions.
We also see in our Q4 results that we have been able, with Flex, to capture the valuable part of the market as we have delivered very strong performances both on internet, but also on digital TV and on mobile postpaid.
On the EBITDA of 2021 compared to the consensus, I think indeed you have the EUR 50 million. That could be part of the explanation. Second thing probably that could explain the difference is related to BICS and TeleSign. We still have an expected roaming impact for BICS because we have one additional quarter of COVID impact and all Q1 is compared to last year. At TeleSign, you've seen the growth numbers, and if we want to continue and to accelerate that growth, we need to reinvest a little bit in the growth, in the product, in the go-to-market of TeleSign to deliver a three-digit growth year-over-year for TeleSign next year. That also implies some investments in product and go-to-market, so that the second element, BICS and TeleSign, probably that has been a little bit different from what we have in mind and the guidance.
The last element probably, but to be confirmed, that the transition at the B2B businesses, even if we are really trying to do it as smooth as possible, this transition, the price pressure on the B2B market is there and could be one last explanation of the difference in between the consensus and our guidance.
Thank you for that. Maybe one other question I have is on the free cash flow. You commented on free cash flow, but to me was not very clear. Did you give a bit more precise guidance on 2021 free cash flow expectations?
What we did is that we just mentioned that the consensus today is at EUR 330 million for free cash flow for 2021. What we just said is that we should not land far off that number.
I still have a bit difficulties to understand exactly why. With the EBITDA being lower loss and CapEx higher, could you maybe quantify some of the variables like the cash taxes that will be materially lower?
Let me try to answer this. I think in terms of EBITDA, we gave the guidance. As well in terms of CapEx, we're guiding as well. On top of it, you will have some extra cash outs for the BICS acquisition, for Mobile Vikings, and as well a limited amount of equity injections in the fiber JVs. We will have dividend payments, of course. At the other hand, we will no longer have some important cash outs for the headcount transformation plan. We will have some good news in terms of tax payments.
Could you be a bit more precise on the tax guidance? Because that's a one-off, of course.
No. We don't disclose that. I can only repeat that we think that we won't be too far off from the free cash flow consensus of EUR 330 million.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. Next question is from Mr. Michael Bishop from Goldman Sachs. Sir.
Yes. Thanks very much. Good afternoon. Just a question on the top-line guidance, please. It sounds like from the presentation, you're suggesting that consumer growth can remain quite robust with the tailwinds from the better subscriber growth this year. I was just wondering, what are we thinking, is consumer growth going to be enough to offset the headwinds in enterprise? How will the two dynamics play out in 2021 within the guidance? Thanks.
That's exactly correct. I think that we indeed are having a very nice traction on the consumer part, and we are transitioning at the enterprise segment. We do think that the growth in the consumer activity will partly offset or all offset because it's hopefully in line with this year. Two elements, of course, the continued transitioning on transition period at enterprise, but also a continued decline on mobile incoming revenues. You do not forget that SMS mobile traffic will continue to decrease, so we also have to offset that decrease in mobile SMS incoming revenues.
Okay, you are saying basically that you can be flattish, or is this sort of approaching flat guidance?
Yeah, sorry, I was muted. Yeah, that's what we guided. I think this is quite clear.
Okay, thanks very much.
Thank you, sir. Next question is from Mr. Ruben Devos from KBC Securities. Sir, please go ahead.
Yes, good afternoon. Two questions. First one relates to the guidance on the net debt to EBITDA ratio. Thanks for providing that. I was curious where this ratio, aside from cash out from acquisitions that have been announced, it also includes some assumptions on proceeds from future asset disposals in line with the #inspire2022 objectives. For instance, thinking about the intention to downsize the headquarters in Brussels or the sale of other activities such as Be-Mobile as the first one. The second one actually relates to COVID, mostly. Belgium, there have been some quite stringent lockdown measures in place. Initially, most of your shops closed, then later reopened. Your commercial performance did not suffer too much in Q4, on the contrary. Related to customer installations and deployment of fiber, just wondering how much of a challenge are their current measures today?
