Okay. Hello, everyone. Good morning. I hope you have recovered from our first half-day of presentations yesterday. We are ready and eager to take the second installment. To wake you up, we gave you Billie Eilish, and I'll tell you from here, it's going to get even better. Can I please first refer you to our usual disclaimer? Let's move on once you've seen that. What do we have for you today? As I said, it gets better. We start with Claudia Nemat and technology, IT, and all that stuff that is hard to understand but really matters. When I was an analyst, I had no idea how important this is.
Claudia will show you where we are on all the buzzword stuff, digitization, cloudification, O-RAN, all this stuff. I'm glad to say we are right there. We got the nerds. We got the PhDs. We got the guys from Bangalore. We got the bots and the self-learning ones.
Let's get cloudified with Claudia. Claudia Nemat.
Thank you, Hannes. A wonderful good morning. It is great to digitally meet you. I hope you are all fine and healthy. For me, it is actually my fourth Capital Market Day, so special greetings to all of you who have joined us throughout the last decade. My summary: We actually delivered on our CMD promises from 2018. We successfully implemented our superior production model, meaning we completed our All-IP migration with clear benefits regarding customer experience, cost savings, and resilience. We did a very rigorous IT transformation with significant benefits regarding speed, stability, and cost containment. We further enhanced our integrated network leadership in Germany and Europe and our perception as the 5G company in the United States with clear business benefits. Going forward, we will evolve from a leading telco to experience-obsessed tech player, and that means precisely five things.
Number one, we are moving to a high degree of network automation, high data rate regarding speed, but telco-grade regarding security and reliability on the basis of our increasingly cloud-native infrastructures and, over time, disaggregated networks for lower cost and better experience. Number two, in addition to the digitization of our networks, we continue to digitalize the entire value chain, sales, service, G&A, for better experience and lower cost. To achieve that, we built on the software expert abilities of our people. Number three, our integrated network leadership will continue to deliver clear business benefits. We are committed to 5G leadership in Germany, Europe, and the U.S., and fiber in Germany and Europe. Number four, to support our ambitious climate targets and to offset, by the way, the massive volume increase in our networks, we commit to double energy efficiency in our network production by 2024.
Number five, experience obsession. As Srini said, "Kunden zu Fans machen," guides our consumer innovation. We focus on product experiences that leverage our superior networks. Coming to my review. We completed our All-IP migration with clear benefits precisely. In Germany, the IP migration was the necessary basis for broadband availability at scale. As a result, we have today many households with speeds above 250 Mbps. Those are our top super vector lines plus fiber households. In both Germany and Europe, it was the basis for plug and play for all our customers. Today, you take out, plug it into the wall, and it works. Here you go. It works immediately. As a result, the activation incidents in Germany went down by 40%, and the annual savings we achieved in 2020 amount up to EUR 100 million.
They are by the way a result mainly of our ATM platform shutdowns, leading to energy savings. To make that tangible, when we shut down the ATM platform in Germany last year, we saved in the subsequent quarter the annual energy consumption of the city of Cologne in just one quarter. Last but not least, I would add that without the IP migration, we would not have mastered the COVID crisis so well. Our networks are still in spite of the volume increases, for example, + 300% in the U.S. The IP migration was the digitization project of the decade. You might ask, what is different at DT compared to other telcos? Two things. Number one, we did it. We did it 100%. It is not the case U.K., Spain, France, or Italy.
Number two, in Germany, we did it together with a massive simplification of our aggregation network, the so-called BNG migration, which is the basis for further automation. Second, as I said, we did a super rigorous IT transformation. What is behind that? We actually fundamentally changed the way we work in business from IT then to joint teams from departments. We radically changed the way we develop software from having only four so-called release containers per year with very time-consuming linear planning, testing, developing, planning, developing, testing, and zero flexibility to a highly adaptive process. Today, 70% of all features and workloads are delivered outside release containers, and that means we can flexibly adapt to market requirements, and 80% with agile methodologies. Overall, with that, as you can see here, we reduced our time to market from 18 months to 3.5.
With that, we all achieved the promise which I gave three years ago, even though it was six months, not 3.5 . For us, IT speed is key. Why? To reduce weight for lower cost and experience. In addition to that major speed increase, also, as you can see here, we doubled the stability of our systems, while at the same time reduced IT spend by EUR 200 million. How did we do that? Moved away from silos, for example, here development, here test and operate, a modern DevOps setup, making sure that operations requirements are embedded from the very beginning for less operational incidents and lower cost. We moved away from hierarchies and Taylorism, skill-based organizations with relevant investments in future-proofing capabilities of our people around the world.
Finally, we moved away from deeply coupled architectures to decoupling architecture with modern API and microservices. We consider this level of change and speed things industry-leading. From my point of view, it is how we do things that differentiates us. For us, that's the avenue to becoming a modern tech company. The third point of the superior production model was our integrated network leadership. In Germany, we won all relevant tests, and by us, the Mobile Connect, the 5G CHIP test , and the 5G Innovation Award. Our mobile index network perception is 23 percentage point better than the one of the next best competitor. With a population coverage of 80% for 5G, I would say we are miles. We are just miles ahead of competition. By the way, that is not only the result of superior tech competition.
Our super rollout is also the result of technology foresight. For example, we were the first operator worldwide to pilot dynamic spectrum sharing required for super-fast rollout, and we were among the first operators in the world to commercialize that. In Europe, we are number one in network perception in 8/ 10 markets, and our network in the Netherlands was even ranked the best mobile network in the world. T-Mobile's perception as the 5G company in the United States has increased by 100% since Q3 2019, and all of that together manifests our being superior. Superior networks are the key ingredient for our enabling brands, for our commercial strengths, and upside going forward. In summary, we delivered, as you can see here, with the dominance on the leading tile. Srini and I ranked the fiber rollout in Germany with the yellow traffic light.
The reason is that we have achieved the planned rollout speed only in the last quarter of that year, ramping up to the full 2 million fiber households slightly later than expected. Coming to the strategy going forward. As I said, very successful telco, a leading telco. We have superior production models, a crisis resilience. We have invested into future-proofing capabilities like in DevOps. Being a leading telco might not be enough, like being a leading automotive company is no longer enough. In today's software-driven world, that might put you into the role of the one-eyed among the blinds, that is not our ambition. We are redefining ourselves. We are redefining the rules of our game to become an experience-obsessed tech player, a tech company obsessed with the experience, Kunden zu Fans, of our customers. Precisely, that means five things. We double down our network automation, cloudification, disaggregation.
We will double down our digitization efforts along the entire value chain, leveraging what we have and the data and software capabilities of our people. Number four, half of our integrated network leadership story on our three on the basis of fiber and 5G. We will double our efforts on energy-efficient production, we will focus on being efficient, best connectivity experience, seamless in play at home, and focused innovations beyond the core. I will now go into point number one, network automation. Historically, automation was like this. We analyzed the process, took out a few steps, and then put the rest in the software. Usually, the speed gains you get amount to 20%, 30%, 100%. Our new software-led approach for network automation has a more significant speed.
It was the precursor for our new production platform, next-generation IMS in Germany, which is, by the way, a multi-vendor platform, open, fully automated, and running out of the cloud. What? This flow-based automation has a significant impact on speed. That's what I call [audio distortion] quick but telco-grade security-wise. Practically, the introduction of a new product feature takes months compared to 18 months before. This represents ideas in network technology as in IT.
Nine days for rolling out a software feature in the network to only two days, and fixing up takes no longer 14 days, but it's only one day. Finally, no night shifts are required. In June, 1 million fixed customers are live in Germany. Our mission is to have all voice and broadband customers in Germany and in Europe on one. Such a broad mission framework is the key for our data customers on one unified platform by 2024. Automated production will contribute to achieving our cost targets. Can I have video on this.
Deutsche Telekom is not just improving profiles. To gain these automations, it help the errors. The benefit, less human error risk and more focus on customer experience with high cost-effectiveness. For the better separation of the network, tests for new implementations work can be triggered also in the cloud.
A good example of cloud automation is our voice production. Looking at the classic approach shows production got done in a very long-term proprietary, firm, rotary way of dependency with a strong low build. With this, we process the voice using software in our cloud. This gives us a better lever for automation. We are pioneering a 3210 version reality, three months for each cloud element. Today, to pilot new software end-to-end connect, one week to validate functional and real relationships, two to four weeks for functional and non-functional. We hit already a significant milestone.
1 million customers have been live so far. By the end of 2021, the entire NIMS network will be cloudified with new 100% automated chains from development to validation production. To achieve our mission, we work in agilities, larger scope, and upskill our employees. We are also scaling these new automations for other services such as TVs. We shape our digital future together.
Now is another example with automated fiber planning. Historically, fiber planning included many manual processes and most maps existed only in analog combination formats. Thus, super complex interactions with municipalities. As a result, a typical fiber area took on average 25 days. At the last Capital Markets Day, I showed you our demo for what was back then a pilot for a new fully automated fiber planning system. We actually digitized the map application for the municipalities and we used 3D lasers to measure the ground and techniques to seamlessly create pictures of surfaces and intersections. Then these are analyzed in a Python script by algorithms to deliver a passive fiber planning.
On that basis, the planning time of the same average area got reduced from 25- 5 days. Today, the system is deployed in 70% of all new areas, so it's up and running, ready for scaling. Needless to say that it is one out of many contributors to reducing our net cost by 25% until 2024. For sure, it's one of the necessary conditions for doing the fiber rollout so fast. Now let's go to another aspect at work.
Historically, we have acquired large systems. In the future, the systems will be smaller. Soft hardware gets decoupled, making hardware much cheaper because we can use standard hardware. One well-known example is O-RAN, Open Radio Access Networks, what you can see here. In our days, Radio Access Network, the radio unit on top of the antenna pole and the baseband unit down in the gray box, all need to come from the same vendors. The stuff within the BBU comes from the same vendor, 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, and all antennas in one area. The advantage, high-spectrum efficiency and high performance. The disadvantage, limited choice and higher TCO. This topic is being addressed in O-RAN. All these components I mentioned can come from different vendors. We deploy software on a standard hardware rack, which can look like that. That's an O-RAN baseband unit.
You see standard hardware racks and software deployed on that. The advantage, more choice, lower TCO. The challenge for the industry, end-to-end integration and automation. I will now explain you back on stage how we are addressing that. As I said, end-to-end integration automation. Deutsche Telekom was actually the first operator in Europe to set up an open test and integrate lab in Berlin to test and operate exactly that, end-to-end testing and integration. The lab is, by the way, open for all suppliers and our competitors. In addition, in the second half of this year, we intend to start O-RAN Town around Neubrandenburg, which will deploy O-RAN technology to actually test it in our productive network. This aggregation does not only happen in the mobile access, also in fixed.
We call that 4.0. It's Access 4.0 based on the aggregation network simplification we did together with the IT transformation journey, and that the simplification of the aggregation network was the result of the way we did the IT transformation journey, which is, by the way, another differentiator. Based on that, we created a fully disaggregated edge cloud simplified fixed broadband access. As a pilot, it arrives by the way, the world's first fixed disaggregated access line. The next step, of course, is work with the industry ecosystem to adopt those principles. In a nutshell, we are prepared. We have the capabilities in place to get it done as soon as the technology and the ecosystem matures. What I assume with regard to O-RAN in the next two to five years to happen. We are not only digitizing the network, but the entire value chain. That chart shows two things.
One is our easy fiber ordering and configuring and provisioning system for our customers. With the previous legacy IT, it took seven super cumbersome interactions for the customers to order fiber connection. Now only two very intuitive and easy ones are required. That system is cloud-based for all channels, and next year, the complete fiber rollout will be processed throughout this platform, which is another contributor for the speedy fiber rollout Srini mentioned. The other example here on the chart is our award-winning bot, Frag Magenta, a digital assistant that supports our services organization through automation. By now, more than 2 million issues were solved, and its independent solution rate without human help is 37%. Srini pointed it out in his speech. Our belief is to combine human service with digitalization, AI-enabled, advanced, augmented, and our ambition is to have all service interactions augmented by AI or algorithms by 2025.
Again, as I explained before, this is based on our industry-leading IT in terms of speed, flexibility, and stability. Now our ambition is to move one step further and create a world-class IT. That means that we will move to a very high degree of truly cloud-native infrastructure, 80% in IT and 55% for N&T across Germany and Europe. Plus, we will massively increase APIs and microservices, which means further decoupling the architecture. We will, of course, retire. If you express that in KPIs, we will further decrease time to market down to two months with 100% agile working. Stability will further increase, and the IT spend will go down by at least another EUR 200 million, which is a most significant contributor to the message Srini gave, fiber rollout self-funded. Why can we do that? Because we are driving a capability and cultural transformation.
Let me explain how we work. Traditional corporate thinking oscillates between centralization bias to capture synergy and decentralization bias to drive speed. I'm a fan of speed and experience. Now we're in different accountabilities. On the other hand, for those of you who got educated in the software rather than the telco industry, it's clear that you need economies of skill and scale when you want to get done the stuff I mentioned, like the scaling or two-step plan. There's no way to reinvent the wheel for that in every customer location if you want to get it done. Our solution is a modern tribe organization, which actually combines the best of both worlds. All IT and product people work totally decentral with the businesses. For example, on the automated fiber build-out or on the gigabits delivery system or on the 5G robot.
At the same time, every human being here in technology and innovation is part of a global skill chapter. For example, for software engineers, network engineers, data scientists, or AI specialists. The purpose of those chapters is to really make sure that everyone has her or his individual skill journey, and at the same time to make sure that we have the right number of people with the right number of capabilities in place from a global perspective, because that goes across Europe, Germany, Russia, and India. Today we have, by the way, in my board area 2,800 people with skills like software engineering, DevOps, data scientists, or modern architecture skills. That is 23%. As you can see here on that slide, that number will go up at least to 45% by 2024. Coming to point number three, we will remain network experience leader.
