Good afternoon, welcome to Deutsche Telekom's conference call. At our customer's request, this conference will be recorded and uploaded to the Internet. May I now hand over to Mr. Hannes Wittig.
Yeah. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our full year 2019 and halfway CMD update conference call. With me today is our CEO, Tim Höttges, and our CFO, Christian Illek. Tim will first go through his 2019 highlights and he will present the halfway update since our 2018 CMD. This will be followed by Christian, who will run through the quarter's financials. After this, we have time for Q&A. Before I hand over to Tim, please, as always, pay attention to our disclaimer, which you'll find in the presentation. Now it's my pleasure to hand over to Tim.
Yeah. Thank you, Hannes, and welcome also from my side. By the way, before I start with my long speech, I want to say happy birthday because Deutsche Telekom is turning 25. Therefore, we are celebrating our birthday. Even our press conference today took place with a cake. Feel shared with a virtual cake today. We've made two presents for us today. The first one is this super performance which we had in 2019. I think we will go into the numbers in very much detail. We are very proud about what we achieved. The second one is about the progress we made on the Sprint transaction. We see a light at the end of the tunnel and we are now very confident that this deal is taking place with all the benefits it's going to have for us here at Deutsche Telekom.
Even for Europe, I think it's very important just having a company like Deutsche Telekom is able to be, or to come into the number one position in the U.S. at one point in time. This is, I think, a historical day for us. Before I go into the detail, let me talk a little bit about what we're doing. As Hannes said earlier, we have a halfway update of our Capital Markets Day. We just want to show you where we stand with the execution of that program and what has been achieved so far, and how we're looking forward on the things. Therefore, it's a little bit longer and more detailed. Even you have seen, we have made a special presentation for you.
I will start with some overview charts, followed by the 2020 guidance, then I go into the highlights of each of the segments. Please, there's much more details in this presentation about every single item we addressed at Capital Markets Day. Please have a look into this document again, or discuss the topics with our investor relation team around Hannes. Let me start on page three. On the left you can see what we call here the Telekom flywheel. Investments are driving growth, customer growth. The customer growth combined with efficiency is driving financial results, the financial results gives us the opportunity to do investments customer growth, the customer growth with the productivity is creating value. This is simply what we are doing over the last years.
Step by step, we are executing on the big game changers for our operations. What were my highlights in 2019? The first one, we completed two major multi-year, and by the way, even multimillion investment programs in Germany. The one is our committed FTTC build out. Almost 90% now of Germany covered, low churn. The second one is the All-IP migration which we here now formally declare accomplished. There are certain smaller things on the B2B side which are following, but nevertheless, the majority is done. By the way, we're not talking about Germany, we're talking about seven markets in Europe. Six of them are already fully IP and the last one is now following. We're ramping up 5G at a high pace on both sides of the Atlantic, by the way.
For the first time in history, the U.S. team is ahead of AT&T and Verizon. With our 600 MHz spectrum, we were able to deploy 5G in almost 200 million households already, which is ahead of the others. We achieved another year of strong growth and financial growth, ahead of our capital markets targets. Look, sometimes, I even can't believe it, every year we have overachieved the main KPIs, in this regard, and the segment contributions because we are not growing only in the U.S., we're growing in all segments. The growth is confirmed by today's guidance. Very important because there were some concerns from our shareholders and investors, we are back in our debt rating comfort zone. Christian will talk about that later on. You see, as promised, we are very safe in our BBB+ rating again, which is very important for us.
As you see later in the presentation, we also made good progress with regards to agility. Obviously, I thought I'm always agile but that's the new buzzword. What I think more important, the digitization is something where we did a digital health check within the organization, as we called it, and trying to understand where we stand. The outcome is very encouraging. Honestly, I didn't know all the digitization efforts within this company, and I'm very impressed by the magnitude of these initiatives. ESG, we are number one. Honestly speaking, remember, I was in DMEXCO. I even made it clear here, earlier, three years ago, we started our sustainability and initiatives here within this company. We made good progress on this one. We included ESG into our corporate strategy.
The strategy is more or less stable over the last year. This is a new attempt that we even strengthen, that everybody thinks that way. We will have a big attempt towards ESG going forward. Let's talk about that later. Last not least, the biggest thing of everything, the merger with Sprint. If you don't have enough to do, which I can imagine, please have a read of the decision from Judge Marrero, the 179 pages. I'm very impressed. I'm very impressed how he judged the situation. He always overseen the competition in this market. I think he did a great assessment. Very happy about the outcome of this process. Page four, the US deal, what an incredible journey this has been. We started, our business was almost dead. Everybody told to sell it. It was shrinking. The Un-carrier came.
Team effort between the U.S. and Germany with regard to investments and the Un-carrier strategy. Huge investments, almost EUR 58 billion into the assets over the years. The unprecedented turnaround, historical one, and I'm maybe using this word for the second time, but you know that. There hasn't been a turnaround like this in our industry so far. Now, honestly, we have all the pieces strategically in place to supercharge this business and to create even more upside for our customers and shareholders. Our attempt is going to be to become the number one in the U.S. Not more and not less, but this is our attempt. We are very happy about the decision so far, and we can confirm the enormous benefits of the merger and the business case. We are now working through the mining steps to get the merger done.
Hopefully, in the second quarter 2020, we are able to close the transaction. Before we go through the details, let's look a quick summary of our 2019 financial performance, which you can see on page number five. It's a simple story, we grow across the board. This is very important because it's not only based on one pillar, it's based on all the pillars which we are operating in. All the segments are growing, all the profitability metrics are growing, too. If you see the numbers, even more impressive. It is a 6.5% revenue growth. It's a 7.2% EBITDA growth. It's a 15.8% free cash flow growth. It's almost 78% growth on the earnings. If you adjust them, it's still an 8.9%. These are the numbers from my mind here.
If I'm not 100% correct on every second, a number here, but this is the target, and I do not know any kind of other telecommunication operator who's even coming close to these numbers. Let's go through the flywheel in more detail. Page six, Germany, we passed 35 million homes with fiber. We passed 28 million lines with super vectoring. 99% of the lines have been migrated to All-IP. In the European Union, in our businesses, we passed 10 million homes with fiber, of which over three million are already with full fiber. On the mobile network side, we are leading. There is only one market where we are not perceived the best network. In all the markets we have the leadership position in. This differentiation via best quality is paying off, and thank you for letting us invest a bit more than our competition.
I think it's paying off. We have, on the 5G side, 450 5G sites, which are up and running and we will connect all the major cities with 5G by the end of this year. We are well on track in this regard. 20 big cities going to be connected. Page seven, our customer growth remains strong. It is the European footprint where we added two million converged customers. I think 9.6 million. I want to say hello to the number 10 million. Hopefully, it's coming soon. We have really a big base of our customer in converged offerings already. 15 million homes are served by our fiber products in Germany. As I said, low churn on this one, and we saw very solid mobile customer growth on both sides of the Atlantic. Let me spend one sentence on Germany with regards to fixed line.
It is the task of the organization to now better utilize these investments which we have taken. It's the task of the organization to create less churn because the base is the utmost most important. There's one thing clear for us, if we want to see a reasonable amortization of this infrastructure, the 40% market share is a must-have for our organization. The task of fighting back on certain initiatives from our competitors is clearly defined. 40% is the number which I'm expecting from our B2C and B2B heads in the German fixed line environment. Moving on to indirect costs. By the way, since Thomas Dannenfeldt has left and Christian came into office, we're making big progress on costs. You see that we had EUR 1.5 billion net indirect cost in our Capital Markets Day. Thomas was talking about it. Christian is executing. I love that, Christian.