More broadly, you've managed to very much quantify the overall impact of COVID-19 in 2020. Obviously curious for 2021, what are your assumptions this time around? Thank you.
On the net debt to ratio EBITDA, there is of course now the cash out for the acquisition, but there is nothing in it coming from disposal of assets. The headquarters in Brussels, it is going to be a long story now because we are not planning to move before 2024, 2025 timeframe. Be-Mobile is no more to sell. I think this is really only the acquisition of Mobile Vikings and BICS that is reflected in that guidance point. On the customer installations and fiber rollout, I have to say that we, and thanks to the team. Geert is here, Geert can answer the question.
Fine, yeah. With respect to fiber deployment and installation, I can tell you we're on good track. It was in fact last year that we had an impact of COVID, because you might remember that during a serious number of weeks, we were no longer permitted to do roadworks and trenching, which is not happening today. On the contrary, we see that we have more flexibility, for example, in city centers. The permits we're getting to intervene now and do as much as possible while it's calmer in the streets and in the centers is just a positive for deployment. At this moment in time, I can tell you for 2021, we are on track with the plan, which is the doubling of what we did last year.
Okay, thanks.
To your second question, of course, it is very difficult to forecast what international travel will be going forward. What we can say is that we will have one more quarter, the first quarter of COVID impact compared to last year. Right now, we think that there might be a slight recovery of travel as of the second half. For BICS, of course, we have exposure to COVID here in Belgium that's coming out. For BICS, we have a worldwide footprint. Here, we are foreseeing as well some prudent incremental performance as of Q2.
All right. Thanks. Just quickly come back on the net debt to EBITDA ratio. It includes Mobile Vikings, and therefore enterprise consideration of EUR 130 million. Yeah, that assumes that we should also take into account the EBITDA impact from Mobile Vikings. Will it be possible to disclose that as it still depends on timing of the approval?
No, of course, it depends on the timing of the approval, so there is only the cash out effect in that guidance. It's going to be a limited impact for even if we manage to close the operations by mid-year, it's going to be a very marginal impact on the EBITDA. Also knowing that the synergies can be executed as from 2021, the network synergies, because you know that 2022, sorry, next year. Mobile Vikings customers are not on the Proximus network. This is an initial synergy for us as from 2022.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. Next question is from Madam Nayab Amjad from Citi. Please proceed.
Hi, thank you for taking my question. I had two questions. One of the cost savings, you mentioned that half of it is related to up to the period 2022, and most of it has realized in 2020. Is it fair to assume there'll be no cost savings benefit at all in 2022? If you could just clarify the drivers for top line and EBITDA growth in 2022. My second question is, what's the update on the sale of VOO, and what would be preferable from a Proximus perspective, a VOO Telenet combination or a VOO Orange Belgium combination? Thank you.
On the cost savings, indeed, we said that most of it had been realized in 2020. You saw similarly in the communication, we made it a point that we have adverse cost to overcome. [EUR 50 million] of customer cost. Some are one-offs from, as I said, transition costs, and some others are social costs increase. To overcome that cost increase, we need to continue decrease on direct cost. That's why we have launched another cost-cutting plan program, which is an enterprise plan, to substantiate the 2021 to 2022 evolution of our cost, but also to prepare for further control of our cost after 2022. That's really why we have launched it, because now to decrease the cost in 2023, you need to work now in the transformation of your systems, of your IT platforms, to prepare for 2023.
It's not like you can decrease your cost over one month. This is why we have launched this new plan, and that is also why we will continue to be very focused on executing on cost efficiencies going forward. On the second question, on the VOO sale process, honestly, this is not my concern today. My concern is to re-execute on the Inspire 2022 plan. We have so many things to do. We need to continue the customer attractions. We need to accelerate the fiber roll-out. We need to transition the B2C segments. This is what we are really focusing where we speak, and we'll be ready to win that market, whoever is the owner of VOO. I cannot say more than that.
The next question is from Mr. Roshan Ranjit from Deutsche Bank. Sir, go ahead.