Now, Srini and Dominique talked about our ambition for 5G and for fiber, [audio distortion]
Deutsche Telekom Campus networks, private, secure, and powerful. Modern work is evolving faster than IT is growing. We can hear this and deploy the concept. Campus networks are a key enabler for digitalization because of high availability, security, low latency, and advantages for IoT. They are the basis for full industrial automations, for shorter production cycles and lower cost. They are the basis for all kinds of aerial autonomous systems like drones or autonomous guided vehicles. One additional advantage, the managed data can stay on campus. Our first campus network was for Osram and started with autonomous guided vehicles.
The campus network is what Siemens Mobility normally delivers to its customers. [Non-English content ]
The largest campus network we've done so far. That's not all. It emphasizes our ambition to shape Industry 4.0.
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The HHLA Sky campus network demonstrates the need for high availability.
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Campus networks are not only relevant in the industrial sector, but also in other sectors, for example in medical. Our pioneering cooperation with Bonn University Hospital demonstrates this distinct value, for example to make CT or MRT pictures available anytime on any mobile device on a large medical campus in a secure way.
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Deutsche Telekom Campus Network. We create value for our various customers. We shape our digital future together.
Okay. Coming to the next topic: green. What is pretty obvious? Our society's path to carbon neutrality and reduction will be entirely, infinitely impossible without digital technology. Deutsche Telekom is an important enabler. The COVID crisis showed video conferences will be extraordinarily significant and many transportation is a super mega privilege of CO2 emissions. Digital technologies enable a more diligent usage of natural resources in agriculture. Digital technologies are necessary to detect and reduce waste and CO2 footprints in logistical chains, they are basis for smart electricity grids and smart homes. Super. Nevertheless, as an industry, we need to look at our own emissions as well. As I pointed out yesterday, we commit to carbon neutral regarding our own emissions, Scope 1 and 2 by 2025.
Already this year, we will use electricity from only renewable source. For your info, electricity counts around 85% of our emissions, meaning, in our own emissions, we have moved ahead. We also commit to be CO2 neutral in Scope 3 for our supply chain latest by 2040. For me this is very important, we started to put major emphasis on this carbon footprint, energy efficiency, and waste avoidance in all our fields with our plans. What challenge? Electricity, including green electricity, of course, also cost factor. The data volume grows for all of us with at least 25% per annum. To offset this volume increase, so, to keep our energy consumption still, to keep our air stable, we will double our energy efficiency by 2024.
Energy efficiency can be defined as ratio between the data produced and the watt-hours needed to produce them. What are the levers to do that? Big lever returns. I talked about ATM, SDH will come next, our three-dismantling 3G and other levers are things like network sharing or again, using algorithms and AI to do, for instance, smarter steering with the antenna, with the scheduler. Another point are more efficient data centers and of course the proper fiber. Here is our plan, doubling down on energy efficiency to keep the consumption stable, to move credibly along the green path. My last point is about the consumer experiences. [ Non-English content ]. Delightful home experiences are of course built on our best networks and we focus on three experiences.
The best connectivity experience anywhere, a seamless interplay of all our products, MagentaTV, Magenta SmartHome, MagentaGaming, the apps for the Telekom routers or Hallo Magenta. In a very focused manner, we innovate on the core, for example, our MagentaGaming offering on the cloud gaming platform. For better experience, we focus on three enablers: cloudification, again, big data and AI service orchestration. That's the summary and let me explain what is behind that. On that chart, first, experience connectivity. Our customers expect that they have cable and fast connection anywhere in their home or in the office like at the curb. It's often different, a particular problem with the telco industry. It's kind of saying a super fiber or super electric line connection might have issues. Why? Because the customer uses the wrong router for her or his access line.
He or she might have put the router at the wrong place. I visited many homes and you wouldn't wonder very often I found it behind the fish tank or the bookshelf. Sometimes the cabling in the house is outdated as is the access point and also we have the phenomenon that the interferences of the neighboring Wi-Fis disturb. There are some non-technical solutions to that challenge, which is that our best service team convince our customers to take the right routers in the first place. Other more automated solutions require a different technology
More precisely, a new router operating logic. What does it do? It decouples software and hardware. You see that's also my pet topic here. It does real-time analysis of the connectivity data, again based on algorithms and AI. As a result, you can support customers with automated sense format and mesh Wi-Fi placement tool or, that's what we're going to do in Croatia, the router chooses automatically the best channel, and it also supports predictive maintenance for ourselves. Today, we have in Europe, 1 billion customers who got the new router operating system. Our ambition is to enable 75% of entire Deutsche Telekom router base in Germany and in Europe with that new logic, first or second generation until 2024. Next topic, experience the seamless interplay. Our customers expect super simple and intuitive onboarding, upgrading, and operating of any new devices.
My personal benchmark is the Apple experience from one model to another goes really seamless. To get that done, we've built a new API-first orchestration layer that adds glue between the different services and devices. With that, you can, for example, on your TV screen, show the QR code of your home Wi-Fi to the kids of your children, or you can get my mother call notification on the screen or on the TV screen that someone ringing at the door. By the way, it's being rolled out this year with already today 200,000 engaged customers on our smartphone offering. Our ambition is to have 90% of our customer base across Germany and Europe enabled with that. Last but not least, our voicification platform.
The idea is not to compete against OTTs, the objective is to voicify all our services and our ambition is by 2024 to have all DT services voice-enabled. Let us have a look at the homes of our customers.
The future of Deutsche Telekom's home experience will be seamless and simple, safe, privacy-respecting, personalized, truly human-centered. Our ambition, become the experience leader in the connected home. The foundation is laid today with the next generation of routers designed by us and a new platform allowing seamless interplay of our services. Turning on safe kids settings when adults are in the house. Setting call notifications on the TV screen while you watch a movie. Arrange home watching of sports or gaming events with distant friends or family members.
It's made possible by a powerful set of enabling technologies like real-time data analytics, AI, and an API-first orchestration layer for seamless interplay between the various services. All by the way enabled by our voicification platform. We'll collect and analyze data from various sources, protecting the privacy of our customers for the best personalized and safe experience. We can't wait to make it all happen. We shape our human-centered digital future.
To sum it up, here you can see our midterm ambition level. It's a commitment to roll out into Europe, a commitment to enhancing 5G leadership, a commitment to enhancing customer experience innovation leadership. On value transformations, our commitment on cloudification, super fast time to market share of 80% to 100% IT spend reduction by at least 200 million, and as I said, keep the energy consumption stable. Now, Hannes, only one final remark.
I believe what differentiates us is the way how we do things. I also share with you number one. I have this ambition transform us, as I said before, into an experience-obsessed telco, which in fact more than a telco company and it means in truly human tech, Investing into digital abilities of our people, [Non-English content] and increase shareholder value. By the way, not forget, have trusted relationships with our technology partners within this fragile world effective global supply chain is also a differentiator. Last but not least, for me it means also to be responsible digitally, socially, all that acknowledged. For me personally, it's why I love to be here. It inspires me, get up every morning, fight to make even better for all stakeholders, all human beings.
Lovely. It's a great vision and it's not just a vision. I'm becoming very tangible for our customers with the help of the great teams that we've put together. We've got time for I think about four people, 15 minutes. Start with Usman. Usman, Berenberg. Good to see you again.
Hey, thank you very much. I've just got one clarification and then two questions please. The clarification I was just looking in the slides where you show the percentage of cloud-based reduction. Is this showing the data amount of data that you're looking to put out networks and it will be public or private that you're referring to? That was the first question. The second question was just on the specific you gave in one of the other presentations on the 40% reduction in cost per peak throughput. I'm just wondering that seemed a bit conservative and that has more spectrum in 5G with you have 4x more spectrum efficiency with massive MIMO. I mean, other operators have spoken more like 90% cost of the kind of production going into 5G. Your comments there would be interesting.
My final question was just on becoming more of a software company, of course, you're focusing on connectivity. Could you share with us what proportion of network functions has been virtualized to date, where you expect that to get to? On software developers, are you seeing that it is an issue when hiring? It's kind of an element when there's a lot of competition for it.
I start with question one is indeed our workload, 80% workload in IT internationally, and 35% is workload. It is a combination of cloud and also private cloud, and especially we see linear work intensity work on U.S. side per day is on that one. Second question. Good. What's said is 2024 to use a gigabit per second. For top speed, it's a relative number. We will have that efficiency. By the way, this has a number of contributors. As you are referring to massive, those antennas to just give a flavor. If you look just at 32x 32 massive MIMO antenna deployed 3.6 GHz compared to 2x2 4G, 5G traditional antenna, you will find that the power use is twice as high. When you look at that antenna in relative terms, it is around about 20%.
As I said, it is one contributor. It's not only about this access element. This is actually, I think, how you need to read it. The last question was.
I would say it's also the fast and spectral efficiency seems like.
Yes, absolutely. You could look at that. Let me see. The last question was around the cloudification. One is the voice and the platform, which mentioned the intent as boost that automation framework and the cloudified platform for our customers by 2025. It's million customers, but the big, as you know, cost item is in the access network, fixed access network, and mobile access network. Here, as I also mentioned before, technology is not yet mature. We expect to mature in the next two to five years. The access part of the network will be cloudified as well. The cloudification happens together with the disaggregation and the further automation. There was another question on the difficult to get people. Yes, you see, I'm actually extremely proud of having a few super geeks from across the world.
Obviously, we are very attractive to get talent, whether it's from South Korea, from Africa, also from the United States. I'm super proud actually, of my very international team and of people who are real geeks. Having said that, I also strongly believe when you look at the mass of people, that in addition to hiring, we need to invest for social and financial reasons, also in the capability building of our both network and software engineers. We pursue an approach where we combine that.
Very good. Our next question then, thank you, Usman, is from Ulrich at Jefferies.
Yeah, thanks very much. I have three short questions, if I may. First one is, I'm interested in the comparison of how you see DT positioned within the industry. Where's DT ahead? Where is it behind it? I suppose your choice of topics probably tells us where you think DT is ahead. The question really is, where might you be behind or where's the opportunity relative to your peers? The second question is on O-RAN. You mentioned that, I suppose it's a difficult question to answer simply, but how far is O-RAN from mass deployment at DT? How many years? My last question is a bit philosophical, but I mean, much of the efficiency gains in your area come from taking out complexity, which has been layered on in past technology cycles, I suppose.
That seems to be a bit of a hamster wheel. Is there any reason to expect that this hamster wheel slows down with the current technology cycle so that in five years' time, we're not going to talk about delayering whatever has been added on in 2021? If you see what I mean. Thank you.
Okay. I start with where we are ahead and where do I see upside potential. I hope I made clear that when it comes to our 5G positioning in Germany and Europe, and you heard yesterday the U.S. team, honestly, I see competition miles behind us. I can assure you one thing, we will make sure that this remains like that in any dimension, if you talk about scope, if you talk about fiber backhauling, if you talk about the top speed. Number one. By the way, also in our ambition to be integrated network leadership, and you see it from the customer feedback and the realize so in the network. Also, I would say, and I mentioned that in my talk, we have really an advantage, Srini called it tailwind, for having completed the IP migration.
Because without having done that, you run into intrinsic complexity. For example, the next level of automation and disaggregation, which I mentioned for the fixed line network, when you want to virtualize that and use different vendors with lower hardware cost, requires a level of simplification. We really did it 100%, and we did it together with that access disaggregation, yeah. Based on some of the topics which I mentioned, the leverage of AI in fiber planning and that very radical approach to automation on our platform, I think enables us in the future to capture the potential. Because I would view it if I were you like this, we have proven this, and now we are scaling. Because our ability to scale, we are able to execute, for example, what Srini said, fiber upscale self-funded. That is scaling opportunity.
To be honest, I think we are really industry-leading when it comes to radicality of transformation, capability, stability, and speed. We are not world-class when it comes to cost. We are actually in the third quartile. In the third quartile, and that is also an upside potential, which I laid out here in the presentation. On the digitization front end, Srini and Dominique talked about that. We are also in a very good way with our bot farm, with Magenta bot and so on. I see us honestly as in multiple dimensions, but what we have proved with exactly that upside potential together is totally different level of automation. Number one, I think O-RAN, the question is when it is mature for the operator like us and others, and my estimation is next to 2025.
What I also want to say here, it will be a relevant component in the next request for proposal rounds to network modernization in Germany. The last question, complexity.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Whether this is just another installment of a regular cycle or whether we are talking about something that is a structural change that will, let's say, last for and give us more stability.
At least once you have the microservices APIs and high degree of condition which forces you to create. You have actually achieved a very strong position, and then you can debate, yeah, on where else you put your additional investments. I see it evolutionary, but in more than just the historic automations where you always set up the next complexities as you go.
Good. Okay. Thank you. Next, we have James at New Street. Hi, James.
Good morning. Thank you, Hannes. Good morning, Claudia, and thank you for taking the question. I have two questions, please, Claudia. The first one going back to the slide where you talk about the comprehensive benefits from 5G, particularly I'm really interested in the point you made around higher CapEx efficiency. Interesting to kind of just dig into that a little bit more. What are your plans within Deutsche Telekom for further densification of your macro cell grid? Do you think that's actually needed at all given some of the efficiencies that come from with 5G? I heard Srini yesterday talk a little bit about small cell build plans in Germany as well. Maybe you could kind of layer thoughts around that into the answer too, please.
The second question I had, very interested in the developments in private campus network, say some B2B. Could you talk a little bit about how you actually see the competitive environment there? Has Deutsche Telekom have an advantage there? Do you see competition in particular from non-MNO players who can use shared 5G spectrum to compete in that area? Thank you.
Okay. Thank you for the question. I come to the first one on the macro and small cells. 5G per se doesn't require network densification. The volume increase in some areas potentially, yes. We assume that 5G deployment will kick in around 2023, 2024, and it will really depend on the plan of our macro network. The German team, for example, assumes 2,000 small cell addition to the macro cells in place by 2024. The next question was around the campus network. Campus network, private versus public. What we actually see with our customers, different horses for different courses. There's a number of customers who have a combination of public and private or only public. For example, what you saw in the video, the Swiss network at the university also was actually based on a public network. Why is that?