We have EUR 800 million run rate savings. We are perfectly on track. For this target, as you can see on page eight, by the way, best greetings to Thomas, who sits in Patagonia. All the best for you. All the segments and many activities are contributing to these savings. Look, guys, I'm making a little bit, let's say, fun here. This is a very serious effort in the company. Service efficiency improvements in Germany are helping us big time. We have, again, halved the amount of service complaints and cases here in Germany. I'll come to that in a second. We have made big progress with digitization. I'll go to that in a second. The T-Systems turnaround, selling off business which are not profitable, focusing the portfolio, are cutting out middle layer management. This is paying off.
We see good improvements on the T-Systems turnaround as well. This altogether is helping us to reduce our costs. The digitization is, I say, I do not know whether this is a statement or whether this is our ambition, but I was asked, Tim, if I would wake up in the morning at 2:00 A.M. and I do not know what to do, what the strategy of Deutsche Telekom is, what should I do? The answer of that would be simple. I would say digitize. You cannot do enough about that one. Whether you are in the service, whether you are in the marketing with big data, whether you are in the technical area with the softwarization and the virtualization of our infrastructure, whether you are in the SG&A. Wherever you are, just digitize because this is the biggest lever for creating productivity, time to market, better customer experience.
It must become the DNA of this organization. This slide, it's complex. Sorry, guys, for that one. It is just the peak of the iceberg of the initiatives. I have asked Hannes to give you a day where you are understanding all the initiatives in the segments, in the different functions, on how we are driving digitization within this organization. You can make your own assessment on how good we are. I think we are doing a decent job here, and can be always more. We have increasing success with our customer app, for instance. We have a penetration of 93%, for instance, in Greece. In Germany, we're 30%, so we have to do more in this one. I expect more penetration there. Nevertheless, I think it's understood in the organization.
In Germany, we are using almost 3,000 bots in different areas, which are helping to become faster, more productive. We leverage digitization to improve the efficiency of our FTTH build-out. This entire planning, the entire rollout, everything is in a new digital tool. This helps us significantly to reduce the bureaucracy and complexity of the planning and build phase. Sales and T-Systems and service activities are getting digitized with our tools from the well-known institutions where the ServiceNow, our Salesforce, and others. Our German IT has shifted towards an agile delivery. Most of our projects are run by eight big tribes in the organization. Honestly, this is something which sounds easy but it's a very complex undertaking to integrate all the functions into tribes, overcoming the silos in big organizations. On page 10, let me quickly recap how we think about capital utilization.
I mentioned that already. There's one thing which is driving it, and this is sharing. Life is for sharing, and we do share a lot of our infrastructure already, and we will do more about that one. We will give others access to our infrastructure, and we will use more third-party infrastructure ourselves. Wholesale is becoming more relevant in our business. This is helping efficient investment in the industry, and it's helping consolidation as well. Remember, we called it the Allianz der Willigen at one point in time.
We are making good progress in this regard, whether it's the EWE TEL deal, whether we have a wholesale agreement with NetCologne, whether we are having a deal with Deutsche Glasfaser in this regard, or whether it's the 4,000 or 6,000 sites which we are sharing with our telecommunication competitors here in the German landscape to overcome white spots, which we have to close to offer a very good infrastructure. Page 11. Let me talk about sustainability. I think, we do not need sustainability as a chapter on page 274 on the annual report. What we need is a sustainable business model. A sustainable business model means that everybody in the organization, everybody, is really thinking about how he can address topics like CO2 emission reduction, plastic-free environment, renewables, and other topics.
Therefore, we included that as the major change to our strategy, as well to the Capital Markets Day. We are putting even money where your mouth is. We have put money behind that. Look, to give you one example, that the U.S. is investing into solar panel companies and using renewable energies to handle their energy consumption. That we have already, in Germany, 100% of the entire energy consumption based on renewables, and that by next year, in the whole business of Deutsche Telekom, 100% renewables will be used. That we have the task of reducing our CO2 emission by 90%, knowing that we have an increasing energy demand, that we have 25% lower value chain emissions per customers by 2023 as a target, should show you that everybody in the organization should think, should try to understand and improve the situation. This has not gone away.
We don't want that it's going away. We have achieved already some achievements here but we're still at the beginning. If I talk about plastic-free environment, if I talk about the legacy of 26,000 cars in Germany, we make a big attempt towards e-mobility in our company. This should show you that we are on a good track. By the way, I'm very happy that the ESG ratings, which were recently published, and Christian, you might go into that one later on as well are showing outstanding performance for Deutsche Telekom. In a lot of rankings, we are already perceived as number one position. Let me move on to page number 13, which shows you that we are not only growing in the U.S.
For the second year in a row, we are also seeing strong growth on this side of the Atlantic, with all segments contributing last year. We are, in all the segments, ahead of the capital markets guidance. It's not just the U.S., it's as well the European entities. If you go to the page number 14, let me reiterate and give you the new guidance on Deutsche Telekom. We expect EBITDA after lease for the group to grow by 3% to EUR 25.5 billion and free cash flow to grow by 14% to EUR 8 billion. We stick to the stable ex U.S. CapEx promise that we gave you at the 2018 Capital Markets Day. As usual, you can find the detailed segment-level guidance for our business in the appendix to this presentation.
As you know, this year we were EUR 600 million ahead of our EBITDA guidance and ahead of our free cash flow guidance. We took that as a new starting point, and on top of that, we are now expecting this 3% growth. You see us very confident about these very ambitious targets in an industry around me, which makes me always depressive. How are we going to make that? Page 15, you see the German business, which is very important for our activities. Despite all the market noise, we are delivering steady commercials in these operations. In 2019, we added more than half a million contract net adds and almost 200,000 broadband net adds. Our mobile customer churn is down to a record of 0.9% per month. 60% of our own branded mobile customers are converged.
Thanks to our market-leading platform, we added half a million new TV customers in the last two years. Honestly, I believe even our commercials on TV are very strong and they're working very nicely. Just have a look into this one. Two comedians are selling the product in a way I've not seen before. We grew in B2B despite the headwinds from the IP migration. This was not an easy task, because the moment where you are talking about analog to IP, everybody questions, why do I need this connection? We discussed that in previous calls. Despite that, we had the net adds just mentioned. Page 16, I think the numbers speak for themselves. For me, this is very important to understand what is happening in the machine room, the engine room of this company.
Because this is the oil of the machines and just three KPIs. The share of agile projects has grown sixfold to 60% in the organizations. When we come, for instance, to our OSS for FTTH, this was entirely developed in Agile mode, and in a very short time to market. The time to market has halved in 2019, and we will further improve this. We have started to ramp up reskilling, but clearly, this is a big challenge for us, and we have to grow. We have even adapted our cultural values, our guiding principles in the company, where we said that we have to grow our people but everybody has to stay curious as well because it's not just about the programs. It has to do as well with our employees who should be curious about change, and entering into new roles.
What, for me, the most impressive one is how the IT, as an enabler for all our business, has improved and has contributed. Peter Leukert and his entire team here in Europe made an outstanding job. This is something we can see as a consequence of this good IT performance on the next slide. For me, very important, the service arena. There are a lot of areas where we made good progress. Just give me a quick feeling about what's going on. Waiting times, down 43%, complaints down 50%, after a year where we reduced it already by 50%. Missed appointments are down 84%. By the way, we don't measure that the way that we ask our people whether they have missed appointments. We ask the customers whether they felt we missed the appointment. Fault repairs are down 19%, and first-time resolution is up 30%.