Great. Thank you. Afternoon, everyone. Two questions from me, please. Just on the ICT unit. You say that you, I think, increased your share. Is it possible just to give us some thoughts looking into 2021? Obviously, there was some volatility through the year, tougher comps in certain quarters. Should we be thinking about a, I guess, relatively flat profile through 2021? Is that going to be a bit more lumpy? Anything you can say there will be helpful. Secondly, just circling back to maybe one of the previous questions. On the EUR 50 million domestic cost now, I think it's quite clear for us to get a sense of how the fiber migration costs will go across in the coming years. On the cloudification, is there any variability there? I think that you said capitalization of the hardware.
Outside of the MWingz, is there any scope for any variability in that number translating between OpEx and CapEx beyond FY 2021? Thank you.
Good afternoon. It's Anne-Sophie Lotgering, responsible for the enterprise business unit. Thank you very much for your question on ICT. As you did see, indeed, we were able to increase our ICT share for total revenues in 2020, and we anticipate that we can do that again in 2021. What's very important for us is the mix of the ICT revenue, because as we've been able to demonstrate in Q4 of this year, it's very important that our services contribution increase versus the product contribution. As part of the transformation of our business moving forward, our ability to increase the services contribution out of the total ICT contribution is absolutely key moving forward as well. That's what I can say in terms of guidance for 2021.
Just sorry, just to follow up. Just in terms of taking share. What type of customer base and who are you taking share from? If you can elaborate on that, please.
Sorry, I didn't quite catch the question. You were very faint. May I ask you to repeat it? I apologize.
Sure, no worries. It was just on taking the share. What type of customers and who are you taking share from, please?
Traditionally, our biggest share of ICT business has been our top customers. One of the main areas, as part of our transformation, is to make sure that we're also able to address the smaller type of customers with more standardized ICT offers. That's also part of the transformation of the business moving forward. I hope that answers your question.
Yes. That's clear. Thank you.
Yeah. This is Geert speaking. On your question on cloudification, let me maybe put some more context first around that. It is as such that we as Proximus, we pursue what we call a hybrid multi-cloud strategy. That implies, in fact, that we organize our internal IT across multiple platforms. That means traditional on-site platforms, fully virtualized on-site environments, but also different on-site private clouds, but also different public cloud players. The financial impact that we are referring here to is in fact the financial impact of cloudification towards public cloud players. In that sense, when you move workloads to the public
Public cloud, of course, at one end, you avoid CapEx investment on your own infrastructure. You avoid renewal of your own infrastructure. Of course, that implies then a higher renting fee for consuming the resources of those public cloud players, and that goes into OpEx. At this moment, for 2021, that is indeed a trajectory where we are moving gradually more and more of our workload towards the public cloud. In that sense, yes, you already have an impact in 2021, and where we assume that a certain single-digit percentage of our IT is moving towards public. This will further grow in the outer years.
Just to add, when you are a small player like Proximus, you really need to leverage the R&D capabilities of the public cloud providers if you want to continue to be more and more efficient in the years to come. This is also part of further overall efficiencies of the total cost of ownership of our IT system. That's really why we are very happy to take that road, even if this is also a bit weighting on our OpEx costs.
Great. That's very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. Next question is from Mr. Ben Bryant from Credit Suisse. Sir, go ahead.
Hello. Thank you for taking my questions. I have a few, if I may. The first is on wholesale. You've already expressed that it may be a bit weak based on roaming and travel, possibly not coming back till H2. Do you have, in your expectation, any pickup in wholesale fiber revenues? Are you speaking to any significant wholesale partners, given that cable prices are going up? It could possibly be a tailwind. Also, on BICS, do you have any internal or targets? Have you said anything publicly about when you expect TeleSign growth to offset legacy decline? Lastly, just on TV, have you seen any impact from the Streamz launch? That would be quite interesting given that the [audio distortion] was quite strong last year. Thank you.