The customers want to also have mobility use cases which move beyond the boundaries of campus networks. Yeah. Therefore, we see a need for public campus network solutions or combined ones. In Germany, as you see, we have the very specific situation that private spectrum was granted. What we see that 60% of those who asked for that private spectrum are basically universities or research institutions or certain manufacturers. For the other 30% who applied for these frequencies, I assume a combination of Deutsche Telekom together with vendors will do it. Your question was also how are we positioned against others?
The feedback we get actually very well, in particular when think about the combination of campus, IoT connectivity, and edge cloud. I also need to say that as of today, the market is still in an early stage. Yeah. Will probably take up the moment the full benefits of network slicing come live.
Great. Just also maybe to add on the first question, we had a lot of densification, network densification the last few years. We extended our site footprint or will have extended by the end of this year by about 6,000 sites in Germany. A lot of that was actually densification. We have a very strong grid. Right. Next. Thanks, James. See you soon. Next is from Robert at Deutsche Bank.
Thank you very much. I would like to follow up on Open RAN with Claudia, if I may. Some people think that the complexity of multiple interfaces from multiple vendors within an O-RAN environment will leave you as dependent on a few specialist aggregators in the same way you are dependent on a few mobile equipment vendors today. Do you think that's a risk for Deutsche Telekom, or is it an advantage perhaps where you guys can manage the complexity yourselves, whereas smaller players may struggle? The quicker side is, can Open RAN be as green as conventional technology, or do you think there's a trade-off there? Thanks.
Robert, great question. First off, I think it's going to be very difficult for smaller telcos. I think it's an advantage for us. Having said that, I view the world not evolving to best of breed and then being dependent on just one integrator, but rather best of suite. I expect certain ecosystems to avoid certain pre-configurations. I believe also, if you want to capture the full TCO benefit, as a telco you will not go into software development, don't be scared. We are not going to develop virtualized network functions, but you need to have certain network integration capabilities in place. I think I showed on one of my slides we have that based on the work we did with Access 4.0 and O-RAN, I believe actually it is an advantage.
In the end, it will not be a case where totally disconnected components get acquired and then all the TCO gains you have, you waste by spending all the money for an integrator.
Agreed.
Must be. Our view is yes. There is when you really get the end-to-end automation done. Honestly, from a technical perspective, I don't see any reason why not to do it. What prevents progress from happening is, of course, the ability to capture value in the expensive hardware systems. I don't see any technical reason with the end-to-end automation why O-RAN shouldn't be as green as single RAN. You're right, today it's not yet, and this is why I said we still need to solve some of these technical challenges.
Excellent. Thank you, Robert. The last question for this round is from Andrew at Goldman Sachs.
Yeah. Hi, thanks very much for the presentation. I thought it was really helpful in terms of understanding new technologies and your progress. What I'm still struggling a little bit with is just how your mobile network will step up versus your peers by 2024. It's really hard to get a real sense on specifics in terms of how you're going to look. We've heard from O2 that they're going to get to around 35,000 towers by mid-2020s with similar spectrum per customer to you. With Vodafone, we know it's going to have around 35,000 towers, but with more spectrum per customer to you. I'm not really sure on where the fiber backhaul differences are between you all.
The question really is where will you end up on number of towers in 2024 plan? Will you need more additional spectrum versus your peers? Are we increase or see a reduction in your network superiority versus peers?
We will continue to have a superior network towards our peers. I need to say, I realize you want to also say something. In the end, it's a combination. A combination of the spectrum position which you have at any time. It is a question of coverage. It's a question of where you have the tower. It is also the question not to be underestimated on certain technological insight. The moment you test it, you are not talking about it widespread. Our spectrum sharing thing is really cool, I would say, when we roll it out. There is a question around the 3.8 GHz in the city. Don't underestimate, we will always observe our peers. By the way, I forget the fiber backhauling, our intensive fiber backhauling.
We will always observe our peers and then, if necessary, work on an adaptation of the parameters.
I think you could have asked the same question a few years ago or for even longer, that spectrum was, I mean, if one of our competitors even had a lot more spectrum than us. Now we have a very competitive spectrum position. Best spectrum composition, we'll have more than the numbers that you have quoted because they include the white spots, that's a shame, that we have those too, we have a build out rate that is way higher than anyone else. We've always been the best on coverage, don't worry about it. Okay? That's a great.
I would put it that way. You wouldn't worry at all. Don't worry. Whatever happens, we will be a step ahead.
No worry. Thank you.
Excellent. Thank you very much. Thank you, Claudia. Thank you, Andrew. That brings us to the close of this session. Now, I'm happy to welcome Adel next. Adel is going to talk about, after Claudia's talking about how we digitize ourselves, he's going to talk about how we digitize our customers and how we enable the cloud in Germany and elsewhere. It's been quite a journey last few years. Some headwinds, I think a lot of stuff got done. Let's hear what has got done and how we take this forward. Thank you. Next is Adel. Adel Al-Saleh.
Thank you, Hannes. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you're from. It's good to be with you. We all feel like in a Deutsche Telekom pop band. We're all wearing the same jackets. I promise you, we all have our own jackets, no sharing. Look, it's been exactly three years since I stood in front of you. It was a lot. I talked about T-Systems. At that point in time when I spent time with you, I got many questions that said, "Look, we're not sure what T-Systems is all about. Why is it continuing to be a bleeding business within Deutsche Telekom? What are you going to do about it? How are you going to position the company?
Five months into my role in 2018, I shared with you the journey that we're going to get into in order to clarify those questions and fix the business as we go forward. What I'll do today is I'm going to share with you the journey and what exactly have we done, but also more importantly, talk about what happens in the next four years in front of us. Let me go and get started. First of all, it's really important to say that the transformation that we put T-Systems on has progressed. As a matter of fact, hopefully you'll realize after the presentation, what we have today is a very different company from what we had three years ago. Clearly, it didn't turn out exactly how we planned. There were things that went well, there were things that were challenging and we struggled with.
At the end of the day, the biggest thing that we've accomplished is a new portfolio for T-Systems that is 100% IT services-focused company. That's point number one. Point number two, different than what DT Group experienced, we actually did see a big impact from COVID crisis in 2020. After a very good 2019, a lot of our customers were hit. 60% of T-Systems business is concentrated in automotive, industrial, manufacturing, travel, and transportation. The industries that were hit the most, if you will, with the COVID crisis. Many of our customers were shut down and not even able to communicate with us, not able to continue their transformational programs or the projects that they were on. We felt that pain.
The biggest issue we faced, of course, is the revenue development in T-Systems during 2020, but also the delivery of transformation, which we, by the way, put on track as we went forward. The third point, hopefully will come across clear is as we went through the three years, we had evolved our strategy. Now being an IT-focused services player, our strategy to be the European leader is cloud transformations, cloud operations, digital enabling, digital solutions with secure sovereign capabilities that our customers are looking for. I'm going to share that strategy with you on how we take the company going forward. The fourth point is we have a very clear roadmap how to build value going forward. We know exactly what we need to do to accelerate our EBITDA growth, and I will share that with you as well throughout the presentation.
Finally, I will share the financial outlook, which we are confident in to deliver 5% compounded annual growth through the planning period and get ourselves to a positive cash contribution. That are the key points. Now I want to get into the details of exactly what happened. Before I dive into all of the granular information, I wanted to step back for a second and share with you the journey that we've been on. I look at it in three phases for T-Systems. Phase number one, which was 2017, 2018. This is when I walked in and a little bit before that I joined the company. It was all around stabilizing the company. You remember the troubled contract. I had a lot of questions from you when we got to May of 2018. What are you going to do about this contract? Is it more than your peers? How do you control it going forward?
It was also about launching a new cultural transformation within T-Systems to think differently, to monitor, evolve. We've done that through 2017 and 2018. I don't think [audio distortion] remember about since we met in 2018. We launched a very ambitious culture. 20,000 employees participated in that. We've enabled more like 70% of our-- phase number II, and you'll recall it when I go to the next slide, was about this four-pillar strategy. A tactical strategy was focused on T-Systems and was 2018 to 2021. We're now entering a new phase with evolved strategy and evolved business model, consistently performing company going forward. That is going to visualize for us through going out through the different eras. Talk about 2018 through 2021 phase, which was about the four-pillar strategy.
You remember the four pillars were, number one, the portfolio. Number two, fix your go-to-market. Number three, we going to do your delivery. Number four was about your SG&A. What are you doing with overhead? Let me go through this very, very quick. First of all, on the portfolio, huge accomplishments here. One is we changed the business model of the company. We created a portfolio-driven logic where the P&L sat in the company away from the divisional structure. We got clarity, where do we make money? How do we compete? How can we grow? Do we have the right to play in some of these areas?
Through a bunch of decisions, things that we stopped, for example, end user service, which is painful on the top line, but it was a business we decided we're not going to do anymore, and we continued to bleed that out from the company. Second was exiting some of the geographies where we didn't see future for us, like South Africa, like Malaysia, which we're in the final phases of exiting. We also did a very important deal, partnership deal with IBM, where we changed the fundamentals of how we deliver mainframe services, changing from a CapEx-heavy model to an OpEx model, accessing technology as fast as it becomes available. The biggest component of our portfolio was about moving the connectivity businesses from T-Systems into Telekom Deutschland.
It was very clear to me as soon as I started digging into the organization that the value chain of delivering T-Systems services business was hugely fragmented in B2B between T-Systems, TDG, global wholesale, et cetera. We decided as a team that it didn't make any sense. We're going to put it together with Srini, so he has the end-to-end value chain to deliver the service. He talked about that yesterday. That was the big change in our portfolio as we went forward. The second area was about the integrated go-to-market. We were very fragmented in how we covered the market. We created an integrated sales force. We digitized that sales force through deployment of salesforce.com as a technology. It's now a data-driven management of our sales capabilities. Very important, we rebranded ourselves. We repositioned ourselves.
I don't know how many of you have seen the missing T campaign, which by the way, won the iF Award, which is a very prestigious award in branding and positioning. We started talking about the connectivity, security, cloud, digital as our key portfolio elements. The third area was about our delivery. We were very heavy dependent on high-cost locations. We set ourselves to make sure we change that by, first of all, building up India. We went from almost zero headcount in 2018 to over 2,000 people today. We are very proud of that team. We shifted a lot of our high-cost locations from a delivery into lower-cost locations. We declared that we have a four-country delivery strategy. Germany, of course, as a foundation, but also Slovakia, Hungary, India, and Russia, where we have a lot of software development. We started to scale in these areas. That drove a lot of synergies across the company.
The last pillar, of course, was about taking costs out of SG&A. I focused initially at SG&A. I thought that was the first area we needed to address. We looked at layers, managers, executives. We removed almost 40% executives from the company. We removed several layers of management, four layers of management. We deployed agile organizational structures. We reduced our HR finance, G&A functions by 30% plus. At the end, we delivered EUR 300 million net IDC savings. That's over 10% of our IDC capabilities in T-Systems. We deployed agile structure across the organization, so we work differently. There's more to come in this area, but that was what drove our EBITDA expansion in 2019 of 17%. All these four pillars, they were underpinned with our cultural transformation journey and a very tight management system.
That's what made the difference for us over the last several years. That is just a quick summary. I already talked about the EUR 300 million net savings, and it was driven really by four key areas. Number one, our sales organization. As we integrated it, we saw a lot of duplication and ability to take some of the cost out. Second was about delivery integration and moving things offshore into lower-cost locations. We went from about 20% of low-cost locations of our total population to 30% in 2020. Third was overhead reduction, we talked about, and the last one was, of course, overhead reductions. I want to highlight that not only did we take headcount out of Germany, about 1,600 net reduction, which is about 11%.
We also took headcount, almost 2,000 people net, from our other high-cost locations and moved a portion of that work into the lower-cost locations. That's what drove our IDC savings through the period. We've had headwinds. I mean, I already said about the impact of COVID. The biggest headwind we have was the revenue development. When I stood in front of you in May 2018, I said our plan is to keep revenue stable or growing at low levels, 1%. We didn't get there. That is the big challenge. One of the things, of course, that drove the revenue down is our decisions to exit certain businesses, like end-user services. By the way, through this planning period, it was EUR 180 million reduction on top line. Also, of course, the COVID impact that we had.
Nonetheless, when you looked at the shift into the growth areas, it did not go as well as we were hoping for. It was slower. We had excellent growth in our public cloud, over 30%, very strong growth in our security, our digital solutions was a disappointment, where we declined minus 2%. After growing first from 2018 to 2019, in 2020, we saw big headwinds for that. Our MIS business, our infrastructure business, declined at about 8%, but if you normalize for the end-user service, it's about - 4%. That did not give us the growth dynamic that we wanted. We did shift more of our business into the growth areas, from 38% of our total business in 2018 to over 47% in 2020. By the way, that will continue for us going forward.
That was our biggest challenge because that 1% growth would have expanded EBITDA much faster than what we've seen. If you normalize for things, by the way, if you normalize for user services, our revenue would have been - 1% over the period and our EBITDA would have been + 1%. Challenging terms in 2020. Let me go through the actual commitments that we made to you in May 2018 versus where do we expect to be landing in 2021. First of all, our revenue, like I said, that's the element we did not deliver on, right? We're declining - 3% compared to what we promised, which was either flat business or + 1%. Second was our EBITDA performance.
We rated ourselves amber here because if you normalize for the portfolio shifts and some of the COVID crisis, we actually have a very strong EBITDA performance of +1%, given all of the changes that we're doing within the company. CapEx, we decreased our CapEx from a little bit closer to about EUR 300 million run rate to about EUR 250 million. By the way, we expect to keep it like that. Our CapEx is between 5% and 6% of our revenue. I would like to drive it in the lower 5% and even below 5% as we progress this business going forward. Our special factors, we dropped it slightly from the run rates that we had, but we kept it pretty much stable throughout the period. We did not escalate.
After a big bump in 2019, we brought it down to exact levels that we were, which is about EUR 160 million, EUR 170 million. Cash contribution, I committed to you in May of 2018 that we will get the business to a cash contribution breakeven by 2020. Well, in old T-Systems, when we still had the TC services, we achieved that. I would say we achieved that by hook or crook in different ways than what we envisioned, but we got there. The new T-Systems needs another couple of years to achieve cash breakeven after we move profitable business of TCS into the TDG business. Of course, our indirect cost was better than what I promised you. We were talking about EUR 100 million of net savings in May of 2018. We delivered EUR 300 million, plus more to come in the future.
Our EBITDA margin, we expanded by 2 points, and our TRIM continued to be one of the best in the industry. We consistently score in the top quartile of our competitors with high 80s TRIM performance. All in all, challenging three years. Lots of things happened. A very different company we have today versus what we had in the past. We're proud of where we are, but we still have a lot of challenges in front of us to address. We are not done with where we want the T-Systems to be. What is the strategy going forward? First of all, is it important to just step back and realize that we now have an IT services company focused on Europe and select countries around the world that is number one in Germany, that is number two in DACH.
We serve majority of the DAX 30 companies. We have eight strategically located security operations center across the world. We manage close to 600 petabytes of storage. By the way, we grow every month half a petabyte. About 100,000 servers across the world through 16 data centers. We're operating in 20 countries. Not in every country the same, because some of the countries are more delivery organizations, with 28,000 people across the world. Out of the 28,000, about 12,500 sit in Germany. Out of 28,000, 12,500 sit in Germany. We've shifted that population to be balanced across the world. That is who we are today. A very different company from what we were three years ago with a clear portfolio, which I will expand on in a few minutes, and a clear path to value creation as we go forward.
We operate as this IT services company in a very buoyant and a very fast-moving market environment. You heard Tim talk about digitize, digitize, where all of our customers are on that path. Digitization is a matter of survival now, and that drives a lot of the consumption and a lot of the spend in the marketplace. The buyers are changing as well, from not only being a CIO into more of a business line managers. The guys like Srini, who are making the decisions, how do they digitize their companies? We had to expand our customer contacts and our go-to-market to cover these business leaders in the marketplace. Of course, COVID accelerated the investments. Initially, it froze everything in 2020, but it is accelerating digitization as we go forward. No doubt about that.
Cloud, as the biggest technology in terms of adoption, is the enabler of digitization as we go forward. That gives the European countries, the European market at about 4% to 5% growth going forward. It is an opportunity because only 10% of Germany has been digitized so far. It's a huge opportunity to come going forward. There's also this European sentiment of sovereignty that's becoming stronger and stronger and stronger. This is an opportunity for us being a European player. It is not just in Germany, it's across the European EU, European Union member states, and it's accelerating. Of course, data protection security continues to be a very, very big topic. Those are the dynamics in the marketplace. The question is, why T-Systems? How can T-Systems participate in this? Again, repeating some of the things I said.
Number one, we are a big player. We are number one in Germany. We're bigger than our competitors, DXC, Accenture. We're equal in share, by the way, with IBM. We share the number one spot before IBM splits the company. After that, we will become number one again, undisputed number one. We're number two in DACH. In several select countries, we're in the top 10. We are a player with credibility. The second thing is we have proven market leadership and engineering capability when it comes to infrastructure management, transition to cloud, and digital capability. I'll use a few examples once I go through the presentation. Third, we have the industry expertise, especially in the industries that we have selected. We have deep knowledge how these customers work. We have deep industry solutions, and we have horizontal platforms that can apply to any industry.
Lastly, we have very longstanding client relationships. Just last year in the fourth quarter, we renewed over EUR 2 billion worth of contracts that extend our relationships with the likes of Shell, DP DHL, Heineken, Adidas, for another five, seven, 10 years, after having a relationship for over 10 years. That is a proof point of how customers trust us. I think it's best to hear from customers themselves. Can we play the video, please?
Adel, you and your team know very well how we work as an industry, but also as a company. That expertise is much appreciated. We had a close relationship and that was the key issue. When we were looking at the Corona app, now it's one of the most accepted apps in the world.
Really understand what are the pain points of Heineken. Secondly, help us to drive innovative thinking and bring experience from other industries, from other customers that, "Hey, Heineken, maybe this is relevant for you." Last but not least, I think if we really want to accelerate the future, we need to find plans to, I call co-invest, to invest together in the future in longer-term arrangements, longer-term partnerships like you and I, you and we have between our two companies and make sure that we both build the future.
I will never forget this. I think this was a Sunday call with the two ministers and Tim Höttges and Christian Klein from SAP. This willingness not only to jump in, but also to get the things moved forward, to speed it up together. I really enjoyed it, and I still enjoy it. Let me put it in a different way. I think it's really an example of how infrastructure projects, how cooperation between the regulator and the public side and the corporate side really can work in a wonderful way.
Now let me talk about this new strategy that I keep alluding to, which has evolved from where we were. There are five pillars to this new strategy. Number one, you'll hear me say this over and over again, focus, focus. Just like Tim says, digitized. We are about focus right now. The focus for us is to be the number one player in Germany and focused on DACH and other select countries around the world. We are not spreading ourselves thin by covering every country in the continents. We are focusing on where we want to play with the biggest focus in Germany and DACH as a region. That's number one. Number two, we want to be the leader and maintain our leaderships in three to five industries with deep industry solutions and a portfolio of horizontal solutions that apply to any industry.
Number three, historically, we have focused on the very large multinational companies, and we will continue to do that. We will protect our space and our base of these large international companies. There is a massive opportunity in the market to focus on the EUR 1 billion-EUR 5 billion companies that are struggling to digitize, struggling to drive themselves forward. That is a big opportunity we haven't tapped in the past that's going to be a focus area. The fourth area is we are positioning ourselves as a strong local partner for our customers. The customers we work with, they have access to the entire management team. They have our mobile numbers. They can call us at any time, and that gives them confidence that the one they're partnering with is not somebody who's sitting in the United States or in Asia somewhere. It's somebody local in the country where we play.
Finally, sovereignty and security is a big differentiator that we bring to the marketplace. Given where we come from as a German headquarter company, we understand what data privacy means. We build it into our solutions. We understand what sovereignty means. If you look on the left-hand side, your right-hand side, you see how does this portfolio come together, and you'll see simplification there. First, you see the industries that we focus on. Right now, we pick the four industries being automotive, public health, and public transport. We have other emerging industries that we cover. Our portfolio now consists of four straightforward elements. Advisory service, advising clients on their digitization strategy.
This is based on our Detecon company, a fully owned subsidiary of T-Systems, driving the transformation agenda with the CEOs and the C-level executives. This opens up the door for our cloud services, hybrid multi-cloud, cloud capabilities, our digital enabler capability with over 7,000 experts in writing software and digitizing and automating and process improvements, and security being embedded in everything we do. That is our evolved portfolio. It's pretty straightforward. It's very clear where we need to focus. What I will do is I will run through each of these portfolios very, very quickly, given the time constraint that we have. Of course, get into how we deliver over the next four years in terms of our financial commitments. First, cloud services. Everybody knows the market is driving very hard into public cloud, but also hybrid clouds.
There is speed of implementation that's happened over the last 18 months that we have not seen in years, and that will continue because cloud is the foundation where you digitize from. It's not only public cloud, it's also private cloud. It's also hybrid clouds. It's edge solutions. What we have created here is a platform that gives the clients the flexibility and the different platforms that they need in order to digitize. We have partnership with public cloud companies. You've heard our partnership with AWS, with Microsoft, with Google, that are substantial in nature for us. We have our own platforms that we deliver, OTC being one of our public cloud solutions as well, and our private cloud solutions.
We have our EdgAIR that's being deployed in many campuses across the world, driving some mission-critical real-time compute and store environments in order to drive data ingestion and AI capabilities to improve the results for our clients. On top of these platforms, we provide migration services to help clients move, including, of course, after that, cloud application services. This is a big business for us. There, we have a period of time for the next three years where we're bleeding away some of the legacy end-user services, where we still have about EUR 150 million to shut down. We didn't shut everything down. We're bleeding off the contracts that we have. Also some of the legacy classical IT businesses that we have, which makes it difficult for us to grow.
On the other hand, our public cloud, our private cloud businesses are growing at faster than market rates, as we've demonstrated already over the last three years. If you think about our digital enabler, we talked about digitization. We talked that this is a priority for majority of the companies. Here, we focus ourselves with 7,000+ experts across the world to start with industry solutions and services, things like the connected back end of the car. For the Daimler customers here, Mercedes me, that is an application that T-Systems has developed with Daimler that's deployed across millions and millions of cars. An example, our police solutions, our hospital solutions, those are industry-specific solutions that drive digitization. They're fueled by innovation in some of the core technologies like AI, like 5G. The 5G campus question that Claudia got, it's not just putting the network in.
It's how do you then deploy applications that use that network. blockchain are some of the innovative areas that we drive. Third area is building platforms that we can repeat and scale, so we don't have to invent it every time. For example, big data platforms, so our data engineers don't have to think about what platform. They focus on what are the applications and how do I deploy them. Finally, it's all about transforming our customers in the cloud landscapes. That is another big area for us as we go forward. If you look about embedded security, just last two weeks, we've heard about the news of a pipeline company in the United States being held hostage with some of the hackers. That is not unique. Some of it makes it to the press, some of it doesn't.
Every company, as they digitize, as they go into the cloud, they need security. Here we have a survey on the left side from the Citi CIO Survey 2020 that continues to say that IT security is going to be the biggest area where CIOs are going to be spending over the next several years. We have a platform that actually takes you throughout the value chain of security, identifying, protecting, detecting, responding, and recovering. We have some of the world's most sophisticated SOCs deployed in strategic areas. We deal, get ready, with 80 million attacks per day on our honeypot infrastructure that we deployed across the world. We can learn the vectors, we know where it comes from. Our value proposition was having security in the network, and IT is very unique in the marketplace.
We can see the traffic coming through our networks, and we can apply the IT environments, which is very unique. Now, I'm going to skip advisory given the timing, and I'm going to go ahead and reinforce what I said earlier. We have a clear strategy and path to continue to build value. One of them, of course, is to deliver additional cost savings. What we're committing to you is, over the next planning period, we'll deliver another EUR 200 million of IDC reductions. The next wave of IDC reduction is a little bit different than the past. We're now focusing deeper in our delivery. Automation, process improvements, tooling. We select ServiceNow as our digitization workflow management system across the entire company. There's still some left in SG&A and sales and our real estate, which we use real time, by the way.
In the beginning of this year, we are not going back to it. We're going into a very different way of working, where we have automation areas, development areas in big buildings where people come in and work together, and we tell them you have things to do with your teams. You can work from wherever you want. We are committing EUR 200 million worth of savings over the next planning period. Of course, all this kind of comes together to give us the new strategy. Our vision is to be the most reliable IT service provider with best technology and industry expertise. Our mission is to help our clients on their digital journeys.
We are the European IT service leader in the markets where we choose to play. We take our customers, we partner with them on a journey into modern, secure, resilient digital environments with three differentiators: data sovereignty, innovation in an open ecosystem, and secure operational excellence. Our enablers are learning, continuous learning, continuous improvement. It's our people, #PeopleMakeItHappen, and sustainability and diversity that Claudia already covered. We're all part of that plan that Claudia was talking about earlier. That is our strategy as we go forward. What does it deliver then? This is our commitment for the next four years. One, revenue, we are focusing to deliver slight growth. We have that balance point we're reaching between our legacy and our new businesses, our growth businesses, where it's going to pass the 50% threshold, which should deliver us growth going forward.
Second, EBITDA growth of 5%. Third, o ur margin, EBITDA, will expand another two points in this planning period, and EUR 200 million in indirect costs, as I described. Cash CapEx, we will keep stable. There is no plan to go back again to where we were after we reduced it from about EUR 300 million to about mid-EUR 200s million . Delivering cash contribution positive in the planning period. This is for the new T-Systems. The old T-Systems, we did it. We demonstrated we could do it. This is now for the new T-Systems.
Hannes, that's our plan, and I think I'm ready for Q&A now.
Great time. Please join me for the Q&A over here. Thank you, Adel. Okay, very good. The times change, and we change with them, and that's the challenge, but it's amazing what has been done and what has been created to take us forward here. Very good. I have the first question here from Steve at Redburn. Steve?
Thanks very much for the presentation. I think we all probably thought three years ago, you'd have one of the toughest jobs in DT, and you probably still have one of the toughest jobs in DT, and it seems like you're doing pretty well in a tough market. Can you maybe just help us understand the trajectory of those financial metrics you set out? When you look at it, I guess that my sense is that as you burn off legacy and move into new collaborations on cloud, that's kind of a negative gross margin mix, but maybe not. You declined 5% in Q1, when do you think you can get to growth? Just give us a sense of, I guess the 5% company that dies is probably a bit back-end loaded, maybe not, but that would be helpful as well.
Just finally, just on, I guess so your division is probably in the front line of COVID and what you've seen in the last 12 months, what you expect in the next 12, what your enterprise customers are telling you, how the business has changed through this process, and what you're anticipating for the next 12 months in terms of challenges as we come out of COVID would be really interesting to hear as well? Thanks.
Well, Steve, let me start with the last part of your question, and then I'll build it up backwards. What are we seeing in terms of COVID dynamics? First of all, we are seeing customers spending again, and we started to see that happening towards the end of 2020, especially our industries where we are very concentrated. As I say, 60% of our business concentrated in automotive, manufacturing, industrial, travel, and transportation. We've seen that come back, and as a matter of fact, one of our biggest disappointments over the last three years was our digital solutions that grew strong from 2018 to 2019, then declined for us in 2020. Now in the first four months of the year, it's up towards 10% growth. We're seeing that come back. Now, I wouldn't celebrate yet and say that the market has recovered.
I think it's still very measured. There are very clear plans to continue to spend. We started the projects. People are pushing forward with their digital agendas, if you will, but I'm still skeptical. I think it will be a very gradual recovery, and people will still prioritize quite heavily where they want to spend. Like security would be front and center. Cloud movement would be front and center. Other areas, like changing your SAP systems, is something that people are thinking more carefully about. That's what we've seen. Now, in terms of the metrics and how it comes, especially on the top line. Look, we've seen very good growth in the growth areas, and you've seen that we've moved the needle to being almost 50% of our portfolio now made out of growth.
Every single element of our growth portfolio is making money. That was not the case in 2018. As a matter of fact, even public cloud at that point was losing quite a significant amount of money. The last three years we moved them into making money without stopping an investment in them. As we go forward, the growth unit is accretive to us on a bottom line and top line. That's why getting 1% growth is super critical, right? Because that does come with incremental EBITDA and incremental cash contribution different than what it was in the past. The margins for us, the digital solutions margin, now, for example, the work that we do with the governments, the work that we do with EU, you guys heard about the Corona Warn App that we did with SAP, the vaccination back ends that we've deployed across. These are good projects for us. They generate reasonable return for us.
The issue for us is how do we expand the margin further by creating more repeatable assets? The Corona Warn App that we built. We've used those assets to go build other areas, like an enterprise tracking system for folks in manufacturing, who want to deploy a more closer proximity tracker, who's standing where. We use that platform. There's work going on around vaccination sharing across the EU countries. We reused a lot of the work that we've done in the past in order to do it. We want to do that more and more. Not having to recreate everything, having more built-up assets that we can reuse, and that expands the margin going forward. The tricky part for me is, can we sustain digital solutions growth that we have demonstrated in the first four months? If we can, growth is a real achievable number.
If we can't, if the market changes and we're not fast enough in changing and shifting more and more towards these innovative platforms, then we will struggle to show the growth going forward. I'm optimistic in terms of the financials and how they come across with those growth profile.
Yeah. You've given EBITDA guidance, and you said this year will be stable, and then that implies that 2022, 2023, 2024 will be better than stable.
It's not back-end loaded, Steve, so it's not all sitting in 2024. We plan for gradual recovery as we go forward.
Okay. Well, thank you, Steve. Next is Polo. Hi, Polo, again.
Yeah. Hi, Adel. Hope you're keeping well. Thanks very much for the presentation. Just had a few different questions. The first one is really just about your peer group. You made the point that you had a leading position in DACH, but who do you see as your main competitors? Are there any listed companies that you think resemble T-Systems? Second question is really just a clarification on client concentration. You said that you're focused on multinationals, but can you just give us some sense in terms of what percentage of revenues your top 10 clients account for?
My third question is really just a bigger picture question in terms of what do you see as the benefits of T-Systems being part of the DT Group?
Polo, good to see you, by the way. Hope you are doing well. Hope everything is all right. Polo, first of all, it is a very good question on the peers. We are repositioning the company to not be compared to the likes of DXC, IBM, Accenture, the very large global players that have a different scale and go very much after this very large horizontal place. We focus ourselves on more of the European leaders. We include Atos in that, of course, because they are very present in Europe, Capgemini, of course, companies like Sopra, like Reply, like Indra. Those are companies, since we are big in Spain, we do look at Indra as a key competitor. That is who we compare ourselves to.
By the way, when we look at the performance of these companies, the median performance in 2020 was about 1% revenue growth and -9% EBITDA growth, that unit that I just described, with a few other European companies. We did actually better than competition on EBITDA side, because our reported numbers were about -2%. Like for like, if you normalize for all of the movements we had, it was flat year-on-year in EBITDA. Revenue-wise, we were lower because we were -1%, normalized with some of the areas. Those are the competitors that we look at going forward. We just chase less of these big global deals and focus ourselves more on this local opportunity that we have, which are still very large companies. Like I said, DAX 30, we serve most of the DAX 30.
We serve a big portion of the Fortune 500. We serve them from a local perspective when they're buying local things. To answer your question on concentration, we haven't published these numbers everywhere, but I'll tell you this. Our top 30 customers make up a big portion of our business, more than 50% of our business. This is where I see the opportunity, Polo. Out of those top 30, about 20% of them are the EUR 1 billion-EUR 5 billion revenue companies. If you look at Germany alone, or you look at DACH, the number of these EUR 1 billion-EUR 5 billion companies is much larger from a total market opportunity than the real big multinationals. We are focusing ourselves with a different go-to market and approach to really get traction in that customer segment. We have some examples already that we've done, in several customers.
I guess the last question you had, what is the benefit of T-Systems being within the Deutsche Telekom group? Look, it's the following. First, when you think of our entire portfolio of DT and within T-Systems, we are the only company in the world that can offer our customers a true end-to-end capability that covers connectivity, cloud, digital, and security. The security work that we keep talking about is driven by T-Systems, and it's a company, our T-Sec company, serves everybody in Deutsche Telekom. They, although managed and consolidated in T-Systems, it's a big part of Deutsche Telekom. Examples are 5G deployment and private networks. We depend on our colleagues in the network side to deploy the 5G campus, but the use cases of the 5G campus is driven by T-Systems, i.e. The autonomous vehicles, i.e., big data, edge solutions that we deploy. How do you actually capture?
We do Daimler's test set, all of the Daimler's hard condition test environments are managed by T-Systems. We have edge solutions in very harsh areas in the deserts and in North Pole, where we capture data through edge solutions and having network expertise brings a real good consolidated solution to the market. As I said, we've created this IT services company. That's no longer confused what we do, but still quite a bit of opportunity to leverage DT as a whole.
Excellent. Thank you, Adel. Thank you, Polo, for the questions. Now we have a very short break before we move on to the grand finale of Thorsten Langheim on Group Development and Christian Illek on the Finance Development. Then they will have a final Q&A, also including Tim Höttges. We have a short break. We reconvene at 1:00 P.M. German time, 12:00 P.M. GMT, and look forward to seeing you back. Thank you. Thanks, Adel.
[Break]
Welcome back everyone. Now it's the turn of Thorsten Langheim. He leads our Group Development department. As I think most of you know, Thorsten is our living legend. He will talk about how we have created value from the portfolio in recent years and not just in the United States. It's equally amazing how Thorsten and team have turned around the Dutch business. This is stuff for the textbooks. Let's hear Thorsten talk about how we will create even more value from our portfolio.
Thorsten, the stage is yours. Thorsten?
All righty. I want to make it clear that I am the only difference between a good week and this presentation. I look forward to this presentation because I get two beers. Beer number one is for wearing this jacket, and the second beer is coming a little later. In any case, let me come to this wonderful picture, because yesterday when I looked at the webpage of the Capital Markets Day, I picked up that there was one in 2010. In 2010, we had our wonderful leader, Tim, presenting on the topic efficiency and capital returns. We were the number four in the market behind Vodafone, Telefónica and Orange, our key competitors, and we had a burning platform in the U.S. Today, if you look at it, we all look different. We wear fancy jackets, and we are the number one in the European marketplace.
If you see this, we are almost the size of Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone. Why do I show you this? I show you this because we are investors, we are shareholders, and we are a management team that is in for the long haul, and that history is not always a good prediction for the future, but I think our track record is good and you can trust us. If you look at my presentation, I think I want to leave three major things with you that you should remember. That's all. I think number one, we have built the best telco portfolio in the sector, and this gives you earnings per share growth, free cash flow growth and strategic optionality. We have no burning platform like in 2010. We will continue with what we have done over the last 10 years, active portfolio management and exploiting strategic optionality.
In the U.S., we want to retain control. In Europe, we will reduce strategic options for our towers in T-Mobile Netherlands , and I will explain to you in a minute why. Number three, we don't have a share price or chief share price officer. We have eight. This management team has aligned interest with our shareholders. We won't shock you, and we want to build out our lead. You can trust us. This is my personal business card. It's interesting to look at Capital Markets Days and then see presentations. Everything can be interpreted as you have won, you have delivered your numbers. I'm just a simple number guy, and I'm just looking at the numbers and want to be judged on this. We at Group Development are responsible for two things, and I think this, to a certain extent, is unique in the industry.
Of course, number one, we are responsible for the portfolio, for active portfolio management. I'm certainly not the most popular person in the group because we have trade-off discussions. We have to allocate capital and not on a first comes, first served basis, but on a risk-adjusted return basis. Second one, sometimes we run activities, like in the past, Scout or Strato, or over the last three years, towers and fixing T-Mobile Netherlands or building up DT Capital Partners from scratch. We are the department for call it value creation, and these are my most important metrics.
Of course, you will find further operational KPIs in the booklet, but I'm just focusing on this EUR 44 billion since our last Capital Markets Day in 2018 on the U.S. for DT shareholders alone, and the sum of the parts, based on your best estimates of the value of T-Mobile Netherlands and GD Towers, creating EUR 10 billion of value. How we've done that, you've seen on the right-hand side. We have done in-market consolidation because we believe in that. We have also both set up assets for FMC capabilities, like in Austria by acquiring UPC or just recently Netherlands by teaming up with KKR and DT Capital Partners for building out fiber. The result of our work, I think, is impressive.
I still want to be humble because at the moment of your great success, you sometimes overestimate the future, and this is the moment where you should be most vigilant. Having said that, we have a fantastic portfolio standing on two major legs. T-Mobile US on the left-hand side is our racehorse. 50% free cash flow growth, EUR 18 billion of free cash flow in 2026. I think a very smart analyst has recognized mid-May that this level of free cash flow is almost representing the whole free cash flow of the European sector. On the other hand, we have, let's say, a stable and steady workhorse for the digitization in Europe. This is our European business, which has delivered a 3% EBITDA growth, and Christian will tell you in a minute what we see in the future. It's number one in revenues.
Now, dwelling on this, let me move on and give you a bit more detail on the three assets that we are overlooking, T-Mobile US, Netherlands, and our towers. This is a 10-year story. You cannot create value overnight, and it's not coming to you as a present. It was a long and sometimes difficult journey. For us, it's always important to get the right asset, but also at the right price, not just a deal that looks great at announcement day. It takes time. Even when we get a deal done, we are always looking ahead, and you have seen us negotiating a valuable call option on 45 million shares in the U.S. as a subsequent step to putting these wonderful companies together in the U.S.
I very well remember the long journey that we had, starting with the AT&T break fee, the reverse merger into MetroPCS, selling our tower business to fund our top line and Un-carrier moves, identifying a fantastic management team that invented the Un-carrier or at a time when it was fancy to think about media content skills to differentiate in wireless. The 2016, 2017, 2018 Ross and Rachel episode between Tim and Masa about we get engaged, we don't get engaged, which finally led to our transaction in 2018. You may remember what I said in 2018. We have a EUR 70 stock with a free option on deal approval. This is a picture that I showed you at the Capital Markets Day in 2018. We were celebrating. To be honest, we were celebrating too early.
In football, there's a saying after the match is before the match. What follows were two tough years, tiring and frustrating at times. Let me look at this picture here. This is Tim and me outside the New York courthouse after the cross-examination by the state attorneys. It's fair to say that we looked a little bit like Waldorf and Statler, frustrating and completely tired. To be honest, in 2018, we had no idea we needed two years with a lot of ups and downs to get to a deal approval. Of course, the heavy lifting has been done by the T-Mobile US management team, by John , Mike, Braxton, and Dave Miller. Remedies are a tricky thing. They need to be balanced, not killing the merger benefits, but addressing the competitive concerns to get to deal approval. Far so good.
I honestly believe that Judge Marrero took the right decision, not only from my selfish position of shareholder value, but also from the consumer perspective. If you look at the recent C-band auction and Verizon spending $45 billion on it, how on earth should we or Sprint have been able to compete as standalone companies? Moreover, last week's refocusing and shedding of some media assets by AT&T tells you a story about how competitive our merger is. Since closing, another 12 months have passed. What has happened since then? I'm just focusing on the stuff that we as a shareholder were focusing on, not on what Mike clearly claims is strong operational performance and improvements over the last 12 months.
Number one, we conducted a successful management transition from certainly one of the best management team, if not in the U.S. alone, with John and Braxton leaving the firm succeeded by Mike and Peter Osvaldik. We renegotiated, as you know, the exchange ratio, and we negotiated a valuable call option that we currently enjoy because it's at $101 while the stock is shortly below $140. We have been conservative enough on synergies. We've learned our lessons out of MetroPCS, and we'd like to outperform expectations. You've seen that we have increased synergy estimates and that we have put T-Mobile US in a position where even on a balance sheet basis, they can compete with the big guys. The target price has been increased over the last 12 months from $102-$106, which gives us great hopes that everything is going to improve in the future even further.
Looking at the share price three years ago, I showed you that our stake value has improved from EUR 9 billion to EUR 32 billion. Now we are at EUR 76 billion. Let me stress a little bit and take a little bit of a pause. This is EUR 67 billion value creation since 2013. That's a lot of value that has been created. For us, it's EUR 44 billion over the last three years. I'm not smart enough to judge, but has this been the most value-creating transaction in tech land? I'm asking as Tim is always asking for bring me awards. We started together with collecting the largest break fee in history. We enjoyed a four to three consolidation in Europe without remedies. Maybe the future will tell. It may be too early to celebrate. In two or three years, hopefully, this is being seen as one of the better transactions.
Even in my old world of private equity, we would get applause. 2x money on an unlevered return in three years is not too shabby. Also for us as a German company, it's a relief after the challenges that, for example, Bayer or Daimler experienced with U.S. M&A. To be honest, it's not a given. Actually, people will know most of the big-ticket M&A transactions go wrong. So far, this team in the U.S. and we as shareholders have delivered on a good story. Why is it? The value comes from a strategic rationale that has been very compelling from the get-go. The C-band auction showed you how valuable the Sprint spectrum is, especially in the 5G world.
We can build the best network far better than we would ever do it organically and by ourselves. If you look on the right-hand side, the implicit valuation of Sprint based on the exchange ratio was about EUR 70 billion on an EV basis. The synergies are now at about EUR 70 billion. The value of the spectrum that Sprint brings to the table based on the C-band auction implicit price is EUR 64, and on top of it, DT shareholders got customers, network, and EBITDA. Look forward. What does it mean for our shareholders? T-Mobile US is a sustainable, well-positioned company. We believe there's a lot of further value creation in front of us. Remaining in control is a priority, and most importantly, it will certainly be financially attractive. Having said that, control in itself is not a value.
However, we'd like to be invested in good assets, and as shareholders, we like to determine a few things in order to get the vote on the rise and track. We want to bring our expertise to the table if it comes to location, M&A, capital structure, and as we have demonstrated to you in the past, to pick the right team on the bus. There's plenty of optionality around our U.S. stake, and we have time. There is no message today we want to increase to 5.1% tomorrow. We have three years, and who knows what SoftBank may do when the lockup expires mid-2024. If they are not selling their shares, we have a proxy forever. If they sell, we have a offer and we have a call option, so we could act earlier if we want to.
On top of the call option on the 101 million shares, 45 million comes at $101. I think that's a good position we are in. Look at the T-Mobile US Capital Markets Day in February. Based on their own projections, they outlined and indicated a share buyback of $60 billion between 2023 and 2025. This gives us even more opportunity and choices. Either enormous cash inflows if we keep our stake flat or increasing our stake if we are not selling anything in the share buyback. We will figure something out like we figured out how to fix the 2016 burning platform T-Mobile holding. Let me move to our Dutch friends.
Let's look at Tim and Christian in 2017 when they tried to figure out who is whose responsibility for T-Mobile Netherlands. Whoever plays tennis, and Christian Illek is almost a pro on the tennis side, knows what happens when the ball comes through the middle of the court when you play doubles. Everybody's looking at each other and says, "It's yours." Guess who ended up taking the T-Mobile Netherlands ball? It was me. Much to that. T-Mobile Netherlands was certainly in intensive care in 2017. Very competitive four-player market, multiple MVNOs, a converged duopoly of KPN and VodafoneZiggo. You may remember that at this moment in time in 2017, Vodafone was acquired by Ziggo, and Ziggo ditching us at the altar. What did we do? Drastic measures were required. First thing to do, align management with value creation via harsh restructuring. What do I mean by that?
We introduced an innovative equity incentive scheme, and on the back of it, we were able to hire one of the best management teams in the sector. Sören, my friend Abildgaard and Johan have been the key architects of this turnaround. A bit like John Legere and Mike Sievert in the U.S., combined with an equity incentive scheme that in the U.S. was a reverse merger into MetroPCS, aligning our interest. The rest was fairly simple. Radical cost takeout, self-funded network improvement, copying T-Mobile US, such as unlimited, and then we applied our M&A playbook to create value. Market consolidation, tower separation and monetizing it. A recent JV on building out fiber with KKR, exploiting remedies of the VodafoneZiggo merger by acquiring the small fixed-line business, Thuis. Results are good. Best network in the world, as Claudia said.
Market leadership assumed on B2C mobile, we have the fastest-growing B2B business in Netherlands. We more than doubled free cash flow since hitting the trough in 2018. On top of it, we outperformed the competition. Something that is always very important for Tim. The numbers speak for itself. The EBITDA rose between 2018 and 2020 has been 15% on the headline side, including obviously the acquisitions. Even organically, it's a 5.3% CAGR that stacks up very well in the European sector. Johan would look at this. Johan Andsjö, the former CEO of Yoigo in Switzerland, would look at this and say, "Oh, Thorsten, it looks like Real Madrid." I say, "Not sure. It's Bayern Munich winning the ninth championship in a row." Here's my second beer. Johan promised me a beer for making a joke about Bayern.
The problem, I don't know joke about Bayern, but I know one about Real Madrid. Just want to share it with you a second. A guy throws a coin on the pitch at Santiago Bernabeu. What is it? People are asking themselves, is it a missile on a player, or is it a takeover bid to buy bits of Real Madrid? I don't know. In any case, I have my second beer. Look at the value creation. In 2018, we had a bid on the table by a private equity firm, roughly at about EUR 2 billion. If I look to your best guesstimates, we obviously monetized our towers, we are now at about EUR 6 billion. The company is extremely well-positioned. It has a fantastic team. It's not only the CEO, it's 2,000 big fans that are working for T-Mobile Netherlands in that market.
We have a pass to FMC via the fiber JV. We will over-deliver on the synergies on Tele2, but also on the Simpel acquisition that we recently done. We will, as we said, initiate a strategic review of that asset. Let me say one thing. I don't like the word monetize. What we want to do is crystallize, not monetize. This company deserves more than being monetized. It deserves to find a good partner for its next journey. The second asset that we have in group development is towers. I called it our sleeping beauty in 2018. We spent a lot of time on it. We learned a lot. We did deals. We partnered with the smartest cookies in the European sector, with the likes of Cellnex. We certainly have done a fairly good job on improving the towers also on an operational level.
How do we think about towers? Towers is a super attractive asset class. DFMG in specific is a gold standard. We have 9,000 pure ground-based towers. This is 2x Vantage and 4x American Towers. We currently build 1,500 new sites per annum, and we have significant colocation upside as TDG is a single tenant on one-third of our towers only. More carve-outs to come. We are obviously working on Czech and Slovakia, and our operational performance has been fairly good. People may not recognize it, we have, not Cellnex, delivered the largest BTS program in Europe over the last three years. We have built 5,000 towers. We have third parties with 25% revenue share on our towers. This is industry-leading. Why are we there? Because we focus on this since 2017.
We haven't hired Bruno Jacobfeuerborn because he was a CTIO of Deutsche Telekom for his technical skills. Everybody who knows Bruno knows that he's certainly one of the best CMOs that we have in the telco sector. Like in T-Mobile Netherlands, our cost focus has led us to achieve 60% EBITDA margins. On the other hand, also let me say this, we have an unfair advantage, and our unfair advantage is Tim. You cannot build 5,000 towers if the CEO of Deutsche Telekom doesn't give you a helping hand on this. Now look at this famous slide here. What can I say about this? I think it creates a lot of questions and excitement. As you know us, we try and test a lot before we come to conclusions.
We have been, can I say that, soul searching of how to retain the unique value creation that towers present. We saw this coming early as we experienced a different market structure in the U.S. where no MNO owns the towers. We reviewed how to best participate. We looked at an IPO, partially monetizing our asset. We reviewed driving tower consolidation ourselves, this hits obviously against leverage guardrails. Moreover, there are clearly benefits of running an independent TowerCo. I think in due course, our patience will pay off. Multiples have re-rated to U.S. levels and most importantly, M&A terms have moved significantly, protecting us as the anchor tenant on pricing and allowing to preserve network leadership. The market is moving into the final phase where Tier 1 operators may consider their tower operations.
Real Madrid, Cellnex, Manchester City, Vodafone, PSG, TOTEM, and Bayern Munich, us, as well as some Americans at the gate, may play out the Champions League over the next two years. I think the time is right to review our options and use our asset as a kingmaker asset in the European consolidation. We have four major criteria. We want to have a premium valuation for a premium portfolio. We want to create balance sheet headroom. We want to have a favorable M&A. Ideally, we continue to be exposed to this asset class. However, let me say this, there is no artificial deadline, and we will deliver when we think the time is right. Let me move on to the final two slides. Going back to 2018, if you will recall, I said I want to be measured by magenta bars. My commitment is to increase asset value.
T-Mobile US is a $70 stock with a free option if the deal is approved. I showed you my Bundesliga, my league table, and you can guess where I am going with this. This is us today. We have created a lot of value. T-Mobile US, unprecedented transaction, massive value creation, and I think a lot of further upside. Netherlands, spectacular turnaround, more upside. GD Towers, valuation doubled, M&A have improved. Our little company, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, generated $0.5 b illion in capital gains, stellar IRRs, and based on that, is successful in getting further funding. We did not get everything right, and we learn from our failures. At DT, as I said at the last Capital Markets Day, we got our timing wrong. We thought hard about selling it, but like you, we saw some value.
We remain patient as holders, and as you can see in the U.K., the stars are aligning for a much better performance of our investment in the U.K. marketplace. That's my final slide. Here's my pitch to you. My pitch is DT is a EUR 20+ stock. I know it's difficult to trust me on this. In 2006, a long time ago, I was preparing a meeting between my former employer, Blackstone, and the German Finance Ministry, which was called The Road to EUR 20. Today, 15 years later, we are at EUR 17. However, let me try at least to pitch my case. On EPS growth alone, we will get there, but it may take some time. You know that we've traded between 13x to 15x PE.
Given the industry hiccups with cash flow warnings, CapEx warnings, reverse of big acquisitions, I understand your attitude or the attitude by investors. Seeing is believing. How can we bridge the time gap? As some of you have picked up, our sum of the parts does not stack up. The value of our stake in the T-Mobile US and the value that analysts subscribe to DFMG and T-Mobile Netherlands leaves Germany and Europe valued almost for free. We don't need a hedge fund to tell us this. This is another reason to review our ownership in those assets as seeing is believing. Let me summarize my presentation. Please remember what I said up front. There are three reasons why we are different. Number one, we have an attractive portfolio. It's well-balanced, and it delivers industry-leading EPS growth.
We have, based on our strong portfolio, strategic optionality. We want to exploit this to bridge the time gap for share price appreciation. Finally, you can trust us as a team. We have aligned interest. We do care about share price and shareholder remuneration. I even made it now in 30 minutes in my time. I wore the jacket, I got two beers, and now I'm looking forward to the usual literature on a Friday afternoon, which is the Batelco summary of events in the telecom industry. Which we sometimes need because we are in this industry together and it needs sometimes a little bit of a funny moment given that it's a tricky one. It's unpredictable at times. A hard one for investors.
Thank you very much. Have a great weekend.
Thank you, Thorsten. To also wrap up in time for Batelco. That's good. You're right. Seeing is believing, but you have shown us a lot, right? It's I think, it's a good time to start believing. The next guy who's going to show us a lot is Christian, our CFO, who holds it all together, and he will show us how this translates into numbers, and you better believe it. Christian?
I really like the presentation so far. I think we have shown a very high level of ambition, both on the commercial side but also on the financial side. Now it's time to basically roll it out to consolidated figures. I will use the same approach as my colleagues have done. Have a quick review on the past 3.5 years and then give you the outlook for the coming years. Let's start with the messages. Message number one, I think we will prove we have promised what we committed to at the Capital Markets Day in 2018.
Trust, to use that phrase, even on the critical metrics like being CapEx or its being cost reduction, you can trust we deliver what we trust. Second point is, if we're looking forward, we see a lot of growth. We're seeing top-line growth. We're seeing big service revenue growth. When it comes to bottom-line growth, that's even higher. I will get to this when it comes to EPS or free cash flow growth. It will happen across all segments. We're not only relying on one segment, it's basically broadly adopted by all segments going forward. Third topic on cost. Look, we're in an industry where efficiency is at the center of our activities, and therefore, we announced another EUR 1.2 billion cost reduction program for the European operations.
I think the U.S. team has shown yesterday how they basically increase their efficiency by faster and accelerated synergy utilization. Fourth topic on leverage. Look, after the introduction of IFRS 16, we changed the quarter to two and a quarter to two and three quarters. We stay in that. We will have a return back into the comfort zone by end of 2024. That delay, and I will get to this later on, is purely explained by the shareholder remuneration program, which has been announced by the U.S., but also our clear ambition to achieve the majority in the U.S. was 15.1%. On dividends and on shareholders. Look, we are committed to stay a reliable dividend player. Our dividend policy will remain being determined by adjusted EPS.
We keep the floor, which we introduced in 2019 at EUR 0.16, we're moving away from EPS growth into a payout corridor of 40%-60%. Given the financial plans, I think dividends will be progressive in the upcoming years. Finally, on the sixth point is we are reliable to debt holders. We have a very strong liquidity position, and we are committed to have unrestricted access to credit markets. Let's start in reviewing the past 3.5 years. Let me start with EBITDA guidance, IDC guidance, and cash CapEx guidance. What you can see on the chart is we promised an adjusted EBITDA growth of 2%-4%, and the prediction until the end of the year is basically saying 4.4% on adjusted EBITDA. If you just focus on core EBITDA is even higher at 6.4%. We met that target.
On the business ex U.S., meaning on our operations in Europe, we basically guided at 2%-3%. We will end up having a 3%. The 3% EBITDA growth is very much driven by the IDC reduction in the past three years. Going forward, we expect a more balanced contribution coming from net margin and cost reduction. Second point is on IDC reductions. You may recall, as we reviewed at the Capital Markets Day in 2018, how we were at cost reductions. We missed on that point. We renewed our commitment to another EUR 1.5 billion net cost reduction in indirect cost, and we're happy to say that we will beat that target by about EUR 200 million to EUR 1.7 billion. On cash CapEx, that was also a highly debated figure. We said peak is going to be in 2018, and from there onwards we have a stable development going forward.
Actually, I have to report back that holds true. Let me move to the IDC development and how it all breaks down. I said we're beating our target of EUR 1.5 billion by about EUR 200 million. Where does that come from? First of all, EUR 1 billion of the cost reduction is coming from the German operations, meaning GIS and Germany. Another EUR 400 million is coming from Europe. Dominique said yesterday we achieved already EUR 320 million, we'll continue to reduce costs in Europe by another almost EUR 100 million throughout the year. EUR 300 million was delivered by T-Systems. If you take a look at how you can assess this, whether this is recurring cost or not recurring cost, I would like to basically draw your attention to that picture here on the FTE reduction in Germany. That excludes T-Systems.
We will reduce the headcount by 17,000 people over the course of 2017 to 2021. That reduction happens almost without any noise. It's a well-established rhythm, which our people, our colleagues from HR are doing with the social partner. If you multiply these 17,000 people with average salary of EUR 70,000, that gets you to a EUR 1.2 billion gross savings only coming from personnel in Germany. Second point where you see that cost is really going out of the system is real estate. We expect that we are going to reduce real estate costs by about EUR 300 million over the course of the time from 2017 to 2021. That's coming from less space requirements. It's also coming from a renewal of our service provider contract, which we did with another company.
Let's move over to free cash flow and EPS. At the Capital Markets Day in 2018, we said we wanted to deliver greater EUR 8 billion on free cash flow by end of 2021. We assume that the adjusted EPS is around EUR 1.2 a stock. In case the merger is going to be approved, that was right after the signing, if you may recall this. Obviously, there will be dilutive effects on both sides on free cash flow as well as on EPS over the course of three years. What are we going to achieve? We are going to achieve actually something which is at the upper level of the merger scenario. We expect greater EUR 8 billion free cash flow at the end of the year, and we adopted our guidance last week. EUR 3.6 billion is coming from European operations, another EUR 4.5 billion is coming from T-Mobile US. That compares to a EUR 5.5 billion free cash flow in 2017.
Same holds true for the EPS. Let me dwell on the free cash flow for a second. Look, what we predicted on the European business was actually EUR 4 billion. We are falling a bit short on the free cash flow coming out of the European operations. This can be explained by non-operational effects. DT suspended the dividend, which accounts for EUR 200 million. Obviously, since the merger has closed, we don't get a margin from refinancing some of the T-Mobile US loans. IFRS 16 also costed us EUR 200 million of free cash flow in that equation. Adjusted EPS, you see we're developing from EUR 0.90 to greater EUR 1.1. I think that is both of those figures are at the upper end of what we expect in our merger scenario.
What we also did when it comes to dividend, total shareholder return, in 2018 at the Capital Markets Day, we changed the dividend policy. You may recall, historically, we were coming from free cash flow growth. We now basically took adjusted EPS as the key metric. We set dividend to orient itself on adjusted EPS growth, and we basically put in a floor of EUR 0.50. Thorsten just mentioned the rollercoaster ride on the closing process of Sprint. I recall back in November 2019, we were just about the federal state's jury or discussion or trial. Sorry, I was looking for that name. We had complete uncertainty on what's going to happen. Therefore, we decided to basically make a call on the dividend independent of whether we get a positive or negative result. We declared EUR 0.60, and we announced a new floor of EUR 0.60.
Look, if you take a look at what we have delivered over the past years, we are a reliable dividend payer. Our payout was in between EUR 0.60 to EUR 0.70 over the course of the past 3.5 years, and we will be a reliable dividend payer. If you combine our reliability on the dividend payout with our operational outperformance, this gives you the outperformance on the total shareholder return. You see us with a 41% increase since the last Capital Market Day. Tim was basically comparing us against Vodafone, Telefónica, and Orange. This is a comparison against the EURO STOXX index, and also we beat the DAX by factor two. What you see here right now is reliability and operational performance really pays off and is being appreciated. Let's go and move forward to leverage.
Again, I'm always comparing what we said in 2018 and where we're standing up until now. In 2018, we said, if we get the deal approved, we will basically need about three years to get back into the comfort zone of our leverage. Secondly, we said, what is the comfort zone? It was pre-IFRS 16, 2- 2.5, and we basically committed to have a rating in between A- to BBB. In the meantime, quite a bit of things happened. First, we got the introduction of IFRS 16, and that basically led to an increase of the comfort zone by 0.25 of a point. To be honest, that was conservative. If you take a look at the current impact of the leasing liabilities, they're not 0.25 points, they're 0.4 points. That was a very conservative perspective on this one.
Second one is the merger closing was delayed until April 2020. What we didn't foresee at the Capital Markets Day is obviously the tower deal with American Tower and the C-band auction. If you collapse everything together, we still, given our current financial plan, would be able to return back into the comfort zone by end of 2023. Let's see how we're moving forward, and that is basically the guidance. Look, we are confident about the future. Our performance in 2020 has carried on into the first quarter. We had a deliberate discussion on what we expect from the remainder of the year. That led to that guidance increase of EUR 200 million in EBITDA and EUR 200 million in free cash flow.
Let me repeat again, it's being equally split between the combination of the U.S. and ex-U.S. Therefore, I think we have a very strong performance in the history and also are positive about the future. Let's finally get into the scorecard. What you see on the scorecard is, on the left-hand side, you see our ambition. On the middle column, you see our achievements plan of 2020, and the traffic lights basically indicate what we expect by the end of the year. I would call this an almost green scorecard except for the shortfall in the free cash flow ex-U.S., and I think we touched the dividend policy in 2019. These are the reasons why we basically put this in yellow. Much about the past, so much about the past performance. Let's go and look forward.
Let me get to my favorite chart. This is my favorite chart. What you're going to see is what is our prediction on free cash flow growth, adjusted EPS growth, and ROCE growth over the upcoming years until end of 2024. Free cash flow is expected to grow from EUR 6.3 billion at the end of 2020 to north of being EUR 8 billion this year, to be greater than EUR 18 billion in 2024. That translates to a CAGR of 30%. Obviously, the breakdown, and we've heard that yesterday, is very much driven by T-Mobile US by contributing more than EUR 14 billion to this overall result. Also, we see free cash flow growth coming out of the European business. What are the key drivers? Obviously, that is service revenue growth coming from the U.S. That's synergy realization, but there are also three supporting arguments driving the free cash flow.
One is obviously the shift from handset lease to EIP, which improves our operating working capital, and we will also expect CapEx to come down once the merger synergies are achieved and lower special factors over time. From Europe, you can expect a constant support driven by EBITDA growth and IDC savings. Let me dwell on this a second and do a little bit of a fast-forward. Let's assume we're in the year 2024, and we have achieved the majority with 50.1%. Out of these EUR 18 billion, half of the EUR 14 billion belong to DT, plus roughly out of the EUR 4 billion, if you exclude the minorities, another EUR 3.5 billion from the European operations. EUR 10.5 billion would be allocated to DT shareholders. This is more than EUR 2 per share and an increase of more than 100%.
The second one on adjusted EPS. We expect that adjusted EPS is growing from EUR 1.20 to greater than EUR 1.75. That translates to a 10% growth. There's going to be a small dip. This is basically between 2020 and 2021. This basically can be explained by the positive impact which we had on the fixed price option in 2020. What we're going to see is, we're going to see a constant increase of EBITDA growth and a constant decrease of depreciation, which basically gives you an indication that this growth is not back-end loaded. It is coming with a steady growth starting from 2022 onwards. Therefore, I think, again, this is a greater EUR 1.75 prediction. It's coming more in a linear curve rather than a back-end loaded curve.
Third one is ROCE. You've seen our ROCE being 4.6% end of 2020, and we expect it to grow at north of 6.5% in 2024. Bear in mind, our ROCE definition is a very strict one. It's after tax. It does include all special factors. It does include all working capital changes on the NOA, all these liabilities, and all impairments. Once we get there, we will have a significant distance versus our average cost of capital, which is right now around about 4.5%. What is the key driver between that ROCE? Obviously, our NOPAT is significantly growing faster than the NOA. Let's move over to the U.S. and go quickly through this. You've seen that numbers already. The U.S. is supposed to grow from EUR 21 billion in EBITDA to EUR 27 billion or EUR 28 billion .
That is basically a 7% growth, and if you just exclude the handset leasing for a second, the core EBITDA will grow at 10%. The cash CapEx is actually peaking in 2021, and you've heard Peter saying yesterday that he's expecting the 2024 level, which is EUR 8 billion-EUR 9 billion already in 2023. Also, we talked about the massive free cash flow, which is coming from the U.S. On CapEx, as I said, the peak is in 2021, and we will return back to normal levels starting from 2023 onwards. Let's move over to the European business and take a look how this will evolve going forward. What we're going to see in the European business is the steady growth of EBITDA, growing from EUR 14 billion in 2020 to EUR 15.3 billion in 2024, and that relates basically to a 2%-3% CAGR growth.
What you also see is that this EBITDA growth is supporting our larger CapEx envelope of EUR 8.2 billion by 2024 in the European business, while it still allows to grow free cash flow. What we're also betting on is that the EBITDA development will be more balanced, coming from net margin growth as well as cost reductions. On cash flow, guys, we always had that question. We also had yesterday in the discussion. Look, we kept our promise on the cash flow over the past three years, and we will keep our promise also what we're indicating here. We keep the EUR 8.2 billion, and you shouldn't be afraid about that we basically have to keep this. That will support the build-out plan which Srini and Dominique presented yesterday, both on the fiber and the 5G rollout side.
Being committed to that envelope is important, and we will apply, as we have done in the past year, a very strict allocation policy on where and how we want to spend CapEx. Next topic is digitization. As you see on the chart, we have taken a fairly holistic view on the digitization within DT. We're basically taking a look at all relevant parts of the business, being in the front end or in the back end. We're continuously optimizing and digitizing as we move forward. We have a program right now across the most elaborate activities being defined between Germany and Europe. We track it from 2020 to 2024 onwards, and we had a consistent review process on how we're making progress on these key initiatives.
Let me pick out two examples which have been mentioned yesterday by Claudia and Srini already. The first one is e-sales share. Obviously, you can take a look at e-sales share. This is a great measure to reduce sales costs, locations to intermediaries and so forth. I always have numerous reasons why we're doing digitalization. Cost reduction is one of them. The other one is the e-sales share, as we go in and develop it further on, will allow you to give you more personalized, ideally a person-specific offer based on your needs. Digitization for me is always a combination of lowering costs but also improve customer experience. Same holds true for the IP migration. If I summarize the IP migration in one word, I would say you get a better product, you allow our service organization to better serve you, and it allows us to reduce costs because we are reducing energy costs and reducing all platforms.
I think that's the way how we're thinking about digitalization, we assess the EBITDA impact by 2024 of more than EUR 300 million supporting our European businesses. There's also just, I would say, classical IDC cost reduction besides digitization. The EUR 1.2 billion additional cost reduction program I was alluding to breaks down into the German segment by EUR 700 million, Europe another EUR 300 million, and T-Systems by another EUR 200 million. Which brings our indirect cost down from EUR 17.5 billion into EUR 16.3 billion. What are the key levers? The key levers is fairly identical to what we've done in the past. Real estate will be a big one. We have a range here of EUR 100 billion to EUR 200 billion. I expect it to be at the upper end. Claudia was talking about retiring old IT systems and simplify the IT landscape, which is going to give you another EUR 100 million to EUR 200 million.
We rely on the leverage effects which we are achieving through our joint venture buy-in, which gives you another EUR 100 million-EUR 200 million. The next one is obviously people-oriented. We will have a very strong focus on overstructures and to make their life easier, but also to let FTEs go, where we basically bet on a EUR 500 million-EUR 600 million impact. The rest of it is going over the other cost categories and saving discretionary costs. All up, it's a EUR 1.2 billion program. I think it looks a little bit smaller than the EUR 1.5 billion which we called out in 2018. Bear in mind, A, our baseline is lower, and B, we need a certain fraction of people for the network build-out, both on fiber and 5G, which allows us to basically reduce cost at a lower level.
Let's move over to the finance strategy. Look, it's often said a strategy is a strategy is a strategy. Same holds true for our finance strategy framework. We stay committed to be a reliable dividend payer and to have undisputed access to the debt markets. What does that mean on the equity side? Obviously, we're committed to be a dividend payer, and I'll get to the details of the new policy in a minute. Second one, we got approved on the AGM to basically have the allowance until 2026 to buy our own shares back. Do I expect this to be very likely in the upcoming two to three years? No, I don't. Still, we have the opportunity. We talked about the ROCE. Our ambition is that the ROCE will be higher WACC starting on from 2022 onwards. On the debt side, not a lot of changes.
We keep the comfort zone, we keep the equity ratio, and also on our liquidity reserve, we keep the policy that liquidity at least has to cover 24 months of maturities. Let's move over to the dividend policy. As I said, in 2018, we introduced adjusted EPS as the key metric, and we said the dividend payout should orient itself according to that growth, and we had a floor of EUR 0.50 a share. We basically moved that up to EUR 0.60. We have paid out dividends in the vicinity of EUR 0.60-EUR 0.70 over the past four years.
What we're going to do with the dividend policy going forward is that we're going to keep the EPS as the key metric, that we're going to keep the minimum payout to give you a guarantee on the payout, but we're moving away from EPS growth to a payout ratio. Given the EPS growth which you have seen, which was about 10%, you can assume that this dividend will be accretive and grow over time. Let's move over to the debt side. Again, what we said is we remain within our comfort zone, which is 2.25-2.75. We said at the Capital Markets Day, we will be back into the comfort zone after three years. This assessment excluded basically two things, the shareholder remuneration in the U.S. and also our ambition to achieve 50.1%.
If we are doing this with the shareholder remuneration and the 50.1%, that will obviously slow down the deleveraging impact and therefore we will basically be back in the comfort zone by end of 2024. The peak of the leverage is expected to be this year, then it will gradually go down. Bear in mind, if we are getting into the comfort zone in 2024, by the end of 2024, the share buyback in the U.S. officially continues into 2025. You heard Peter saying it will not stop after 2025 either. When it comes to our maturity profile, you see that actually the average maturities that you're going to have over the next four years is EUR 3.6 billion. It's very balanced. You don't see any spikes. By the way, that holds true for the maturities also beyond 2024.
We will receive another $4.7 billion coming out of the U.S. The first chunk is coming in in 2022 with almost being half of it. You see that we have a very strong liquidity position. That liquidity position, which was EUR 17 billion at the end of last year and on average will be around EUR 14 billion-EUR 15 billion, covers our maturities over the next 24 months really well. Before I basically wrap it up, let me just talk a little bit about ESG and what is our contribution to ESG. It's basically around about four points. One is on procurement. We already have a policy in place that suppliers have to sign a strict supplier code of conduct, and this is going to be monitored on a regular basis. We will increase the importance of ESG as a criteria in the vendor selection process.