I think the last topic is, for us, the most important one, and we want to significantly improve this KPI going forward. It's noteworthy that we achieved this improvement in customer experience despite the ongoing All-IP migration and the associated disruption which were coming with that. We expect an even further slowdown of complaints and other things in 2020 because of the end of the All-IP migration for most of our customers, especially the B2C customer side. This, by the way, is then driving costs down. The moment where we have costs down, we have cash flow to invest or even to share that with you guys. This is the flying wheel again, and that shows how we think about things. Moving on to the network side on page 19, sorry, 18.
Here you can see, and in the middle is, by the way, the chart Christian likes most. This is not our slide, it's a slide which is always published by German journalists. What you can see here is that we always had a significant mobile data speed advantage, and that we have extended this advantage over Vodafone and Telefónica. By the way, guys, these guys are loudly announcing, By the way, we are carrying most of the data traffic in Germany, and therefore we are the guardhorse of the mobile market. Congratulations. The other guys, like Vodafone, says, And we have most of the SIM cards registered in German networks, 50 million. Congratulations. Guys, I give a shit.
The average mobile data speed is what matters, and the customers who are coming to us matters, and what they're paying as a revenue and are willing to contribute to that, it matters. We are by far service market leader, we are by far the quality leader in this network, and we are by far the perceived network leader in mobile. That was right, and it's going to be right, and I think this slide speaks for itself. On FTTC, in the next slide, it's a little bit different. Even here, I think we took the right actions here. At least the customer numbers are supporting this. We now serve 80% of German homes with at least 50 Mbps . Honestly speaking, Hannes, this number is wrong. I think it's higher already, the 80%, but that is just, it's our number.
60% with at least 100 Mbps . We have 28 million households serving up to 250 Mbps . Combined with this super vectoring offering, which we currently have, it's helping a lot to convince new customers. At least, as well, reducing the churn in this field. Which brings me to page 20, because we can call the FTTC rollout and vectoring almost finalized. Therefore, the big question going forward is now what is happening now on the FTTH side? We call it the FTTH factory. You can see that on that slide, what we are aiming for. First, we want to ramp up our FTTH rollout, our own FTTH rollout, to two million FTTH households per year, latest from 2021. That's what we are working on. We don't want to start from scratch. We have already done some homework.
The first one in Germany, everything is expensive, including the FTTH rollout. We had to work hard to reduce the cost per home passed. Now we are below EUR 1,000 already. We are still striving for significant further reductions in the way how we are deploying it. Most of the costs are construction costs, and therefore, we are pushing legal wise but even other things to get this cost reduced. I already mentioned our new fiber OSS, which we have, which is another piece in the puzzle. Even here, we made important progress, this system is digitizing the entire process. On top of that, we made important progress with the fiber collaborations. We have a 1.5 million line project in Stuttgart, which is up and running.
We have a similar size project together with EWE TEL, our proud partner in the north, to establish a fiber joint venture here as well. We got approval for this deal and for the conditions and the way going forward, which makes it important because this is a blueprint for all the other partnerships which we are striving for going forward. We are also working on the right commercial framework for fiber. We want to be constructive, and we are in a dialogue with a lot of players, including the regulator, to establish that they're not inefficient, three of redundant infrastructures being built. If we can use an infrastructure of a third party, we will do so. We do not have to build it ourselves. We will be always open on wholesale as well, that somebody is using our infrastructure.
It doesn't make sense to overbuild fiber infrastructure in areas. If there is no access, we're not letting it happen. This is not the problem which we are seeing right now. Page number 21, European businesses. The EU segment achieved 3% organic EBITDA growth last year. This is the eighth consecutive quarter of EBITDA growth. Guys, do you remember? This was one of our problem child, and we were very brave on the Capital Markets Day to say, Guys, we are turning that around, and we want to have this value-enhancing storyline around it. Please have a focus on that one. We always found it a little bit like the orphan child in our portfolio. I think Srini Gopalan and his team did a terrific job over the last year in the way how they turned it into a real gem. I'm very happy.
It's not just cost reduction which he drove aggressively. It is even in our convergence fiber and ICT businesses, where he is now driving differentiation. If you see the fiber to the home build-out, which is aiming in these countries, it's significantly beyond 50% penetration. He has a clear path towards FTTH. Group development. Our tower business and the Netherlands business. Talking of good plans, the next slide is clearly showing that having a good plan is the start point but execution is even more. They did beyond the improvement of the business. They integrated the Tele2 merger very successful in the Netherlands business and without remedies. And we proved that it's possible to get one player out of the market and at the same time, increasing competitiveness and the profitability of the business.
I think, hopefully some Brussels authorities are listening to this call here and looking at slide 22 because you can easily find out that it was the right thing to let us run and challenge the status quo of KPN and of Vodafone in this environment. We are doing terrific. The mobile service revenue growth is in the vicinity of 3% over the last four quarters, 90% EBITDA growth, EUR 150 million synergies are on the merger, realized in higher spectrum efficiency, and achieving with this the mobile leadership. We were the winner of the P3 and the Umlaut test for the fifth year in a row. For me, the most important one is because sometimes you get criticized of bad network in a country.
I always say, by the way, we know how to build networks because the best network ever measured in Umlaut is the T-Mobile network, which has been T-Mobile network in the Netherlands. That's the Dutch business. We are very optimistic with regard to the future. Very entrepreneurial management running this. Going to page number 23, which shows you the towers. I know you're very curious about our towers. There's so much noise on towers and sometimes some voodoo as well. Let's for a moment focus on the fundamentals of this business. First, you know that we have a very large and attractive tower portfolio. What you know as well with the 5G deployment, this tower profile is growing at a high pace. We are the lead tower operator in the German market, and by the way, even in Europe, if you combine all the European towers.
There's no one else bigger than we but let's focus on Germany first. This market offers above-average growth opportunities because of sharing and because of new sites which we are adding to this portfolio. The 5G build-out obligations are a guarantee for growth of this business. We collaborate well with our peers. At the portfolio, we have a 2.3 times sharing co-location ratio on these towers already. What you can see, we have even strengthened the entrepreneurship in that business under GD. Thorsten Langheim and his team and Bruno Jacobfeuerborn were able to significantly ramp up the EBITDA from EUR 585 million- EUR 771 million. This is a significantly increased business of almost EUR 200 million within one year, which is, I think, a very impressive achievement.
Now, let's move to one of the problem child of the past, or I would call a swallow, not a spring yet. Therefore, we're in the middle of the turnaround but with encouraging results, which is T-Systems. Let me just pick up a few highlights from this slide here. First, we have completely revamped our sales approach. We have massively cut costs through shoring, especially to India. Digitalization, massive overhead reductions. We are aggressively restructuring our portfolio in the way what's in and what's out. We decided to integrate the telecom business into our German operations, which is then a fully integrated organization for TC, for Mittelstand B2B to the large enterprises which gives us a much more efficient, much more cohesive execution. We had intercompany targets in between and a lot of complexity, which we are eliminating by now giving it to one hand.
IoT and security gets carved out to make them even more agile, that they can sell via the T-Systems sales pipe, via the T-Deutschland sales pipes but even via their own sales pipe, which is helping us and beyond. We are exiting end-user services, where we switch to a new model, how to organize our mainframe services with a partner so that we are not running unprofitable or no margin businesses. This is just a piece of the story. I was most impressed by the order entry which we have seen by the end of the year. Just from my mind, we had more than 40% more order entry than the year before and our targets. TMUS, ongoing momentum, moving, seeing what's happening there. Guys, it sounds so easy what we are doing here.
2019 cost a lot of energy, a lot of energy, both on this landing. On our side, doing all the negotiations, traveling back and forth, back and forth. Every night, just yesterday night, we had another phone call until 11:00 A.M. to settle up the things. Despite this second task, which we all had to carry, the U.S. had an outstanding performance. We expanded our network. We launched 5G and low band to 200 million POPs in December. I mentioned that at the beginning. For the first time, T-Mobile is ahead of AT&T and Verizon. We're not smaller, we're ahead of these guys. Much earlier than previously planned. I know some of you were not happy about the CapEx here but I think it was worth doing it. Customer churn came down to record lows.