Just on your question on wholesale, of course, we are not going to be specific on numbers around our expectation for the different topics you mentioned, the roaming, travel, and et cetera. Indeed, the specificity of Proximus with the fiber development compared to other operators is that we are not shifting copper wholesale revenues towards fiber wholesale revenues because we do not have a fixed copper wholesale revenue today or very limited fixed copper wholesale revenue today. That's indeed an opportunity for us if we manage to meet the acceleration of the rollout of the fiber network. We could have more and more customers on our fiber network. It's not going to be material for next year. In the long run, this could be indeed an opportunity for us also compared to other geographies where fiber has been rolled out.
On the BICS, I will leave the floor to Matteo.
Thank you for the question. I'd like you to actually restate the question because I didn't catch the second part of it.
Sure. I was just wondering if you have any targets on TeleSign growth to sort of offset legacy decline in that business. Thank you.
I think your question is about EBITDA, most likely. I would like to remind you that basically, TeleSign is operating in a market which is CPaaS market. It's delivering above market rate in terms of growth. We expect that, of course, we expect that to continue. On the BICS side, as we have explained also in our call on February 9th, basically, BICS consists itself in three areas of the business. Legacy, where you have a structural voice decline, where we continue to optimize margin, awaiting to participate in consolidation. The core business, which has been impacted by COVID, and the recovery is linked to the recovery of the COVID, which from a BICS perspective is a global matter, fairly complex to predict. Therefore, we are very disciplined and prudent on that front. We expect staggered and very diversified recovery of COVID across the globe.
The growth areas where we intend to announce our exposure to the cloud comm and CPaaS enablement market. We're building on the basis of what has been built in BICS in the past months.
This is Jim speaking. On your last question on Streamz. As you know, our latest TV offer is building on Android TV as a platform. One of the big advantages of Android TV is that we are able to very quickly onboard new content partners. This has actually allowed us, as of launch of Streamz in the Flanders region, to offer Streamz as a service also to Proximus customers. We didn't have a negative impact of the launch of Streamz. It's actually for us more a positive impact because we can now offer to our customers content that in the past was not available to them.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. We have another question from Mr. Nicolas Cote-Colisson from HSBC. Sir, go ahead.
Yeah, sorry. Me again. It's going to be short. On KPIs, any explanations around the fall in the quad play customer base in the last couple of quarters? Is it a change in market dynamics? I can see an increase in triple play parallel. What product clients are dropping? Thank you.
This is Jim again. Indeed, as you can see in the quarterly evolutions of fixed voice, actually this is also what you see coming back in our quad play. As said, our triple play Flex offer is really driving a lot of value, with a very strong ARPC. We're really happy with that performance. Indeed, the impact on quad play is linked to fixed voice being less and less appetite for the consumer segment.
Okay. That makes sense. Do I understand correctly that you said about the TV trends that what we have seen in the last couple of quarters is something we should also see in terms of the net adds for 2021?
That's indeed the ambition and that's the trend that we have been seeing over the last months. We will continue to drive the market and our customer acquisition in that sense.
Thank you. That's it for me. Cheers.
We have one last question from Madame Nayab Amjad from Citi. Go ahead. Madame Amjad, your micro has been opened.
Hi, can you hear me?
Yes.
Hello? Yeah. Just one quick question. Would you consider co-investing with Telenet and Flanders or having some sort of collaboration with them rather than both of you overbuilding each other's network?
Nayab, I'm sure you understand that I cannot answer very precisely on that question. What we are doing is building this fiber network, and we always stated that this fiber network is an open network, so we'll be more than happy to welcome Telenet on this network. We are also hoping for a rational behavior of all players in the infrastructure play. We see what could be also the outcome of the discussion between Telenet and Flanders. Let's see how it goes. We are quite confident that we are building the best network, the best infrastructure. It's an open infrastructure, so there is no reason why we should not be in a position to welcome Telenet or others on our network.
Thank you.
Thank you. We have no other questions. Back to you for the conclusion.
Yes, thank you all for your participation. Should you have any follow-up questions, you can contact the investor relations team. Thanks. Bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, this conference call is concluded. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect.