Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Ulrich Leiter. In my capacity as chairman of the supervisory board of Deutsche Telekom AG, I hereby open this year's shareholder meeting and will chair this meeting in line with the articles of incorporation. On behalf of the supervisory board and the board of management, may I extend a warm welcome to you, the shareholders, shareholder representatives, shareholders meeting online. Unfortunately, I'm once again unable welcome you personally here in Bonn to our shareholders meeting this year. I'm sorry, but last year, we also experienced this type of shareholders meeting.
It's totally different than our than the usual type of meeting we have. As a result of the ongoing COVID nineteen pandemic, a meeting with personal attendants is still out of the question. Since we wish to hold today's ordinary shareholders meeting safely, we have decided to make use of the legislation that lawmakers have institute instituted for 02/2021 as well and convene this meeting in a virtual space without the physical presence of shareholders and their proxies. Given that we still need to observe social distancing, the number of participants here at Deutsche Telekom AG's headquarters has also been reduced again. Present here today are the chairman of the board of management, Tim Hodges, and the CFO, doctor Christian Ilic.
Welcome, gentlemen. The remaining members of the board of management are not physically present. They are all taking part in the meeting via a separate audio video link. Similarly, apart from me, all members of the supervisory board, with the exception of myself, are following the meeting via a separate audio video link. If necessary, the members of the board of management and supervisory board who are not attending in person can communicate at any time with maybe the intending members of the board of management or with the motor republic.
And I also would like to welcome doctor Christoph Neuhaus, who is sitting beside me and as a notary public has been retained to keep the minutes of the shareholders meeting. And finally, I would also like to welcome new proxy holders appointed by the company who are present here in bond. On behalf of all the members of the governing institutions, I would like to also welcome everybody who is present at headquarters in Bonn and thank them for being here to make this possible like they have been doing for many years now. For the first time at the shareholders meeting, I would like to welcome miss Leroy, who's in charge of the board of management's Europe department. As a new member of the board of management, I will discuss additional changes in the composition of the board of management and supervisory board later in my explanatory notes and information on the supervisory board report.
Let's turn to the formalities for today's shareholders meeting. I hereby establish that the shareholders meeting has been convened according to the law and articles incorporation in due form and in due time through announcement in the Federal Gazette dated 02/26/2021. And all other communications and publications required in connection with the shareholders meeting have also been made avail available in due form and time. Invitation to the shareholders meeting and all other documents to be made available to shareholders in connection with the shareholders meeting can be found on the company's website. The special shareholders meeting website has the address www.telecom.com/he.
This is a site which you also use to access this Internet transmission, and I hope things will go smoothly there. Now I come to an amendment to the agenda. Together with the motion for resolution proposed by the applicant in this connection as well as a motion for resolution and a statement by the board of management of Deutsche Telekom AG were published in the Federal Gazette from 03/03/2021. All other notifications and publications required in this regard have also been made in due form and time. These documents can also be found on the company's website.
Counter motions filed by shareholders have been published together with all required information on our company website where they can still be examined and approved. These counter motions are deemed to be submitted in today's shareholders meeting. When the shareholder who submits the countermotion has been properly terminated and registered for the shareholders meeting. Countermotions accordingly deemed to have been submitted are accessible via the website for the shareholders meeting at the Internet address www.telecom.com/hv and are marked accordingly there. And so far as these do not amount to rejection of a proposal by the management, they will be put to vote today if they are not resolved by proposals by the management previously put to vote being adopted with the necessary majority.
Nominations have not been submitted today. For the sake of proper order, countermotions are available here on-site as are all other documents to be displayed at the shareholders meeting as required by law. I would also establish that the convocation of today's ordinary shareholders meeting as a virtual meeting with the shareholders' rights is communicated in the convocation is based on the decisions taken by the board of management with the approval of the supervisory board in accordance with section one, paragraphs one, two, and six of the applicable act on the measures in company cooperative association foundation and condominium law to combat the mitigation of the effects of the consequences of the COVID nineteen pandemic. The act also provides for the possibility for supervisory board members to participate in this meeting via for for the the operator via audio video link for the the public call based on a corresponding resolution adopted by the board of management. These opening remarks as well as the speech of CEO, mister Huttka, some other statements will also be available online
In addition, we are recording the opening remarks and the report by the board of management, and we'll make these available to interested media subsequently. Please note that audio or video recordings of the meeting are prohibited. K. The shareholders who are duly registered for the shareholders meeting or the proxies can use the password protected Internet dialogue to perform postal or online voting, have the voting rights exercised by the company appointed proxies in line with the voting instructions issued, grant proxy authorization or subauthorization to a third party, or raise an objection to a resolution of the shareholders meeting. Any postal or online votes as well as proxy authorizations or voting instructions for proxy holders as appointed by the company may be cast or issued or amended or withdrawn via the password protected Internet dialogue until voting commences.
Objections to a resolution taken by the shareholders meeting may be submitted via the password protected Internet dialogue before the meeting ends. The declarations will be handed over to the notary public and we'll have a certain amount of time allotted towards the end of the event. The other options described in the notice of convocation published in the Federal Gazette remain unaffected. This applies in particular to the possibility of changing or revoking postal or online votes or proxy authorizations and instructions to the proxy holders appointed by the company outside the password protected Internet dialogue. Given that the proxy holders appointed by the company are also here in person today, This shareholders meeting has a formal attendance area.
Today, this is the meeting we are in, namely h zero point twenty at Deutsche Telekom's headquarters in Bonn. The list of participants, ladies and gentlemen, which means the register of shareholders
who
are present or are represented and of shareholder representatives is being compiled as we speak. Once the register has been completed, it will
be
made available here, and I will then inform you of the official attendance figure and of the number of postal or online votes that have been received so far. Any changes to the attendance figures that may be occasioned by issuing or withdrawing proxies to the company appointed proxy holders will be reflected in regular amendments to the list of participants, which will also be made available here. I shall also prospectively inform you about the updated attendance figures from a legal perspective as well as the current number of postal or online votes received by such time. Shareholders who have duly registered for the shareholders meeting or their proxy holders can access information from the list of participants and on attendance during the shareholders meeting via our password protected Internet dialogue. Before we commence a meeting proper, let me briefly outline the next few steps.
After the report by the board of management and the verbal explanation of the report by the supervisory board, The board of management will answer the questions submitted via the password protected Internet dialogue by midnight 03/30/2021. To the extent that questions are to be answered by the supervisor board, I will answer these questions in agreement with the board of management, which will adopt my answers as its own. After answering the questions, I will explain the voting procedure, call out the proposed resolutions, and provide a few more notes and additional information. You'll then have approximately five minutes approximately five minutes to cast, change, or revoke postal or online votes or proxy authorizations and instructions to company appointed proxy holders in respect of the motions for resolution called. You can use the password protected Internet dialogue for this purpose.
Then the votes will be cast by the proxy holders appointed by the company who are here on-site. When determining the result of the vote, the yes and no votes cast by consumer online means will be included. These were the necessary organizational details. We now commence with the agenda. Item one is as follows.
Submissions to the shareholders meeting pursuant to Article 176, Section one, Sentence one of the German Stock Corporation Act. Under this item, annual financial statements, the consolidated financial statements, the combined management report, and group management report, as well as supervisory board report are presented. All documents to be submitted to this shareholders meeting have been available for perusal on our website since the meeting was convened and will remain so for the duration of the meeting. The same applies to articles of incorporation. Documents provided are also available for perusal here on-site.
Ladies and gentlemen, shareholders, I now give the floor to the Chairman of the Board of Management, Mr. Rakesh, for his report.
Mr.
Rakesh, you have the floor. So you're seeing me here in the living room, Deutsche Telekom. I welcome you to our second virtual shareholders meeting. Unfortunately, it's not in person. I really miss this direct dialogue with you, but I hope that you have made it through this diff these difficult times in good shape so far.
We've learned how important digital communications is. We just we've also learned how important telecom involved being involved is, how well our networks have functioned. And I must say in 2020, our colleagues had to do a lot. There's heavy heavy demands placed on them. They kept the network up and going.
Our lives have been and still is at home, spending the whole day in home office and video conference, working from home, homeschooling with the kids, and on top of it all, all kinds of entertainment through television, Netflix, etcetera, Telecommunications conferences via Zoom require three megabits per second. If I download a YouTube video or a Netflix video, I need five megabits per second. If you add that all up, you'll notice very quickly that 50 megabits per second is what you need, and that's really that way. But, nevertheless, it doesn't always go smoothly in every household, and not every connection works smoothly. In most cases, it's because of the home networking.
Home networking has to be improved to also make customer experience better. Because if you get a lag or something like that, it's just what's happening in the building itself. The building itself can slow down the signal by up to 40%. And if it's by radio transmission, then or Wi Fi, then you can have problems as well. That's why I have a couple of tips for you, practical tips.
Use Wi Fi six. That's a new standard that you can install. It's kinda like this. It's like going from a two lane interstate to six lane interstate and mesh routers. That's my second tip.
That's the latest technology that we're selling right now. What is that mesh? Mesh is a router that works with repeaters and that are installed in different rooms in a household. So it's like this. Every room has an optimum Wi Fi supply through these repeaters because each of them sends out a wireless signal, not only does it strengthen the signal, you can have good data connections everywhere in the household.
And you might be saying, oh, how am I supposed to install this? I don't understand software. I I don't I even have trouble with computers. I need a technician. No.
It's not. Good technology function functions and works simply, and that's why I'd like to present our mesh router to you. Here, you see the latest model from Deutsche Telekom.
This is
the main router, and these are the devices that
you put
in the individual rooms of your household. You install it, plug it in, and you push this plus button here. And then you go in the other room and you hit the plus button there, and it works. All the devices work in all the different rooms. You have the same great data connection in every room where these are installed.
Most of them work with 50, a 100 gigabit in a very stable way, and we are offering this to 34,000,000 households already today. And our our competition competitors like to sell this product too, by the way. But usage behavior will change. New applications will be coming online that need more bandwidth than what we have installed in our homes today, and that is what we are getting ready for right now. The future is fiber optics, ladies and gentlemen, and this is the famous fiber optics that all of Germany is talking about.
A fiber optic cable like this can be used to supply an entire district or
the city. Just a couple
of these tiny cables can supply a couple thousand customers with a huge bandwidth. If we're talking about 50 megabit today and a 150 or 200 megabit, which we have made cables for that in a lot of places, we're talking about many times that amount. We can have transmissions of up to one gigabit per second, and new technology will be able to handle 10 gigabit per second. That's the future we're talking about. All types of data connections into the house will be made possible by this.
How can we get this fiber optics in the home? What does telecom have to do so that everybody can benefit from this huge bandwidth? Just like everything else in life, the most important thing is to be well prepared. Being well prepared starts planning, and network planning at Digit Telecom has been modernized. Might have seen out on the street the TCAR, which is helping digit digitize our entire infrastructure with fiber optics.
What is this TCAR that you see on the road everywhere now? First of all, it's outfitted with cameras. It's got laser scanners on it, and they make recorded images of areas where fiber optics are to be installed in the future. Every five meters, it does a 360 degree sweep of the whole area. Four individual cameras mounted on this device ensure that every detail on the surface structure can be recognized.
Two GPS antennas on top of this make sure that these pictures are directly linked to the location and synchronized with it. And that gives you a completely digital picture of the whole street. And the data is then put in a huge database. And with AI, it is then processed and approved artificial intelligence. And that gives you a complete digital picture of areas that we want to serve.
And, also, it helps you optimize the whole, yeah, whole grid of fiber optics. Here, if you Dortmund, for example, on on the screen, Dortmund has 2,000 kilometers of roads that have to be scanned. We've got a lot of it already. And during these trips, we are making 2,000,000 photos of this region just here in this city. And it's, of course, anonymous, completely anonymous.
Vehicles are picked turned into pixels, and the planning is then made available to the municipal authorities immediately. So it's not a lot of red tape, and it's not a lot of bureaucracy. It's all taking place digitally. And what's important in all this is especially the planning of the so called distribution cabinets because you have to root the fiber optic cables out of the ground and then get it to the home. And the planning of these these cabinets is key in all this.
If we could save up to 50% of the expenses required with all this time and effort by doing it all digitally, and it cuts the time down to a fraction. So just to give you an idea here, our chairman of the supervisory board, he's also a technician involved in the laying of fiber optics infrastructure. But ladies and gentlemen, that's not everything because we've planned this, but now the rollout has to begin. Roadwork is one thing, but how do we go from the road into the household? How do we go from the street into the house?
And I'll tell you one thing. My friend, Yarth is sacred in Germany, and that's why we have to find a new technology. We have to think about this, and I wanna give you a little presentation on this. This is like we call it a ground rocket. And you have a house in the background, and it starts at the street.
And then we want to go through the front yard without causing any damage. This is a ground rocket. It weighs about 20 kilos. It's got a circumference of 10 centimeters, and we use pressurized air underground to shoot it through from the road to the house. This is the magenta mole, and it covers up to 15 meters per hour.
And finally reaches the house, and then we hook it up, and fiber to the home is completed. So ladies and gentlemen, this is a huge investment, maybe the biggest investment in the history of Deutsche Telekom. We've said by 2024, 10,000,000 households should or our plan to get your optics and not just to the street. We're talking Apartment into the apartment, into the home. So for us, this is a huge technological challenge, but also an administrative challenge, And we love it.
We love the challenge. The color of the fiber optic cable journey is magenta. We're investing, and we are the network of the future. And I would thank all of you in the rain, cold, and snow during the corona pandemic who've been out there making sure that our network network is fantastic today and will become even better in the future.
Dear shareholders, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,
in a
nutshell, 2020 was a record year for Deutsche Telekom despite the coronavirus pandemic. Deutsche Telekom's employees are really going the extra mile right now, And for that, I offer my warmest thanks. Our culture has carried us through the guiding principles we follow, and that is what I want to talk about today. In this difficult period, we are in a position to provide a sense of security for the people out there. Our high end concept work, the incidence levels at telecom are much lower than the average population.
Last year, the health rate even improved to ninety five percent, and we hope that we will also be able to vaccinate in the near future. Over 70,000 employees within eight weeks. Our our company medical service could handle that. And therefore, we see light at the end of the tunnel. We just don't know how long the tunnel is, but we are looking forward, offset by the strong financial position that we created for ourselves in 2020.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are strong in The United States. We're strong in Germany, and we're also strong in Europe. Handelsplat was writing this morning Deutsche Telekom way ahead of its competitors. Well, we exceeded our guidance on both sides of The Atlantic. Revenue up 25.4% to €101,000,000,000 thereby breaking through the revenue sound area of €100,000,000,000 In organic terms, revenue increased by 3%.
Which means that we grew even without the merger in The United States. Adjusted EBITDA up 41.6% to €35,000,000,000 In organic terms, the growth rate here stood at 7.9% organically. Net profit up 7.5% to €4,200,000,000 Adjusted earnings per share plus 15.4%, 1.2. Free cash flow, 6,300,000,000.0, down 10.3%. But we are expecting this decline.
It is just a temporary consequence of the business combination in The United States, which we closed exactly a year ago today. And I can tell you that it has already become a smashing success. We are now serving more than 100,000,000 customers in The U. S. And that already positions us second in The U.
S. Market even though we started from a very weak position. The market capitalization of T Mobile U. S. Has actually increased its synergies even greater than planned.
We had anticipated $6,000,000,000 per year, and now we expect $7,500,000,000 So what are we doing with all that money? First, we are reducing debt in The United States. Then we will benefit directly from the success of The US business. In the period from 2023 to 2025, T Mobile US will give up to $60,000,000,000 back to shareholders. And as you know, we currently hold a stake of around 43 percent.
So up to around $26,000,000,000, we go to Deutsche Telekom. This gives us a lot of scope and opens up completely new possibilities for us as entrepreneurs. First of all, we can increase our shareholding in The Mobile US to more than 50%. We already secured the option to do that and at a much lower price than the current share price. Secondly, we can invest further in Europe.
Without The United States, the fiber optic build out in Germany that I was just talking about would be much more difficult. And thirdly, can further develop our dividend policy, and we can reduce the group's net debt. At present, it stands at around €120,000,000,000. That is 2.78 times our adjusted EBITDA. However, we are aiming for 2.25 to 2.75, and we will be back inside this range in the medium term.
Ladies and gentlemen, people make numbers. And a corporate culture without a strategy is aimless, but a strategy without culture is weak. The former national handball coach, Dagwa Zigalson, once told me the following formula for success. He said, success equals talent plus hard work times attitude. The right attitude is a key factor here.
If we want to be successful in our business, it's the multiplier for what we want to achieve. For us, this is expressed in six guiding principles. First of all, delight our customers, always putting customers first. All our products and internal processes are aligned accordingly. And in our ideas forged, we work together with customers on new products.
A number of places I went to visit last year were in Nuremberg and Bamberg, where I met, my colleague Tanya Crosscheck. In the first coronavirus wave, she packed up her computer in the car, and since then, she's been working from home. If just one customer is disconnected from the Internet, she swings into action. And just like her 30,000 service colleagues in Germany, they do the same day in, day out. They fulfilled we fulfilled 43,000,000 customer requests in 2020.
Another case in point that shows from the attitude come the results. Fewer complaints, down 35% since 2019, less lateness. Actually, not many more. Our technicians are on time for 95% of all agreed appointments. Less ping pong.
We resolved more than half the problem from the first call. The first contact resolution rate has increased significantly to now 54%. We only finished the call when problem has been solved. Our customer service sets us apart from all our competitors who used to say in the past that they were better than us, and that hasn't always been the case. Today, however, we are leading the field.
No matter which indicator you look up, brand image, ratings from our customers, ratings from trade journals, Deutsche Telekom is almost always in first place. But today is no different. It was today, after all, that we achieved another accolade from Connect magazine. But most of all, I am delighted with the feedback that we've had from customers. We've undertaken to term our term our customers into fans.
And during the crisis, there really was fan mail. We received hundreds of letters saying thank you. But thanks to me and thanks to our organization as a whole. You can see just a couple of examples behind me on the wall here. Thank you, dear customers.
It does us good, and it certainly motivates us to become even better. And, yes, I also deal with customer complaints personally. And I'm looking into it with my colleagues. We swing into action, and we try to solve any problem that is out there even though we may not even have created it. That takes us to our second guiding principle, which is get things done.
We want things to be as simple as possible for our customers. So we are simplifying all our products. Sometimes we start out small and then we make a big. The best example of this is the Mind Magenta app, which we developed in the European market. Of course, it's also available in Germany, and we continue to add more features.
This app lets customers manage everything themselves from home, setting up WiFi, reporting calls, questions relating to the contract. Everything is possible with this app. And 60% of all our customers are using it as we speak. And that's what I call successful digitization. And the fact that this works comes down to one thing.
We have migrated our entire network to the Internet protocol. You could say there is no more need for the interpreters in our network. In other words, the interfaces between the individual components. Everything now speaks one language. Everything understands this language.
All devices and all applications are now IP based. We invested more than a billion euros in this migration over the past few years, and I can tell you it is now paying off. We are seeing more digitization. There are clearly fewer outages. Our customer service is perceived as being more efficient, easy setup of devices.
That's what IP stands for. And by the way, we've been pioneers on this field in the telecoms sector. And at the same time, we have another positive effect, which is the reduced telecom Deutschland's indirect costs, which were down 200,000,000 last year alone. Now the second aspect of this guideline is, and the guideline once again is get things done. Despite corona, we built out more.
Deutsche Telekom is a leading five g provider far and away. We cover 80% of the population in Germany, 86% in The United States, and 100% in The Netherlands. And I'm guessing they appreciate it. Deutsche Telekom has always been leading in mobile communications. We have the best network in 12 out of 13 markets.
We have the best provider in Europe. And our network. In The Netherlands, it's the best network ever tested in the world, at least according to the external provider, Umlaut, which is which just encourages us to continue along these lines. In the Flex Network, we are being accused of having missed the boat. I'll have to be honest here.
We aren't the ones to stand around waiting at the pier. We set sail long ago, and we've completed many stages along the way. We started by laying optical fiber to the gray street cabinets, vectoring and super vectoring. Our competitors who complained about that big time. But that didn't mean that they were laying out optical fiber themselves.
Instead, they used our lines. I mean, anyone who says FTTC needs to do FTTH. And that's why we are now building optical fiber directly into the homes as I was able to demonstrate to you before my speech. Having said that, Ostrate Telecom will not create a new monopoly network. We are no longer a state run company.
We are basically a customer's operation, and that's why we are working with hundreds of partners. We also know, however, that our major competitors will not need as much FTTH as we will. So we've concluded lease agreements for our network with Vodafone, Telefonica and one hundred one Vericel. Volume, 17,000,000,000 over ten years. This will enable us to increase the utilization of our network.
It reduces our costs. At the same time, it increases the profitability of our own build up, and we can continue to invest. Ladies and gentlemen, I am an avowed network investor and always have been. In the past seven years, we invested €36,000,000,000 in Germany alone, which is 30% more than in the seven years before that. And now we will raise this figure again.
Euros 18,400,000,000.0 will be invested worldwide in this year alone, and Germany, over €5,500,000,000. And, of course, we also need to acquire the relevant mobile spectrum for that. And I can assure you, we won't be satisfied until everyone can take part. Hashtag bye bye. Now no risk, no gain.
Infrastructure pays off over a long period. For fiber, it is fifteen years. What really matters is that you have a high capacity utilization of the infrastructure together with fair prices and of course low internal production costs. And that's why the digital planning that we've rolled out and upgraded is so important. Last year, we achieved a return on capital employed of 4.6% in the group.
That is more than our cost of capital. And this goes to show that our long term investments are paying off. In Germany, our broadband revenues were up 7.8% compared to 2018. We are no longer losers, and with FTTH, this figure will grow even more. The third guiding principle is each other team apart.
Deutsche Telekom has developed a strong culture of debate, which is what this Wobblers stands for. We don't want to be wobblers.
For
us, it's not about the power of individual departments. Rather, if it's about the power of the point made, we did away with the central corner. We work together to implement what we've decided together. One good example is climate protection. The build out of the networks, the operation of data centers, the cars that our technicians use to get out and about, all these things generate more c o two.
And the young generation in particular is demanding that we do something about it. If every ton
of carbon
c o two saved ensures a bit more future. So we discussed it. Between the costs on the one side and the necessary climate protection on the other. There's no compromise here. And that's why we said we want both things.
We want the build out, and we want it to be climate neutral. To the end, we've invested, tens of millions of euros. We've invested in solar parks and wind farms, and we only buy electricity from renewable sources of energy. SolarGe Telekom's network is 100% green. Last year alone, we saved 300,000 metric tons of c o two in Germany.
Deutsche Telekom seems to be leading in this field as well, and that's why we've adjusted our targets once again. For 2030, we had committed to 90% less c o two. Now we've determined that we will reach 100%, and we will do this by 2025. But we want more. The products that we buy and sell that we are using should also be net zero, and we will achieve this by 02/1940.
The fourth guiding principle is act with respected integrity. Deutsche Telekom advocates for a society in which diversity and inclusion are a given. There is no room for racism, sexism, or discrimination in our company. Our t stands for taking part. Diversity, we speak all together.
27% of our managers are women, and the number keeps rising. And in 2020, we filled 24% of all management vacancies internationally. One example being our board of management. Dominique Leroy has been responsible for the Europe segment since November. Dear Dominique.
Ladies and gentlemen, we also stand for respect and integrity beyond that because, unfortunately, we see that hate and incendiary speech are on the rise, and the Internet is becoming a crime scene in this context. What is the of your position on this? We are campaigning with 44 partners because we want an Internet in which people can move freely without fear of being marginalized or of being discriminated against. Our campaign against hate speech has reached 340,000,000 people. It is shaking things up.
It is moving people, and hopefully, it will help to improve online discourse. Because by the way, democracy is also an attitude. We are shareholders. Respect is a social duty. It's also a corporate one, mind you.
And especially in this last far from simple year of the coronavirus, we were able to see that our employees did an even harder and even better job. That's why we paid out a special bonus to them, €500 across Europe for everyone except for managers. We also encourage employees to be a part of Deutsche Telekom. In Germany, any employee can now buy shares for €1,000 per per year, and we will add half the shares again on top after a retention period of four years. And that's how you turn employees into entrepreneurs.
The fifth guiding principle is I am key, count on me. We keep our promises. That's our claim for everything who's working in that company in terms of how we are dealing with each other, how we are dealing with our customers, and of course the same goes for you our shareholders. What we say is what we do. We are proposing a dividend of €60 cent per share for this year.
This puts the return from share price and dividend at 6.8% in 2020, which is much higher than at all of our main competitors. And the share has performed very well recently. The price is currently at €17.11, and it has developed very well. But I still believe that we can cross the €20 mark. And most analysts also see room for growth.
The average target share price assumed by analysts is €19.82. This means Deutsche Telekom is back in the trend, and it's the only telecommunications companies still represented in the Euro's box 50. All the other telecom companies got kicked out. Why is that? Well, first of all, we focus on strong economies.
We operate on networks exclusively in Europe and The United States, so we are somehow the market leader in the Western world. Secondly, we focus on doing what we do that, building networks and selling products that are closely linked to these networks. Thirdly, we offer our customers asset value, six more convergence products from a single source. And fourthly, we actively address issues. Albania, Romania, Greece, The Netherlands, and the yes.
Even The United States used to be trouble kids. In all these countries, business did not go to plan in the past. So either we parted ways from it or we let that business into shape. And how do you think that what's happening in The United States or Greece or our pearl, which is governance. Above all, however, our success is down to the fact that from our attitude, real actions follow.
And in business life, trust is the most important currency and reliability begets trust. Deutsche Telekom has built new trust in recent years, including on capital markets, which brings me to my final point and the last guiding principle, which is stay curious and grow. We keep our eyes open. We stay on the ball. In our company, everyone enjoys personal growth.
And as a result, so does the company as a whole. And so we grow. Mobile customers in Europe and Germany, up 1,400,000 last year. In The United States, up 5,500,000. Broadband customers, up 388,000 in Germany.
So that's a plus. The figure is not shrinking as in the past, and the number of broadband customers in Europe was up 281,000 people, and earnings are growing accordingly. In 2020, the bottom line was up 1.5% in Germany, up 2.1% in Europe, up 10.8% in The United States, and in the group development segment, it was up 6.6%. And we are continuing this growth. In Germany, by systematically building out FTTH and five g.
This should help us to gain more shares. In Europe, by focusing business more on convergent offers, I. Mobile communications, fixed network, and TV from a single source. And in The United States, with our attack on the duopoly of AT and T and Verizon, we can become the number one there. And we always have the best network by some margin.
We
also see opportunities for growth with business customers. We now support small and medium sized companies from Telenet and Deutsche land in a holistic way. And that is one reason why revenue has fallen at key systems. In 2020, it was down 5.6% to €4,200,000,000 And we are also sharing business that does not turn a profit. But the coronavirus pandemic is also taking its toll at T Systems.
Corporations are holding back on investments for the moment. And the restructuring of T Systems is hard. We know that. That said, T Systems also needs to make a positive contribution to the group's results. And to this end, we are now aligning it as a straight service provider for information technology, which means business with data centers or the cloud, digital solutions such as the WARN app, which can soon be used to report rapid antigen tests, by the way, and thirdly, security.
Everything company need to protect themselves in the digital space. Dear shareholders, 2020 really was a record year yet again. But this year, we want to do even better. We plan to achieve adjusted EBITDA of around €37,000,000,000 free cash flow of around €8,000,000,000 and we also expect revenue to grow even further. We will announce our medium term planning at the Capital Markets Day in May.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are still in the midst of the pandemic. But many people are losing confidence. We are not going to be affected by this. We have shown that we can be successful even during the crisis. And I think there is reason to be optimistic in Germany as well.
Overall, we can do more than we sometimes think we can. We have all the ingredients for the formula for success, education, talent, and now it comes down to our individual attitude. I hope that once the pandemic is over, we will take a good hard look. What did we do well? What did we do badly?
And then we need to consistently change what didn't work well. And that doesn't only hold true for telecom. It applies to our society as a whole. And the question can't be, what have I got to lose? Rather, it must be, what can we all gain together?
And exactly what contribution can I make myself? Digitization at all levels is the key here. It is an obligation for Europe, as a matter of fact, and an opportunity for Deutsche Telekom. We are ready to help because we know ourselves that all it takes is to delight our customers, to be a team together and a team apart, to act with respect and integrity, to be somebody others that can can others can count on, stay curious and grow, and above all, get things done. Just like our six guiding principles.
In this way, Deutsche Telekom will continue to be successful now and in the future. Our attitude powers our strategy, so does our corporate culture. So that from the supposed small details of 2020, the big picture of 2030 can grow. And that is a picture of a successful Deutsche Telekom. There can be no future without the past.
Thank you.
We connect everything and everyone, and the purpose of connection is human understanding.
Communication has been personal. Now it has become tele communication.
Can we help local communities to become part of this new digital world? You are gonna be the ones which breach the digital divide. This wild west in the Internet has to get regulated. People will judge companies more on their purposeful, on their ethical behavior because everything is fully transparent.
A title like the CTO could actually start standing for chief trust officer, or, you know, you're gonna have a CDE, a chief data SFA.
We need even for buying things on the network.
We're seeing the development of sensors that are essentially in digital field. On top of
that, we will have human machine interface.
We have a huge customer base where the demand of high speed data and large volumes of data is growing and is growing really, really fast. We have the ability to serve their needs, building a high quality fiber and five gs network. What are we building this company for? Fundamentally, we're building it for the next generation, and we're building it to be a big part of digitizing Deutschland.
Mr. Hertges, thank you very much for your statements. You provided a very clear picture of the situation now and of the future. And we all know that future will be built on our past, and this is what the management board worked on. And I would like to thank the board of management and all the employees of Deutsche Telekom for their work, which makes the company what it is.
And I think it is also on behalf of the shareholders that I thank all the employees for their achievements in the past financial year. And I would like to ask the Board of Management to convey our thanks to the employees. Dear shareholders, in a physical meeting, there would be applause now, but this cannot happen right now. But I would like to just take it to the minute that you would have had applause if you had a different type of a meeting. I hope this is also in your interest.
Let me now cover the Supervisory Board report. This report is included in the annual report and it starts on page seven. I would like to summarize the report as follows. The supervisory board intensively monitored and supported the management of in the business, and we had a total of 47 meetings, 12 supervisory board meetings, one off-site meeting, and 34 committee meetings. The participation rate overall was 98%.
But at this occasion, I would also like to mention that the work of the supervisory board does not only happen in the meetings of the supervisory board, but the supervisory board is a corporate body and is closely linked to the company treating the top major topics. Cooperation with the Board of Management has always been good and based on trust. The high number of meetings ensure the close and regular exchange with the Board of Management. These future basis for fulfilling the legal supervisory tasks were the verbal and written reports provided by the Board of Management. The Supervisory Board reviewed the development of the company in its regular meetings.
The Board of Management fully met its information requirements in a timely manner. The content and scope of the reports complied with all the legal requirements. Even between the meetings, the board of management replied to individual questions or reported verbally. Additionally, I had a regular exchange with the CEO between the official meetings. On the basis of its reviews and discussions with the auditors, the supervisory board came to the conclusion that the internal control system, the risk management system, the compliance system as well as the internal audit system are functionable and effective.
The business transactions and measures at the Board of Management submitted to the Supervisory Board in the financial year 2020 in accordance with the list of business transactions subject to co determination, we discussed thoroughly and reviewed in detail. We approved the measures presented. The external auditor audited the financial statements and the consolidated financial statements as well as management report and the group management report and granted unqualified audit opinion. The Supervisory Board approved the financial statements and the consolidated financial statements of its review during the meeting on the 02/25/2021, the financial statements are thus adopted. The year 2020 was a year of major challenges and significant achievements for Deutsche Telekom.
We are happy and proud to say that it was the best year ever in the corporate history of the company. Let me briefly mention the most significant issues discussed by the Supervisory Board in the past financial year. The financial statements and consolidated financial statements, the business strategy and development in The United States, finalization of the merger between T Mobile US and the mobile provider Sprint, integration of Sprint t Systems business strategy and development further development of the group strategy and group transformation financial and debt situation market situation and competitive situation development of a new board compensation system, and I will say more on this topic later Various performance decisions, for example, the sale of a Dutch radio tower business and a fixed line business in Romania. And then personnel matters. Reorganization of the board divisions, Mr.
Gopalan, now board member for Germany Mrs. Leroy, now board member for Europe exception of the board employment contract of Mrs. Nemak, Ms. Boehle and Ms. Langheim And what is really important, long term succession planning for the Board of Management and the Supervisory Board.
Budget and annual finance plan 2021 and midterm plan 2021 to 2024. And last year and this year of special importance, corona crisis management with the effect of the pandemic on the business, but also the employees of the company. Now let me talk about the situation of the company, your company. The financial year 2020 marked the record high for Deutsche Telekom. Let me repeat this, a record high for Deutsche Telekom in its history.
In spite of the corona crisis and corona hit us in a better way, it restricted our activities but it also promoted our business. Due to the Sprint takeover, revenues for the first time increased to more than €100,000,000,000, and earnings also grew significantly. Organically, I. E, without Sprint, the growth rate year on year was almost 8%. At the absolute figures, this is €2,600,000,000.
Mr. Hertges just illustrated the records achieved in the last year. The group, and this is of greater importance, is on a growth path. The operational business saw a very good development in almost all areas, and I have to say that this is The business year was characterized by consistent execution of the group strategy just presented by Mr.
Hedges and the ongoing transformation of the group in times of digitization and technological change. The financial year 2020 was exceptional in many respects. It was characterized by significant achievements by the Board of Management and by the unforeseen corona crisis. Deutsche Telekom completed a trailblazing transaction in The United States. Mr.
Telekom improved its market position in Europe and simultaneously made a significant contribution to deal with the corona consequences by providing stable networks. Mr. Telecom invested almost €17,000,000,000, which is roughly 30% more than last year. Despite the difficult general environment, the company has laid solid foundations for future success. The excellent results confirm the successful work of the Board of Management.
And I would like to expressly thank the Board of Management on behalf of the entire Supervisory Board for these extraordinary achievements. The tough competition in the industry and the permanent competitive and regulatory pressure, however, remain challenging for the company. But whereas most of the telecommunications companies in Europe have difficulties coping with these pressures, Telkom is very well positioned and by far the leading telecommunications provider in Europe. The Board of Management has a clear strategy to ensure Deutsche Telekom's future. Based on the results achieved in 2020, as Mr.
Hertbiter already mentioned, the Board of Management and the Supervisory Board, in line with the announced dividend policy, propose a dividend payment of €60 cents per share. It is now important to consistently execute and develop the strategy of Deutsche Telekom that Mr. Herzges just described vividly in his speech. I am confident that the Board of Management and the employees will continue to succeed in building on the strength of Deutsche Telekom. And I think it is especially that the new focus on the important topic of corporate culture just mentioned things to hit get or make a huge contribution.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me now talk about personnel changes in the Board of Management and the Supervisory Board. Let me first talk about the Board of Management. Ms. Birgit Bohler has headed up the extended Human Resources and Legal Affairs Board of Management Department since the 01/01/2020. Doctor Thomas Kremer, who left the area data privacy, legal, and compliance, retired from the group as of the March 31, and he supported the transition to the new structure before he left the company.
As already announced in the last shareholders meeting, doctor Dirk Wessner left the board of management at the end of last year. He resigned from his function as the Head of Department for Germany with the Board of Management as at the 11/01/2020. In June 2020, Mr. Srini Goppalan, formerly responsible for Europe, was appointed as the new court of management member for Germany effective November 2020. In September 2020, the supervisory board appointed miss Dominique LeRah to succeed mister Guoppa Lan as the board of management member for Europe effective 11/01/2020.
Miss LeRah is an experienced manager strengthening the Board of Management of Deutsche Telekom. Miss Leroy has a track record of more than thirty years of experience in the consumer goods and telecommunications industries and knows the industry very, very well. The Supervisory Board welcomes the even more international and diverse composition of the telecom board of management. Again, a really warm welcome to you, miss Lura. We are happy to have you on board.
Finally, Michelle report about three reappointments. In December, we reappointed Ms. Nemak as a board member responsible for technology and innovation effective 11/01/2021 for another term of office. In February, we reappointed miss Bo Birg Bohler, board member for HR and legal affairs, and mister Frosty Langheim, board member USA and group development, and these reappointments will be effective 01/01/2022. Miss Nemat, miss Bolle, and mister Langheim, we are happy that you will stay on, and we wish you the best of success.
Now let's talk about the changes in the supervisory board. There were no changes among the shareholders representatives in the in the supervisory board in financial year 2020. But the term of office of doctor Helga Jung will end with today's shareholder meeting. We propose to elect miss Jung for another term of office to the supervisory board. I have to mention that the Supervisory Board decided to shorten the term of office of shareholders representatives in the Supervisory Board from five to four years in the future and thus ensure more flexibility in the Supervisory Board as was repeatedly demanded by investors.
We thus propose to elect Ms. Young until the end of the shareholders meeting twenty twenty five. Miss Young is a former board member of Allianz SE and a member of several supervisory boards. In her time at Valiance, she was responsible for the insurance business in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America as well as for the areas mergers and acquisitions, strategic shareholdings, as well legal and compliance. She graduated in business administration, has a long experience in national and international top management positions, and offers excellent expertise in the supervisory board of Deutsche Telekom.
Ms. Jung has been a valued member of the supervisory board in the past five years. Please find miss Jung's CV and invitation to today's shareholders meeting, and we also published the CV before in on the website. The search for Cannibis of the Supervisory Board was based on the agreed competence profile. And here, I would like to put your attention to governance declaration on page six.
We thus ensure that relevant competencies deemed important are covered in the Supervisory Board. Changes among the employee representatives. In the financial year 2020, we saw the following changes on the employee representative side. At first May twenty twenty, term of office ended when he left Deutsche Telekom. Ms.
Karsten Marks was court appointed as his successor in the Supervisory Board effective 05/01/2020. In connection with the termination of his activities at Verdi, Mr. Lothar Schroeder resigned from his mandate as Vice Chairman of the Supervisory Board after fourteen years and Mr. Zauerland took over as the new Vice Chairman on the 03/27/2020. I would like to thank the leading member Mr.
Decknaf P on behalf of the Supervisory Board. And a special thanks again goes to Lukas Schroeder. I already thanked him last year, but I would like to thank him again for his long tenure as vice chairman of the Supervisory Board. And I shall also thank the current members on the supervisory board for their intensive and successful work last year. Thank you.
And I will now come to the topic of corporate governance and here especially compensation. As you can see from the annual report, Deutsche Telekom complied with the required the recommendations made by the German corporate governance code in its old version in the year 2020. In the current financial year, we will follow the rules of the new corporate governance code. Compensation. As announced last year, the Supervisory Board developed a new Management Board compensation system that is submitted for approval during this shareholders' meeting under Agenda Item nine.
The new Management Board compensation system defines the framework conditions for the granting of compensation components to the Management Board and thus the total compensation. The Supervisory Board has developed the new compensation system on the basis of the new stock operation act and especially the new act implementing the shareholders' right directive out to the governance code. The new elements are mainly based on the stronger share component in the compensation and the use of the so called ESG criteria as one of the KPIs for variable compensation. The letters ESG stands for the sustainability objectives of the company, e for environment, s for social and g for government. The provisions of the new compensation system will be introduced within two months of the shareholders meeting taking effect retrospectively on 01/01/2021.
It is, of course, based on your approval, dear shareholders. We will submit transition provisions to the members of the board of management and hope that they will all change into the new system. However, and this is what I would like to underline here, the existing board contracts enjoy protection of the status quo. When defining the new compensation system, the supervisory board followed the following principles. And before I explain these principles, let me point out that the compensation system is not the only way to control the board of management and the company.
The only way for the board of management to control the company. The contrary impression was stated in the pre discussions, and this is why I would like to mention again that there are various control systems in the company and these control systems are even of a higher importance than the compensation system. We ensure compliance with the regulatory and legal requirements and the principles of good corporate governance. We support a long term corporate strategy for sustainable development. We define appropriate compensation levels in line with peer groups, and the levels are independent of the system but are then, of course, based on the system.
What we want to achieve is strong pay for performance, which means that the payment is based on the achievements. We also would like to take into account the shareholders' interest and the stakeholders' interests. The system should be intuitive and transparent, especially for the board members affected. What is also important is a consistency of the compensation system in the company starting at the level of the Board of Management down to the employees. And following these principles, the supervisory board developed the compensation compensation system over a period of almost two years.
It took us long because we also had a lot of discussions with investors and proxy advisers to take into account the investors' views regarding the requirements and the design of an adequate compensation system. And we also waited for the final conclusion of the outlook to law. And we used the discussions with the investors and the proxy advisers in order to compare the approach of the Supervisory Board with their ideas to explain the motivation of the Supervisory Board was to respond to criticisms raised by investors. Let me point out one aspect of our compensation proposal, and this is the possibility to reward special achievements of a board member in the interests of the company with an extraordinary bonus payment in exceptional cases. There were a number of questions on this point in the run up of the shareholders meeting, and I would like to explain this Supervisory Board's motivation to preserve this compensation component.
The Supervisory Board would like to keep the possibility to make a special payment in the case of exceptional developments. Of course, the supervisory board will ensure the adequacy of such payments. It will only use such payment if the performance to be rewarded has an exceptionally positive influence on the long term strategy and development of Deutsche Telekom. Furthermore, such a payment was based on a really extraordinary performance of the board member. The performance does have to go beyond the normal responsibility of respective board member.
It is also important to know that such a special bonus payment is subject to the compensation cap. This means that the special bonus cannot go beyond the maximum cap defined. This cap will still be in place. Finally, I would like to point out that we used the instrument of extraordinary success bonus payments very restrictively and very cautiously in the past. We did it, for example, in the case of the special bonus for Mr.
Hodges for his extraordinary performance regarding the merger between T Mobile U. S. And Sprint. To our shareholders, this should suffice on the topic of management board compensation for now. During the Q and A session, I will come back to individual questions regarding the compensation system.
To shareholders, ladies and gentlemen, let me summarize my report on the year 2020 as follows. The supervisory board has closely monitored and supported the management board on the basis of a compliant and effective corporate governance. Deutsche Telekom is strategically well positioned, is on a clear operational growth path and is financially well positioned based on a solid balance sheet and a strong free cash flow. Thus, the Board of Management has laid strong foundations also to master future challenges. The past is guaranteeing the future.
Dear shareholders, I would like to thank you very much for your attention. I am now going to address items two to 11 of the agenda. The full wording of the agenda items two to 10 as well as the motions for resolution proposed by management can be found in the invitation published in the Federal Gazette. There is one special circumstance surrounding item two. As part of the share matching plans, treasury shares were transferred to plan participants in the current financial year.
7,213 of which were transferred after 02/16/2021. As a result, the number of dividend bearing shares increased compared to the figures indicated in the invitation in the shareholder meeting. The board of management and the supervisory board therefore adjusted the motion for resolution for item two on the agenda as announced regarding this issue in the invitation
to the
shareholders' meeting. The board of management and the supervisory board proposed the adoption of the following resolution. Net income of €5,129,092,899.85 posted in the 2020 financial year shall be used as follows. Payment of a dividend of €60 cents per no par value share carrying dividend rights that equates to €2,846,000,680. And we propose to carry forward the remaining balance to unappropriated net income, which equates to €2,283,006,073 and €45 cents.
The adjusted motion on the appropriation of net income is available for inspection on the shareholders' meeting website at www.telecom.com/hv. That's what I wanted to say about item two to 10, The full wording of item 11 and the associated motion for resolution submitted by the shareholders can be found in the amended agenda published in the Federal Act. To shareholders, I am now going to announce the current attendance figure. This is the 04/01/2021 in Bonn. Here is a list.
At the
moment, 3,245,280,073 shares are represented. That equates to 8,370,000,330 million €916,986.88 or 68.16%. That's 4,761,458,596 local value shares. This equates to the following share capital, €12,189,334,005 and €76 cents. In addition, we have received postal properties for a large number of non par value shares.
Please refer to the numbers on the wall behind me. This, of course, will be relevant when assessing the votes cast later on, and so I will give you an updated set of figures later on. At the current time, 8.74% of the share capital is represented here, including the profit growth. I will hand over these figures to the notary public. A list of participants is available for inspection on-site.
As already mentioned, information from a list of participants and of the attendance, Victor, can be accessed via our password protected Internet dialogue during the meeting itself. Ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders, we will now commence the Q and A session. I would now like to ask our CEO, Tim Hakus, to start responding to the questions submitted in advance of the shareholders' meeting. Mr. Hakus, I don't know whether you meant to comment on how much interest there has been in submitting questions and how things may have changed versus last year and whether you wish to dare to give us a forecast on how things might develop.
We hope that we will be able to welcome shareholders in person next year, but we don't know. So over to you, Tim Hertkers. Thank you very much, Chairman, and also thank you for your great cooperation with the Board of Management. I would like to comment briefly before I start to answer questions. We received five sixty nine questions from almost 200 shareholder representatives.
So that's more than last year. Maybe just anecdotally, my speech had 2,000 words and one shareholder actually submitted questions corresponding to about 10,000 words. So it's difficult. It can take a lot of time today. Some questions were, of course, very similar, almost identical.
And so we will be collating these questions and breaking them down by subject matter. We have 13 dramatic areas and there are three fifteen questions that we will be responding to. This is the order in which we want to respond to your questions in. We will indicate this ahead of each thematic block, and we will also, of course, be responding to those questions that didn't fit in with any of these thematic areas. The Internet's dialogue was, of course, your channel for submitting questions, And there were a number of personal issues and customer issues that were raised via the Internet dialogue.
Of course, we won't be responding to them here today. But, of course, we have passed them on to the responsible departments, customer services notably, and they will resolve any issues you may have. Shareholders registered for the shareholders meetings were able to submit questions until Tuesday midnight using the Internet dialogue. The last question came in at 11:45PM on the March 30. Questions that came in outside of the Internet dialogue can, for legal reasons, not be answered.
I hope that you understand why that is. And so let's start answering the questions from the shareholders. Ladies and gentlemen, of course, we received a number of questions on the impact of the COVID-nineteen pandemic. Coming in, amongst other things, from Mr. Schmidt, Mr.
Oswald, Ms. Gebler and Mr. Weidenbuller and a number of shareholders that are not mentioned by name. On the impact of the COVID-nineteen pandemic on the telecom, let me just say one thing. Generally speaking, we are getting through this crisis pretty well.
Virtual telecom is economically stable. We have more than €100,000,000,000 revenues in 2020. That was a record breaking year for us. Our investments were beyond €17,000,000,000 That's also a record breaking figure. But of course, our business activities in various parts of the group were impacted by the pandemic.
For instance, there were some temporary travel restrictions, meaning that our roaming and visitor revenue went down. And the terminal device business was impacted as well as our large customer business. I mentioned this in my speech. That said, we had an increased demand for voice telephony, especially in the fixed network area that was in early twenty twenty. I want to stress that it is not possible to make proper predictions on how long the pandemic will take.
So that is why our guidance for 2021 includes the impact of further issues here, especially in regard to roaming. We believe that the negative impact of the coronavirus pandemic will impact on our bottom line to the tune of about 200,000,000 in 2020. The same is true for 2021. There was no coronavirus pandemic induced reduction in the workforce across the group. On the corona worn app, our tracing app, I want to say the following.
It has been downloaded more than 26,000,000 times. And so this tracing app is one of the most successful worldwide. It is helping to combat the effects of the pandemic. Almost 300,000 users have registered positive tests so far and were able, hence, to warn other users. At the moment, 26,500,000 downloads have been done.
Of course, this is a major project and not everything has gone according to plan, but we believe that this is a success story that we can certainly be proud of. Anecdotally, I was actually warned three times that I have contacts that tested positive, and I was able to respond accordingly. The app is being developed all the time with new functions, and any ideas to improve it are being tested and trialed on an ongoing basis. We are liaison with the Robert Koch Institute and the Federal Ministry of Health in this area. There will, for instance, be an so called event function integrated so that the infection clusters can be recognized.
And yesterday, you may have heard reports of the integration of results of rapid tests that can be updated to the app. Of course, the functions have to remain voluntary. As always, we do not want to collect more data than necessary. It is an open source app. The program code is openly available.
The level of data protection is very high, which has meant great acceptance. But of course, on the other hand, it's also criticized for that. The federal government asked Deutsche Telekom and SAP to create the app. We are fulfilling this mission in an economically efficient manner. The development costs are expected to be about €20,000,000 and per month, the running costs are about 2.5 to €3,500,000 for the entire infrastructure, including the operation of the hotlines.
A lot of people are calling in and, of course, Cosmotic, that is included in this amount. We also were asked about travel costs that were not incurred because of the pandemic. We see that helping to boost our bottom line in 2020, but I do want to stress that there have also been negative effects. We reported in detail on that. On the question itself, excluding The US business, in 2020, we spent around €100,000,000 less on travel expenses than in 2019.
A lot of that, not everything, but a lot of it is due to the pandemic. On the question of whether we have any changes in our loan liabilities because of the prices, no. There have been no noticeable changes. One shareholder asked us whether we have any closed shops at the moment and whether there are any shop workers on short time. Yes.
We have short time work in 159 of our shops. But, of course, this is a scheme that is, amongst other things, dependent on incidence rates, and developments are very dynamic. And so there's lots of changes in the number of closed shops and sites. We were asked whether Deutsche Telekom topped up short time pay. Under the wage agreement, workers of PVD, this is the Deutsche Telekom, are paid a grant to make up the shortfall of up to 85% of workers' growth pay.
However, not exceeding the full net salary that the workers would have earned without short time pay. We were also asked whether we are meeting the requirements of the government on meeting people working from home. Yes. We are meeting them. We were also asked how many working days have been lost because of quarantine.
In Deutsche Telekom AG, domestic subsidiaries and foreign subsidiaries. Overall, we have lost sixteen thousand six hundred and ninety eight point six six working days, accounted accounted sorry. Two thousand three hundred and ninety three of these dates were accounted for by DTAG and fourteen thousand three hundred and five point six six days were accounted for by the subsidiaries. None of our sites shuts down completely. A shareholder asked how we handled working from home before the crisis.
At Deutsche Telekom, for years, we have been working, we have been allowing mobile working. This is in fact part of our wage agreements as well. At the beginning of the pandemic, Deutsche Telekom allowed all staff to work from home provided their work allowed them to do so because that was a precautionary measure. A shareholder asked how much we could save in the longer term after the COVID crisis has ended if just 10% of working hours could be worked from home. We are monitoring developments very closely, of course.
However, it's not possible to give you a good answer in terms of how much we could save. You may need less office space, that is true, but we might need more meeting space and creative space as well. A question was asked about the infection in the group. We don't divide that information across the group to break that down. We have one thousand six hundred and eighty seven infected employees in Germany.
Fourteen hundred eighty one have recovered, and two hun two thousand seven are still infected. Internationally, we had three thousand two hundred and eighty nine infected people. Two thousand nine hundred and seventy four people have recovered. In The US, eight thousand eight hundred and seventy four employees were infected. And here, we don't have a breakdown between recovered and actively infected employees.
Across the entire group, we regret that four colleagues died in connection with the coronavirus infection. As for voluntary support, the question that was asked, we do not record any numbers on that. As for the possibility to delete data from the corona warning app, none of the data are centrally stored anywhere. The data is maintained on users' devices and the users can delete that data anytime. It was also asked why no selection option was integrated into the app allowing users to opt out of the data protection.
This is a question that should be addressed to the federal government because they were our client here. We integrated whatever the federal government requested in regards to functions. We were asked about our attitude to the Looker app. Both the apps, Looker app and the Corona War app are both helping to combat the pandemic in different ways. Of course, I believe that they complement each other each other quite well, and Deutsche Telekom will actively support any activity to help combat the pandemic by digital means.
I would now like to say on behalf of everyone who's working in the crisis intervention team to thank Ms. Bohler, who is lead responsible here. Mr. Celtic is leading the staff here. Mr.
Celtic, Ms. Bohler, if you like the shining lights that have helped to navigate the group through the crisis. They've done so extremely professionally. There's lots and lots of people working to help. Deutsche Telekom is being ranked or rated very highly by its employees for what it's doing during the crisis, and I would like to thank everyone who's been involved.
We've received a number of questions on how telecom stock has developed in value. Ms. And Mr. Luig, Mr. Kuras, Ms.
And Mr. Knoppek, Mr. Plach, Mr. Oswald, Mr. Kestner, Mr.
Seidl and other named shareholders have asked questions here. I need to ask you to consider that we need to bear in mind that different ways of dispersing dividends need to be taken into account here. We have an overall positive return of the telecom stock since we went public in 1996. However, compared to the DACs, things have not gone satisfactorily. There's a number of reasons for that.
You have liberalized the market telecommunications regulatory issues have been against us here. Lower prices for consumers and competition on the markets have of course impacted on prices and market share. And that is particularly true for the years 02/2010. We've seen our revenue and profits decline as a result. Over the last ten years, if people invested in the telecom share, they would have seen an increase in value of 157% compared to the DAX.
The total return was 113 percent. Stocks Europe was up 103% in this time. And if you compare that to general European television sector, we see a decrease in value of minus 18% over the last ten years. The same figures for the last three years have looked as follows. The value of the telecom stock has gone up 48%.
That's twice as high as the DACs, which went up in value 24%. Stocks Europe, 600 went up 25%. And the European telecommunications sector saw a decline in value of 11%. If we look at the last twelve months, telecom stocks went up 49%, almost performing at the same level of the docks, which is up 53%. Stocks Europe six hundred was up 39%, and European Union sector generally grew by 16%.
So the telecom stock has certainly done well compared to the DAX of the European stock market in the last ten years. Deutsche Telekom is by far the most valuable European telecoms company. That having been said, we are, of course, not happy with developments over the last twelve months, and that is why we are working tirelessly to achieve better development for you all. Over the last twelve months, we've seen a lot of discussions, especially in regards to the continued planning of our US business. We've been talking to our US investors, and we are also discussing our plans to invest more in fiber in Germany.
Roberto just said that this has meant that the analysts hitting for a target stock price of about €20. And in March, we spoke at length with our American team on the further plans for The US business, And we will, of course, be sharing more information with you in May at our Capital Markets Day. We've got a question on the risks to the development of our share price. I would just like to refer you to the chapter risks and opportunity management on pages 118 to 134 of our new reports last year where we have a detailed explanation of possible risks to our business. But I have pains to point this out.
We also cover the opportunities for our group. We had a question on whether we are considering buying back shares to help maintain our share price. On the 05/25/2016, the shareholders meeting authorized us to buy back treasury shares up to a tune of 10% of our share capital. Today, we wish to ask for a new authorization to do so. This is point seven of the agenda of the shareholders meeting.
However, we believe that the dividend is our primary instrument for remunerating and rewarding shareholders. We also were asked whether we are considering a minority IPO in order to increase at the value of Deutsche Telekom. Deutsche T Mobile US is already listed in its own right. OTE Market Telecom and Deutsche Telekom are two. We will be verifying whether this makes sense over the next few months.
We are a conversion provider, and so we believe that fragmenting the German business does not make sense. The towers business is the number one in Germany. It is well positioned in order to continue participating in the German growth market. Another question was on what we can learn from Google and Amazon. These companies are pursuing a very different business model as Deutsche Telekom, and so it is only possible to a very limited degree to compare the two or the three in this case.
We also got a question in connection with our initial offering of Telecom shares in 1956 as a communication strategy at the time. It is not unusual for a company to publicize complex action involving a retail tranche. We do not believe that this is in any way a negative thing. The IPO price at the time was based on the current state of the market at that time. General market fluctuations are not manageable to any great degree by a company.
In 02/2010, private investors accounted for 14% of our share capital by the 2020. That has gone up to 18%. So that share has actually gone up, not down. Mister Oxford referred to so called scandals, but we do not believe that these are impacting on our share. We don't know how many telecom shareholders made losses, up to what extent.
We also don't know how profitable their investments have been because we don't have any information on that. We also don't have any information that would give rise to believing that there have been speculations or manipulations Let me talk about the dividend now. We received a number of questions on dividends. Mr.
Kesten, Mr. Metzdorf, Mr. Osvald, Mr. Lohmann, Mr. Gender, Mr.
Eckendorf, DABA, Immobilier and GNBH and a number of other shareholders that are not named here. Generally, the dividend, of course, should reflect the adjusted earnings per share. Our minimum dividend is EUR $0.06 0. Let me say the following on the 2020 dividend. Our adjusted earnings per share 2020 has gone up 15%.
This is mainly due to a nonoperative noncash earnings contribution relating to the valuation of our call options on shares of T Mobile US. About the outlook for 2021, we expect a decline in adjusted EPS. In addition, we need to consider the net debt of the group. The aim, of course, is to keep net debt across the group within a certain range. This range is defined by the ratio of adjusted EBITDA to net debt.
Our comfortable range is 2.25 to 2.75. When we concluded the agreement on the merger between Royal US and Sprint, we announced that we're going to be leaving that range temporarily. The idea was to return to that range in the third year after the closing of the deal. At the end of the year 2020, that value was 2.78. This is we believe that the board of management and the supervisory board, the dividend of €6 cents for 2020 is appropriate considering the long term impact on earnings and our current net debt.
Of course, we want to return to our debt ratio as soon as we can. The main drivers here are increasing free cash flow of the T Mobile US. We expect synergies of around €7,500,000,000 thanks to the merger of the two companies.
The free
cash flow in The U. S. Business is expected to rise to between 13,000,000,000 and $14,000,000,000 until 2023, and their cash flow will go up to over $18,000,000,000 a year. This is a realistic way to return the debt ratio back to the intended range. What about the outlook on dividends?
I would like to refer you to the respective chart and annual report and what mister Hodges just told you. Our dividend policy adjusted for 2019 foresees a minimum dividend of 60 Euros per dividend bearing shares. It will still continue to reflect the relative growth of our adjusted earnings per share. Mister Beckendorf asked about our current dividend policy and whether it will continue into the year 2021. Yes.
It will. We will be giving you an outlook on our dividend policy for the years after that on the Capital Markets Day on May 20. As for the timing of the payout of the dividend, We believe that this day, the date of the shareholders meeting, is the most appropriate one for paying out the dividend. What about this fiscal deposit account? There's a number of factors that influence how long we can pay out the dividend from our fiscal deposit account without the deduction of capital gains tax.
We believe that this will continue to be the case for the next few years. This means that there will be no deduction of capital gains tax on the dividend. Deutsche Telekom does not have any distributable profits as defined by section 27 of corporate income tax act because the fiscal deposit account exceeds the carrying amount of equity. This has historical reasons such as the privatization of Deutsche Telekom in the 1990s and the acquisition of T Mobile US using telecom shares. This is a purely fiscal calculation.
It conforms to German tax law and has nothing to do with our profit as recognized under German control company or IFRS. We had another question on our plans regarding the so called dividend in kind, the stock dividend as it's also called. We introduced the stock dividend option in 2013 for the business year 02/2012. This was an option for our shareholders, and we wanted it to give us the flexibility we needed at the time to make investments. There are disadvantages when it comes to stock dividends.
The shares, of course, diluted, and you have an increase in the numbers of shares qualifying for the dividend. And administratively, the work is more than a classic cash payout. And so we discontinued the stock dividend option in 2017 for the 02/2016. And secondly, I'm not planning to reintroduce it anytime soon. Finally, the Salstelle, the payments office received €700,500 for its work that it did in paying out the dividend.
Back to Tim Hurtges.
Yeah. It's coming to my meetings. So
this brings me back to my favorite topic, the build out of fiber optic cable, mister Matcon, mister Flasek, mister Burning, mister Brock, missus Inge, mister Ducke, mister Halstein, mister Sparangio, mister Bongo, mister Matas from Deca Investment, mister and miss Chek, mister Oswald, mister Rohit Aker from Union Investment, mister Schmidt from DWS Investment, mister Timan, mister Beckendorf from DWS, miss Gabler and other shareholders who I won't name, pose a series of questions on the topic of the build out. Just a basic note, telecom invest billions in infrastructure every year. But you were planning on an investment of €18,400,000,000, alone in Germany, more than €5,500,000,000. Most of this investment is channeled into our infrastructure, and it's well invested. More than 34,000,000 households in Germany have connection from Deutsche Telekom.
This allows access to bandwidth of at least 100 megabits per second, so called FTTC connections. 26,000,000 households have what's referred to as super vectoring. Super vectoring makes possible speeds of up to 250 megabits per second. One important aspect, however, is that customers also have to order these high bandwidths. So we assume that the next step will be that we pick up the pace of the build out of these to the of this fiber optic cable to the household of customers.
And by 02/1930, every household in Germany is supposed to have a possibility to receive fiber optic connections either from telecom or competitors. That's part of, yeah, our mission for society. And after twenty five years of regulation, we're going to do what is necessary to defend our market share. And, of course, we will also meet our mission on behalf of society, but we will not be able to reach that goal in the current regulatory framework. But we do compete with competitors.
That's part of our fiber optic strategy. We're open for cooperation with competitors and have already demonstrated in many territories of Germany that we're reliable partners. That applies to national carriers as well as regional companies and local municipalities and utilities. So we provide our competitors our network, and at the same time, we purchase network services from competitors in order to, yeah, and supply more and more people with our potential products. All market players profit from this cooperation on a voluntary basis, especially people in our country.
Our next objective is to support 10,000,000 households with with the the possibility possibility for for an an FTTH connection by 2024. And beginning of that time, we expand and build out FTTH households by 2,500,000 a year, and that applies to urban and rural areas. That's how we will limit to our very important task of supplying a sophisticated digital infrastructure for our population. One special aspect of fiber optics is supplying our schools with fast Internet. Here, we're really going full steam ahead, and we're supporting continuing education of teachers as best we can, but because of red tape and bureaucratic impediments, there's, of course, delays sometimes.
And there's yeah. It's like house house fighting because there's different regulations from a different lender and areas that the question that we received with the five g mobile telecommunications can be replaced in areas that don't have enough fixed network supplies. The clear answer is no today. In '20 we had 20,000,000 in 2020, and we want to supply 5,000,000 more in 2024. So that's the headline for Deutsche Telekom.
We want to supply every household with fiber optics. Mister Montes asked several questions about how our customers are accepting fiber optic connections. I can say in response that demand is increasing continuously every year. Wherever we offer high bandwidth, more than 50% of our customers are ordering broadband connections of 100 megabits or more. Regarding the question about which products are there's a major demand for, our broadband offer of up to 250 megabits, our Magenta TV offer with additional streaming.
Products like Netflix and Disney are gaining more customers for telecom than for the competition right now. Above this, we offer Magenta. It's a very unique product in the market. And finally, regarding the question of our fiber optic build out, the objective of supplying every household in Germany with fiber optics can't be achieved by telecom alone. We're optimistic that our competition will also make their contribution to the build out in Germany, and we're open to the rest of the market for cooperation under fair conditions.
And the keyword here is reciprocity. We want to pay the same price for using others' infrastructure as they pay for us. So the federal government pro has a program to support and subsidize build out where it's uneconomical for companies. At the same time, the market's important not to flood the market with this kind of these subsidies as it would have an impact on the price and also affect our incentives for the build out. So another question was in when will fiber optics be available in Telekom is in charge of the build out in Deutsche Telekom.
In order because we're cooperating with Deutsche Glaswasser, we're able to we'll soon be able to offer our products there. Mister Kielman asked about our own build out of fiber optics. Investment in the network infrastructure is very complex, and it you could only really assess it over a longer period of time. For example, the frequency is for the five g build out were already purchased in 2019. In addition, in the course of expansion, the five g network last year, also the LTE network was expanded.
So the five offices similarly com complex, but we want to invest at present in you know, future technologies if only just to remain competitive. Mister Schmidt asked about the obstacles to build out of fiber optics. One is building regulations, which frequently provide for fiber optics to be laid at minimum depth. If the cables are laid at a more shallow level through so called microtest trenching, that's not allowed. So in addition, also building permits for laying fiber optics is very involved and very complicated, and you often have to have the approval of owners of properties to lay fiber optics from the street into the household.
And so something like trenching would make it possible to speed things up at more economical prices, for example. One question about mister Beckendorf related to the build out of fiber optics. In order to accelerate that build out of FTTH, we will be boosting investment from currently 1,200,000,000 to €2,000,000,000 per year. And in order to make it as efficient as possible, we'll continue to cooperate with other players, and that will play an important role in the business strategy in telecom. Questioned by miss Gabler on the on the topic of network capacity utilization.
With voice connections, it's 50% higher, and data volumes are 30 to 40% higher in during as a result of the corona period. There was no directly corresponding breakdowns in networks or fluctuations or problems. And this is due all to the fact that our network we made it through this whole pandemic without any breakdowns, and that wasn't the case with the competition. And one shareholder asked about whether the campaign more broadband for me was all about this is these are fiber optic offers in FTTH areas. And the biggest cost item here is burial to bring the fiber optics into the house.
It's not possible to really state a general cost or price for this. But overall, we're too slow in adapting our technology to modern cabling technologies. The whole bureau cratic procedures have to be made have to be characterized by less red tape. And Srinigopalan, our very successful European head of the German bead business, said he has three priorities, fiber optics, fiber optic, and fiber optic. So this brings me to the next chapter.
One question on mobile telecommunications. Was sent in by mister Zeller, mister Mantes from Investment, mister Oswald from the Schutzkemann Schachter Kuputl, Anleger, mister Beckendorf from DSW, miss Gabler, and other shareholders whose name I won't mention. Just let me say in just general terms regarding the topic of mobile telecommunications expansion, I would note that telecom is building more than 1,500 new LTE and five g locations per year. In addition, we are expanding our performance with existing sites. This applies to urban areas as well as rural ones to improve mobile telecommunications.
We're cooperating with competitors too. We've agreed to close these gaps in coverage throughout Germany by using currently existing infrastructure. In the world, if we receive approval, we could build up to 2,000 more sites a year. At the world level, we're investing €18,400,000,000. This year, more than 5,500,000,000.0 alone in Germany, which pays off to in Germany, we'll reach a milestone in coverage in mobile communications soon.
Recently, we reached it. Now we cover 80% of the population with five g, and 90% by the end of the year is probably what we'll achieve. So that's the next stage. So that's significantly more than our competitors. Our customers perceive us as the five g market leader and are actively asking about five g.
And so we're able to offer very attractive tariffs in this area like a Gentleman deal with five g as part of the package and five g capable smartphones as well. Deutsche Telekom is investing on a massive scale in the development of the five g network, both in terms of network coverage as well as an improvement in network functions. The aim and objective is to leverage new functions that are associated with five g stand alone, including so called network slicing. These are ultra reliable communication with a low latency or reaction period and quality of service offers. That's another significant aspect of five g.
In addition to generation of more sources of income, also, costs for our current networks have been reduced, and we're taking out of commission older costly, older systems and replacing these with advanced technologies that reduces electrical consumption and improves the profitability of the company. We get build out of five g the country. There's being is well, the next step is the five g evolution. We'll do everything we can to optimize five to make it better. Mister Matt Matt has asked about the status of our five g build out and the technology we use.
The build out technology was only possible through the innovative use of so called dynamic spectrum sharing. Existing antennas don't have to be revamped, which costs a lot. It's sufficient to upgrade the antennas to do to upgrade five g. And, also, fewer new sites are necessary to expand the network that saves time and money. The build out of five g throughout the country is therefore taking place on the basis of this dynamic spectrum sharing technology.
Another question by mister Matas related to mobile communications. With the help of dynamic spectrum sharing, four g and five g can be operated parallel to one another on the 2.1 gigahertz frequency band for five g users users leads about 1,500 megabits per second possible for our LTE customers, available Internet speed. It's also increased by use of additional frequency with pure five g build out on 3.6 gigahertz frequency speeds of up to one gigabit per second are achievable. And we're building out both of them, both three point six and two point one frequency range. That creates capacities and allows us to cover a lot of territory fast.
I have a question for mister Mach just related to the topics of Oron and Huawei. Yeah. Regarding the topic of Oron, the launch and use of open band that stands for the excess network. It's possible competitive and dynamic ecosystem by RAN providers. And over the medium term, this open open RAN and the efficiency of RAN implementation as well as the operating costs for mobile network operators will improve.
The main disadvantage of open RAN is the increased complexity in the integration of RAN components from different manufacturers. Combination is the key here in order to be able to cope with this. Regarding the topic of Huawei, as has often been stated, we purchase mobile communications technology and from a whole host of different manufacturers. At the same time, with a view of the political discussion in Germany that began in 02/2019, we have decided to phase Chinese suppliers out of the core network where there are heavy critical security issues, where we are able to use components from competitors. We would like to keep these for us with a view to the competition, and that's probably in the interest of their shareholders too.
But in the antenna access network, only the same manufacturers can be used in moving from in in five g components moving these to four g components. That's why telecom uses the five g build out in the antenna network suppliers Ericsson, Nokia, and Huawei. We're evaluating all our manufacturers and suppliers in terms of their ability to supply us given the current geopolitical situation and the COVID nineteen crisis. The question relates to our statement best network and its origin. The advertising statements are based on external mobile communication as such as connect mobile mobile phone test 2021 and the magazine chips mobile communications tests for 2020 and 2021.
And we want to continue to do our own measurements to evaluate our performance. We are working continuously to improve our mobile communication supply. So I have a question related to the supply requirements with the mobile communication standard LTE. In Germany, the LTE network of telecom covered 90 at 1% of households at the end of 02/2019. So the supply requirements of the federal network agency from the frequency auction in 2015 have been met.
Regarding the question of network build out for one and one Drillisch, this hasn't begun yet, and it will take several years until networks from customers outside of urban areas can be used. One plus one Drillisch announced that only 25% of the population would be supplied by 2025 and fifty percent by 2030 with its own network. Thus, one and one Drillisch over the long term will have to make use of network of Telefonica, that's so called national roaming, and that's already the case today. Because one and one Drillisch also has to earn to pay for the additional cost for network build out. We do not expect to price competition to become more intense there.
Another question related to the cost of past frequency auctions in the auction in 2019 for five g frequency in the 2.1 gigahertz and 3.6 gigahertz period. German Deutsche Telekom invested around €2,170,000,000. Regarding a question about the sites for our five g antennas, these antennas, for the most part, are operated at the sites of the Funkturm Gesellschaft, which is 100% owned by Deutsche Telekom AG. So that was the block of questions relating to mobile communications. And I'm going to take a little breather here and do a fuzzy test.
Maybe you can see this.
We have a one gig transmission rate here with a 3.6 gigahertz antenna. So we're not just talking about a theoretical exercise here that's happening. 898 was the downhill speed, which brings me to sustainability. We've received several questions on the subject. Among other ones from Mr.
Schafer, Mr. Matys from Union Invest, Mr. Rotaker, Mr. Dickendorf from DSW, Mr. Abe, as well as other shareholders who I will not mention by name.
First of all, on a general note, we look at ourselves as a responsible company, which is also embedded in our group strategy. We are committed to sustainable actions, and in this way, we want to make a contribution to solving the ecological, economic, and social challenges of our time. In Germany, customers have been surfing on the green telecom network since the beginning of 2020, which is run using 100% of electricity from renewables. Our next goal is to reduce our carbon emissions by 90% compared to 2017 by 2030. We are convinced that long term growth can only be achieved if we take on responsibility as entrepreneurs and meet the social and ecological challenges.
So we believe that sustainability will pay off and all group units from telecom will benefit from it, including our shareholders. Now let me turn to the individual questions. We received one question on the rollout of our charging infrastructure for electric cars. As we are continuing to expand it at the moment, we have more than 150 sites all over Germany, hence making a major contribution to the mobility transition. And last year, we made it possible to save carbon emissions by 3,700 tons.
And my question referred to the standard printing paper. It is certified with the the Blue Angel and eco label, and it accounts for around 90% of all our printing operations. Our paper from central printing operations, including mandatory communications, invoices, etcetera, is fully printed on recycled paper. The invitations to the shareholders meetings have been sent using FSC certified paper for years. And you can actively support us by receiving your invoices online and by having your shareholders meetings documents sent to you electronically.
Next year, we will send out far fewer documents. Another question was on the energy mix that we are using. Our group is buying green electricity from different sources in 2020. Green electricity accounted for 62%, and it is used from water power and wind power. However, 40% of our green power comes from so called power purchase agreements or PPA.
These are demand driven electricity supply contracts, which are computed directly between power plant operators and large companies such as ours. And in this way, we can make sure that we always get green electricity. One PPA is was done with a solar park in Mecklenburg for Palmer in Mecklenburg, Western Pomerania. We want to systematically extend that share of PPAs. And at the moment, we are also directly buying 8% of green electricity.
To what extent today's financial forecast from Deutsche Telekom is based on the targets of the Paris Agreement. Deutsche Telekom has fully considered the implementation of ambitious climate protection rules in accordance with the Paris Agreement and its medium term financial planning. This particularly holds true for investments in more efficient technologies and mobility solutions as well as the conversion of to electricity from renewables and the implementation of our Green Mechanter program. Mr. Amat has also asked whether we are in line with a possible supply chain act and whether we are monitoring our supply chains.
Deutsche Telekom is well prepared for a possible new supply chain act. Even today, comprehensive social standards have been established, which make sure that we can comply with human rights and the processes of good governance. As for the monitoring of supply chains, when selecting new suppliers, our supply sustainability requirements play a major role. As we continue our cooperation, we will rely on dedicated self assessments from our suppliers and risk assessments. The compliance with our basic principles, compliance with human rights, is regularly monitored using so called social audits.
Let me turn to a question on the cost benefit matrix and the sustainability area. Deutsche Telekom regularly monitors the level of ambition of all various parameters, nonfinancial KPIs and targets. And we always adapt our parameters in consideration of the associated cost and the expected benefit. Mr. Bechendorf asked about our KPIs for measuring the energy and emission intensities.
Pleasantly, these KPIs decreased over the past few years. However, the development of such indicators is subject to various fluctuations, fluctuations including technological development cycles. As far as energy intensity is concerned, we see an effect from the integration of Sprint in The U. S. In 2020.
As a result of the measures that we are working on, we will continue to improve efficiency and these targets will also be used for to determine the level of target achievement of the Board members. Mr. Arle asked about climate, friendliness, and resource efficiency of our fleet and the associated information in the CR report. The essential factor for inclusion in the telecom portfolio are positive for the workforce costs including sustainable criteria such as a good carbon emissions value and compliance with the latest emissions rules. You asked also asked about training and training offered specifically to drivers.
Unfortunately, due to corona, there were no such training sessions together with the automotive providers in the past year. Then you asked about the tires used by telecom. At the moment, we are not using revamped tires in our fleet. As for transparency, we are reporting on the most important fleet data in a transparent way. The CR report includes information on our annual systematic materiality analysis.
Based on this analysis, we provide an ample report on the number of vehicles and fuel emissions. Mister Adler then asked about the share of so called cradle to cradle products. As part of our activities to for resource protection, our way to a secular economy is of particular importance. For instance, we are offering our customers renewed media receivers and routers, which basically come back to us using a leasing model. We also introduced a sustainable smartphone because customers can give us their old smartphones if they like.
However, we cannot come up with a specific figure. Mister Arbe also wanted to know whether we can whether we are using sustainable materials for building towers. Deutsche Telekom is pursuing a sustainability strategy. When it comes to building new mobile towers, we need to comply with various regulatory provisions regarding structural stability, and this means that we can only use alternative materials such as timber in a limited way. And for example, after both solar energy and energy efficiency in our facility management, Procurement and power generation are organized locally in the group.
All major group units are working to continuously increase the share of electricity from solar and wind power. Wherever it makes sense to technically upgrade our buildings, we are doing it. As for the question regarding Deutsche Telekom's entire power consumption in 2020, this amounted to 2,718 gigawatt hours. The energy supplier of Deutsche Telekom AG in Germany is Power and Air Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG. We've received many questions on the investment portfolio among others from Mr.
Braun, Mrs. And Mr. Luig, Mr. Stephens, Mr. Klassen, Mr.
Fluehrer, Mr. Matthijs from Dikka, Mr. Beckettdorf from PSW, Mr. Hulman from SDK, Mrs. Rothacker and other shareholders that I will not mention by name.
On a general note, whenever we are changing our portfolio, it is designed to sustainably increase the value at Deutsche Telekom. This is consistently being monitored, and it can mean that we decide to sell certain companies or activities such as in Romania last year or in the event of the sale of our mobile towers in The Netherlands. But it may also lead to acquisitions such as the acquisition of Tele2 in The Netherlands or that we are merging companies such as T Mobile US. Now as for your questions, Mr. Matas asked how the investment portfolio in Europe is developing.
In Europe, we always want to ensure the best convergent customer experience that comprises six network of mobile communications. Meaning, in addition to the organic rollout, we always monitor the opportunities for acquisitions, for instance, in Hungary and The Czech Republic in the past. Now a question on the sale of Telecom Romania. The decision to sell Telecom Romania is subject to regulatory approval that we are expecting for the second quarter this year. It was a strategic decision.
And in the meantime, we have set up the mobile business and touch base that it it has become competitive. We've received several questions on Deutsche Funktum. DFMG is responsible for our business with mobile towers in Germany, but it was spun off as a separate company as early as 02/2002. We also spun off our Austrian and Dutch mobile towers to separate entities. Leasing such towers to third party is always based on market conditions around 25% of the disclosed revenues from our mobile towers are generated together with competitors in mobile communications.
And we regularly examine options on how to improve the value of our portfolio. The next question was on the sale of our tower business in The Netherlands. There were two targets primarily in this context. First of all, we bought an excellent valuation of the business and we used the proceeds in order to provide initial funding for the infrastructure fund or GIV. Then there was the question of whether we looked into a possible IPO.
And another question was what is the value of our mobile towers in Germany? The answer in The Netherlands around €12,000,000 The next question was whether it might make sense to pool all mobile activities and preparation for a subsequent IPO. We are firmly convinced that the convergent product should remain at the heart of our strategy and that's why such a measure is not being planned. And in this business, convergence has not quite progressed as much. In The US, we already have an IP We already did the IPO.
The next question referred to a possible spin off of T Systems. T Systems is an integral part of the group. T Systems supports large corporate customers. It is now focusing on IT services because we spun off the telecommunication services to Telecom Deutschland. T Systems transformation was taken from 2016 and will be continued consecutively.
The next question is what will happen with our BT Group investment. It was spun off to pension assets. Over the past few months, the BT share rose by around 30%. And once the situation regarding positive weather in The United States has clarified, we believe that this positive trend will continue. Now let's talk about taxes and tax havens.
We received several questions in this context, including on tax havens. Mister Duhnberg and mister Oswald, for instance, asked questions. Mister Duhnberg asked about foreign subsidiaries, and he said that it might be a good idea for us to check whether we as a corporation may lead to tax evasion. However, this is not based on where our company is actually located. It depends on where we are generating our business.
So that would be Germany for the German business and The US for our U. S. Business. That's what the taxation is always based upon. And according to German tax laws, there is no possibility even to dodge taxes.
Another question was whether we are keeping our shares in T Mobile U. S. Via a holding and The Netherlands and whether this is for tax reasons. Well, this
was
actually development over time. There are several reasons. It goes back to the nineteen nineties. So far, we have not benefited from that in terms of taxation. Mister Oswald says that or he actually asked several questions, which more or less aimed at asking whether Deutsche Telekom is using any tax havens to shift profits from a to b.
The answer is no, mister Ossai. This is not the case. Deutsche Telekom is not using any phantom companies in tax havens or any other artificial entities, which brings me to to Hertkots, and he will talk about T Mobile US. So that is all happening very fast now. Let me now turn to the questions from Paul Allen McIntyre.
Mr. Ossite, Mr. Ossite, It is true that many years ago, Deutsche Telekom was not satisfied with the performance of the mobile US. And it is true that in 02/2011, Deutsche Telekom entered into negotiations with the competitor AT and T. However, due to a veto from the US American DOJ at FCC, a transaction did not come about at the time.
With hindsight, we count ourselves lucky that the sale didn't go through back then. I would like to remind you that AT and T back then paid a so called breakup fee amounting to $6,000,000,000 to us that we used to make the investment gap T Mobile US much smaller, and that actually marked the start of the turnaround. In addition, since 2013, our US business and T Mobile has continuously developed positively following the reverse merger with Wipro PCS as the new management team led by the, then CEO, John Bledger. We were able to significantly gain new market share and to clearly improve the financial position of the company. And for many years, you know, there have been many reports about that in the press.
The two of our five g network has now become the fastest and biggest network in The US with the best network coverage. I mean, think about it. This is a network that previously was not represented all over Germany, and then we actually outperformed our major competitors and offer the best network. Why did it take so long until the merger with Sprint went through? Well, it took some time and previous attempts failed because of the demands of the Sprint main shareholder SoftBank.
So it was actually an advantage for telecom and shareholders to wait in order to get better conditions for the transaction. So we created value by waiting. Mister McIntyre would like to gain an overview of the plannings at T Mobile US for the next couple of years. And the question was whether we are considering a sale of T Mobile US. Mister McIntyre, ever since we set up T Mobile US anew, the company has developed more successfully than any other company in our industry.
Recently, the company had 102,000,000 mobile customers, the so called branded postpaid and prepaid customers. And with that, T Mobile US already outperformed its big rival AT and T and is now attacking the current incumbent Verizon. T Mobile is mainly leveraging the value potential from the continued rollout of the best nationwide five gs network in The U. S. On the basis of the merger with Sprint, we can use the 2.5 gigahertz frequencies.
So we've got more capacities and therefore higher bandwidth. At the Capital Markets Day in mid March of this year, the T US management presented the plans of the company which are very ambitious for the next five years. T Mobile US is aiming at strong growth in several additional market segments, for instance, in rural areas. In the business customer segment, T Mobile US is planning to boost market share of 10% to around 20% over the next five years. In early March, the company issued a special offer called WFX Solutions.
So working from wherever you are. It is designed to fit the needs of business customers and it comprises Internet solutions and business applications. In the home broadband segment, the company is expecting to gain 5,000,000 customers by the 2021. By 2025, the number of broadband customers at home is set to rise from 78,000,000 customers. And this will likely come with very positive margins because the current cost structure can be used for WiFi networks.
The ARPU, average revenue per customer, and the churn potential is comparable to that of the mobile contract customers, while at the same time, device costs are lower. So we have a much better outlook for T Mobile US, and this is based on the strong positioning of T Mobile US in the market for five g services. Thanks to the 2.5 gigahertz licenses that we gained in connection with the merger with Sprint, the five g network of T Mobile US is the fastest and peak point in The US. In addition, T Mobile US has acquired additional five gs licensees in the recent C band frequency auction for urban and suburban regions. By reinforcing the leading five gs network, T Mobile is safeguarding its strong market and competitive position, which is important because the cable network operators are also penetrating the mobile segment.
T Mobile US also raised the expected cash value that arises from estimated synergies from the Sprint transaction, and they rose the number from $43,000,000,000 to more than $60,000,000,000. In the medium term, the company intends to achieve cost and investment synergies of around $7,500,000,000. Previously, the budget figure for that was $6,000,000,000. Free cash flow, so the money that's left ultimately will amount to 13 to $14,000,000,000 in 2023 and more than $18,000,000,000 in 2026. These tremendous cash flows make it possible for the company to consistently bring its net debt down over the period in question and it also offers the potential to give something back to the shareholders, I.
E, including us. Following the statements from of T Mobile US at Capital Markets Day, such payouts to shareholders will only come about if the net to EBITDA ratio decreases to around 2.5. So first of all, we will leverage the synergies, bring that debt down, and then there's a payback. The paybacks to shareholders do not mean that debt will increase. We would only issue such paybacks once the level of debt has been brought down.
And of course, that also means that we are decreasing the level of debt here. For the years 2023 to 2025, the mobile US is expecting that this positive financial planning could lead to payouts to the shareholders of $60,000,000,000, $50,000,000,000. The exact amount and the exact timing of such repayments to shareholders has not yet been established, and we don't know how exactly this will take place, whether we will be using share buybacks or other instruments. Deutsche Telekom is the main shareholder of T Mobile US and therefore we can considerably benefit from such shareholder remuneration. So that's important.
It wouldn't be possible to invest in this money in optical fiber in Germany if we weren't able to leverage all these synergies in The US. So we are not in a situation where T Mobile US needs to to do a trade off between reducing net debt or paying money back to the shareholders. On the contrary, both things will be combined. Now let me turn to a question from mister Matasan, mister Krotz Krotz. He asked about the option of increasing our investment in T Mobile US from 44% of shares to 50.
On the 06/22/2020, we entered into an agreement with the Japanese corporation SoftBank, which also includes includes a purchase option for T Mobile shares amounting to 101,000,000. This safeguards access to the majority of capital at T Mobile US in the long run. At the same time, we enabled the immediate sale of around 198,000,000 in T Mobile US shares. The share of SoftBank in T Mobile US was reduced by around eight percent as part of that. And as a result of this sale, the share of T Mobile US shares that we were able to exercise using our voting rights decreased to around 52.5% as of the 08/05/2020.
So we continue to have access to the majority of votes at T Mobile US. The purchase options for the T Mobile shares held by SoftBank can be exercised until the 06/22/2024. And SoftBank is subject to a so called lockup until the 2024, which means that they cannot sell their T Mobile US shares before that, which means that as part of our purchase option, we can decide anytime if and when we want to buy the 80% of T Mobile shares from SoftBank. Euros 45,000,000 of this purchase option can be exercised at a price of $101.5 per share. The current share price of T Mobile is $125 So you can see that this is a very strong option.
The remaining 57,000,000 of this purchase option can be exercised based on the market price. So let me sum up. T Mobile US is the strongest growing component of our portfolio. Our agreement with SoftBank following the Sprint the T Mobile US and Sprint merger ensures that we hold the majority of votes and are prepared for the full consolidation of T Mobile US by the 2024. Our goal is to continue participating in the positive trend of T Mobile US.
We regularly monitor our investments in T Mobile US considering strategic and financial aspects, including the possible option to increase our share or stake. And like I said, we also have the option to increase our capital share in T Mobile US by mid-twenty twenty four. We would still be able to acquire shares from SoftBank as part of a call option. To date, we have not adopted a resolution on that and we nor have we issued a statement as to whether we are planning a capital increase. Please bear with us, but we are not going to comment on that today.
There is no time pressure and we will regularly examine or check on our decisions under strategic and financial viewpoints. At the same time, we are very focused to returning to our target range with our debt to EBITDA ratio. Starting in mid-twenty twenty four, SoftBank is authorized to sell T Mobile shares, and Deutsche Telekom holds a right of first refusal on such shares. One question referred to the management of T Mobile US. I understood mister Forswitz's question such that he wanted to know whether SoftBank would be able to intervene in the business of T Mobile US because it is a true shareholder.
The answer is no. SoftBank only holds an stake of just under nine percent at the moment, which means that they cannot interfere with the decisions of the board of directors for day to day business. Mister Oswald, at TmallOS, unlike at Deutsche Telekom, where we have a board of management and and the supervisory board, only we have one committee, which is the board of directors. And it has 10 members which were appointed by Deutsche Telekom, and seven of them are employees of Deutsche Telekom AG. These members are Tim Haktis, which is myself Christian Elek, Thorsten Langheim, and Dominique Leroy.
One question was, whether this might be the ideal time to actually sell T Mobile US shares. Of course, it would be our obligation to examine any possible offer, but this would not be an ideal time to sell off the shares of T Mobile U. S. Because we believe that we will see a further increase in the share in the value generated in The U. S.
And we will participate in And the capital markets are looking at the transaction in a 100% positive way. Before the transaction was announced in 2018, the T Mobile share price stood at around $65. That was in 2018, and it has now risen to around $125 or almost 90%. And the higher share price reflects the excellent development of the company and the excellent prospects for the company which were presented at the recent Capital Markets Day. So this was a very complex transaction and a very successful one.
And we need to hedge this option, which is below the market price. We owe this to Thorsten Langheim and his team. They did a great job in making this possible. And the operating management team has been in place for about a year under the management of Mike Sievert. It's a young team, and they are continuing the success story which was kicked off by the previous management team.
We now have a fresh and new team in The US, which is responsible for implementing our strategy there.
Okay. And now we move into space, ladies and gentlemen. From the rocket, we now go into space. There were a number of questions concerning the topic, if not, from space come from missus Friedel, mister Pumbach, mister Schulman, mister Schulze, mister Deli, mister Keste, mister Rosenau, and other shareholders. Our look at Starlink from a strategic perspective, new technologies always have their special incentive for companies because they open up new possibilities.
This is why we are open for cooperations with other market participants if these enable our technologies and our portfolio add to our portfolio or also make it possible to have efficiencies, for example, in the field of infrastructure expansion. Starlink or Elon Musk is one of many potential partners in the field of satellite communications. Companies at present enjoying high press coverage probably also because of the founder. I could also mention Jutelsat or OneWeb. One shareholder is asking in this context whether the space based satellite network planned by Lockheed Martin Corp and Omnispace LLC is more disruptive than the Starlink project of SpaceX.
No, from our point of view, it's not. The constellations just address different users. Based on the characteristics of these bridge technologies, we do see opportunities to also ensure good coverage also in remote areas. Starlink is making progress. For the first time, recently, 100 metric per second were measured downstream.
In Verticillicom, it itself has has had positive results when testing with when doing tests with a mobile provider from the stratosphere, and we see this as an addition to our rest track network. And it's only Deutsche Telekom that invests into these technologies and works on these technologies to have this new disruptive technologies even if it's difficult financially speaking. But whether these technologies actually achieve market maturity is something that we'll see in the future. Our strategy will not be changed by these projects. We want to be leading in technology with integrated government networks.
Already today, Deutsche Telekom is using the supply technology of our partners in order to provide connections for our customers. For example, in the context of the European aviation network for broadband Internet in aircraft. And we also accompany the development of new networks and technologies in the HAPS Alliance. Regarding the question whether we plan our own telecommunications satellite nights, no, not at present. And just to describe the context, Starlink is neither preferred nor selective by us, and we don't see it as beneficial.
The message that I want to convey is that we always have to be open for innovation and new technologies. We have to think about whether this is substituting or additional technology for what we are offering today. And we have to be open at all times, and this is something that I was talking about. It's not about a short term deal or anything else or just one partner, but we want to focus on a variety of different technologies. Let's now move on to the topic of the virtual shareholders meeting.
Questions were raised by Mr. Sterling, Mr. Mr. Eckhart, Mr. Ruoff, Mr.
Oswald, Mr. Frankel, Mr. And Mrs. Wolf, Mr. Schmidt, Ms.
Gebler, Mr. Weiden, Mr. And other shareholders. The first question is because of today's shareholders meeting. The cost for today's meeting is between 2,800,000.0 and €3,000,000 The costs are mainly caused by printing and sending out documents for the shareholders meeting.
In 2020, the costs also were a total of €3,000,000. Personal meeting would cost us around €5,000,000, so we are saving €2,000,000 because of the virtual format. Mr. Eckhart asked what additional costs we have to pay for media service providers and the Internet dialogue. With media service provider cost us €280,000, the Internet dialogue €300,000.
Miss Ulrich asks whether we can have the next shareholders meeting in Nuremberg. From organization for organizational and cost reasons, we will always have it close to our headquarters here in Ponce, so it's not possible. Asks why he cannot send his registration to the shareholders meeting via fax. We offer a number of possibilities to send the reply, but we didn't think that the fax was used very often any longer. And mister Oswald asked why it's not possible to also ask questions via letter or fax.
The law requires electronic communication. We have provided our Internet dialogue for this. So for legal reasons, it's not possible to send us questions via fax or via letter. Mister Eckhart and mister Oswald asked regarding the possible restriction of shareholders' rights in a virtual shareholders' meeting and ask us about all considerations how we want to have the shareholders' meetings in the coming years. In the shareholders' meetings, the shareholders take essential decisions, and we want to have a good exchange with you.
But unfortunately, the pandemic makes it necessary to find new ways of meeting. Nevertheless, we want to have a format that makes it possible for the shareholders to take essential decisions. The legislature made it possible to use virtual shareholders meetings last year, and there drew a balance between practical reasons and the legal certainty. And it was said that it's possible, legally possible, to have actual shareholders meetings. We all hope that the pandemic will be over soon and that we can meet again in the physical meetings so that we can have a better exchange with you.
Mister of also, I said that when we are ask answering questions, we always point to the annual report. Yes. This is true. We do this in order to enable an efficient meeting and a lot of information, almost everything is visible in the annual report. Mister and missus Wolff asked why the Board of Management suggests to vote against item 11 on the agenda referring to future regulations.
And Mr. Biden Mueller asked whether the changes in the articles of incorporation couldn't be available as long as the the pandemic lasts. Do you think we need a legal agreement that is that is applicable to all corporations. And this leads me to a question by mister Fearling. You asked to have the documents for the next shareholders' meeting as short and simple as possible.
But the scope and the content of the invitation, of course, is also based on the topics to be discussed in the meeting. The content of documents is mainly determined by legal requirements, and we always try to keep it as short as possible, but we also have to have it in the proper way from a legal perspective. As Frank had a question concerning the dispatch and the sending of documents, we send out documents in due time on the March 4. If, in some cases, the delivery is delayed, we apologize. Registration has been published in the Federal Gazette on the February 26.
The Internet dialogue has been available since since the 03/03/2021. Mister Kritz asked why it's not possible to show all the questions in the shareholders portal. If this is not possible, there would be some difficulties with the format. It's not our intention. Also a question why there is no automatic reply or automatic confirmation of the sending.
It's normally done in the Internet dialogue, but you can also find copy of all the questions submitted. Mr. Ruff asked a question concerning the graphical presentation of the Internet dialogue. The websites are developed using the so called responsive design. This means that they are shown differently in different end devices.
One shareholder asked regarding the registrations for shareholders' meetings in 2019, 'twenty and 'twenty one. In 2019, we had 109,101 shareholders. In 2020, 104,739. And in this year, it was 109,832. I would like to thank all the shareholders that they followed us into the virtual world.
Mr. Schedler asked about the delay in the transmission of the shareholders, and this is taken into account in the schedule. The delay is about sixty man minutes sixty seconds, sorry, and it was taken into account in this schedule. Then there was a question where the guests were admitted. No.
Then there was a question who is or which external law law firm is supporting us? It's the law firm Elm and Ovary. Then there there was a question how many employees are busy with answering the questions? It's about 20 people in the combination functions. The next question is what is the time effort to answer questions we do not measure this explicitly, and this is why I cannot give you a clear answer.
Then there was a question concerning the language used during the shareholders' meeting. It's the shareholders' meeting based on German law, and this means that we have to use German. Then there was a question concerning technical transmission. The transmission is on the Internet with bandwidth between 500 kilobits and five megabits per second. And this depends on the broad bandwidth available to these status.
And we also have qualified technicians monitoring and ensuring the technical stability of the platform. We produce and transmit all these signals in line with European standard EBU, and this also ensures the synchronicity between image and sound. And now I hand over to Mr. Lena regarding the Board Management compensation. Dear shareholders, we received a number of questions on Item nine of today's shareholders meeting.
This is the item dealing with a new compensation system for the board of management. The supervisory board has developed a new compensation system in line with the requirements of the new Stockholm Relations Act and the recommendations of the German corporate governance code. And we also made comparisons with other listed companies in Germany, DAX thirty, and other companies in the telecommunications industry. And we also take into account the compensation structures within Deutsche Telekom itself. Additionally, the Supervisory Board also had a number of discussions with investors and proxy advisers advisers when developing the compensation system.
In order to find out their view on compensation system, I already reported on this. As a result, the supervisory board is now suggesting adequate, transparent, and clearly understandable compensation system that supports Deutsche Telekom being the leading European telecommunications company and also stay this for the near for the next future. Let me come to the questions. One question by Mr. Pavlita.
Regarded was regarding the scope and the amount of the Board of Management compensation. Mr. Pavolita, please bear with us, but we cannot show the entire compensation system, and we cannot explain all the details here in the shareholders' meeting after it was already published. In the indication to the shareholders' meeting under item nine, we have 26 pages between pages forty and sixty five to describe the compensation system for the board of management. The current compensation for the business year 2020 can be seen in the compensation report on pages 138 to 148 of the annual report, another 11 pages.
A new compensation system is shown using charts, tables, examples and explanations. The description is fully transparent. We didn't hide anything and we don't have anything to hide. Our presentation of the compensation for the Board of Management is based on the relevant requirements and recommendations of the code. Mr.
Oswald, the German governance code requires a presentation of the compensation and how the compensation can develop based on the minimum and maximum part of variable compensations. And we also need to report the compensation paid in the current business year. In both tables, you can see the ancillary services and also the service costs for a old age provision. And German GAAP also requires a description of the net present value at the time when the share based components are granted. It is absolutely impossible to show all the necessary information on two pages only unless we have very, very small print, then you would be unable to read this.
The presentation of all data is not different from the presentation of other DAX 30 companies. The payables regarding flow and planting of compensation to the management board based on the German dot corporate governance code filled two pages, so it's not possible to make all the presentations in two pages. We changed the compensation system for the Board of Management and because this was necessary based on changed requirements. It's about the new requirements of the German corporate governance code and the changes in the Stock Cooperation Act based on ARUC two. The supervisory board was very happy with the previous compensation system.
This is also true for the group of management, and this is why we tried to keep up as much of the system as possible. If you compare the current system to the new system we are proposing today, you will see that the changes are only minor and many of the components of the compensation have only been slightly adjusted. The Surprise Report, in view of new regulatory requirements, has intensively thought about the share based and nonshare based compensation. The supervisory board is quite happy with the share matching plan introduced for the first time in 2010 regarding retention and incentivization. And based on the wishes of the investors, the supervisory board also decided to have a share ownership guideline and an LTI based on a share price based component.
Based on these all these aspects, the supervisory board did not think it was necessary to have additional targets in the context of the share matching plan. We would also welcome a situation where the regulatory requirements would be less complex. We share view your view there. Yes. It's true.
The systematics, the basis of the compensation requires a number of components, and this is due to the regulation. But, nevertheless, and this comes to another question. Mr. Hatsheps can still calculate his compensation on his own, and he doesn't need a consultant to do this. But I can also easily make the calculations.
The department top executive management at Deutsche Telekom is responsible for the payroll of top management and board of management, but the payroll as such is in line with the payroll of the other employees. And I also have to say that this goes beyond the definition and the compensation itself because it also includes tax aspects, but we are still in the position to do the calculations. The we have to also show the tax components. And the same is true for the generation of the compensation report where we also follow the legal requirements and the recommendations of the German Corporate Governance Code. Within and this comes to another question.
Within Deutsche Telekom, there are various departments that are generating the payroll for in for different groups of employees taking into account the specifics of all these different groups. We continuously review, thanks for your recommendation, where we can use artificial intelligence in order to create any value for the group. But for the Board of Management Compensation, we are not using any artificial intelligence unless you think that the use of calculators is already using artificial intelligence. And there was a question regarding the peer groups of other telecommunications managers in The US and also in Germany. The compensation system in The United States is difficult to compare to the compensation systems in Europe and in Germany.
Share based payment is much more pronounced in The U. S. American compensation systems and the compensation paid there are much higher than the compensation for the Board of Management in Germany. Compared to other tax 30 companies, the members of the Board of Management of Deutsche Telekom have a rather average pay regarding the usual comparators, revenues, market capitalization, and number of employees. The management board of Deutsche Telekom should be positioned in the upper quarter of the German decks 30 companies.
The level was much lower than that in the past. The supervisory board also reviews the compensation in relation to the compensation paid to other people in the company. This is the so called vertical comparison compare or unlikely horizontal comparison where the compensation of the board of Management of different companies are compared with each other. Doctor. Telecom has not used compensation consultant for designing the new compensation system.
Doctor. Telecom, however, on commissioned by the supervisory court uses compensation studies by a compensation consultant to review the compensation, and these costs about €10,000 per annum. In the context of the studies used by us, we then aggregate the figures and statistically prepare them. Our compensation consultant was not involved in the generation of the new compensation system and was also not involved in the presentation of the compensation report. But to the com follows, as I already said, all legal requirements when generating the compensation report and the invitation to the shareholders meeting and also follows the recommendations of the of the German corporate governance code.
In question, there was the recommendation to limit the management compensation to €500,000 per annum. The supervisory board is simply required to ensure an adequate and good compensation for the board of management. The average payment in the tax 30 was much higher than €500,000 in 2020. The integrated compensation for the management of Deutsche Telekom do not give any reason to think that they were excessive. The invitation to €500,000 total compensation would mean that the Supervisory Board would not be in a position to find talented and ambitious candidates for the succession of current Board members.
Next to the questions answered already, we also received a number of questions on individual aspects on the compensation system, which I now would like to answer. There was one question regarding the compensation of men and women or ladies and gentlemen in the board. In the new compensation system, we do not have to make sure that we'll have equal pay between men and women because the Supervisory Board, when fixing the compensation, is not by the gender of the board member, the sexual orientation, nationality, or religion. The supervisory board regularly discusses the adequacy of board compensation as required by law. This is a legal requirement, and the supervisory board is responsible for this.
So there cannot be any question that the board of management increases its compensation itself, and the supervisory board also does not adjust the compensation every year. Normally, the increase of compensation only happens in the case of reappointments or the change of the allocation of business responsibilities. But the Board of Management compensation also has variable components and this is why the payments can fluctuate and can either go up or down. One question was concerning the adequacy of the variable components of the compensation and the link between the compensation and the paid dividend. Doctor.
Ilek already described the dividend policy of Deutsche Telekom, and there is no more incentivization necessary. And I also would like to come back to what I said earlier on. We've got several possibilities to control the company, not only the compensation system for the Board of Management. Variable compensation reflects the good performance in the last financial year. In spite of corona, this was a very excellent development and this is why the managers also participate.
And the Board of Management also participated from the dividend development in the past and also participated in the success of the company. In the new compensation system, the long term variable component is share based so that the dividend paid also has an influence on the compensation for the board of management. I think a link to the dividend would not be adequate because then the decision on the dividend could be influenced. Missus Gavins asked about the role of the return on capital employed ROCE and the weighted average capital cost WACC regarding the compensation of the Board of Management. Regulators require a balanced view a balanced approach regarding financial and nonfinancial indicators, and this is something that we try to take into account.
ROCE return on capital employed is not based on the short term variable compensation that accounts for 25% of the long term variable compensation component. The taking into account of ROCE as a KPI and the allocation in the context of the long term variable pay was welcomed very much by the majority of the investors we interviewed. A direct comparison between ROCE and WACC is integral component of our communicated financial strategy. It is our approach to at least earn the capital costs with the ROCE. The work itself is not elementary for the development of the ROCE in a period that is used for comparison.
Several questions were about item four dot one dot two regarding the granting of compensation payment for losses of variable components at the previous employer. So if the if somebody wants to change jobs and come from another employer to our management board, Here, it's mainly regarding the loss of share based compensation components. Normally, the supervisory board gets help, for example, by actuaries. They try to determine the value of such a compensation component with a previous employer. This then is taken into account in the negotiations by the supervisory board.
When pay such payments were made in the past, this was always done also asking the managers to invest into shares of Tata Telecom and linked to intentional waiting periods. Is such a component necessary for employment contracts if the active service is provided for doctor Telekom should be compensated for from the point of view of the supervisory board? The answer to this question is clearly yes because this is paying damages to the people. Many companies are trying to tie their high potentials to the company using long term share based components and recruiting these people is only successful if you also grant the part compensation in part to what they lost. But please rest assured that the Supervisory Board regarding such payments does not only require the managers to invest into telecom shares, but also agrees provisions say there might be some clawbacks if there is a premature in the termination of the employment contract restored to telecom.
My question was regarding the restriction of the total compensation if people want to leave the Board of Management management and compensation payments. What is described in 10.1, the severance regulations when leaving the Deutsche Telekom board is not comp is not linked to other benefits. We got a question from mister Kopfer regarding the effect of the planned compensation system for the management board regarding future compensation? More specifically, what would be the change in compensation for the Board of Management in 2029 if you assume that the new regulation had already been applied when the board the members of the board of management joined the company, this cannot be answered. A forecast for the year 2029 is not possible from today's point of view.
And in the new compensation system, we also have variable compensation, which where you can achieve 150% now with a new 150% of target achievement, but there is also a downside risk. And maximum target achievement possibility increases from 150% to a maximum of 200% in the new system. Compared to that, both members in the new system will not receive any company pension payments any longer. If you were to compare year 2019 to the year 2020, and perhaps this was meant with a question, we again cannot give you an answer because due to the changes of the target structure, we don't have any reference values for the past. And until today, we have not come to any new board agreements in the new system.
Ladies and gentlemen, the topic of board compensation very much focuses on the position of the CEO in the company. And here, I would like to make one very clear statement. Mr. Hodges is a successful CEO who does excellent work together with his team in the Board of Management And as shown today, with a new corporate culture, we improved the achievements, and we have achieved a completely new level Also, with a view to what in The United States after many, many attempts, we now have achieved a completely new level, and we have brought the company into a completely new position with a new compensation system that we are proposing today, it's not about increasing mister Hetker's compensation. The supervisory board has not adjusted any of the components of mister salary since the extension of his contract in the year 2018.
And at that time, we mainly increased variable components. Mister Hetker's fixed payment was only raised very moderately. If there were fluctuations in Mr. Hetker's compensation in the past, then this is due to the fact that his variable components can have can be at a different level reflecting the success of the company in the relevant period. And let me point out again that the adequacy of the compensation of the Board of Management resulted in our assessment that we are below the average of other tax companies.
So it's not about increase of the compensation. But in item nine on our agenda, it's about basic change of the compensation system to a new compensation system in line with new regulations in the corporate governance code and in the Stock Corporation Act. The supervisory board also intensively dealt with the question whether the Sprint merger justifies an extraordinary bonus payment. This is what mister Peckendorf is asking about. Yes.
As the Hertges described, the story will come from a valley of failures and then we have very complex steps and we now achieve a new structure which enables us a new position on The U. S. Market. The merger with Sprint is one of the biggest successes of the corporate history of Deutsche Telekom and all the board members made their contribution. This success is however mainly due to the extraordinary performance of Mr.
Hechtas who made this possible after a long time where he used a lot of discipline, persistence, and creativity, that's where he overcame many difficult challenges. I personally can remember a number of telephone calls, mister Hertzkins, where you sometimes were enthusiastic and then you were absolutely disappointed about the progress during the negotiations. And it's great to see how much stamina, how much commitment, and how much creativity then finally resulted in this big success so that we are where we are right now in The United States. I can remember when the discussion started, T Mobile share price was below $10.16, and now it's 125. So this is a huge difference.
And Mr. Hetkers, thank you very much again for this achievement. You also mentioned Mr. Anfel and Mr. Ed and Mr.
Elek, they all supported you a lot. And in so far, the special bonus is definitely justified. In that connection, let me refer to a question for mister Schmitz. The prerequisite for setting such a payment is, of course, that it is one off in nature, meaning that the performance of the board of management member needs to go above and beyond what they would normally be expected to do. And in addition, it is necessary that the performance of said Board of Management member is a contribution to the long term strategic continued development of the group.
Mr. Schmitz, both of these criteria were fulfilled, for instance, in the case of the merger between T Mobile US and Sprint because of Mr. Hoedra's special performance, and all shareholders of the group will be benefiting from this transaction in
the long
term. The payment recognizes mister Hertke's several years of activities in this field. He accompanied all of the activities to merge these two companies. It was a very difficult process in The US, and he brought it to a successful conclusion. In addition to the €600,000 that were paid out in connection with this case, Jim Hurtis did not receive any other increase in his salary.
The Schutzgraffer Capitalanmrega asked whether it had been considered to pay out the special payment after the synergies have come to fruition. We discussed this That is true. However, we did not feel that there was any reason to postpone this payment for a number of years because it should be paid out in close temporal correspondence to the work that has been done. It is important to the Supervisory Board to have fundamentally the possibility to allow for such a payment.
And so it is an integral part of the remuneration system as we see it. The supervisory board did not just use an algorithm in order to calculate this payment. We looked at the situation very carefully, and we need that room for discretion because it is difficult, of course, to assess the contribution that has been done. So it's important to have some room for move that move and move that there, excuse me. Item number nine on the agenda of shareholders' meeting is about the general transition of the remuneration system for the Board of Management to ARUG two.
That is the reason why we're having the discussion today. There is no other reason. In connection with this, the Supervisory Board has decided to propose a cap for the CEO of €8,500,000. This is what the law requires, the code of conduct and the code of ethics as well. There needs to be a defined cap on CEO's salaries.
Where the transition to the new system is concerned, the supervisory board has decided to wait for today's of Management members ways to transition to the new system. I anticipate that you will vote in favor of this change, and I hope that many, if not all, members of the board of management will accept the new system. And that concludes what I have to say about the questions on the compensation system. That takes me to the next point. Mr.
And Mrs. Luig, Mr. And Mrs. May, Mr. Heine, Mr.
Schulder, Mr. Oswald, Mr. Bechendorf and the Schutzkowenzejof Zakapitan and Leger Deutsche Schutzfeinning from Vetperpay visits have asked questions on this. We have questions on the proposed auditors for 2021. The proposal to the shareholders meeting is to appoint the Trustpofungsgeserchft PDC as auditors of the annual financial statements for 2021.
The original plan was to switch auditors to The current proposal was motivated by the fact that the allegations against in connection with the Wirecard case are still not resolved. Also, we felt that it would take too much time in order to switch to a new auditing firm. The audit committee of the Supervisory Board is the responsible body here and monitored compliance with the criteria that are important for the proposal to switch to the tender plan until the 2019, and the audit committee reported to the Supervisory Board at regular intervals. In the 2020, there was no reason for us to reconsider our decision to switch to as auditors. The responsible bodies looked at the allegations against that came in after that period.
And the audit committee meeting in November 2020 discussed these allegations for the first time. And so the audit committee revised its proposal on the January 19. The decision to postpone the switch to another auditor by a year was resolved on the 01/25/2021. That is when it was decided to propose to postpone this decision to the shareholders meeting. It was not the federal government that actively contacted us in this matter.
We actually raised the matter ourselves to the federal government and also discussed it with other institutional investors. The board of management has no power to decision to make decisions in this area. The decision to postpone the switch to another auditing company was communicated by the chair of the Competence Audit Committee, miss Coleman, to the partner at that we were in contact with at the time. This is mister Hibbsch, and they responded in a very professional manner. At this point have not been retained when this decision were taken, and no payments have been made to either.
This decision, and I want to be clear about that, was taken by the competent bodies without any influence from third parties. It was a challenge to find an alternative for because an auditor can only ever do a thorough audit of the financial statements after they have been in the job for a while, and the time until the beginning of the retention was very short. You may not know this, but this is a group wide audit covering all of our subsidiaries, including The US business. It's not just an audit of Deutsche Telekom AG. Besides the option to postpone its switch of auditors in 2021.
The supervisory board looked at the option of proposing the second ranked auditor that was in the running for the final audit in 2021. PwC is our current audit company, does not need any transition time because of this, and that is why the competent parties decided that PwC is the best option in order to go ahead and do a thorough proper audit of the financial statements for 2021 as our auditors PWC has the full confidence of PTAG's supervisory board. Over the last few years, our cooperation has been exemplary. PWC accepted our proposal to extend their contract after it had been contacted by the competent bodies. Since our IPO in 1996, PwC has been the audit company for Deutsche Telekom AG, the obligation to rotate will only come into play in terms of the financial accounts after the 01/01/2024, and so we had enough flexibility to keep retaining PWC.
Thank you very much, Mr. Inek, for giving us that room for
maneuver. Proposed
decision on Item 5C concerns the turn away from and the commissioning of PwC as auditor for additional financial reports during the year. So also for the 2021, obviously, these things are connected and that's why the decisions are connected as well. It would not make any sense to separate these two decisions because means, in the meantime, has explicitly rejected our offer to become our new auditors. Mister Oslo asked why we do not appoint new auditors every year. There are very many reasons for this.
I am a former auditor myself, Mr. Oswald, and I can tell you that switching auditors is not a trivial matter. The audit quality would certainly be impacted negatively because of the amount of time it takes to get into the job. That's why it makes absolute sense to retain auditors for a number of years. And of course, the shareholder is the shareholders are perfectly free to approve a new auditor every single year.
You also ask when telecom will be audited by KPMG. It will depend. For that, there would have to be a tender, and KPMG would have to participate in that tender. They would have to be presented to the shareholders meeting of KPMG as the preferred candidate and the shareholders meeting would have to approve KPMG. These services have to be put out to tender and any auditing company can participate.
So KPMG may have an opportunity to participate at some point in the future. That's what I wanted to say about the questions on the final auditors. That concludes the questions that we were able to semantically cluster. I've just been told that we're now at a point where around 300 questions have been answered. So we still have a number of work in front of us, mister Hodges.
Why don't I hand over to you at this point? Right. Lunch is for losers, as they say, and so we will continue without delay. There's a number of questions on the same theme here, and I will be handing over between me and hanging over to Mr. Ilk every time again.
First of all, Vinfried Matas asked about terminal devices. T Mobile US is revenue with terminal devices reaches around 1,000,000,000 for 2021. The projected revenue will be between 3,500,000,000.0 and 4,000,000,000 US dollars. Current development is in line with the forecast of the company and also the switch of the customers is going well. What about the core EBITDA for 2021?
This is an indicator, which is EBITDA minus revenue from the renting of terminal devices, and it tells us whether it makes sense to get out of the rental business. The question is what this means in light of what our competitors are doing. The portfolio is being adjusted to meet current requirements. We are ensuring that digital transformation reduces complexity, cuts down on costs and facilitates everyday work. Our portfolio is helping our customers to transform their classic infrastructure services and moving towards secure multi cloud services and modern digital architectures.
Two Systems has years of experience and a lot of expertise in this area. At the same time, we have strong partnerships with leading IT manufacturers and hyperscalers, Cisco, VMware, for instance, Microsoft. We have we have a focus on security, transportation, and cloud sovereignty, especially in Europe. Digicon is offering first class advisory services for digitalization. In addition, we also have a sustainability program for IT services because of digitalization should also help to protect the climate.
The focus is generally on the core business around the customers that we already have in regard to cloud services, security and software applications. On the next question, how will the cloud business continue? Well, we are cooperating with large partners, hyperscalers, AWS, Microsoft, and Google, notably. At the same time, we have an advisory business as well as digital solutions that helps customers to transform their business and move it to the cloud. And we have what is known as public cloud operating services.
This is helping us to support our customers as they digitalize their business processes. Mr. Matas, you also asked about the shop situation in Germany, in other European countries and in The U. S. First of all, on Germany, 99 of the shops are to be closed down.
This is a process that will take us up to the 2022. Further closures will happen. In Europe, well, our continuously improved online offerings and the success of the telecom app has meant that in our European footprint, there's less foothold in our shops. And the Supervisory Board has, of course, promoted this. However, it remains to be seen how customer behavior will change, maybe more than normal once the pandemic is over.
Part of our strategy is to keep an eye on this trend and adapt our
brick
and mortar sales to customers' behavior. But we will always need our shops. We will never shut them down completely. They are our calling card for us, for our brand, for our services, also for existing customers that need somewhere to go if they have an issue. So we cannot digitalize this part of the business completely.
That is a complete fallacy. In The US, the coronavirus pandemic has had a positive impact on digitalization of T Mobile US' customer business, and we expect this trend to in future. After the merger with Sprint, T Mobile US will have access to 8,800 shops. That's a very large number. Last year, that number went down to 7,500.
T Mobile US plans to continue optimizing the number of shops and sites. You had a question on doorstep sales. Since 02/2004, we've been using partners such as Ranger Marketing or PSO to reach out to potential fixed network and broadband customers across the country. This is part of our doorstep business. The challenge when looking at fiber rollout is to ensure that there is sufficient demand and retail demand for it.
So even before we start, basically, we needed to get a sense of whether the neighborhood is willing and able to buy broadband services from us. And that is why doorstep sales channel is so important. We're able to provide people with personalized advice. That's a really important part of our sales strategy. We were also asked what we're doing in order to improve employee satisfaction in The US.
Satisfaction is enormously high in America, and it's very important indicator for us. We're seeing this in the indicators that we have. 92% of people in The US are proud to work for T Mobile US. 85% of employees would recommend T Mobile as an attractive employer to their friends and family. T Mobile US was awarded best place to work multiple times by the independent platform Glassdoor.
A lot of work is being done in order to maintain satisfaction at this high level. There's lots of learning and advanced training courses with external experts. We have bestseller authors that come to train our employees and so on and so forth. And also our social engagement is very important. We're doing this in Germany, likewise in The U.
S. Where we're assisting vulnerable young people and also adults, the employees. Appreciate this. The Schutzke Manschaf Zutlein and Lager has pointed out the increasing role The U. S.
Business plays in terms of boosting group revenue and profits. The shareholders are also asking about management's opinions on ways to strengthen the German and European business and consolidate in the EU maybe. As a rule, the group has in the last few years definitely benefited from the very good development of T Mobile US. T Mobile US had its Capital Market Day recently, and the announcement was made that 60,000,000,000 US dollars is going to be returned to the shareholders between 2023 and 2025. And in Germany and Europe, we are benefiting from that We invested much more or have been investing much more than before also in Europe.
And these investments, thanks to synergies from The US merger, can be paid for with our own cash as it were. But, of course, we need to ensure that our business remains balanced in the long term. We're monitoring what happens in the market in Europe and in The US. And on this basis, we are evaluating the options available to us. At the moment, we do not assume that there's going to be a cross country market consolidation of telecoms companies inside the EU very soon.
Obviously, activities in some areas of the market may happen. I have to tell you as CEO, I would be delighted if we could see more of a consolidation in what has become an extremely fragmented market that it takes two to tango. We were asked to provide examples of smart city solutions. Deutsche Telekom is a corporation partner of the UN when it comes to the initiative United for Smart Sustainable Cities, U4SSC. This contributes to the sustainable development goals.
Many of our products help to achieve these goals. For instance, intelligent charging infrastructures for e vehicles, intelligent intelligent administration, dynamic management of
systems.
We also have solutions in our portfolio that help to achieve digital air quality monitoring. And there's also city trees that we have, which help to clean the air in urban environments. Mister Beck and Doctor. DSW asked what projects are happening in cities and local communities, which telecom is convinced that it can only digitalize if scalable solutions and sustainable business models are implemented. Of course, it's important for us to have a good five g and fiber infrastructure.
It is also important that municipalities build an urban data platform allowing inter municipal cooperation to happen. There should be no stand alone solutions for individual cities and municipalities where people do whatever they they want without cooperation. Dutch Telecom offers a number of solutions in this area, for instance, in the field of open source programming, we're working with partners so cities and communities can take whatever solutions
are good
for them. An example is the Data Competence Center for Cities and Regions, TKSR. This offers an opportunity to use a uniform open source data platform helping as many media properties as possible to work together and connect. These are scalable solutions that are helping communities to make good use of the data that they have. This is good.
Dutch Telecom as well because this generates additional revenue for our networks. Now that brings me to mister
Mr. Matas from Deca Investment asked a question about finance payments and the valuation of goodwill and the annual employment test. The goodwill was on balance sheet at the 2020. It was not a $118,000,000,000, but merely $198,800,000,000.0 dollars. The estimation of the value with exception of TWS, here, the value is taken above the market capitalization is based on future expected payment flows.
Mister Machias asked about the danger of impairments in goodwill and also the decline of ROCE's, and we're expecting ROCE to decline in the next year. But by 2022, we expect it to increase again. You asked about the target there. It's always important whether ROCE is above the discounted capital cost. And for 2020, it was this capital cost rate was 4.5%.
Which Matas also Matas asked about the indebtedness of the company and the impact on investment growth. We have the object we've kept the aim or rather we have met our own requirement that we want to keep the net debt within a certain corridor. We said that the Sprint integration would require about three years and that the fact that we're in the first part of the corridor is not surprising. Synergies in The US are expected to have an effect in the coming years and the run rate of 7,500,000,000.0 US dollars. And also, the growth in free cash flow, You heard the figures for 2020.
We're expecting over the long haul, 18,000,000 billion US dollars a year. Also, the build out of fiber optic cable in Germany requires considerable investment as well. So we've taken this into account, and it's not being impeded by this merger either. Also, a question was asked by STK regarding indebtedness. In my view, it's very similar to what I just commented on, however.
Yeah. Do you see that?
Yes. The ident it's the same question, basically. Another question is on our business report. We receive awards for our transparent reporting on a regular basis. The launch of the financial parameter, EBITDA AL and free cash flow to place in coordination with other competitors and ensures that as a result of accounting standards that we still have comparability with previous years.
In addition, in our view, it's also a common practice that CapEx has looked at and adjusted for spectrum investments, and we've communicated this quite clearly as well. So once again, here's a question about weighted cost of capital. As I said, it was 4.6%. I answered this question whether we would allow follow-up questions. Yeah.
Another question was whether we would achieve a margin of eight to 10% at T Systems. In 2020, EBITDA AL was 7%. And this year, we think it'll be roughly the same level. In 2022, we're expecting then to achieve a margin above 8%. And with that, would give the floor back to Tim.
Yeah. Thank you, Christian. This brings me to the with a question about social projects by Deutsche Telekom, especially the Diaconian project to ensure the adequate employment for excessive civil servants at Deutsche Telekom. We have various internal and external projects. And telecom civil servants are also used at the German Protestant church as well as for government authorities.
And we've made an agreement for the use of civil service in certain projects with the Diaconic Diaconi. So in the view of Deutsche Telekom, the cooperation with Diaconis was also a possibility to find employment possibilities for excess excess civil servant staff here. The employment project for civil servants with was then ended at the 2016. The main reason for it ending was the declining number of civil servants that were, yeah, excessive here, and we have not been able to find sufficient number of qualified civil servants that meet the requirements of the project. So in business year 2020, the cooperation with Diaconian and donations were no longer made in 2020 in the last five years.
So from 2016 to 2020, the amount of donation to them, what, totaled €6,700,000. The question was how much is the total amount of all donation certificates that Deutsche Telekom received from Viacom during the entire period of the project. So as I said, €6,700,000 from 2016 to 2020. The cooperation by Deutsche Telekom with the Diet Clinicians' Verat served the person implementing the work and civil servant obligations of Deutsche Telekom. In particular, requirements under the constitution to find employment for excess civil servant staff were met in the Diakoni project over the last five years from 2012 to from 2012 to 2016, an average of 87 civil servants were used per year.
In addition to Diaconia, Mint Sucunce EV also used the model of issuing donation certificates in the years 2000 2018 to 2020. However however, this was much lower at approximately €1,000,000, and these were certificates for donations. How great here's another question. How great are the donations that Deutsche Telekom has made to non profit organizations and political organizations? And what is the percentage of the telecom paid out in cash on these organizations?
Telecom doesn't make any donations to political parties and doesn't make any cash donations either. All only bank remittances are used. In addition well, in 2020, the total amount of donations by Deutsche Telekom AG was €2,200,000. And beyond this, Deutsche Telekom GmbH donated €5,000,000 to the telecom foundation. Why here's the next question.
Why does telecom not publish a transparency in the transport transparency report how much donations it made. Actually, transparent, and we do publish we published this in the corporate responsibility report for 2020. Next question is about the Open RAN. Open RAN initiative comprises providers from Europe, Asia, and America, and it's following the trend of all network software guided equipment receiving a new architecture. The number of manufacturers for the antenna network is supposed to be increased through this, and that's the site that we welcome.
That will help us avoid in the future a large or any major dependencies because of the large number of providers. And when we buy components for network equipment, digital sovereignty is an issue, and that's why Open RAN is a very helpful instrument. This gave last about the fluctuation in the number of staff. Num the natural fluctuation at the 2020 was only 2%. The previous year, it was 2.3%.
She also asked whether we need subsequent financing or additional financing. No. We're in constant dialogue with our banking institutions, and we have a good standing in the bond market. Also, we're highly appreciated as a bank customer, and we have a good credit worthiness rating from certain agencies. Miss Gabler also asked about mister Ilex.
She asked about the annual gross income. Based on our reporting system, we were able to come up with the following figures. These are the figures that were received by executive staff if they were not a member of TopManage. As of the 12/31/2020, between 110,000 and €229,000 target cluster, 4,464 people received this and at the level of 203,000 to €320,000 annual salary. That cluster included 124 person, and over €320,000, We cluster had 43 people.
What are also, a question was asked about the number of respective staff, the number of staff, and change in percentage year on year. Also, what measures have been taken by the board of management, the supervisory board having a negative impact? And so we are moving towards a structure with operative segments. The development of the number of staff in our segments will change compared to the previous year is contained in the annual business report on page 106. Miss Gabler also asked about curious aspects of our litigations.
Even in large number of litigations that we have to deal with, there are some odd things and curiosities. Not they're not really worth commenting, and also there's a general rule of confidential confidentiality. But if if you are suggesting, though, that we are really having litigation against some spacemen or animals for the third protection against us, I have to disappoint you. Also, you wanted to know about how many lobbyists are employed at telecom. Political interest representation in German is insured in the area of policy and regulation.
There are total 20 public affairs staff at the different locations and offices of Deutsche Telekom in Germany, and they're in charge of communication at the national level, also in at the regional level. Three of these staff members are in Berlin office, nine are in the Brussels office, and five are in office in Washington. Miss Gibbler also asked about lobby activities. Now the whole notion of lobbying cost isn't defined or it's very difficult for us to define at any rate, and that's why we like to we prefer to stick to transparency rules and publish the cost of our work in Washington, Brussels. In Brussels, this amount was about 1,000,000 in 2020.
At T Mobile US, it was 10,000,000 US dollars. These figures are not comparable with each other, however, because they relate to respective requirements. As soon as the requirements in Germany have been defined, then, of course, we'll publish figures on this. If Abeler asked what the board of management and supervisory board would do better in 2021 than it did in 2020. For us, 2020 was an absolute record year, and that's why we can definitely say that we and hence, the board of management supervisory board did a lot of things really well in 2020.
But, of course, we don't want to just rest on our laurels. We want to continue to pursue ambitious goals. Biggest challenges for Deutsche Telekom in 2021 are realization of the synergies from The US merger, the build out of five g and fiber optics, accelerating the build out of fiber optics in Germany, continuation of the transform transformation of our business customers area in T Systems. And what we will do, maybe it's different in 2020 or better, is the virtual or hybrid cooperation, both the board of management and the supervisor board. The most important challenges for the company, in my opinion, will be, first of all, digitalization of industry and business, but in particular, schools and public administration.
We need beacons that promote digitization among all of us. Also, digital inclusion and a responsible manner of dealing with it in a digitalized society. We're talking about ethics and free speech, also sustainability, climate protection, and saving natural resources. And also germ Europe is involved in a a real, yeah, difficult international terrain between The USA and China. As I said, digital information will be the priority.
If you're you're interested in software too, which we use at supervisory board and management meetings. Regarding information, we use secure data room from Brainloop AG with two with double verification to transfer information to the board of management. We use SharePoint by Microsoft, and for video conferences, we use Webex from Cisco, and it's all in the telecom network. But Gabe Lark asked about the development of data traffic in our networks. Data volume per fixed network connection, including Magento TV for telecom, Dwight Schlint, in December 2019, averaged 146 gigabytes.
2020, the average amount was 217 gigabytes. Average data volume per mobile communications agreement contract in December was four gigabyte, and in December 2020, it was six gigabytes. Monthly use is subject to seasonal fluctuations, but the the figures are trending upwards. Bullman asked about quantum technology computing is not a core business of telecom, but we're moving in that direction. We're doing a lot of doing a lot of research here, and the focus of our activities are identifying and preparing possible use scenarios in our business fields.
Spelling that out in more detail, we're involved in research in the area of quantum cryptography, which is a method to safeguard and secure our networks. Economic potential here is no doubt enormous. That's why we're already investing now in training of staff for this new technology. Mister Pullman, you asked about our business our business model with RPL in comparison to the formal t online portal. With online portal tonline.de, it's not comparable really to the cooperation with RTL.
With Magenta TV, we want to offer our customers the best partner portfolio, the best user experience, and the best content. With TV Now Premium, we're expanding this this partner and content. And majority TV smart and majority TV smart flex, terra streaming service TV now is completely premium. It's completely integrated to them. In addition to which Telecom Deutschland has agreed with the RTL Media Group to penetrate growth markets of streaming streaming and personalized advertising.
With us, you can use one platform to have to access all the cons all the content. And and if we're talking about paid content, you can look at where the most favorable offers are. Mister Bachman, this brings me to your question about the the form used for telephone invoices. With digitization, not only are we meeting customers' desires, we're also reducing the amount of paper to protect the environment. But our customer customers still have the possibility to receive a duplicate of their invoice by surface mail.
And to do this, we recommend using the so called SIPA automatic debiting system. This ensures that the amount will be paid on time. Please also try our app. With this app, you have permanent cost control. You can communicate with us directly.
You have complete transparency over all the transactions on your invoice in your project environment. Yeah. Also, you asked about the length of the transition period regarding, yeah, electrical grid risks. The priorities depend on with well, it depends on the respective technology priorities where priorities are where there's breakdowns in critical infrastructure. Central areas are network reserve facilities.
For example, we have to secure these, like, in they're they're huge. They're the size of ship diesel engines. So and also, we have mobile grid backup facilities, can be used mobile in Germany. And so we got redundancy as far as energy supplies goes. Another question is why we're losing market share in the fixed network and building out the network.
Why we're losing market shares in fixed network and well, the number of sold fixed net connections continues to grow. That's why we don't understand your question about losing market share. The cost of building out 18 MFGs, these are the cabinets in Schaafen, you asked about, are approximately €1,000,000. Mister Bockman passed about the quality of our service centers. His observations that he described in our contact for, yeah, dealing with complaints is hard to understand.
I can't really don't understand his question. He asked about the quality of our service centers, and then he described it is not being transparent. Our staff are required to answer the telephone stating their name and their their offices. And they're also taught soft skills like friendliness. We do external tests to to confirm their behavior.
And if there's complaints about customer through customer feedback, we take action to stop this kind of behavior. In the recent tests conducted by Connect, the following categories were tested, reachability, waiting time friendliness, and quality of statements for customer service. Srini Gopalen is in charge of Herrit Abelhassen is the in charge of service in Germany, and we've seen huge increases in customer satisfaction, especially at service centers.
Okay. Good. Okay. Let's continue with questions on the balance sheet structure from Mr. Bouman.
Goodwill, Mr. Bulman, amounts to €20,000,000,000 not €120,000,000,000 €120,000,000,000 that comprises all intangible assets, which includes spectrum licenses from The U. S. So how do we want to address net debt? That is based on what I just said on how we want to tackle net debt in the context of the situation in The U.
S. T Mobile U. S. Has raised expectations in terms of the synergies to be raised. The amount expected has increased.
So we are expecting the guidance to actually improve, if at all, rather than to be corrected downwards. The next question was whether we don't expect a share price of €30. I think €20 is more realistic. If you want to achieve thirty first, you need to achieve the 20. Then mister Bachmann asked, what was the current share of BlackRock in Deutsche Telekom as of the 12/31/2020?
BlackRock hold held a stake of 4.92%. Another question was, do you know that companies such as Answer Young, PWC, KPMG, Deloitte are suspected to have been involved in ComCom and ComX transactions. We are aware of such reports, but we don't have any further information. The next question was what was paid to the auditors in 2019, euros 36,900,000.0 to PwC. Other consulting services, 9,000,000 mainly to Ernst and Young and PwC.
Tax consulting fees, 2,700,000.0 mainly to Deloitte. Other services, 98,700,000.0 mainly to Deloitte. In 2019, a total of €17,100,000 were paid to KPMG. 2020 financial accounts, 63,200,000.0 to PwC. Other consulting services, 5,500,000.0, mainly to Ernst and Young and PwC.
Tax consulting fees, 7,900,000.0, mainly to Ernst and Young and PWC and other services, 48,100,000.0 to Deloitte. In 2020, a total of €16,800,000 were paid to KPMG. We did not subcategorize such payments in terms of KPMG. Okay. Then Mr.
Oswald asked about how we intend to handle revenue and customers and to what extent customers are important for our revenue. Honesty and transparency provide the basis for a trusting relationship. The increase in customer satisfaction shows that we are on the right track. Mister Aswald, as for your question, you asked to what extent the traditional telecoms business is still ready to survive. Data traffic over the past few years has increased considerably and will continue to increase.
According to Ericsson, mobile data traffic will triple by twenty twenty five per smartphone compared to 2020, which means that the need for telecommunication services will continue to grow. Nonetheless, as a result of techno technological innovations such as software based networks and the entry of new market participants, for instance, Microsoft as an infrastructure provider over the top players with new services will continue to change. This is not a new trend, but we've observed it for a couple of years and we have adjusted our strategy accordingly. We are well prepared and confident that we will continue to be successful. On your comment, digitization as a buzzword and a means to gain a sharper profile.
Digitization is an essential trend that massively changes a lot of our work processes and entire value chains in many industries as well as the way we live together in our societies. We look at ourselves as a trustworthy partner with the necessary technological know how and years of experience to support our customers and digitization. Now as for your comment that in the telecommunications industry, there's also black sheep and that there's a lot needs to be done to improve the reputation. We are very proud to say that we have a very good reputation and that customer satisfaction here is very high. The results actually measured in the KPI, the tri am index.
On a scale from minus 66 to plus 134 points, Deutsche Telekom came in at 70.2 points in 2020 compared to the base value of 67.9 points. In The US, we use the Net Promoter Score, which has improved by 68% since 2016. As for your comment, Zach, there are always technical problems and challenges. Yes. That's true.
We are operating in a technology driven environment. In addition to running highly complex technologies, we also need to be able to control physical challenges such as floods or lines that are destroyed underground. In addition, there is continuous innovation and the rolling out of new infrastructure such as five gs and optical fiber. Nonetheless, in mobile communications, we stand apart from our competitors due to our excellent network quality, and we regularly win accolades for our network. I think it is understood that with all its technological competence, Deutsche Telekom is one of the innovation leaders.
And without networks, there's no digitization. Mister Osvalis, I am pleased to hear that you liked the speech that I gave at the last shareholders' meeting. You said great speech. Well, thank you very much for that praise. I already talked about where Deutsche Telekom stands today and what the goals for the next couple of years are.
And by the way, we deliberately chose to show the video at the end in order to provide an outlook to 2030 and to give you an idea of how things are likely to develop until then. Mr. Ossal, with regard to my question at my speech at the shareholders meeting, you quoted me as saying, we need to be self critical in order to be successful. Yes. We'll stick with that.
Our attitude is essential to the company's success. Our company is operating in a highly dynamic and technology driven ecosystem. Therefore, it is becoming ever more important that we are not resting on our laurels. Instead, we should continuously ask ourselves how we can improve and how we can continuously adapt ourselves to changing market conditions. Responsibility encourages us.
That was a quote. Yes. It does. And more than that, we are proud to take responsibility for society, especially now in difficult times. And I think in terms of corona, we proved that we are ready to do this.
But in this context, I would like to point out our activities to become more economical in terms of the use of resources and cutting carbon emissions, our campaigns against hatred on online, and our engagement in connection with corona warning app. Well, and then last year, I was saying that, yes, we are the ones driving digitization. And we are building and running highly efficient telecommunications networks. We invested €17,000,000,000 in that last year, not including spectrum. And this makes us one of the main enablers of digitization in all the markets where we are present.
And you referred to my term plow horse from last year in this context. Then the question was, should we shouldn't Deutsche Telekom set up a customer advisory board? Answer, at Deutsche Telekom, we have the so called ideas forge and established format where customers and noncustomers can actively contribute to what we are doing. We are now working with more than 14,500 participants to develop and further improve our products and services and to provide the best possible user experience. And we also and particularly take into account critical yet constructive feedback.
So Mr. Oswein, you are welcome to join us on this ideas forward. Then you can see how we are working. Then you asked about how do we help Europe to continue digitization. Deutsche Telekom is making a significant contribution to improving digitization with its networks and services.
Over the past few years, we have tripled the rollout of optical fiber in Europe and we have connected 1,000,000 additional households to the network in 2020. We offer a 98% coverage with LTE. At the same time, we are offering smart parking, smart lightning, traffic management, etcetera. During the corona pandemic, for instance, we started supporting digital learning for pupils, offering free of charge data packages and learning products. Now if you want to turn us into a software company for digitization, then we would no longer have the resources we need to invest in the networks.
That will turn out to be a strategic trap for us. The most important thing for us is our infrastructure. This is what we are focusing on. And, yes, we're also doing software, but it is not at the heart of the product that we are offering. Mr.
Oswald then asked, how about your plan to become a European champion? The strategy of the Deutsche Telekom Group is we want to be Europe's leading telecom company and we'll stick with that goal. Based on our current market capitalization, we are almost twice as big as the next biggest competitor, Vodafone, and almost three times as big as Orange. And in an international scale, BT and Orange are still smaller than Deutsche Telekom combined. So, yes, we want to become even more relevant, and I'd also like to point out the article in hundreds platform this morning which impressively described what we are doing.
If we want to be leading, however, that doesn't necessarily mean leading in size. Size is just the result of good management. We want to be leading in terms of our attitude, in terms of the way we go about things. Mister Ossal, you asked about digitization and the average age of people on the board of management at the women's quota. The average age of the board of management is 54 and on the supervisory board, 57.
So we said, you know, I should actually join the supervisory board. And all the members are highly skilled in terms of this foundation. With 45%, this Deutsche Telekom supervisory board has an above average number of women on the committee. On the board of management, the women's share is 37.5%. But whenever we have to fill vacant posts, the main factor is still whether someone is a suitable candidate for the job description or not.
Mister Ossuyves, you asked several questions on compliance at Deutsche Telekom. The board department, HR, and legal is responsible for the compliance management system. At the same time, we have a dedicated member at every management and board of management level who's responsible for compliance. The chief compliance officer of Deutsche Telekom is responsible for the group wide designing, enhancement, and implementation of the compliance management system. At the level of our operating segments and NetCo's compliance officers implement the compliance management systems and achieve the compliance goals.
On the website of Deutsche Telekom, you can find all sorts of detailed information on compliance. Also, Deutsche Telekom has set up a whistleblower portal called Tell Me where interested parties can provide anonymized tick offs. Deutsche Telekom does not have an external special attorney in this context, but our internal lawyers are handling it as part of the case management process. According to the Deutsche Telekom website under compliance, you will find that in 2020, 46 cases were confirmed as being compliance relevant. In addition to controls performed by internal auditing, the compliance management system is audited by external audit company.
The compliance organization Deutsche Telekom comprises a 153 full time equivalents across the group of whom 38 FTEs are allocated to group compliance management at group headquarters. Mr. Oparin, you asked about how many litigations are currently pending. We classified in 2020. We initiated around 4,900 press charges against 4,900 customers who were not willing to pay.
There's over 160 litigations from customers against Telecom Deutschland. In addition, there are around 770 litigations under labor law and civil servant law. Then there are various 350 trials pending at Brachy Telecom AD or its domestic subsidiaries under civil law. And in Germany, we have another 100 trials with a litigation value of a total of €100,000. And then there are 90 pending admin related litigations.
We regularly provide reporting on that in our quarterly reports. Mr. Osslide, you also asked about business trips. For journeys to The United States, we are using standard flights that we travel first class. Mr.
Ossard, you asked how many how many processes were there over the last ten years that required an ombudsman to be involved? What amounts were involved? And what were the number of trials? We do not have an ombudsman at Telkom. Consumers can contact the telecom customer service or the arbitration group of the federal network agency if necessary.
We've had some good experience with that at telecom. In 2019, there were around a 175 telecom arbitration cases pending with the federal network agency. And we always try to find a solution directly with the customers which succeeded in those cases. Now, mister Ossuer, you asked about our advertising activities. Yes, advertising spending can be measured and is continuously checked for efficiency.
Deutsche Telekom has raises the largest brand awareness in advertising compared to any other telecommunications providers in the German market. In February, Deutsche Telekom achieved an unaided awareness or recognition of 52% followed by Vodafone and one on one with 33% respectively. By investing in advertising and by presenting itself as a leading integrated all in provider, Deutsche Telekom has managed to position itself successfully in terms of Internet, fixed network, mobile communications, and TV. Mister Osslide, you asked how the color magenta was created. The color magenta was introduced in 1991 as part of the development of a new brand image.
The idea was to find a unique color for the IT and telecommunications industry, and that worked out well. The color was developed together with a marketing agency called Interbrand Schinsmeier and Lux based in Zurich. Then mister Ossard had several questions on voice control in customer service. In 2020 alone, we received 35,000,000 calls. And all of these queries require specific and comprehensive knowledge on technology products and calling plans.
And therefore, we select our employees carefully. With our voice based portal, we are enabling our customers to find the right contact partner. In this way, calls don't have to be forwarded several times, and we can then resolve a large part of the queries in the first row. This is our goal. The voice portal is necessary in order to provide the right quality to our customers.
And our service quality has been confirmed by various tests, as I said. Whenever we are getting critical customer feedback, we are taking it seriously. We are enhancing the voice portal accordingly. Actually, we don't even want the customers to notice that they are speaking to a machine. Then mister Ouslag wanted to learn more about my talks with representatives of the federal government.
The German government, as a co owner of Deutsche Telekom AG, exercises a controlling function on the supervisory board. The representative of the German government on the Supervisory Board is Doctor. Horst Boesinger, State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Finance. I myself as CEO regularly provide reports on the Supervisory Board and answer any questions that the members may have. Mr.
Ossweil also wanted to know to what extent digitization has progressed in the group? Digitization at telecom means to tackle three areas in a very focused manner. First of all, customer interface. Every customer interaction has to be digitally enabled. One example of this is the Magenta.
In our European Natcos, as many as 62% of our customers are using the Magenta. In Germany, it's only 56%. In addition, our technical service is using apps in order to proactively maintain the network and customer hardware so that we can detect potential failures at an early stage. That's referred to as preventive maintenance. As far as the digitization of the customer interface is concerned, T Mobile US has come a long way.
They have a so called team of experts and that is an essential pillar to provide the best possible customer experience there. Secondly, we are also digitizing our networks. In the future, like I said, networks will be increasingly controlled by software, including Open RAN. And therefore, I mean, the home of software is the cloud, which means that a lot of these functions will be stored in the cloud. And the third point is that we are digitizing our internal processes in order to become more efficient and better.
One case in point being our entire admin system. We also digitized external processes, during the corona pandemic. During the pandemic, within just one weekend, we made it possible for 16,000 service center staff to start working from home in the home office,
which was unique.
We just dismantled the hardware in the office and made it available to our colleagues at home because we didn't have enough laptops. And that worked out very well. We maintained our the level of production of productivity. You asked about the development of the telecommunications market in Germany. The Federal Network Agency obliged Deutsche Telekom to make its telecommunication services available to competitors in the form of wholesale services, which means that competitors can then make these services available to their customers.
The goal of the regulatory authority is to reinforce the position of the competitors. This is a market which is shaped by fierce competition and such as telecom lost a lot of market share. Having said that, for the past few years, we have constantly regained market share, especially in mobile communications. And last year, we were also able to regain a larger share in The Giga coax marketing for instance, we are market leader in Germany.
We have a retail market share of just under 40% and in broadband, we are the number one You asked about our strategy? I'm sorry, mister Harkers. I need to interrupt for a moment. This is just a virtual shareholders meeting.
But if we were at the face to face meeting, then I would have asked mister Oswald a long time ago how many questions he intends to ask because he's been answering his questions for much more than ten minutes, and we actually want to set aside the same amount of time for all shareholders so that everybody has a chance. I know that this is a special convention, a conventional one, but can I ask that if we have the same number of questions again, we should consider handling it differently because it cannot be that one shareholder asks such a long list of questions just because we are holding a virtual meeting, which is completely different from the face to face meeting? Let me just remind you, we are here in order to work on the agenda. And the questions raised must be directly related to the agenda and should help us to work on the agenda to coordinate our activities. I think Deutsche Telekom is offering so many different channels to obtain information on the company and its activities that we shouldn't raise all the relevant questions here.
I mean, this is shareholders meeting and this is about the most important, the most pressing questions. Mr. Ostfried, we do appreciate the interest that you show in our company. It's great that you care about so many different success of our company. But in the best interest of all the other shareholders, we might want to think twice about how we want to handle such a long list of questions.
So why don't we do an off-site break now? And we'll continue in a moment with Mr. Ossait as well. But just to give you a chance, Mr. Herkis, to save your voice as well, let's continue with something else now.
Let me now take over, and I will also answer questions raised to Mr. Oswald. Mr. Oswald, let me say at this point, I hope you understood me correctly. We really appreciate your interest, but we have to bear in mind the interest of all the shareholders.
Mr. Oswald, you asked whether there were any claims against the decisions taken by Deutsche Telekom in the previous shareholders meetings, no, they've not. Then you asked about a fleet. Yes, we've got a fleet for company cars, and this is managed by T Mobility Solutions. Now there were a number of questions regarding the company cars in general.
All in all, VertuCom has 33,000 company company cars. And I know that they are mainly used for the interest of the company, but also sometimes for private reasons. We've got 6,500 company cars under our car policy, 1,500 for the managers, and the rest is distributed among sales and sales people. We have a car policy, but and the things are regulated. You also asked about any privatization.
Did we know about privatization efforts? No. You also asked about the shareholders meetings and the tax rules. Telecom doesn't have anything to do with the tax regulations that we cannot grant you any tax benefits. You also asked a question concerning debt.
I think I already mentioned this several times. Financial debt as of the end of last year is €120,200,000 or as I already said, the leverage ratio is 2.78. Mr. Oswald, you also asked about the book liabilities in the balance sheet. They are €132,400,000,000 The net financial debt, 120, as said before.
Questions concerning the valuation and the discretion that you asked here, the valuation of all the assets and debts is based on IFRS. These are explained in detail in the annual report, and the discretion we have is also explained in the chapter on assets in our annual report. Mister Aswaj, you also asked about the aggregated representation of all debt since 1996. Our debt position is permanently refinanced, and this is why it doesn't make much sense to give you any aggregated figures. Because, well, on on liabilities and debt, you asked about the liabilities of T share and the interest per t share, 25.25.
This is the financial liabilities per share, and the interest burden is €1.25 per share. Then the question is, when will we get back to the debt corridor that we set ourselves? And I think I already answered this question in detail. Then you asked about the interest that Telecom has paid since the new emissions, $296,000,000,000 since 1996? Mr.
Offal, it's the total development of net financial. Yes, we already have this. Mr. Oswald, some other questions of you were about the share culture and the number of small shareholders, it used to be 16%, and it increased to 40 it's declined to 14%. And in 09/2019, it was 16% again.
And now in 2020, we have got a share of 20%. We will treat all the shareholders the same, and this is also true regarding the answers that we provide on questions raised by the shareholders. We don't have the impression that between 1996 and the year February, the burdens that we gained there are still on our business. Regarding a comparison to other stock operations, the question why we are no longer paying for public transport and parking tickets during the shareholders meeting. This question was raised again.
For the next face to face meetings, we will not be will pay the fees. And now, KFW has a certain share, and we you also asked about the dividend here of the federal government or KFE. The dividend proposal is €2,480,000,000, and this means 31.9% or $9.00 €8,000,000,000
You asked about our strategy Mr. Ossweil and you said that we should also look at the services and prices of smaller companies. We said that we are pursuing a growth strategy and then 2020 we achieved the highest levels customer satisfaction. In mobile service revenue, we have a market share of 36.6%. In broadband, in terms of net adds, we almost have 56% market share.
And with convergence offering, Magenta one, we also keep on growing. But of course, you are right that we can also learn from other providers. That's why we are constantly monitoring our competitors in the various markets as well. One question from Mr. Oswald on life sharing.
That's what the Deutsche Telekom is all about. Our customers want to use the options of the digital world to stay in touch and to share special moments. With our network, our products, and our services, we enable our customers to do just that. Mister Osweil, some of your questions referred to some negative reports in the media in connection with misconduct by Deutsche Telekom. As a large company, Deutsche Telekom has been have often been subject to reporting both positive and negative.
We clearly commit ourselves to values such as respect and appreciation, which is also embedded in our code of conduct. However, at Deutsche Telekom, there have also been cases of misconduct. We are looking at into all compliance related cases. Respect and integrity by the way are part of our set of values that I mentioned in my introductory speech. Mister Oswald asked about compliance investigations with one of our subsidiaries in Brazil.
Yes. There were some compliance relevant cases in Brazil which were reported to Germany. This was about the breach of internal guidelines, which was sanctioned accordingly. It depends on every individual case of the ultimate consequences are. Then we've also asked about the consequences of the doping scandal for Deutsche Telekom's advertising activities.
It was a negative development, but it had no negative effect for the shareholders. We included a sports doping clause into our contracts, and we try to hedge the risks in our contracts to the best possible extent.
To also ask about Tim Hertge's commitment in the supervisory board of the Sverdrup Munich football club, Munich does not need my sports advice. Although, as a former handball player, I have little knowledge about football. If they've got excellent people to do this, I am in the supervisory board as a representative of the main sponsor, and I give my strategic and economic knowledge. And Pverlia is quite successful. You also asked about the media payments.
Well, the highest media spend we have is during the Super Bowl spots of Mobile U. S. The prices are public. Last year, the thirty second spot cost around $5,200,000 Now let me move on to the question of the average age and the attrition of our people. The age structure is 41.5 years group wide.
The female share is at 35%, male share 65%. The attrition rate in Germany is at two percent. People usually work with us between one and twenty four years. But Kilicom offers young people who start into their career using classical training or dual studies. For the year 2020, we had 40,511 applications, 35,409 of which for classical training, and 5,102 for dual study course.
All in all, the share of female applicants in year 2020 was 25% and the share of male applicants 75%. We have 2,150 trainees and dual students and 2,094 contracts which we concluded. We have good experience when we use the trained talent to fill positions in our company. And the number of people that spent their whole career at Deutsche Telekom, we can't say anything about this. But we also offer company pension.
We have a telecom capital plan that is normally paid in old age in a single payment, and there is also possible to start paying into a regular scheme using the telecom pension fund. Both systems are implemented for the major part of the employees across all the groups. Mister Oswein also asked about the career opportunities for our young talent. At the end of the dual studies or the training, people can ask to be taken over by the company. And in 2020, we took over 686 trainees and 386 students and gave them a chance to work in the company.
We also have various upskilling possibilities for young talent so that we support people in their personal development. For high for university students, we have a startup trainee program. Startup trainee positions are advertised. Gradients from university can then apply for the eighteen months start up program.
After
the successful application and after going through the program, they have the opportunity to be considered as top experts in the group to drive innovative and strategic future topics. Where somebody comes from is not the main question here, but rather how he or she drives the development and uses and lives via telecom network. The development of new and existing employees is very important. They have various possibilities for personal development, also using digital learning platforms. Mister, I was like, you had some more questions concerning the trainees.
As of the 12/31/2020, we have 4,061 trainees. Thirty Telecom has 12 different job profiles we offer to young people, seven technical and five commercial players. In the technical field. It's in IT. It's in system integration for data and process analysis, digital networking, digital management, IT systems management, and IT systems electronics.
And see, Then we've got this commercial training courses. On the 12/31/2020, we had 1,379 trainees in the first year of training, 1,341 in the second, and 1,341 trainees in the third year. We are not offering any training covering four years. In 2020, across all the training years, three point two percent of the trainees terminated their training as of the 12/31/2020 in Germany. We made it possible for 4,061 trainees to enter into their career here.
Two thirds of the trainees are normally taken over in permanent jobs as of thirty first December twenty twenty. We had 48 different nationalities among the 4,061 trainees. We've got our own training operation, Telkom hospital, doing active in 35 of our national locations and one of the 35 sites of the telecom training and every you in our training. Then you ask a question concerning trainees. We've got our own training operation, and we offer the best of our trainees sometime abroad.
This takes between six and twelve months and depends on the trainee course. The time spent abroad is irrespective of the job profile. We mainly focus on Eastern Europe. This is organized by Pilcom Ausbundung and is normally happening during the second year of training or studies. Training and dual studies are an important pillar for winning new staff, miss Housewild.
Now I come to the question concerning further training and upskilling. Deutsche Telekom offers a wide range of upskilling possibilities. There are specific offers for software development on cloud architecture, agile, project management, languages, but they are also informal learning offers. We give our employees orientation so that they can select their own learning methods and courses, but there's also a small share of obligatory training, for example, on dental protection, security and compliance that everybody has to go through. I would like to speak again.
Mr. Offred already said that I highly appreciate your high degree of interest in the company, but we would like to complete the meeting in good time. And we also would like to give many shareholders the possibility to ask questions. I'm not sure what we will do in future years, whether we will have follow-up questions. Probably, we will have two day meetings in the future.
Mr. Pawel, I'm not sure whether you are listening. I assume you do. Perhaps it would be a possibility that in the interest of other shareholders, we also wanted to cover and answer the questions that you withdraw your open questions. If this is the case, then I would like to ask you to tell us, and I would like to skip the rest of your questions for the time being.
Then let me continue with questions by Mrs. Gabler, and we start with the taxes paid by Deutsche Telekom for 2020. We paid sales tax. We paid wage tax, corporate tax and commercial tax
and
electricity tax. The next question is on tax and social contributions. This is, of course, based on the individual features of the employees. And this is then handed over to the tax offices, and they are also reviewed. Another question is on the credit and loss transfer agreements.
In the existing agreements, all the income is reported. We, of course, also are in line with all the legal requirements based on the commercial code, and we also offset losses carried forward as much as possible. Another question by missus Gebler is what losses of what companies we took over. We use operate operative segments to control our company with the exception of key systems, all making a positive contribution. Look at individual corporate companies is is not very telling in the structure of our company.
Missus Peter also asked about special service hotlines. First of all, we don't have any commission payments for hotline numbers. And as the network operator in the past two years, we got about 3,000,000 or we paid 3,000,000 to our customers in the hotline 100 oh, one three seven in 2019, we paid 19,000,000 of sharings and in twenty twenty, twenty five million. Mrs. Gebler also asked about our credit lines with which banks we have these.
We've got credit lines with 21 banks amounting to a total of €12,600,000,000 and these are bilateral private lines at the usual market conditions. Missus Gabriel also asked whether and to which amount we paid negative interest rates in nine in 2019 and 2020, especially in 2020 after the merger between T Mobile, MTS, and Sprint. We had high payment flows from The United States, and, unfortunately, this meant that we had to pay negative interest rates in 2020. Ms. Gerda, you also asked about the operational development in the three largest companies related to revenues.
And again, I have to say that we use the operational segments to control our company, not the legal entities. All the segments in 2020 made a positive contribution to SDA AL, all with the exception of T Systems had a positive SDA contribution, and it is we normally do not take a look at the individual entities in the different countries. Missus Geithler, you also asked about the development this year. Please refer to the annual report for this. You also asked about EBIT in the annual report 2020.
It was €12,800,000,000, and this is something that you can find on page 51 of the annual report. Another question is about the capital that we need for our operations. And in this context, you asked about art, works of art, which are not necessary for our operations. On the asset side side, in balance sheet, we've got €265,000,000,000. And on Telecom AG, we've got €116,800,000,000 In the balance sheet, we've got cost of arts amounting to €7,000,000 Mrs.
Gebler also asked about our investment plan for the next five years for the year 2021. We plan investments amounting to €18,400,000,000 and about €7,700,000,000 will flow into the European business, the rest will go to The United States. By 2024, we will successfully increase capital expenditures to €8,200,000,000 in Germany. In United States, we plan to invest 11,700,000,000.0 to $12,000,000,000 and this is, of course, excluding spectrum and including acquisitions. Mr.
Kuechner also asked a number of questions in the context of Wirecard, but Telkom does not have any direct investments into Wirecard. In the context of the pension fund management, we had very small positions where Wirecard was involved, and this is amounting to o point o 7% of the total share portfolio. In the portfolio, we've got around €100,000. They were liquidated, but in the share portfolio, it's around €800,000. And all in all, we've got a loss of €1,000,000 that we report in this context.
Escape now also asked about the assets that we use as collateral for credits. And here, I'm talking about collateralized assets. April, it was 19.9 €19,000,000,000. T Mobile US was 17,300,000,000.0, October 4,700,000,000.0. And the terms are between twenty thirty one to 2060.
The interest rate is between 2.4 253.6%. And for the rest, I refer you to the statements in the annex to the annual report. Mr. Stithner also asked about the equity ratio. The equity ratio is based on the interim reports and the annual reports on the 03/30/2019, it was 25.8%.
In September, 26%. And on the December 31, 7027.1% in March, 26.3% and in June, seven twenty seven point two percent on the 09/30/2020 at fifty seven point one percent and at the end of last year at twenty seven point four percent. On the question regarding the impairment tests. I think I already gave you plenty of information on this beforehand. What else do we have?
Miss Epley, you also asked about insurance. In our group, we got income from insurance companies amounting to €73,000,000. The biggest individual items was $20,000,000 in damages that we were paid in The U. S. And we've got reimbursements in the context of Hurricane Laura in United States and some other smaller minor items.
Thank you very much, Christian. Now I would like to answer questions raised by Mr. Sylvia Lena. She asked whether perhaps we should focus on Gaia X instead of the cooperation with Amazon and Microsoft. As supporter of Gaia X, Deutsche Telekom is already working for the guarantee of cloud sovereignty, but we also wanted to provide our customers the best cloud services by providing access to a broad range of different services, and this includes AWS Asia or Google Cloud.
And, of course, we always comply with the highest data privacy and security standards. And we want to have global scalable solutions that are established in the market by the big cloud providers and the global community and we also want to have good European cloud solution with high data privacy rules. Then there is a question concerning small and medium sized enterprises and how we want to gain contracts here. You mentioned the Cloud PBX. Last year, about 18,000 qualified contracts were automatically generated and passed on.
A smaller share of the online contacts is now sent to Outlook mailboxes and they are processed by our staff and we are also working on an automation of these processes. On Cloud Pay TVX, this is an important topic for the future especially for small and medium sized enterprises. In the service, we improved the quality of advice. And normally, any inquiries coming in will be answered within one week. We invest into contacts with our customers, and we've got a new team, Redenta Service Life video consulting, where we've got specialists dealing with our customers.
And there's also the possibility for our customers to get a cloud PBX offer which is not binding on the Internet and to send it directly to the team. Is the cloud first approach a new dimension? And can this be a European game pager? The progress of the cloud technology is one of the most important technology trends in recent years and cloud native is setting new standards for ICT solutions. It's no longer about having data centers, but about having intelligent processes in highly automated infrastructures.
So we are talking about cloud computing. Here, S. Companies are dominating Microsoft Asia and Google based on their size and technology competence. With Cloud First, T Systems is gaining a new strategic position and it links the approaches of the private and the public cloud and is offering a hybrid cloud with these multi cloud processes, which are an alternative or an addition to the American players that offer European solutions, here we are coming back to Diax. Deutsche Telekom is offering new opportunities in these new times.
The following question is referring to the initiative Cloud First and is asking what aim we are pursuing. The Cloud First strategy is placing the public cloud first. With the public cloud solution, our customers are supported in the digitalization of their business processes and we use the our own Open Telecom cloud but also the structure of partners such as Asia, Amazon, Google and others. Mr. Scharz would like to know regarding data protection risks when American cloud use cloud providers are used.
Deutsche Telekom is cooperating with the majority of companies in Europe and the large cloud service providers. All the services are subject to an individual risk review, and existing risks are either mitigated or excluded by taking the necessary measures. Privacy and security assessment processes. This includes the assessment of various scenarios, external and internal ones, research and assessment of possible alternatives and a close exchange with our partners Microsoft, AWS, and Google. We also offer this proof of closure to our customers, and this means that either there's a decision to process and store the data in Germany only or we use trends too, and this is we are preparing for the recommendation of the European Data Protection Committee to transfer of data to third countries, and we do not see any need to set up special provisions.
Paul Max Bloch, Eppart Slausich and Mikhail Barnecker asked about the about the advantages for new customers compared to our existing customers. We have a clear focus on our low loyal existing customers, and we want to give them the opportunity to have access to the best network with the best service and the best product. In December, we gave all our existing mobile customers 100 gigabit by for free, and we also have special offers for new customers. The loyal customers, for example, get an advantage of €120 if they decide for new product or new rate. So our offers are available for new and existing customers in the same way.
And, of course, we also want to respond to cancellations of contracts that we get and we try to convince customers to stay with us, for example. But it is also usual in the market in the intensive customers to offer new clients special services and incentives that we would like to be even more attractive also for our existing customers If our customers are unhappy with our services, then we would like to help them as much as possible. You asked why the cost for high speed access of doctor Telecom is so expensive compared to other countries. In Germany, the fiber cables have to be underground, and this is much more expensive than in other European countries. The investment, of course, needs to be earned.
However, we offer a fair price benefit ratio with a high quality. If you take into account the purchase price priorities in other European countries some of the cheap offers are no longer that cheap. Switzerland, with largest provider Swisscom, the entry into the Internet with 50 megabit per second costs CHF65 a month, €58. In Austria, the a one tariff costs €50 with 18 megabits. For Deutsche Telekom, the 50 megabit rate in our numb price costs €39.95, and the 100 megabit rate is €44.95, which is lower.
Mister Kutz, you asked why we increased the prices for our mobile rates. First of all, no. We don't want to lose any customers, but on the contrary, we want to gain new customers. The model price adjustment is only applicable to some few old rates. Our current portfolio has been updated in September 2019 for the last time, and we offer more services for our customers for all the Magenta mobile and family card rates.
We more than doubled the data volume. And apart from that, StreamOn is inclusive even in the smallest rates, the Magenta Mobile Plus. And streaming offers are not even taken into account. All the rates traditionally used in new five gs mobile standard, and this is better services to all our customers in the best mobile phone networks. Customers who still use an old rate can change into the new portfolio at any time.
Question by Gordon Moushala regarding the integration of T Mobile US mobile cards into German contracts. For typical Deutsche and T Mobile US, these are two separate companies and two separate contract partners for the customers. And this is why it is not possible to integrate the Tidal Mobile US contract into a contract of Telecom Deutschland, but we try, of course, to make the integration as easy as possible. Then your question concerning sports sponsoring, mister Pfeiffer. Sports sponsoring has been an element an important component of the communication communication mix for a very long time.
Sports sponsoring in telecom group, inclusive of Sprint, amounted to 130,000,000 in 2020. We mostly focused on football followed by baseball in The United States. The rest of the spending was for sports such as basketball, American football, but also name rights in sports arenas. We do not only we are not only active in professional sports but also in general sports. Mister Pfeif, I missed that was by concerning the sports sponsoring for Bikaria Munich.
The volume is in the double digit million euro area, and please be assured this is a good ratio. The we have a modern sports sponsoring contract focusing on branding on the jerseys, the training, clothing, the banners in the stadium, and on the facilities interview the calls, and the Internet presentation. And we also have possibilities for public relations with players, trainers, and the management of Bavaria Munich. And we also have content rights presence on the digital and social media channels in the stadiums, and we also have tickets tickets available for the home and the nonhome games. Is it correct that the strategic development was reviewed or readjusted after the pandemic crisis?
We continuously observe and analyze the developments, societal trends, technological trends, new regulatory framework conditions, and we, of course, adapt our strategy to the new challenges. COVID nineteen, however, supported us in our strategy. Our networks were performing in spite of the lockdown. In our operational business, we were fairly successful, and we provided stable networks and had record high in new contracts. And we have continued fine tuning of our strategy, but other than that, we did not have a complete re strategy new strategy in recent years.
Then it was asked whether in view of home office and homeschooling, we also have improved the performance of our Netflix. During the pandemic. We improved the services to our customers in many ways. For our mobile phone customers, we offered an additional gig volume to our mobile customers of 10 gigajoups. And we also provided free of charge Cisco Webex licenses to schools for homeschooling.
We offered an optimized homeschooling. We offered Office 365 n Teams to our corporate customers free of charge as well. And at the same time, we, of course, continuously adjusted capacities in our networks, and this, of course, means the number of infrastructure investments. Mister Walter, your new question is about our peeling capacities and whether we plan to increase them. Deutsche Kilicom has a total capacity of 60 terabit.
And in our information, this is the largest network capacity for Internet connectivity in Germany, so 60 terabit per second. During epidemic, TIG has expanded the capacity by about 13 terabits with partners and customers, and this is around four terabits per second more than d six in Frankfurt has all in all. Deutsche Telekom wants to have direct connectivity with the partners and customers because only this will make it possible to have a high quality control and safe backup. The discussion concerning a commercial platform such as B6 is not meaningful because the B6 platform is a hub switch that connects many partners with many other partners. What we have established would only be possible to a limited extent there and it is thus only available for smaller applications or smaller ISTs or smaller traffic.
The positive results of the network tests of recent years are leading proof that this is the right procedure, and we offer everybody a nondiscriminatory access under the given framework conditions at reasonable price. Mr. Wiemeyer asked about data protection and the use of most recent technologies and how innovation fits in with all of this. Deutsche Telekom feels it's important to be transparent to its customers and employees. This is of primary importance.
Wherever we can, we work with consent by users or people can opt out. When it comes to AI, artificial intelligence, the outcomes that the applications produce are checked for plausibility and corrected where necessary. In certain areas, we have clear statutory rules. For instance, according to the Telecommunications Act, users have to consent if conversations are to be recorded. And so all factors play a role here, the benefit to the company, the trust of the users and the law.
All of these are balanced very carefully indeed. There was also a question about the added value of selfie ident of N E C T G M B H. This is a possibility to verify the veracity of biometric features such as holograms. However, for the reverse side of the personal ID, a photograph will be sufficient. It is only verified whether the data corresponds to what's on the front of the idea.
According to Turf Zaland and the accredited conformity office, the data in the passport or the ID are processed in line with the law. Artificial intelligence applications were also verified and certified by. Set the value added value is that the customer doesn't have to wait. The procedure is available around the clock. The shareholder asked about our business around payment services in Hungary.
European regulation allows us to pursue new business models, and we're trialing one of these in Hungary. The concept foresees the use of our customer app also for payment services in order to make life easier for our customers. You also asked whether we don't have a long term payment strategy, and you referred to the closure of the online payment service provider Click and Buy. We are constantly verifying how our portfolio is doing in terms of value contribution. All of the activities and their strategic significance will vary from case to case, but the logic is always the same.
At the moment, we don't
have a payment strategy as such. A shareholder told us that the beginning, the start time of the events should be included in the financial calendar. Thank you very much. We will look into that and indicate the starting time. Mr.
Eichmann, good afternoon. You asked about the costs that we are paid or that we are paid when our competitors want to use our network. Deutsche Telekom is still regulated quite heavily, and the federal network agency allows for the option to adjust these fees for downstream services according to models for hypothetical networks. The interconnection rates are probably going to be set from the European by the European Commission and no longer from the Federal Government Agency. This will happen in summer twenty twenty one.
It is anticipated that there will be price caps that are fixed across Europe, and they will be set via a hypothetical cost model. For that, that will to us, that will obviously be a new orientation orientation. The midstream products are going to be products for which we can set the fees in cooperation with our midstream customers without regulatory intervention. A lot has changed in that regard. Christian, over to you.
Thank you very much. I have a question by Yvonne on the share program for employees. This year, for the first time, we're going to be offering employees the opportunity to buy shares in the company. On a voluntary basis, we can invest up to €1,000 in Deutsche Telekom shares. For every two shares that we buy, we will be given one extra.
For this, they will have to hold the shares for four years. As I said, this scheme is going to be launched for Germany in 2021, and we're planning to roll it out to the European footprint in 2022. Another question on the share program is this, will former employees also be able to benefit from this program? The authorization to use our treasury shares will not allow the inclusion of former employees, so no. A question on item eight of the agenda.
Will Deutsche Telekom be able to trade its shares in future? If treasury shares are this is not about trading treasury shares. What this is about is to buy back treasury shares. We do not want to trade in our treasury shares. This is just an authorization to buy back treasury shares that are in the market.
Question by Glasgow Kassen Hans Oswald on Kongstar and how that business has developed. Kongstar is a very good business. It is still growing top line and bottom line, and it's also a very well known provider. It is contributing a lot to the company's profits. It's boosting our German business.
It's helping us to remain the leader in mobile communications. So we're very happy in recent years. Lars Kirsten wanted to know what Netco's group are not profitable. Well, as I just said, we do not manage by operative segment. All operating segments on EBITDA AL side are contributing positively.
TSYS is the one exception, and this is how we want things to be. If we look at the operating segment Europe, for instance, we can see that all European NatGos in addition are making a positive contribution to EBITDA EL. Mr. Ruhr was asking about the different currencies in our annual report. It is perfectly admissible to show equity and the profit in local currency.
This is what other companies are doing as well. This means that it is easier to compare the information with the information provided in the local financial statements. Deutsche Telekom's financial statements also include an indication of the numbers in the local currency. We are convinced that the way we portray that information meets the needs of the readers appropriately. Mister asks to explain how the federal government is exercising its influence and what impact this has on our business.
The federal government does have notable influence because it has more than 20% of voting rights directly or indirectly. That is always the case for these kinds of shareholders. This notable influence is exercised by the voting rights in the shareholders meeting and the fact that there is a representative in the supervisory board. However, its influence has no impact on the entrepreneurial decisions that Deutsche Telekom takes. There was a question on the annual report regarding the other additional other operating expenditures.
Euros $877,000,000 is the figure. The majority of that is accounted for by T Mobile US. Administrative payments, 162,000,000. Catering and association fees. The same shareholder is asking about the additional other reserves.
The figure here at the 2020 is €697,000,000 The main items specifically here are two forty six million euros in connection with addition, there's some provisions for warranties for 42,000,000 the the tune is €42,000,000 and environmental provisions of €11,000,000. I just want to point out that Mr. Osvar has told us that he's not withdrawing the questions. Okay? That's fine.
We have to assume that some shareholders didn't ask the question that they wanted to ask because Mr. Osvar did it for them. And so all of the questions posed by mister Osborn will be responded to. And then we'll have to see what we will do if we can account for the same situation in future years, how we're gonna handle that. Okay.
Shareholder is asking why we are currently not implementing any capital measures. We believe that a capital increase at the present time is not necessary nor sensible. Benedict Buetlein wants to know what measures we're planning in order to reduce our exposure in case interest rates rise in the next few years. Wolfgang could ask a similar situation. I think I explained how we are planning to reduce net debt in the group.
This is mainly going to happen through the free cash flow contribution to our US business, but also the boost to our business outside of The US that is going to return us to the range that we feel comfortable with. Another question was about whether it makes sense to completely reduce No. We don't feel that this is sensible. It was asked what parties or political organizations and associations have received information from Deutsche Telekom in 2020.
We are not allowed to donate to political parties. And so we have nothing to report in The US. Party donations are not permissible if they come from foreign companies. The general donations that Deutsche Telekom AG made amounted to €2,200,000, €15,600,000 is the equivalent amount for the entire group. A question was asked about the interest rates for existing and possible new bank credits.
We are predominantly financed via the bond market. The euro exposures have an average interest rate of 1.8%. In The US, that's 5%. We also have a liquidity reserve in the amount of €12,600,000,000, which revolve every three years and the terms and conditions correspond to those available on the market. Hamed Poulihan is asking about our Bitcoin, our cryptocurrency strategy.
Bitcoin is one of many alternatives of government legitimized currencies, and we regularly exchange with banks about this. We've done a there's a small bitcoin relevance at T Systems since early days yet. Miss Gavin is asking about the ROCE, how it developed specifically. Well, in 2016, it was 5.7. Twenty seven fifteen was 5.8%.
2018 was 4.7%. 2019, it was 5.1%. And in 2020, it was 4.6. Our ROCE is above the average for 2018. I think I can skip this.
Okay. Back to the questions of mister Osvald that we skipped. Mister Osval is asking about the dual. We had 501 5,102 applicants for our dual study up program. 644 were accepted in 2020.
All of the students can apply or interested parties can apply. We have an exclusive job exchange for those who are coming out of the course, so we can accept them on our payroll. Training has always been a very important thing for Deutsche Telekom as a company. We want to rise to the social responsibility. We take it very seriously.
As of the 12/31/2020, we had 3,112 trainees and 1,782 students. How does Deutsche Telekom handle cooperation with vocational colleges and non company training measures? How do we interact? The basis of our cooperation is the Vocational Training Act. Deutsche Telekom as a company is a place where they learn on the job, incorporate their vocational colleagues so that colleges so that the students can benefit.
Mister Osweld also wants to ask about retraining or up skilling for older employees. As a rule, everyone can learn anything at such a teleprompter. It doesn't matter how old they are. Our training profiles are, of course, geared to technology and what the market need. And so we always need experts in the areas of cloud, AI, data analytics, software engineering, IT security, and agile working.
In the first part, you asked whether Deutsche Telekom still has civil servants and what they're costing the company per year. Deutsche Telekom currently has 22,000 civil servants at the moment.
According
to the law, we have to contribute to a pension fund. These contributions amount four to 405,000,000 p a. However, the number of civil servants is declining and so is that figure. The pension payments are funded from the contributions of the postal successors and income from the federal budget. Mister Osvald, you asked whether Deutsche Telekom still has monopolies anywhere.
After the liberalization of the telecoms markets twenty years ago, we've been faced with strong competition in the German mobile and fixed network markets. And so Deutsche Telekom, as a rule, is no longer a monopoly holder. For purposes of regulation, however, the antitrust and regulatory authorities are still quite strict as to the role of Central Telecom in these submarkets, please take a look at the publications in the of the Federal Network Agency. They have a formal report with all of the details. Mister Othend, you asked about the role of the Federal Network Agency, which is an independent agency whose employees and civil servants are not paid by Deutsche Telekom.
They are not colleagues of Deutsche Telekom workers. They are, of course, obligated to maintain neutrality. Mister asked about the comparability of working arrangements between salary employees and civil servants. We have. If you compare the two groups in terms of the costs that they produce, there are no significant differences between the two groups.
If the salaried employees in question are younger and they work for companies with other wage agreements, there may, of course, be some differences in personnel costs, but then you'd be comparing apples with pears. Thank you, Mr. Oswald, for your phrase that you voiced towards Deutsche Telekom's publications and events. We enjoy, of course, the fact that the shareholders appreciate what we do and what we like to show and that they enjoy the services that we provide. We will continue on that route.
Mister Oskar asked about the construction sites of Deutsche Borlaugen. Well, we have plenty of them across the country. We have worked hard to get to where we are today, and we believe that construction sites are opportunities. We analyze them. We work on them.
And so we like to speak to our shareholders about the construction sites. Mister Osborn, you also said that customers are by building their own networks and you're wondering whether this is business that is passing virtual telecom by. Our fixed line connections are connecting 34,000,000 households already. They are very fast, but, of course, we wish to continue growing and making our network even better and faster. The technology of the future to us is fiber.
But, of course, for that, we need the right circumstances. For instance, we need broad approval for alternative laying, table laying. That is Henrik Schmidt from DWS Investment and mister Ostmann asked about the obstacles to nationwide digitalization. They're asking about the business potential and the possibilities for the dividend and what role Deutsche Telekom wants to play in digitalization. Speaking about internal digitalization, we have overcome a number of obstacles in recent years.
Not for nothing is the subject one of the core priorities on my personal CEO agenda for this year, digitalization. The successes and further plans have already been detailed when I answered your other questions. As for our business, digitalization is without a doubt a big opportunity. As for the telecom, we want to be the preferred partner for digitalization, and we want to grow with our business customers. We're already growing, by the way.
Our IT solutions for small and micro companies, SMEs, large groups, and authorities are helping our customers to make the best of the technologies of the future. Tropical topics are, for instance, the Internet of Things and cyber security. They're becoming more and more relevant. Cloud applications and IP networks as well. We also feel that we are a competent partner for digital identity administration, politics and society, and we are very proud that we were chosen to develop the corona one app together with SAP.
By the way, we also helped implement the virtual federal Party Conference of the Christian Democrats at the beginning of this year. Digitalization will feature very heavily in future and will influence our top line and, of course, our dividend. Mr. Oswald also pointed out that there's a great deal to do in future. We have a clear strategy that we want to implement step by step.
We are successful, and we want to do everything we can in order to remain successful, not just by a certain date, but continuously. Mr. Ossan has praised the work of the back office of this year's shareholders' meeting. For sure, I can only agree. Thank you for that.
And with that, next chapter. Thank you very much for writing in and thank you for your interest given that you're still a child, and we think it's great that you are a shareholder. And it's brilliant that you want to meet me in person. I think it would be lovely if we had a video conference at some point. Or if you can count upon, why don't you drop in?
On the picture behind me, you can see when I was interviewed by a bunch of children last summer, that was actually one of the best dates that I had. Best events that I had that year. And, hopefully, you can come to Bonn to meet me whether you bring along your parents or your grandparents. It would be lovely to welcome you here in Bonn. Or tablets, cheap enough for peep for young people to buy with their pocket money as well.
That's one of those things. Of course, we have services and products for children, but we can't give away our service and product either because we want to make money. We're a business. And, of course, they think we have suitable services and products for children. For instance, children can use a GPS enabled smartwatch, which basically functions like a mobile phone, or we also have telephony and voice services that children can use in an emergency situation.
All that cost is €1 in connection with a rate plan of $9.95 a month, and that will run for twenty four months. And this smartwatch can, hence, be paid out of your pocket money. No problem. That monthly amount is cheap enough, of course, or you can ask your parents and grandparents to step in. By the way, we also offer smartphones in connection with a mobile contract.
Sometimes, they just cost €1 on top. And there's also the possibility to have a second SIM card, a family card, and that's offered to children and adolescents between six and 17 years of age so that your parents don't have to be worried about where you are. There's FRAGFIN or the child protection app, Serfi, which helps you to use the Internet safely. Mister Eckhardt, you asked about training. You wanted to know about the number of our trainees and students.
We already provided those figures, 5,800 trainees and 2,000 odd all the numbers have already been provided. The CEO is reading out the figures broken down by individual group. This includes training of those activities for interns and also for refugees and migrants. The group is sending out a specific signal by doing that. Of the 5,800 trainees, 1,684 were female.
And
the chairman is providing the figures for other years as well. We have dual students across the German group, Germany, T Systems, Europe, and g h GHS. They're also working in the technology and innovation department. In 2020, we had 1,700 dual students roundabout, of which 1,200 odd were dual bachelors, the remainder were master students. I have answered this question several times already, and so I would like to refer to the answers that you gave in response to Mr.
Oswald. You also asked about the number of trainees and dual students, whether the pandemic has impacted on that number. No, the numbers have not changed. The pandemic had no impact on these numbers. Last week, by the way, I spent ninety minutes with the trainees, but I didn't obviously, I asked how they were and they said that they were feeling absolutely fine, but of course, they really want to return to their offices.
In all of our dual students and trainees are trained in such a way that they are attractive new employees for us, and a lot of them are also accepted into Deutsche Telekom proper. In 2021, we have seventeen seventy seven vacancies across the group, seven fifty are trainee vacancies and around 150 are for GOL students. You also asked about the strategy in regards to training and training places. For years, we have been training much more than we actually need. Both trainees and dual students are very important and valuable to us, but we do train more than we would need ourselves.
Last year
this
year, we have been we have offered 2,150 places. I think I've mentioned this number several times already. The question also was asked why we don't pay our employees more rather than discussing a high dividend. Deutsche Telekom pays its employees an attractive salary, a competitive salary. The majority of our employees are paid salaries that are negotiated with the unions.
I also want to point out that all of our employees are going to be paid a bonus for the great achievements that they have made during the pandemic, by the way. That's going to be tax free in Germany. We hope that this is a sign of appreciation for our employees. If we look at our currently employee satisfaction surveys, then I think we can safely say that we are happy. In fact, the satisfaction has been no higher ever than it was last year.
We are committed to our dividend policy. The dividend policy foresees that our dividend reflects the adjusted earnings per share. A minimum dividend is always going to be €60 euro cents, which Telecom has come to know to deliver on its promises in that regard. Mister Filla asked how many employees in '18, 19, and 20 were paid without having to provide any kind of service and if so, how much they were paid. As a rule, all people whose jobs are cut will be offered a solution that suits both sides.
There's a number of instruments that we can use for that. Severance pays, old age partial retirement, early retirement, and so on and so forth. If employees decide to not take up our offer, they are transferred to a transfer company. Of course, their employment contract will change. We help them to find a permanent or temporary position elsewhere, which means that they are coached, they are assisted in going into job interviews.
Sometimes they are used temporarily in certain projects. So it is not the case that people are paid for doing absolutely nothing. So no money is paid to people for doing nothing. So question on short time work. The company that operates the shops is on short time work or the people employed by the company is on short time work.
That amount that we paid is 60% of the net salary that they are not receiving. And for employees, we charge them at 67 percent. Employees in tax band five and the child that is not on the tax card also are paid 60%. The short time worker pay goes up to 70 to 77% from month four onwards. And from the seventh month onwards, it goes to 80 to 87.
If they are if they stand to lose at least 50% of their income in the months in question, our employees under wage agreements also receive a grant under the wage agreement. This corresponds to the difference between the monthly salary that they do not get paid because they are on short time work, and 85% of the monthly fee that the employee had earned if they were not on short time work. It's quite complex. What I'm saying is they get 85% of their gross salaries. Civil servants are not receiving any short time pay.
So if they are furloughed, then they will only get the actual salary plus a grant amounting to 92% of what the salary employees get. Here are the effects in numbers around 11,000,000 in 2020, March, April and May. In 2021, in February, the effect was around €3,000,000 of which 2,000,000 are liabilities to the Federal Employment Agency. Our shops are oh, reopened in March, and so the figures will look very different from those in February.
There's a question about the use of home office in the group for many years ago, which telecom has often to staff the prob possibility for mobile working. And now you can do it almost everywhere in the group. The call center for customer assistance in Germany has with the eight of our IT also shifted to home office in order to offer our customers the service during corona. Already at the beginning of the pandemic, Deutsche Telekom also protected its staff by allowing them to work from their home office. The corona protection regulation, which applied from the January 2021 to the end of thirtieth April.
And made homework working from home obligatory has been also put in purpose by us. I have questions from miss Collins. First of all, you suggest we publish certain debt in the next business report, and I won't make a commitment The second but we'll try to do that. The second question is whether we can compare ROCE with our most important competitors.
Of course, we do that. We just have to look at structural aspects, how it's treated. One competitor does it before tax, another does it after tax, and the approach is slightly different in The US and in Europe. This brings me to t systems, the next group of topics because this specifically involves the SAP business. One shareholder wanted to know how much this IT our IT business contributes contributes to our overall Roughly a 100,000,000 in earnings or or rather in EBITDA adjusted EBITDA is contributed by it, so that's a secondary importance.
The question was about another question was about SAP business in 2020 and which contribution have made. T Systems is one of the most important partners of SAP, and we have a lot of application business. And the FFT Matcos, we work together with them and implement solutions for customers. Another question relates to SAP business at T Systems in 2020. That was also influenced by corona, and that's why both in terms of sales revenue and EBITDA, we had we saw a contraction there.
With regard to T Systems and current developments at T Systems and the impact of corona, their total revenue, the operated business in 2020 was €4,200,000,000, which was 5.6% below the previous year. On the one hand, this was due to corona because the IT market contracted steeply, and there were two areas particularly affected digital solutions, but also the automotive branch. And positive development in growth areas were able to compensate for the decline in the classic areas, but not completely. So you can see that corona also provide a positive impetus for digitalization, and that's why our expectations are that we'll stabilize our result this year. There might be a slight decline in the classic IT business, but we are forecasting that we'll get to grow again in those areas.
Then a question is about savings in IT systems in 2018 in the capital market. We had a net reduction of a €100,000,000 for 2017 to 2020. And these net savings, to receive them, we have to have a gross saving achieve gross savings. And these gross savings, which we cited in the capital market, were 300,000,000.0 or €300,000,000. In key systems, though, achieved greater savings.
The indirect costs were down net by €300,000,000 between 2015 and 02/2020. Another question is on a possible IPO for a special purpose acquisition company. We're not planning any ITO for T Systems or some areas of it right now. Now let's start with the topic of the d t three liability for the brochure. We haven't completed the this proceeding yet on and there's been a test case.
It hasn't been completed yet, and the Federal Supreme Court has referred it back to Frankfurt superior regional court. So we haven't as far as the cost of ongoing proceedings go, we have been reimbursed from the KFW from the ongoing from the ongoing proceedings. Here's the same question regarding d t three. And as I said, it's been sent back to Frankfort Superior Regional Court. Another question involves litigation from mister Oswald on the t share.
This involves d t three, which hasn't been completed, and I already just gave the answer to this question to refer back to the Frankfort Superior Regional Court. But the question was how much money we have paid for the online brokerage platforms in Germany, like, '24. The contribution last year was in the middle double digit millions area. And compared to the previous year 2019, we were able to decrease it slightly. The amount is always related to the respective product value of the respective product or tariff.
Paul wrote about the who is in charge of the real estate business and managing that for the company. That's me, and we do this together for the segments as well to optimize our real estate portfolio. Real you said that you had the impression that real estate assets are not used economically. We do see potential clear potential for improvement here and to develop this portfolio. And, also, you asked how we assess the vacant space right now.
We always have to make sure that planning increments are made for entire buildings that we can either use ourselves or lease out, but we also see potential for improvement here as well. Another question relate to other services. And in 2020, for other confirmation services on to we paid 2,100,000.0 for tax advice, 3 point sorry. 3,200,000.0 for tax advice and €5,000,000 for other services. One, shareholders said they would like to record the, the financial statements conference, and that's not allowed.
That's prohibited. And with that, I'd give the floor to mister Lehner. Yeah. Thank you very much. This brings us to the last block of questions to address here.
One shareholder asked about what measures we'd be taking to increase earnings in the coming year. Well, we have a very strong customer basis, and we're banking in the future on keeping our loyal customers so that we can continue to grow with them and offer them an even better telecom experience, gaming, h n toone,com network solutions, IoT, enterprise collaboration tools, digitalization of business processes, more bandwidth, and mobile and fixed line. This is all what Deutsche Telekom is doing today in its private business as well as the business area. And that is exactly where we're going to be leveraging our assets in the future in sales to customers. Business customers, we want to offer one stop shopping more within modern integrated portfolio, and we are also able through our organization under the Germany segment, positioned for this in organizational terms.
In the new customer area, we want to grow, especially in the business segment in The USA where we want the traction going forward. We have a modern infrastructure, very powerful, and that's the key to also have loyal business customers over the long term. Cost reduction is another element of our growth, and that applies especially to The USA where in the next two years, we will be concentrating on leveraging synergies with Sprint and T Mobile US. One shareholder asked about the medium long term strategy for expansion in other business fields. Our networks and telecommunication services at the core of our value creation both in the medium and long term.
Infrastructure is something good, and that's why you have to stick to your strengths. And so our focus in investment will be in this area in 2021 as well. More than 80,000,000,000 figures will be invested in the operation of our networks. That's where our focal point will be our thrust. And we want to also penetrate business fields that are closely related to our network, but we don't wanna go too far from our core competence.
So what we want is to really stay focused on our strengths and offer infrastructural services, again, to TV, smart home applications, gaming ideas. These are examples of new business fields that we're interested in. One shareholder asked about customer verification with the online EID identification function. There's a PIN that's used too. We use this in many shops of our partners.
We're planning electronic personal identifications with a PIN identification for online bookings. And in telecom shops in the future, the IUD function on this will be on these identification cards will be used without a PIN with a c a n procedure. Verified workers will be able to read personal identity cards. Parallel to this, we're working on an ecosystem for identification in which users of different ID systems can place these in encrypted form and use these on a platform. This is part of the initiative of the federal government for electronic identification.
Another question relates to long waiting times for our telephone customer service. We find it unacceptable, but set because of the closure of a lot of telecom shops. Since the lockdown, there's been an enormous increase in telephoning volumes. People used to be able to go to the store, but you can't now, so they call. So we've done everything to keep the waiting periods as short as possible, and we can solve any problems with the first contact.
And to this end, we've launched a whole package of measures and devoted resources to this time and money, and that also impacts the waiting time. And right now, the current developments are changing rapidly in rare cases. It may be the case that waiting times are longer. And in these cases, we recommend customers use our callback function. So customers can simply wait for us to come back, and we'll try to get back to them as soon as possible.
And the average waiting time is around a hundred and twenty seconds right now, which we've arrived at. Before that, it was several minutes. So we've really reduced the customer waiting time. And this is attested to by regular, yeah, consumer tests out there. And the traffic light system is green right now for us in this regard.
Mister Seymour, you asked about the certification of our services based on criteria for the selection of the certifier and the review of distribution of service partners. The service of Telecommunication is reviewed every year by to Freinland in accordance with international standards. ISO 9,001 and management systems of ISO 27,001 and verified on that basis. Criteria are reviews in comparison to all the standards. If a certifier is lost or is they're they're reviewed on the basis of different criteria, things like reliability, and certification was done
by the Deutsche because I was talking
to San Sebastian from management system, d u s. And above and beyond this, Deutsche Telekom. And within the group, there's other certification parties working to ensure independent independent to ensure independence of individual partners. Distribution insurance partners are verified, like, with Freidland external partners or by our compliance department on a regular basis. So these are all questions that if you write to us, we can also provide more detailed information on.
Florian Floor shareholders interested in Agenza TV and asks how we want to expand our the service. We are developing it in tune with customer needs that includes the pooling and aggregation of a wide variety of services and providers in the streaming area. That means not only direct access to these services, like, through the user interface or the search function. It also means product and price functions and where they can communicate directly. And we'll continue to expand partnership streaming to meet the demands of customers.
And by the way, you've perhaps heard about the deal in the area of football, not only for the European Cup in 2024. We also have the rights to the European Cup and the World Cup. So will Magenta Sport continue to acquire TV rights for football and show them exclusively for small football matches with the business model in this regard. Yeah. Because I was saying premium premium football rights for the Bundesliga in the German market and Champions League were awarded for last year for the next period.
And the question arises so they're not available for purchase right now. Generally speaking, tell Deutsche Telekom takes part in auctions of sports rights according to certain strategic criteria. Whether we take part in the tender or not, as our business concept is based on several pillars in addition to whether it complements our services, in particular, the magenta TV platform. Another question is whether marketing of sports generates revenue and along with the media and range of people that you attract through sports. Those are all part of the equation that we consider when we be part in any tender for sporting sports sports transmission rides.
Another question was whether we would focus more on Magenta TV in the future and also, Republic with an offer there. Yeah. We offer connectivity. Our networks and telecommunications services are at the core of our business. On top of this, we select select we offer select connectivity services, smart home, magenta gaming, and our networks are something that customers experience.
And these services strength our brand by creating an emotional tie with good customer experience. That's why, yeah, spin offs for this certain product line are not being planned. One shareholder asked what importance new fields like Magenta TV cloud and online marketplaces have. First of all, Magenta TV is a very important product for us, and it's an important differentiation in our additional business. We want to be the leading TV platform in Germany and serve our customers with simplicity, the best entertainment.
And all of this should be as smart as possible and usable as easily as possible usable, and that's the Magenta TV. It's growing, still growing, and we think we have a lot of market potential. Today, we have 4,000,000 customers, 40 and there's 40,000,000 households in Germany, so we have a lot of potentials still. In the private customer area, Magenta Cloud can be used for photos, music, and other digital online services, and that content can be processed through. And we can offer this on all devices.
Magenta Cloud adds to our customer business and adds to customer loyalty. So we have to do a little bit more, I think. We've neglected it a little bit lately, but we're working on it. They tend to gaming, allows video gaming. That's a new business model for us on almost any platform and hardware, mobile, or in the fixed network, but it's all cloud based.
And this is a new product that we put on the market. We're the first ones to do this, and we see huge growth potential here, especially through the, real efficiency of networks we have now, like five g or or fiber optics. When will the Disney Plus be available through the Magenta product?
Disney Plus has
been available since the March 24 on the media receiver last year and on the Magenta receiver. And there's also a monthly And beginning on the April 7, another variant is available for twelve month period for only five years a month. That option applies to all flat all to mobile, fixed network, and TV. So you can see it's really worth being a long term customer because you get additional services that others don't have access to.
So that's a real added value for customers. We see a lot of growth potential through this exclusive offer via telephone. Disney was a big topic over the last year. So that's the end of my presentation, Elena. Thank you for listening.
That was a great effort with mister Lucas. I have some questions that relate to the supervisory board now. Mister,
asked whether the applicant, doctor Jung, has enough experience, to work on the supervisory board. The supervisory board has ascertained that, missus Jung has enough time and is adequately experienced for her job on the supervisory report. Mister Smith from DWS. Thank you for pointing out that missus Young is also a suitable candidate for the audit committee. That's what you said, and we agree.
We think it's good to have a system that is based on rotation in the various committees. Please refer to Page nine of the annual report for further details. And six out of eight committees, there were changes in staff in terms of the composition of the committees. How do we continue with the Supervisory Board? Please refer to the annual report to learn more about current appointment periods.
Whenever a new member is to be appointed, we look into it in-depth in order to refill any vacancies in line with the skills required for the Supervisory Board. Mr. Schmidt, you asked why Doctor. Breunich, Mr. Busing, and missus Kruman are labeled as independent on the committee.
This is based on the recommendations of the German corporate governance code. According to this code, a supervisory board member is deeply independent if he or she are independent from the Deutsche Telekom board and from any shareholder. From the point of view of the employer on the supervisory board. This is the case that we are not aware of any conflicts of interest. If you are referring to the interaction with representatives of the German government, this does not apply here.
Mister Schmidt, you also asked what findings we derived from the specific evaluation of the audit committee. The finding was that the audit committee already works in a very efficient and effective way. At the same time, we identified potential on how to improve even further, and we derived relevant action to make the audit committee more efficient. It was asked whether missus Coleman is going to step up from more mandates over the next twelve months. The answer is no.
There are no such plans. Mister Matis from DK Invest, on your questions in how far the supervisory board prepared itself to look into the latest EU requirements on taxation and how these requirements are met in our committees. The supervisory board, even today, audits the declarations from the nonfinancial statement in line with EU requirements for taxonomy and sustainability. With missus Sukala, the supervisory board already has a member who is very skilled in this field and the Supervisory Board has appointed her as an expert in this field. In addition to the Supervisory Board, the Audit Committee also deals with this subject.
And when it comes to the audit of the nonfinancial statement, the Supervisory Board regularly obtains support from an independent operating company. So Mr. Matas and Mr. Schmitz with further questions. And Mr.
Bechtdorf from DSW, you wanted to know what is the current status of your search for new members on the Supervisory Board, the answer for new Chairman of the Supervisory Board. Well, as you know, I will leave the Supervisory Board as Chairman next year with the structured succession process in place. This has been coordinated with the Nomination Committee. A proposal from my successor will be submitted in time before the next shareholders meeting where a decision will be made. And I can confirm that we are also taking into account external candidates.
Then a further question. Are you going to make sure that we have equal representation on our committee on the Deutsche Telekom committees in the future? Minister Schmidt asked the same question for the audit committee in particular. Let me repeat that the corporate governance code describes that most of the members be independent, but no such rules are in place for the actual committees. According to the shareholder representatives, all of our members are independent, the members on our committees.
Then another question from Union Invest. The question was about the future criteria applied to members on the Supervisory Board. When appointing a successor for the post, we are deciding in line with the relevant codes and requirements. The goal to the international setup of the company is to make sure that we also have sufficient members with an international background and relevant experience. The declaration on governance online can be used to obtain further details.
I would like to point out that you don't that it is not enough to not have a German passport in order to demonstrate that you are considered to be international. Another question was whether the supervisory board supports statements made by the Board of Management. For recap, this was about the request to add additional items to the agenda. The Supervisory Board did not issue a statement on that. As the chairman of the supervisory board of Deutsche Telekom, I fully support the statement made by the board of management in this context.
Then there was a question on the remuneration report. I already said this morning, we've got nothing to hide. We are publishing the remuneration report for the supervisory board and the board of management with all the relevant details in line with the rules of the corporate governance code. Mister Osweid and missus Vander Hottaker from Union Invest asked a question regarding corporate governance. At Deutsche Telekom, Telekom, we believe that a good corporate governance is a central management task and the basis for our corporate success.
The supervisory board and the board of management themselves with the recommendations of the new German corporate governance code, and we are going to apply both national rules and comply with international standards as well. I was pointing out this morning that we are constantly in touch with shareholder representatives and others in the run up to the shareholders meeting. I myself as the chairman also regularly meet up with investors to discuss these things. Mister Oswein, with regards to the to the election of supervisory board members, you were asking about the election criteria, and you were suggesting that their qualification is not the only relevant factor. Let me state, first of all, that I don't really mean don't really understand what you mean by qualification.
Because qualification to my mind comprises all sorts of things, not just the way you're trained, but also your cultural background and your behavior as a human being. Well, with this in mind, we always consider the overall qualification of an individual and in order to determine whether they are suitable for the supervisory board or not. And no other criteria play a major role. And there are specific targets for filling positions on the supervisory board. As I said before, let me give you a couple of examples, but please also refer to the annual report.
Strategic competence, financial competence, controlling competence, innovation competence, sustainability, and social competence, these are factors that play a central role. But in addition to that, you should have a speak up mentality and be committed to actively join in. If you were interested to learn more about, well, what my ordinary working day looks like, I would like to invite you to to see for yourself what it looks like, but then there is no ordinary work day for me anyway. Due to my tasks on the supervisory board, my working days vary a great deal. Today, for instance, we are holding the shareholders meeting.
Then we will have a meeting to discuss the remuneration system with mister Hertges and the other board members. And when it comes to staff issues, which are particularly tricky, I often speak to all sorts of different people on the phone. So in part, we don't have any, well, typical working days, so to speak. Mister Oswald asked about the total cost of the annual financial statements in 2020. That €17,000,000, of which 15,000,000 for the final audit.
Other marketing services, 1,000,000. Tax consulting, 0. Other services, 1,000,000. The other individual services are prescribed. Mr.
Schmidt from DWS, you asked about the increase in share of Phantom shares as a result of our dividend policy. The supervisory board has paid a fixed remuneration of Phantom shares, and that's why the dividend policy does not have an influence as suggested by you. Then meeting fees, this question cropped up several times. The meeting fee amounting to €1,000 for supervisory board members is in the lower range compared to other companies. Some people are assuming that people are only attending meetings because they are paid this fee.
I wouldn't have a problem with including such meeting fees in fixed remuneration. But the way we handle it is in line with market standards anyway. So I already talked about funding shares. Then there was another question here on meeting fees. And it said here, if that's the case, then we have to reject item 10 on the agenda.
So let me refer you back to what I was just saying. Then a question from Fabian Kopfer. They referred to the number of supervisory board mandates of mister Hodges with Daimler. The supervisory board activities of mister Hodges outside of Deutsche Telekom are in line with the German corporate governance code, and they also help him to even improve his expertise. In fact, this is member of the supervisory boards of two listed companies.
FC Bayern is not to be included in this because it is not a listed company nor can it be compared to a listed company. One question from mister Weidenbuller regarding the remuneration systems as mentioned in today's agenda and whether it includes employees as well. The answer is no. Are dealing with the remuneration pages advisory board members and the board of management here. Individual components also apply to individual employees in a different form.
I already pointed out that one constituent element of our system is that we have an end to end structure in place, which is why some elements may turn out to be identical. Then the question on the election of doctor Heger Jung for another term, and the question was whether we were able to find another suitable lady. Answer, missus Jung is a business management expert and she used to work for Allianz, which means that she has years of experience in terms of national and international management. With her expertise, she continues to be an ideal member for us on the supervisory board. And I already said previously that we are glad to have missus Jung on the supervisory board as a member.
She proved to be a valuable colleague over the past five years, And it is possible to serve on the supervisory board for three terms. She hasn't served for three terms yet, which is why what we are doing now is in line with the rules and regulations. And I already commented on meeting fees. Andreas you asked whether a committee such as care makes sense. We are discussing anything to do with sustainability on the supervisory report as a whole.
And I already pointed out Sukharev, we have a true expert from this field on our committee and other Supervisory Board members have also gained a lot of experience on sustainability and other companies, which is why the supervisory board as a whole is dealing with this quite successfully. Many questions that is relevant to all of us today. How many participants were attending the meeting at the beginning of mister Hodges' speech as opposed to the beginning of the q and a? At the beginning of today's AGM, we had 1,050 shareholders or their proxies on our Internet dialogue.
At the same time, we had around 300 3,700 accesses to the livestream. By the end of mister Hebkneis' speech, we had 1,000 people on the Internet dialogue and around 4,500 people using the livestream. So mister Hebkneis, apparently, that was a very inspiring speech. And now now right now, we have 400 people on the Internet dialogue, shareholders or their proxies, and 2,900 people accessing or using the livestream. I think that's a great number, and it shows that, thankfully, you show a keen interest in this company.
Mister Schmidt Spitzner, I look at you, and I can see your thumbs up. Now let me look at mister Hodges, mister Ilek. Okay. So ladies and gentlemen, all questions submitted on the agenda items have been answered. Thank you to all those who submitted questions showing an interest in this company, which is your company, the Q and A session is now closed.
Ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders, voting will commence shortly. Under section 17, paragraph two of the articles of incorporation, it is my responsibility as chairman of this meeting to stipulate the type and sequence of the vote. As in previous years, the results of the vote will be determined using the addition method. This means that the yes and no votes will be counted separately and added to determine the number of votes cast. Extensions are not counted accordingly.
The official result of the vote will be determined electronically under the supervision of the notary public. As the shareholders are only represented here today by the proxy holders appointed by the company, vote casting will continue with the sign off of the votes to be cast by set proxy holders in line with the instructions issued to them, which have been uploaded to the system. The voting instructions indicate for each individual item for how many shares the proxy holders were requested to vote yes or no. By signing off, the proxy holders undertake to cast the votes as laid down in the voting instructions. The proxy holders sign off the votes by placing their signature under the instructions as displayed in the system.
The postal or online votes received by the company were registered electronically and will be accounted for in the vote count. In other words, the net and no votes received by post or online will be added to the yes and no votes of the proxy holders. As for the counter motions, I already mentioned that I shall point out that I will first call a vote on the motions submitted by management. If these are accepted with the majority as needed, the counter motions will be redundant and will not have to be voted upon. Otherwise, we will have to proceed accordingly.
We can now proceed to the vote on management motions regarding agenda items two through 10 and the proposed resolution on agenda item 11 submitted by DSW acting on behalf of and by proxy for Bayern Invest. On item two of the agenda, you will be asked to vote on the resolution proposed by the Board of Management and the Supervisory Board, which has been adjusted to reflect the number of shares carrying dividend rights of which I informed you ahead of the q and a session just after reading out agenda items two through 11. The proposed resolution is available for inspection in this room. And for items three through 10, we will vote on the management motions as shown in the invitation to today's shareholders' meeting, which was published in the Federal Gazette on the 02/26/2021. As for agenda item 11, we will vote on the proposal submitted by DSW acting on behalf of and by proxy for Bayern Invest as shown in the amended agenda published in the Federal Gazette on the March 3 regard to items three and four, I shall make reference to the prohibition of exercising voting rights pursuant to section 136 of the German Stock Corporation law.
With regard to item five, I shall point out that there will be separate votes on the appointment of PWC suggested in sub items a to b. The resolutions on items two to six and items nine and ten require simple majority of valid votes cast. The resolutions on item 78 require a simple majority of votes cast and a majority of the capital stock represented in the vote on the resolution. The resolution on agenda item 11 requires a simple majority of the valid votes cast and the capital stock represented in the vote of the resolution. The list of participants has been updated.
The updated attendance figure is ATIS. Addendum to the attendance figure for the shareholders' meeting of Deutsche TelekomMD on the 04/01/2021 in Bonn. Attendance of the number of shares for postal votes has changed in the Nissan at the moment. At this shareholders meeting, we have 3,245,285,340 NoPar shares, which corresponds to €8,307,930,470.4 or 68.16% of the capital stock, which consists of €4,761,458,566 amounting to €12,189,334,005.76. In addition, postal bills were cast for 27,766,957 share NUPAR value shares, which will be taken into account for the final vote.
Let me sum up. Overall, we have 3,273,052,279 non par value shares represented in this AGM or through postal votes, which corresponds to 68.74% of capital stock. Let me hand this over to the Nota Republic. The updated list of participants is available for perusal here in the room. I shall point out again that information from the list of participants and on the attendance figure can be accessed via the password protected Internet dialogue during the shareholders meeting.
Ladies and gentlemen, you have now now meeting 04:48PM, which means you now have six minutes. So forty eight plus seven, that means 04:55PM. This is the time that you've got to issue, amend, or withdraw your postal or online votes, proxies, or instructions issued to the proxy holders appointed by the company. You can use the password protected Internet dialogue for this purpose. Then so after 04:55PM, the votes will be cast by the proxy holders appointed by the company right here on-site.
So let's take a quick break.
Yeah? Okay. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, let me point out that the time to issue, amend, or withdraw your postal or online notes, proxies, or instructions issued to the proxy holders appointed by the company will end shortly at 04:55. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, the shareholders, the possibility to issue, amend, or withdraw your postal votes or online votes, copies or instructions issued to the proxy holders appointed by the company and now. The relevant functions in the password protected Internet dialogue will now be closed. I hereby open the voting procedure and would ask the proxy holders appointed by the company to sign off the votes in line with the voting instructions on the motion for resolutions by management on items two through 10 and the motion for resolution on item 11 submitted by DSW acting on behalf of and by proxy for Iron Invest. This will take a little while. Please beware please bear with us for a few minutes.
We'll have a short break. Have the proxy holders appointed by the company signed off their votes in line with the voting instructions? Thank you for this signal. That is the case, and the votes have been signed off in line with the voting instructions, and the voting procedure has ended. Ladies and gentlemen, the notary will be present while the Yeah?
Okay. Yeah. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, the meeting continues. I now have the results of the vote.
The shareholders' meeting has approved all management motions under items two through 10 with the necessary majority. The proposed resolution on agenda item 11 submitted by DSW on behalf and on proxy for Bayern Invest was rejected. The detailed results of the vote will be published online very soon. Allow me to inform you of the results of the votes on items two through 11 of the agenda. Votes on the ordinary shareholders meeting of Deutsche Telekom AG on the 04/01/2021 in Bonn.
Ladies and gentlemen, I will now announce the results on the items through to 11 on the agenda through to ten and eleven on agenda item 11 submitted by BSW on behalf of and by proxy for INvest. And I will put up the decisions. The presence was 3,000,245 million 285,647 votes taking into account 7,801,297 votes submitted by postal vote, which is 68.74%, which is 4,751,000 458,596 stocks of the share capital. On item two, the result was as will be shortly shown on the screen. Item two was approved with 99.86%, giving it the necessary simple majority.
So the dividend payment of €6 cents per share was decided as shown in the management proposal on item two on the agenda. As I already explained to you at the beginning of the meeting before we started the Q and A session. On item three of the agenda, the shareholders submitted their votes on the approval of the activities of the members of the Supervisory Board. Motion was approved with 99.7% of the votes, reaching the required simple majority for this resolution. Mister Hedges, a big thank you to you and your team, and congratulations on this result that really shows the trust of the shareholders you enjoy.
You're beaming now. But, well, the vote in favor of the dividend was even higher, but it's even better now coming to item four on the agenda. Here, the result of the vote is that the motion was approved with a majority of 88.61% of the valid votes cast, which is the necessary simple majority. I was only asked to read, not to comment. But I if I were to comment, then I would express my hope that this does not include double votes, votes that are both meant for the compensation system and the independence.
But all in all, I would like to thank you. 88.61% expressed their trust in the work by the Supervisory Board. On item five on the agenda, the results are as follows. The result for item five k is 94.23% of the valid votes cast, which is the necessary simple majority. So PWC Frankfurt am Main was appointed external auditor for the presentation to this meeting and the agenda.
Thank you very much for giving this vote and for settling this matter and that we can now appoint PricewaterhouseCoopers for the next year. The tender item size b was approved with 94.22% of the valid vote cast, meeting the necessary simple majority. So PricewaterhouseCoopers, the trust for Frankfurt mine was appointed external auditor for the interim financial statement and the management report on the basis of the law for the business year 2021. You can see the details concerning this motion under item five in the indication to this meeting. Item five c on the agenda was approved with 94.45% of valid COGS cost, and this means that the appointment of Ernst and Young, Gmph, such as Buffungsgutelschaft Stuttgart as the external auditor for the interim financial reports in line with the Stock Operation Act for the 2021 was rescinded and PWC, the Trafalcon Schuster Frankfurt on the mine was appointed as the external auditor for the review of additional financial statements and reports based on the act for the first quarter twenty twenty one.
The complete wording of the resolution can be found under Item 5C in the agenda published with the invitation. Item 5B on the agenda. Agenda item five d was approved with a majority of 94.21% of the head votes cast reaching the required simple majority. So PricewaterhouseCoopers, Swissas Swissaschaft Frankfurt mine was appointed for a possible review of additional interim financial reports for the quarters mentioned in the agenda. The complete wording of this resolution can be found under agenda item five d in the invitation published in the federal government.
On item six on the agenda. The agenda item six was approved with 97.89 of valid votes cast, reaching the required majority of votes. So doctor Helga Jung is elected as member of the supervisory board, and the complete wording of this resolution can be found on item six in the invitation published. We are happy about the trust shown to the Supervisory Board regarding this proposal. And this is Jung.
We are happy that you stay as a member of the Supervisory Board, and we are looking forward to good cooperation. Congratulations to this election. I'm sorry that you cannot say anything right now, but I can see that you are talking. On item seven on the agenda. Then Item seven was approved with a majority of 93.46% of the private boats cost reaching the necessary simple majority of three quarters of the represented stock capital.
So there was a resolution on the authorization to acquire and use own shares with possible exclusion of subscription rights and any rights to tender shares as well as the option to redeem the own shares. And the full wording can be found under Item seven on the agenda as published in the indication. We'd like to thank you for the flexibility that can be used if it was necessary. Thank you very much. This is not right, of course.
On item eight of the agenda, the results are shown on screen. The result of this vote is majority of 93.85% of valid votes cast, which is the necessary majority of three quarters of the represented stock capital and the simple majority of votes. This is referring to the authorization to use equity derivatives to acquire own shares with possible exclusion of any right to tender shares. The full wording can be found in under item eight in the agenda published. Thank you very much for this resolution as well.
Item nine on the agenda. The resolution was adopted with 72.772.7% of valid votes cast reaching the necessary separate majority of votes. So this is the resolution on the approval of the compensation system for the Board of Management members. The full wording can be found under agenda item nine in the invitation. Let me say very clearly that it is not in line with the expectations that we had when we developed the compensation system and we now have to what we do about this resolution.
That is not fully satisfactory to us. And I think that the component of the extraordinary bonus payments has contributed to this decision, and we will review the matter. But I still see this as a very clear message that we now have to assess. Item 10 on the agenda. The resolution was adopted with 99.15% of valid votes cast, reaching the necessary simple majority of votes.
So this was the resolution on item 10, and the full wording can be found under items 10 under item 10 in the agenda made public with the invitation. So here, this is a higher value, and this concludes the votes on agenda items two through 10 of the agenda. They were all adopted. And this means that we no longer have to vote on the counter motions. It's not necessary to vote on the counter motions.
On item 11 of the agenda, this is the proposed resolution submitted by DSW on behalf of and by proxy for Bayer Invest has published in in March in the federal Only 45.151 of the valid votes cast were in favor of the resolution proposed. This means that the proposed resolution by the SW on behalf of by proxy for Bayer and Invest has not received the necessary majority but was rejected by the shareholders meeting, and this change in the articles of incorporation will not be made. This makes it easier for us, but the result is quite tight. So much on the results. Ladies and gentlemen, we have now reached the end of our agenda.
I would very much like to thank you also on behalf of the board of management and the supervisory board for your participation in this year's virtual shareholders meeting. And again, I deplore that it was a virtual meeting. I really have fond memories of our physical shareholders meetings, and I really hope that we will soon meet again for the next shareholders' meeting. I would like to thank those employees who helped in the preparation and organization of this shareholders' meeting and have been instrumental in ensuring the smooth running of events. What was missing are our trainees who normally collect votes.
Next year, hopefully, they will be here again, and we'll have a full hall. In conclusion, may I point out that the next ordinary shareholders meeting of twenty twenty is scheduled to take place on 04/07/2022 in Bonn. Dear shareholders, we hope we will then be able to welcome you again in person. Thank you to all of you. And as pointed out at the beginning, I can have to wait for five minutes before I formally close the meeting for legal reasons.
I wish you nice holidays. Take care. Stay healthy, and thank you very much for the interest you showed in the company, mister Hetkers, that it's best if our customers become our fans. For the shareholders, we know that you are already our fans. I hope you will stay.
Thank you.