I think these guys are at the same level now as our European operations, the market leader operations. We delivered yet another year of strong growth, both on postpaid and on profitability. We did well standalone. If this deal would not have come to a conclusion, I can tell you, we would have not quoted bankruptcy, but it would have been a different situation. Nevertheless, we were very confident to find a way then in this space as well. Together with Sprint and the opportunities about the spectrum efficiency, we are much better off now. On page 26, we show some highlights, how we implement the strategy going forward. The first thing is, a strategy is a strategy is a strategy.
That 82% of our people, of the 218,000 people in this organization, are giving us the feedback, We understand the strategy and can explain the strategy to a third party, shows me that we have an aligned interest in this organization with regard to implementation. Having good results gives this organization the mental strength and the power to get these things executed. We are now adapting step-by-step the needs of these different activities along that line. I do not go into every element of this one. You can easily find out that there are a lot of priorities which we have to do. There's one thing which we changed, and this is the green arrow which you see under simplified digitized X-ray and X responsibility, which is the ICT responsibility element.
Therefore, we want to make that clear to everybody that not only a few people should think about sustainability, that everybody has the duty on this one. Page 27, we won't stop. I hate this graph because this is a silly street, but nevertheless, I like the topics on the right side. These are the priorities going forward. We made good progress so far, but there's still a lot to go. Despite some improvements, our customer satisfaction metrics are not yet where we want to have them. I want promoters on the brand, more than we have today. We have less distractors, but we need more promoters. We need to become more digital and agile. I said that. Digitize should be a headline of what we are doing.
We should become more diverse and even more innovative to a certain extent, braver in the way how we're doing things. We need to monetize the good infrastructure better, which we have, because the capital efficiency is not where it should be at that point in time. We should test the best way to get Germans FTTH done. This is a strategic imperative for politics but as well for us as well, which we have to solve. As mentioned, we cannot wait to deliver the amazing goodness from the T-Mobile US, Sprint recharging effort here, the combination, which we are totally excited about. In other words, guys, we won't stop until everyone is connected. That is the purpose of this company. If you look to the capital markets, they are results so far. We had good years and a good execution around that one.
There is always things which you can improve. I can say you, we feel strong today but if you are having a victory, humility is the name of the game. If you suffer or if you lose one time, you should not lose your self-confidence. We are enjoying that moment, just for a second, but we know that humility is a good advice not to become complacent. I can promise you one thing as long as I'm sitting here, I will keep this, guys, awake. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Tim. I'm still awake and welcome from my side. Look, my presentation looks a bit different today. We have removed some of the redundant information of the previous presentations and adding more trends analysis. I hope you're going to find this useful. Let me start with the key financials on page 29. Reported revenues were up in the fourth quarter by 5.4%, taking us to a full year growth of 6.4%. On an organic basis, that would have been a growth on 3.3% in Q4 and 2.8% respectively for the full year. Obviously, the two biggest effects between reported and organic is Tele2 and foreign exchange rates. Our reported adjusted EBITDA after leases grew 8.2% in the fourth quarter and 7.2% over the full year. Organically, we have grown, the fourth quarter by 6.5% and 4.2% in the full year.
Let's take a little bit a look at the ex-U.S. EBITDA performance in the fourth quarter. Ex-U.S., we grew our EBITDA by 9.3%, that takes us to a full year growth of 4.7%. On an organic basis, we grew by 8.8% in the fourth quarter and 3.7% on a full year basis. A couple of peculiarities here. A, this is clearly ahead of what we said at the capital markets day were for our corridor, 2%-3%. B, actually, guys, ex-U.S., in the fourth quarter, grew on EBITDA levels higher than U.S. That is not a usual observation which we're having here, I think this was coming from all segments. The contribution was coming from all segments. I think the European team is really happy to provide these kind of EBITDA growth.
Free cash flow was up 23% in the fourth quarter and 16% on a full year basis, which is also above our guidance of around 10%. The adjusted EPS grew by 8% year-over-year. Let's go into the segment performance and start with Germany as usual. Again, if you take a look at the adjusted EBITDA performance, another quarter of 2.4% growth. Again, at the upper range of the communicated EBITDA growth corridor of Germany. The total service revenue improved by 1% year-on-year, and that was supported both from the fixed line as well as from the mobile side. This is what we're going to see on the next page, on page 31. The mobile service revenue actually recovered from the one-off in Q3, so we've seen a 1.4% service revenue growth in Q4.
On a full year basis, that was 1.9%, despite quite a bit of regulatory headwinds, and we still remain comfortable with our midterm guides of 2% service revenue growth. Taking a look to the right-hand side of the chart, fixed service revenues improved to 0.7% growth, and that was very much driven by wholesale and also by the broadband growth, and that overcompensated the decline in our legacy business as well as the IT migration headwinds. Moving to the performance in mobile. As you can see, the commercial performance in mobile is really healthy. 57% of our mobile contract customers are now within a convergent offering. Our B2C churn has come down to 1%. We're still seeing a very healthy data usage growth in Germany of almost 60% year-over-year, and we have now more than almost three million customers which basically enjoy the StreamOn service. Next page.
Our commercials and fixed. What you see is another 47% on broadband net adds in that quarter, despite the fact that the market has shrunk by about 30%. Our fiber net adds dropped below half a million, and that was actually due to weaker growth in the wholesale, but our retail net adds remained strong. By the way, almost 30% of our FTTC subs are already on speeds of 100 megabits and more. Again, a very continuous growth and good growth in the TV space. Q4, 74,000 net adds on MagentaTV, gets us to a growth year-over-year of 265,000. Also what you see is that the line losses actually have improved, between Q3 to Q4 to 170,000 line losses. We expect that since we have finalized the B2C IP migration, that we see further improvement in 2020. Next page. Taking a look on 34.
What you see is actually we had a very strong broadband growth of 4.9%. You see a very strong wholesale growth, which is basically being driven by a higher speed upselling, but also due to the unbundling fee price increase, which started in the third quarter. Despite the fact that our total retail revenues are still shrinking, this will come to an end as the single play migration will finalize and also the connection revenues will finalize. You see that positive trend from negative 1.4% to negative 0.4%, and I expect this to continue to improve. Let's move over to T-Mobile US. As you know, T-Mobile US has communicated both their numbers as well as their guidance on February 6. Let me be short here. Again, they won 1.9 million new customers, 27 quarters with more than one million net adds.
The EBITDA was growing by 3.7%, and this is very much due to some renewable energy derivatives, which actually impact our IFRS EBITDA performance. If you compare their performance on US GAAP, they would have been grown by 9.2%. What you see on page 36 is some of the key KPIs, and Tim already talked about them. A very low churn rate of about 1%. We have still a very strong network, and we are defending this with our 5G build-out strategy, and the ARPU levels remain generally stable. Let's move over to Europe. Again, the performance in Europe was very good from a financial perspective. Reported revenues up 3%, EBITDA up 5% in the fourth quarter on an organic basis, 3.8% and 5.7%. This is due to the deconsolidation of Albania to a large degree.
If we're taking a look at the commercial figures of Europe, I would say commercials were strong, are strong, and expected to be strong. If you're taking a look at their contract net adds, another 250,000 which they added, another 70,000 on broadband net adds. FMC net adds, another 300,000. Their household penetration with conversion offerings in Europe is now 49%, which is a year-on-year increase of nine percentage points. I think it's very impressive. Also you see that the TV net adds are trending up. Moving over to T-Systems. I think we're making good progress on our ambitious turnaround plan. The plan is obviously strongly supported by the significant cost reductions which we're driving in that segment. We're seeing stable revenues but the underlying trend is moving in the right direction.
We're basically withdrawing from some low-margin business, but adding some good gross PU revenue into the revenue mix. What you also see is a strong EBITDA performance after leases of 36% year-over-year. Again, T-Systems has delivered more than half a billion of adjusted EBITDA, which is very much in line with the guidance which we have given at the Capital Markets Day. Next chart is group development. Again, group development, strong performance. Organic revenue growth for the segment was up 0.9%, and it was very much driven by some intergroup revenue phasing between DFMG and Germany. The organic EBITDA after leases grew by almost 10%. The commercial performance, which you're going to see on page 41 is really impressive. Very strong contract net adds in the Netherlands. Also very good broadband net adds. The mobile service revenue growth is 2.8%+ .
The market is shrinking by 2%. You see that they're really performing against the overall market trend. You also see that the adjusted EBITDA year-over-year was growing by 13%. On the tower business, we actually added 1,800 towers in 2019, of which 1,400 were new builds. The recurring revenue only grew by 2% but that is due to the intragroup phasing. The EBITDA after leases grew on a 7% basis and that is organically. Let's close out on the key financial figures on page 43. You see the free cash flow bridge on free cash flow after leases which has grown Q4 2018 over Q4 2019 by almost 23%. You see it's very much driven by the strong cash flow contribution from the operations. We have met our free cash flow guidance, despite the fact that we have to absorb some U.S. merger related one-offs.
The EPS grew by 23% or 24%, which you can see on the lower right-hand side of the chart. That is another increase of EUR 0.08 over the year which means an 8% growth. The final chart is obviously the net debt chart. We reduced net debt from almost EUR 79 billion- EUR 76 billion. There are two major root causes for this. The good one is the very strong support from the cash flow out of the operations. We were a little bit lucky also on the Forex side because that helped us by EUR 1 billion, reducing the net debt from almost EUR 79 billion- EUR 76 billion. It got us back into the ratio, as I said it during the Q3 call, into our leverage corridor which is 2.25-2.75. We're back into a ratio which is 2.65.
With that, I would like to open it up for Q&A. Thanks. Hand it over to Hannes.
Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Christian. Now we can start with the Q&A part. Sorry, the presentation was a bit longer than usual but I hope you found it useful. If you'd like to ask a question now, please press star one. It's always on your touch-tone phone and I will announce your name, and then you can also cancel the questions with star two. You can also send us questions via a webcast or sometimes even by email. We start the Q&A today with Akhil at J.P. Morgan.
Yeah. Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. I've just got two, please. Firstly, if we can start with towers. Tim, you mentioned the strong growth potential you're seeing in your tower business but I wondered if you'd talk about the strategic thoughts around towers. We've seen Vodafone at the results commenting that you weren't keen to share towers in Germany. Just some comments as to why. Is it a structural issue or is it strategic? How you think about monetization of towers in general as well. Secondly, just a question around German pricing. We've seen Telefónica Deutschland very recently move to unlimited plans. Just keen to understand how you think about that. Whether you think it's a threat or whether you think it's complementary in terms of more for more. Thanks.
Akhil, let me start with the tower question. I don't share the point of view that we're not sharing because I think Tim already presented this. We have an agreement among all three competitors to actually share 6,000 passive infrastructure towers in the white spot area. We also communicated our gray spot sharing agreement with Vodafone, where we're basically exchanging 2,000 towers on each side in order to improve the overall network. I would say there is a significant sharing already. I'm not sure where this comment is coming from. What we always said on the tower business is, let's solve the business model first. For us, it was a big question on how to basically share the pain in the white spots. We have found a solution for this, how we upgrade our network performance by having gray spot sharing.
Bear in mind, there's a big growth opportunity in the German market with all these build-out obligations which we're having and with a fourth player coming in. I think we have a lot of value creation ahead of us. What we always said is on towers, we keep the options open. Since we have carved out the business beginning of 2000, you can take a look at the numbers and how they evolve. We're not ruling out that we're going to do anything with towers. Everything is basically, for us, possible. Right now, for us, it's important to actually get to the optimal business model when it comes to developing our tower business. Tim, do you want to do the pricing?
Yeah.
Okay.
Telefónica Deutschland has made a few changes recently in their pricing, and the first one is, I think, the doubling of the data allowances for 20 GB, EUR 30 per month and for 10 GB, as it was for 10 GB before. They have introduced a speed tiered unlimited pricing in the market, removing the six months for free promotions. This let's say what we are talking about. For the speed tiering, surely this could appeal to some customers, there's no doubt about that. We always thought, we are the market leader, and it's not us starting this. We had a pricing disregard, and we set the high price bar on this one. This is something which we expected. We have now to see how attractive 2 Mb unlimited are for the customers.
For EUR 30, that is something which we will carefully watch for us. What we have done is we have doubled the allowances which was our initiative as reaction on this one. What we learned from our side is that, from a pricing perspective.
From a customer service perspective, the customers appreciated, let's say, our offers. You have seen our decent churn. You have seen even the net add numbers which we were able to generate in the fourth quarter. Therefore, as you see the convergence numbers, which are always including mobile and fixed line services as well, we have the StreamOn option in it as another offer. We keep confident that with the strategy, which is different to the O2 strategy, that we are comfortable to generate our 2% medium-term mobile service revenue growth. That's how we look at it at current time.
Thank you, Tim. Just maybe also one thought of mine on the Vodafone comment. I think they were also primarily referring actually to the active network sharing side rather than the passive side. On that, we think that we found the right balance and the right agreement for ourselves to balance network leadership and efficiency considerations with the gray spot sharing that we have agreed, and which is also complemented, of course, by the white spot sharing on the active side. We move on to Polo at UBS.
Yeah. Hi. I've just got two questions. The first one is on German broadband. What impact are you seeing from Vodafone and their push on one gigabit broadband speeds? Is there more pressure on you to accelerate your FTTH rollout? Second question is really just about the German All-IP migration. Now that it's complete, can you maybe talk in more detail about how we should think about voice line loss and broadband net adds going forward? Another way of asking the question is, how much of a drag each quarter is All-IP on line losses and broadband net adds in Germany? Could you remind us in terms of quantum of cost-saving benefits we should expect from All-IP migration? When should we start to see this feed through into Germany EBITDA? Thanks.
First question. Look, it seems an aggressive move from Vodafone. I got it the way that they're closing down the Unitymedia branch, and therefore, they have to do some things to attract the attention to the Vodafone brand in this regard. It's by far too early to say what the impact of this one is. They call it the promotion through 5th of April. Let's see how this is working and how is that affecting us. Look, my assessment is, why do they have to reduce their premium product by a price cut of almost 50%? That seems to be that they have problems on selling their products. Is that the sign of weakness here, what we see there? Let's wait. For us, it's very clear. We have an ambition of 40% and I said that earlier with regard to our broadband net adds.
We have an infrastructure which can easily be filled with this market share and the churn. We will react accordingly if we see the impact of this one. That's where we are. I do not see an immediate impact on the FTTH business case or whatsoever because we have a mixed calculation. Let's see how this is evolving over time, today I would not have sleepless nights because of that.
Okay, on the All-IP migration, let me just repeat what Tim said. In any case, we want to defend our ambition to achieve 40% net add share. I think that is important to us. If you take a look on how we assess the forced migration, the negative impact on the net adds on broadband due to the IP migration, we always said that's in the vicinity of around 10%, which basically drags our net add share down. That should at least improve to a large degree. If you take a look on the IP migration, we have now migrated about 99% of all lines. The only area which is still left is the more complex B2B area. I would say on your specific questions on line losses, take Q4 versus Q3 as an indication.
We expect significant improvement over the course of the year. I think we should show you these numbers once we have finalized Q1.
With that, we move on to the next question, and that's from Christian at HSBC, please.
Yeah. Good afternoon. Thanks. A couple questions. First is actually on the deal. It was rumored that you might renegotiate the price. Can you tell us at least anything on the timing or on that process, generally speaking? Whatever you can share in that respect would be helpful. On the German business, there's a huge debate on who or why in Germany. Is there anything you can share with us in terms of details? What the, let's say, the worst case impact would be, then also in terms of the political debate, what you're hearing. That would be helpful to get an update from you and your view on this. Lastly, Polo already touched on the FTTH point but I'm asking a slightly different question here. Deutsche Glasfaser announced that they would roll out FTTH to six million homes in Germany.
What's your take on this? It's a meaningful number, so would be interested in your strategy in that respect. Thank you.
Okay, Christian. First thing is on the deal. Look, as you know, the long stop date in the business combination agreement has expired, both parties have the right to walk away. Nevertheless, both parties are very interested to get this thing done, especially after all the efforts we made and all the approvals we got. The business case of this company going forward and the cost synergies, all of this is very well intact. Therefore, we are quite excited about these deals. Nevertheless, we have a phase now for closing mechanisms. We have discussions among ourselves to formalities, and I'm not disclosing whether we are renegotiating the price here or anything else. It is something which has to take place between partners before something is getting announced here. Therefore, no comment on M&A. Second thing is the German business and the Huawei debate in Germany.
Look, the assessment is as follow. We have seen recently that Brussels and Thierry Breton, the new commissioner, has offered a toolbox to the industry. I think it's a very reasonable package, and it makes a lot of sense what is in there. It demonstrates one thing. It demonstrates, guys, we have to do something our own with regard to encryption and with regard to the software steering. Second, it stresses clearly that one of the big negatives why we have these difficulties with regard to different RAN infrastructure is the lack of Open RAN and the Open RAN software. Enforcing Open RAN is something. The third one is the idea about penalty sanctioning mechanisms, which should be embedded into legal enforcement, into the legislation. It is another topic which makes totally sense. This is the way going forward.
I do not see from what is discussed in Brussels nor in Germany, any kind of impact as we have heard that from BT or Vodafone on their regulation yet. We have a clear position that Germany wants to see the core network being Chinese-free. That is for us, an easy effort going forward to make that possible, and the rest is up for the governmental decision. The Conservative Party has come to conclusions on this one, and now there's a debate on the governmental body. It looks like we find a solution here. The German government finds a solution which we are able to implement.
Let me dwell on the question of Deutsche Glasfaser. First of all, if I'm not mistaken, currently they're passing around 600,000 homes passed. If they want to build out, they will be at seven million. That sounds quite like a challenge but we appreciate this to a large degree because we always said we cannot build out fiber for Germany just coming from Deutsche Telekom. I think there will be some overbuild also into our vectoring infrastructure, which we expect. Bear in mind, we have, to a large degree, a very performing cable network, which is already overbuilding our vectoring network, so that would be an additional competitor. The third one is, I think, a point which Tim made clear in the very beginning. We're open for wholebuy.
We have struck the first contract with Deutsche Glasfaser in a small city called Lüdinghausen, where we have a whole buy contract. I think you always start small, and then you embark from there. I think it's going to be a combination that we probably will see some overbuild, that we will rely also on their infrastructure, but it appears to be quite a big challenge from 600 to almost 7 million.
Yes, and we have super vectoring, of course. Georgios at Citi is next, please.
Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. Firstly, Tim, congratulations for your 20-year anniversary the other day. I have two questions. The first one is around Sprint. Obviously, the closer we get to the deal being approved, the more we have to think about the impact on your financials. I was wondering if there was anything you could share with us around the EBITDA transition from Sprint to T-Mobile, to Deutsche Telekom numbers, or whether at least you can give us an idea of whether the impact on leverage you identified a couple of years ago is similar to the one we should expect now, or whether something may have changed. My second question is really a follow-up from Christian's earlier question on fiber. Your wholesale revenues are now growing over 3% the last couple of quarters.
I just wanted to understand whether you expect that to be 2020, maybe the peak in terms of wholesale tailwinds because of this overbuild. On similar angle, in a way, with these agreements with Deutsche Glasfaser, I was just wondering, moving from on-net to off-net for you, do you think the premium you can charge to the retail customers is sufficient to keep the profitability of the customers more or less the same? Thanks.
There was an echo. Unfortunately, on the impact on financials with Sprint, there's no new news because we don't know anything further. We will have full access to their numbers, to all of their accounting numbers and so forth, whenever we have closed the deals. Prior to that, we're not allowed to talk to them. Therefore, we can't give you any kind of more transparency on those numbers. We would love to, we can't. On wholesale revenues, look, I think first of all, I'm happy with that 3% growth, which we're seeing in the wholesale area. We have some structural tailwinds. This is obviously the ULL price increase, which we have seen. What we also see, and you see it on the fiber numbers, that the wholesale numbers have come down. It looks like that the competitors are moving on their platform as well.
We have to closely watch this but I think it's too early to tell you whether it's going to be having an impact, a dramatic impact. I think we have to watch out in the upcoming quarters how this evolves.
Thank you, Christian. Next is Steve at Redburn, please.
Good afternoon, guys. Just to echo Georgios comments, congratulations on 25 years. Sorry, mostly congratulations on not giving a shit about your competitors in Germany. That was great to hear. Yeah, a couple of questions. Just coming back to fiber. I read sort of slides and heard your comments. I guess like every operator, you want to maximize return on fiber, but they're not always able to do that, and that's the sort of modeling challenge that we have. Can you just sort of maybe give some early thoughts on how you go about doing that? Do you think JVs are the way forward? Do you think you can charge a premium for FTTH over your current super vectoring wholesale products? Do you think you need copper switch off? All those sorts of issues.
Maybe just give us an idea of when you think you can lay out the enablers and the parameters that you think about in maximizing returns? Secondly, just on the U.S. EBITDA reconciliation. I mean, the sort of gaps got steadily bigger on the power purchasing agreements in the U.S. You started the last year at EUR 600, ended up, I think, at EUR 900. You're flagging for another $900 million gap this year. Please remind us what this gap is and which EBITDA measure you think is better, and whether you think EBITDA as a whole for U.S. is trustworthy given the sort of growing nature of this gap? Thank you.
Steve, let me start with the fiber question and how we see the world going forward. The first one, I hope you would agree that it was the right thing to deploy vectoring, super vectoring first. Talking about more than 80% of the households being covered with 250 Mb, seeing the nice numbers on the net add side, despite the IP migration, which we have seen. On top of that, even the revenue development and the integration with TV service, I think you would easily agree from a commercial perspective that this was the right thing to do. Second, we had to prepare ourselves for the fiber build-out, the fiber factory.
On top of that, the subsidization policy which the government has laid out, there are tons of money which are lying there and not being freed up yet for subsidization, which makes that much more viable for us to invest and to build fiber in these regions. Now, we will burn the chips and we move into the fiber factory very soon. Then, what we're doing is fiber, wherever it makes sense and wherever it is possible. Up to two million households prospectively being deployed on this one. We will drive costs down so that we make it cheaper. That is something, a learning curve issue. By the way, I saw that at BT as well, how they were able to use these learning patterns here. There's definitely our willingness for collaboration.
Wherever somebody has built a fiber infrastructure, being it Deutsche Glasfaser or whoever, if he's coming with reasonable terms for us, we will utilize the infrastructure with our customer base. What is lacking today? Subsidization is there. Collaboration works. Fiber factory is improving. What is lacking, I think, is a clear regulatory environment in Germany. It's still unclear under which conditions the German government is, or the Bundesnetzagentur is willing to regulate. For instance, copper switch offs, which are driving definitely the profitability of an environment network. Or to which conditions is the German government willing to change the housing association privilege, which is a very important point for the profitability of fiber to the home in Germany. Cable is blocking that but I think if Germany wants to see more fiber deployment, they have to overcome about this restriction in our market.
I think there's not only us who can do something. There's even the regulator who's forced to give us a constructive, competitive-oriented infrastructure piece here. That is what we are working on in parallel. I'm not worried about this issue, because I see that with 250 Mb , with a good price offer, you can win and convince customers in a lot of, let's say, areas. In a lot of areas where fiber is needed, we are ahead of the game. Take just example of the business parks and schools. We are moving on. We are now accelerating our FTTH build-out. We are using more and more money for that, which we free up
From the former FTTC build-out. This is helping us. We keep the envelope of EUR 5 billion stable for the German entities, the footprint here for the upcoming years, but more and more money is going into this one. Collaboration is definitely part of that and we are negotiating with a couple of people at that point in time, initiatives around it.
On the second question, U.S. EBITDA reconciliation from U.S. GAAP into IFRS, three major factors which basically explain for the bridge. One is stock-based compensation, which is around EUR 400 million. One is different leasing treatment, which is around EUR 400 million. The third one is the renewable purchasing agreements which hit us about EUR 100 in this year. This is why the bridge was EUR 900 in 2019. In our guidance, we basically planned for a bridge of EUR 850. We reduced the impact of the renewable energy contracts and that is the explanation on the drivers. On your question, what's the right number? Obviously, the T-Mobile US folks comparing themselves with their local competitors. Therefore, you have to do it from a U.S. GAAP perspective, and we have to translate it into an IFRS perspective.
I would say it depends on against which competitive battlefield you compare yourself and I would always say compare yourself against the relevant competitors which is an AT&T and Verizon, and therefore, US GAAP is obviously the adequate accounting principle.
Thanks, Christian. Next is Fred at Bank of America, please.
Hi, good afternoon. Two questions, two follow-ups, please. On the U.S., you say you need to wait for the Sprint accounts. If you look at the performance of both T-Mobile and Sprint in the last two years, you've seen some pretty large variations. For instance, you targeted a year one free cash flow of EUR 1 billion- EUR 2 billion. In year four was EUR 10 billion- EUR 11 billion. Is this still the right ballpark for NewCo? How can we think about the loss of business from the subscriber base disposed versus wholesale revenue recovered? A follow-up on the FTTH debate. We've seen a lot of your peers like KPN and Swisscom ret posed fiber to the home to focus on fast FTTB rollout, now pushing back towards fiber to the home as a right strategy to face cable.
Are you still confident with your phasing of up to two million lines a year? Do you feel further political pressure to deploy FTTH faster? From a commercial standpoint, you seem reasonably relaxed about Vodafone pushing gigabit products, if you can comment on whether you see increasing pressure here as well. Thank you.
Let me start with the U.S. question. Obviously, that is an M&A related question which we usually don't comment on. Let me flash a little bit of data on this. Look, we have redone the case back in summer, July 2019. The U.S. team clearly said that the whole case stays intact, although some line items obviously deviate from the original signing case. For example, the underperformance of Sprint, the overperformance of T-Mobile US, refinancing costs have significantly come down. Ever since then, I think we haven't seen any additional remedies, and what we're doing right now is that we're saying the case is, in total, intact, but we cannot give you more granularity on that one because, again, we have to take a look into the details and look under the hood of Sprint to really figure out how it looks like.
Obviously, there's a delay in the case that obviously impacts also the signing case versus what we're going to see at the end of the day once we're moving over the finish line. Again, bear with us a bit until we have the details in front of us, and then we can elaborate more on these topics.
Just on the FTTH question, I think Tim has addressed these questions largely, and we are not today guiding for anything different than what we have shown in the presentation or communicated in the Capital Markets Day. We have a plan for fiber. We will reallocate resources as stated. We are focusing on the key pain points at this point in time rather than big headline rates. We have 1.6 million lines passed, and now we leverage all the tools that we have described in the presentation to deliver. We monetize our super vectoring. We have 28 million homes with speed up to 250 megs, and that number will also increase further in the coming years. Let's see how that works. Politically, there's no shift in the debate at this point in time. Next is James of New Street.
Thank you very much. Good afternoon. I had two questions, please, following on with regards to potential impacts of Sprint transaction. When you put the slide up when the deal was announced in 2018, you showed that you would be willing to go above your leverage threshold for two years. I wanted to check if that was still the case, if you'd be willing to go above the 2.75 times just for a two-year period. As a follow-up to that is could you comment, assuming the deal does go through, on what your appetite would be to buy spectrum in the C-band auction, or do you feel that with the 2.5 GHz spectrum you would acquire from Sprint, that your spectrum portfolio would be pretty adequate and there'd be less need to bid in the C-band auction? Thank you.
I think as you're alluding also to the Capital Markets Day, the impact of Sprint and leaving the quarter off 2.75. What we said is we are reaching the quarter in year three. Absolutely correct. We have no further indication to deviate from that perspective. On C-band, I think it is too early to comment on C-band right now. Let's figure out how the auction design will look like, when it's going to take place. Right now, I think we're utterly focused on getting the final things out of the way and get the merger over the finish line.
Okay, next, we like to hear Ulrich at Jefferies, please.
Yes, thanks. My first question would be, in the annual report, when you break down on a divisional basis, the different guidance items. I think the indication is that the CapEx in Germany would actually be down in 2020. Is this in the context of the items you listed earlier, Tim, about the necessary moves you expect on the legislative and the regulatory front? Is that essentially a signal that you're cutting CapEx until these things are settled, i.e., a sign of strength or how would you frame a CapEx cut in a situation where I think there's some political debate about the quality of the mobile networks and the need in Germany to roll out fiber on an accelerated pace? That would be my first question. The second one is on the 40% market share target. You haven't mentioned that for some time.
I think this was a very high-profile target for some years, and then it didn't pop up in the communication. Where do you see yourself at the moment in terms of overall market share? Does this actually mean you have a bit of catch up to do, i.e., you might potentially get a bit more aggressive at this point, or am I misinterpreting this? Thank you.
Ulrich, this is very semantical question. Anyway, I would not rate it as a statement, as a question. Look, our German CapEx is EUR 4.2 billion for the Deutschland entity, where we are building fiber and the network and 5G service and like. This EUR 4.2 billion stay absolutely flat, EUR 4.2. There is no decrease on this one. I hope that we can even build more because of the productivity gains which we have at the factory and other things that we get more out of the CapEx than what we had so far. Why have we said in the annual report and the prognosis that we have a slight decline? I remember that one. There is in the overall footprint of Germany, we always show the CapEx of the whole German, inclusive of the T-Systems activities. This is the EUR 5.5 billion.
We have a decline from EUR 5.5 billion-EUR 5.4 billion, so EUR 100 million less in the total footprint. To be precise in our German mentality, we said there's a slight decline. That's how you should understand that.
Tim, let me add to that. I think on this EUR 4.2, we have a slight decline for 2020 in TDG but we increased the CapEx envelope in DFMG, and this is exactly because we want to comply with the build-out obligations. Overall, you're right, it's the EUR 5.4, but there's a shift between DFMG and TDG in 2020, a slight one.
On the 40% market share target where we are pretty close. We are also, despite the All-IP migration, pretty close in terms of the net add share in 2019. I think you have surely tracked this over the last few years. We have been responsible and steady in our approach to this. We have a chart that shows we have 300,000, 300,000, and 200,000 broadband net adds in Germany. 200,000 last year was severely impacted by the IP migration. I think this is a very steady development. Now, of course, we want to maintain our 40%, so we've said that a few times today, and we mean it. We have also shown that we have a good way of managing that and being responsible overall. I would say with that, we move on to Robert at Deutsche Bank.
Yeah, thank you. Going back to Chinese matters, where there is trouble on a couple of fronts. Are you seeing any impact yet from supply chain difficulties in China on your German enterprise customers and their ICT plans and spending, or even on your own supply chain at this stage? Thanks.
Robert. Look, we took the decision, considering the health and the situation for employees to step out of the Mobile World Congress, which was a tough one. We do not want to see people have a flu, getting put in quarantine and then isolate in the organization. A lot of concerns of the people. We took this tough decision, despite the fact that there haven't been so many cases in Spain or in Europe yet. This is to be just caring about our people here. The second thing is, the coronavirus is definitely something which we should all be worried about. This is touching all value chains because the production of most of the industries is somewhere happening over China.
We have seen that a lot of the companies after New Year breakdown have started much slower and later than previous year. The Apple announcement yesterday is related to the Foxconn situation. Foxconn had started very slowly. Now, we do not have a shortage of Apple handsets at that point in time because of our storage, which we have here, and the products which are on its way to us. The longer it takes, it might affect us. We do not see any impact on Samsung. We have talked to these guys with our task force. We do not have even shortage of Huawei or other phones here. That is not an issue. On the network side, the task force gives us the feedback that there might be some components later being affected. You should know that most of the areas we have at least two vendors.
We have a certain hedge in the way how we're doing it. On top of that, we have storage as well. Look, the longer this coronavirus will take and the more it is going to affect the Chinese industry, then it might affect us today. Today, we do not have any shortage, nor on network, nor on handsets. We keep you posted.
Thanks, Tim. With that, we take two more questions. One is from Joshua at Exane, please.
Hi there. Thank you for the questions. Just two from me. Firstly, on the tower side, you talked about the growth opportunity from building new towers in Germany. I'd love to hear a bit more about the other organic growth opportunities, maybe through increasing co-location, and specifically whether you're learning anything new via your partnership with Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners and Sonax in Switzerland. Secondly, just on the fiber to the home factory point. You talk around a EUR 1,000 per home passed number, which I assume is the average. We've seen that come down already. Given some of the new initiatives which you've talked about, what is the range of fiber to the home deployment cost now in Germany? Are we looking at EUR 500-EUR 1,500, EUR 800-EUR 1,200? Just be great to get a sense of where this could fall to longer term. Thanks very much.
Let me start with the tower question. Obviously, as I said, the biggest opportunity is basically coming, if I may say, opportunity from the build-out obligations, which you all have to comply with, which is build-out obligations, which will heavily touch the white spots, but will also affect our rooftops when it comes to 5G. Look, on the co-location potential, the current co-location ratio of DFMG is 2.3 among three competitors. If you want to reach to full potential, it can be moving up towards three, but that is, I think, what's been left. The open question is to what extent the fourth player will get into play, whether they basically will be seeking for additional co-location, but we haven't seen a clear indication from this one.
Look, partnerships is part of the option space going forward, but since we haven't defined the option space, I would basically leave it there and say, yeah, that's part of the option space. On FTTH, look, the target is obviously on average to get to below EUR 1,000. Let me be clear. If you take a look to the build-out cost in the different areas, if you go into dense urban areas, obviously we're seeking more towards EUR 500- EUR 600. If you go into suburban areas, to more in the vicinity of EUR 1,000- EUR 1,500. If you go to rural areas, it can go up to EUR 30,000, but this is subsidized, obviously. It very much depends on the mix, where you want to build out. I think an average number doesn't tell you a lot.
I think you have to really cluster it down in which area you want to build out, and you want to have target costing in metropolitan areas, which are well below EUR 1,000, which are more in the vicinity of EUR 500-EUR 600.
Okay. With that, the last question, please, from Ottavio at SocGen.
Hi, good afternoon. A couple of questions. The first is a follow-up from the deal in the U.S. I appreciate that it's difficult to comment on financials. It's basically less directly to Sprint, more related to other players. When you present deal, you basically give a target of $15 billion for integration cost. The reason why it was relatively high is because you actually included all the contractual penalties for breaking the lease for the tower you have to decommission, but also all the contractual penalties to renegotiate the debt. Considering you have two years to talk to TowerCo in the U.S., and of course, to the debt holders. Do you reckon that $15 billion is still relevant, or there could be some savings on the integration cost? A follow-up also on the intercompany debt with T-Mobile US.
When you presented the deal a couple of years ago, you said that you were planning to reduce the intercompany loans by half, I reckon it's between EUR 6 billion-EUR 8 billion, euro, sorry. What's the plan to reinvest this liquidity when it reach you in Germany? The third one, it's on the legal challenge you actually brought to the deal being approved between Vodafone and Liberty Global. Where you Tele Columbus NetCologne, if I'm not wrong. If you can share the rationale and which sort of remedies you want to achieve through these legal challenges. Thanks.
Look, Ottavio, I understand that you have this question regard to the business integration plan. I can tell you only one thing. We have to do the closing. We have to put the plans together. There are a lot of plans still in the clean room, which we have to also bring together, then we come back to the market. I'm not now one that Christian or myself are speculating about is this in or this is out or whatsoever. The only thing what I can tell you, what we know, we had a board meeting last week. I was in the U.S. for four days. We had an intensive discussion about what we see. The logic of this deal is fully intact with all what we know. It's intact from the cost synergy perspective, what we see.
It is even intact from the spectrum position which we have in place. It's intact when it comes to the interest and refinancing cost, because when we did the deal, we anticipated a significantly higher interest cost for this high yield refinancing. It's the best window at that point in time to get this thing up and running. We had even anticipated our business case, which you probably don't know, that we might have additional remedies or legal costs to carry, which are not foreseen at that point in time. There's still a little bit of way to go. Therefore, and I like your position here, I would find it illogical to make a pure statement on one single item here.
Look, if you ask me for my stomach, my stomach tells me that the case has even improved compared to the 22 months ago, when we started with our business case here at the communications with the capital markets.
On the intercompany debt from T-Mobile US and the $8 billion, which will flow in our direction here at DTAG. Dollars, sorry. Obviously, we have maturities of about $5 billion which we have to refinance every year, and that will probably create a lesser amount of work in the treasury department because this thing is coming back. Look, we have clear CapEx plans, we have clear net debt plans, and I wouldn't expect any kind of changes, even if there are $8 billion coming from the U.S. into DTAG.
Okay, Christian, thank you very much. I think we also have the question on Vodafone Liberty Global and potential remedies. We have always said, what the issues are from our perspective is the dominance in the TV market and the dominance in the household market. We feel those were not adequately addressed in the merger ruling. That's why we feel this needs to be reassessed. With that, I pass back to Tim.
Okay. I just want to say happy birthday, Deutsche Telekom. We just crossed the $100 in the U.S. market. We started 15.60, as we all recall. It's an unbelievable story and we are very confident in the way how we move forward here. We enjoy the moment here at Deutsche Telekom as well. Had a good year, 2019, but a lot of things to be done going forward. I think, I hope you get some more details on where we stand with regard to capital markets commitments.
We're going on roadshow now, hopefully to see you all on tour, guys. Thank you for listening and supporting us over the last year.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Thank you, Tim and Christian. Don't forget, we own 63% of T-Mobile, which is now at 100. With that, thanks also from my side. If you have any further questions, please contact us at the IR department. Have a good rest of the day.