We don't have a final number yet, but there's a clear commitment that we're going to do this. We're working jointly with external and internal resources on tracking whether Scope 3 emissions are being reduced within our landscape or vendor estate. Secondly is we will introduce sustainability-linked bonds into our bond framework. Thirdly, we will become even more transparent on the CR reporting. Look, we received a lot of prizes on the CR reporting, but I think there is reporting standards coming from TCFD and SASB which we have to adhere to and which we're going to do. The last one is even our DT Trust is geared toward ESG investing. Actually, the pension fund started to do this in 2013 and the trust has moved into that direction in 2019. After that short excursion, let me conclude on our finance strategy.
Look, if you see that wheel, as I said, we will see a massive bottom line growth on free cash flow with a 30% growth, on EPS with a 10% CAGR and also by an increased ROCE which improves by another two points. That massive free cash flow growth will allow to pay shareholder returns from T-Mobile US over the course of 2023 to 2025, which accounts in total for up to EUR 60 billion. Those planned shareholder buybacks will be a significant lever for us to achieve that 50%. You also heard Thorsten saying, we don't have to decide this tomorrow. We have time in order to get there, which allows us as DT to take part on the long term growth of T-Mobile US.
As those shareholder returns will not stop after 2024, will also allow us to faster deleverage our business in the years beyond 2024 or give you a higher return as a shareholder. I was talking about the equity side and the dividend policy that we're moving to a payout ratio. I was also talking about the net debt, the debt side, sorry. Let's wrap it up and take a look to the commitments which we put out there. Is that slide on? Can I have the next slide, please? Can we move on with the chart, please? No. Okay. Very good. You presented yesterday, Tim. If we don't It's coming? Come on. Let me just wrap it up. On revenue growth, we're pretty much at 1% to 2%, which is comparable to the last Capital Markets Day.
We also basically give a guidance out for service revenue growth, which is 3%-4%, which is the new guidance. Adjusted EBITDA will be raised from 2%-4% to 3%-5%. Obviously, I talked about the free cash flow growth of 30%. That relates to the 10% in the past history. We have an accelerated EPS growth and accelerated ROCE growth, and we're committed to stick with the c ash CapEx guidance at EUR 8.2, saying while it's true that we are committed to reduce the IDC by EUR 1.2 billion over the course of the period until end of 2024. That is basically the commitment from the group side.
I will finish here. Look, you can be rest assured that this team is committed to deliver as we have done it before. Along from Thorsten, whenever that ball is going through the middle, you're going to pick it up. Okay, thank you.
Very good, Christian. That brings us to the final Q&A, and the final Q&A will be with Christian, with Thorsten, and with Tim. I'll ask you to please join me here on this couch and just maybe while they are coming, acceleration is the word. You've heard it, or how Srini called it yesterday, right? It's about being reliable. Acceleration. Here we go. Let's see if we have some questions. I've seen quite a few guys already on the screen. We start with Akhil. Akhil, can I have your question please?
Yeah, of course. Good afternoon. I've got one strategic one and then two hopefully very quick financial ones. I think in Thorsten's presentation, he talked through the fact that obviously one of the biggest value creation events for Deutsche in the last five, six years has obviously been T-Mobile US and the decision to stay in that market and then merge with Sprint. I guess the question was, if we look going forward, do you see any other transformational strategic decisions on the horizon that you're thinking through in terms of the Deutsche equity story? Do you think the story going forward is much more operationally driven instead? That was the first strategic one.
The two financial ones is, Christian, in your presentation, you talked about the target, the 6.5% break. I think in Srini's presentation, he talked about Germany going from 6% to 9%. The U.S. I assume will have a very good return given the high cash generation. Can you maybe help us bridge why the total is only 6.5% if Germany's 9% and I presume the U.S. is very good? The final bit was just on the dividend. I think there's no doubt the dividend growth is attractive and I think is very healthy. I guess even at the high end, the dividend's about a EUR 4 billion dividend, whereas your guidance base is cash flow is EUR 18 billion, and that's about EUR 11 billion proportionate. It's about a third of your cash flow generation.
Just if you can maybe comment on how you think about that in terms of what the residual cash would probably be useful if you think about mid-term and what your priorities would be. Thanks a lot.
Who wants to start? Strategic question first. The first one?
All right, Akhil. Look, two months ago, I would have said that for the next five years, this is all about operational improvement, performance, utilizing the best network in the 5G world and doing more of the same as in the past. We have the capacity, we have the speed, we have the quality in the network to exactly do what this fantastic team in the U.S. has done over the last seven years. Over the last two months though, Verizon and AT&T have shed media assets. I'm asking myself, as you may ask yourself, what does it mean for the future? Number one, certainly it's a kind of recognition how strong we have become. It's a focus on the wireless operations of these two big players in the U.S. market. They take us very, very seriously.
Second, which also underlines the value that we can bring to the table. The question then lies on the table, what is the next kind of effort to differentiate in this market if it is not network, which is what we have. There we have learned a lot of lessons in the European marketplace. Convergence is one of the topics that may come up in the future. One of the reasons why we'd like to retain control, because if anything happens in the future, you want to have a juicy control premium for shareholders. I said that, Akhil, I don't have a crystal ball. We started in 2013 as the smallest mobile operator, and at the end, we were able to consolidate and this great team in the U.S. is now challenging the number one position in the marketplace. Who knows, maybe we get bigger.
I have no answer on that. Certainly it will be an interesting period of time. I think we will enjoy operational upsides and a wonderful network with a lot of capacity, we'll see.
Look, on the ROCE, Akhil. First of all, we're predicting a ROCE larger than 6.5%, not 0.65%. I think, yes, the number in Germany is right, but you also heard Dominique that she will continuously take time in order to move its ROCE up. Don't underestimate the investment level coming from the U.S. We just added another EUR 8 billion of spectrum. There's a massive build-out. That burdens the NOA. It will take some time until the U.S. is actually progressing in these levels as well. I think it's a composition of different pieces, but you're right, the German figure is already at 6% and will further grow.
On the divi- The divi , as I said, is you can expect that the divi will increase given the EPS growth. What we have consciously discussed in the team is that we wanted to have some flexibility on the divi payout. This is why we came up with a payout ratio of 40%-60%, by the way, which is well-established in other industries as well. Because we don't know whether we actually have the flexibility to pay out more, which is towards 60%, or whether we have to stay strict because we haven't secured the 50.1% in the U.S. yet. Therefore, we basically came up with that solution. The third one is, look, even if we get to the 50.1%, we also have to think about our leverage. We said that we are getting back into the comfort zone end of 2024.
Again, this is another delay by a year, and therefore, I think that was all factored into our dividend discussion.
It really is about the balance, isn't it? We'll strike the right balance. The other point, I think that you rightly pointed out, it's nice to have these choices because your free cash flow per share is over EUR 2 in a few years, right? That's good. Next question is from George at Citi, please. Thank you, Akhil.
Good afternoon, guys. A couple of questions from me, mostly focused on towers. The first question is to just get an understanding of how you're thinking about your tower value crystallization. Price not being the determining factor and let's say similar price, would you have a preference for a clean exit or to still maintain exposure in any deal you agree? My second question linked to that is whether you believe in market synergies within towers, and particularly in Germany because there are some limitations perhaps that don't exist in some of the other countries.
My second question again on towers is a bit more of a long-term question about your overall network infrastructure. You spoke yesterday about cloud-native networks. Srini also mentioned the importance that telcos could play in edge cloud. I'm just trying to understand whether you believe these investments are better done from a tower perspective or from an operator level, and how that could change your strategy, the importance of towers versus the edge cloud. Thank you.
I think the first one is one for Thorsten and then.
I take the first one?
Yeah.
All right.
You can answer the second one.
Preference for a clean exit or to maintain exposure in a deal, and whether we believe in market synergies. First of all, we have learned a lot over the last three years. We've teamed up with Cellnex for the Sunrise Towers in Switzerland. What did we learn? We learned a lot about the Cellnex management team is certainly one of the smartest I have met in this sector. How you make money in this game. It's all about build to suit, especially for the number three and number four in the market. This also becomes build to suit for the number one or number two in the market in the future. Of course, in-market consolidation of assets that you own is something that creates a lot of value for TowerCo.
Cross-border synergies are limited, as we all know, also in the tower sector. This is not to say that a management team with a smart headquarter and a very smart M&A head is able to add a lot of value. I think Cellnex speaks for itself of how loading up towers in different countries can create a lot of value for investors. Second, in terms of the preference, I don't have any preference, neither has this management right now. We are just saying we are open to a lot of options. We've looked at a lot of stuff. We know what the pitfalls are and what the pros and cons are. As Tim is always saying, "Let's attack and see." I like that. I was thinking about just putting my cellphone number in front of the page and said we are now open for business.
We are in a different state than two or three years ago or over the last two and three years because we've recognized that the valuations have moved to a place where it makes sense for us to engage, and most importantly, where the M&A structures provide enough protection for us to further differentiate. That is a key thing for us because we also see the tower model in the U.S. Keep in mind, we sold our towers or part of our towers in 2013 to Crown Castle, and we know how it is to deal with tower companies in the U.S. We know what we have to avoid, and therefore, we are open for business now. There will be I'm excited to what may happen over the next, call it 1.5-2 years until the next Capital Markets Day.
I think the next one is for you. I guess it plays to networks of networks and how we orchestrate that. I think it does. Let me answer it because I think it is in the context of what Tim presented yesterday, the networks of networks. We have the capability to orchestrate this, and we will not always be the owner of this network in every place, but we'll put it together in the best possible way for our customers.
I think what we wanted to say, and I don't want to repeat what I said and what Claudia had said as well, the idea is this ecosystem is changing. In this changing ecosystem, we should be adaptive. Adapt to all the developments which we see. We should not do that naively, but we should do it. I know a lot of partners are watching the Capital Markets Day. They send me notes. Being it the Microsoft people, being it, let's say, my friends at Cisco and other companies. These people, they're not competitors, but sometimes they're even not friends. We have to find the right doses on partnering with them that we create win-win situations in this digital ecosystem. It's a very complex one, but we have opened our doors to partnerships. By the way, that's not something new. Remember, the first Capital Markets Day was about win with partners.
Now I think we've grown up in this ecosystem, and when it comes to the architecture of our networks, when it comes to the softwarization of all the functionalities which we talk, both on the consumer and use case side, but as well from the way how we organize our businesses, we have to embrace them. That is what we are doing. How we then share, trough, how we share then the value chain, that is something which we have to then negotiate. I would say the last years taught me that's a win-win, and that we were more winning from these partnerships than losing.
Great. Excellent. Thank you, Tim. The next question is from Josh at Exane. Josh.
Thanks, guys. A few quick ones, hopefully from my side. First one is just following up on the towers question. What percentage of your German towers today do you consider to be genuinely strategic and differentiating that you might want to retain some kind of reserved control over in any future tower structure? The second one is a slightly annoying one about cash conversion. One of the things we often get asked about with DT is what's the real post-everything else free cash flow? Maybe just if you could give us a direction of how you think things like finance leases, vendor financing, et cetera, would trend over the next few years as well, would be helpful.
The final question is just regarding your comfort range on leverage, because I think a lot of the last few days has been talking about why DT, partly through its European operations, but also U.S. is a different kind of telco, given its higher growth and exposure in assets. The question is, what would you need to see happen in your performance to raise your comfort level or comfort range for leverage? At what point do you think you could say this is a business that should be levered more at 2.5x-3x than the 2.2x-2.7x you talked about today? Thanks.
Can I start with the last one? We will not change the corridor, to be very clear. The reason being is it forces discipline into the organization. I'd rather prefer to tell you I'm out of the comfort zone and having that deliberate discussion with my peer and left colleagues on an ongoing basis than basically lift up the comfort zone. Mathematically, you're right, Josh, because you know that the lease impact is about 0.4 points right now, and you could argue, but for me, it's a disciplinary activity to keep the comfort zone where it is, and then I'd rather prefer to delay returning back into the comfort zone.
Second point is, if you take a look at the share buybacks, which are coming from the U.S., they will not stop in 2024, right? There's an official program going into 2025, so that will help us to deleverage, and it will continue the years beyond that. On the leverage, no change and keep the discipline. Keep us honest on this one.
Thorsten on the towers.
On the towers, yeah. Just one sentence here on that. I think one thing that is noteworthy is that leverage is good for equity holders as long as your EBITDA and free cash flow grows. Obviously, we are also in a different environment than 10 years ago, where interest rates were much higher than today. You see that we are also, as a team, discussing these kind of topics. We feel much more relaxed today than maybe five years ago when the leverage ratio was lower. This is not to negate what Christian was just saying, just an observation. Second one on towers. Yeah, of course, there are some strategic towers. I cannot give you a kind of sense, maybe it's 5%, maybe it's 10%. It's much less than you think, because it's no longer a coverage game in Germany.
We still have an advantage there. Given the license requirements, also the other guys have to move up and we are open for business on co-location. We have some juicy rooftops that in any case, we cannot share, by the way. These are differentiating things for us. The old discussions that you had in the past about how many strategic sites you have, is much less than a lot of people are thinking.[crosstalk]
Okay, let me just dwell on the free cash flow. Our clear ambition is to make the free cash flow as healthy as possible. Give you an indication. Recall back in Q1 2021, we basically have reverse factoring, and we're trying to do this on an ongoing basis. Secondly, also, the vendor financing in the U.S. has increased. While at the same time, free cash flow is increasing. From a percentage point of view, I think the dilution is coming down as well.
On the lease trends, look, in the European business, there may be some slight increases because we have to build out into 5G, but it's not massive. I think that the biggest question that was asked yesterday as well is obviously the renewal of the leasing contract with Crown Castle and SBA in the U.S., which we haven't mastered yet. I would say once we're through this one, I think we shouldn't expect a significant increase on the lease trends going forward because we struck deals which are 15 years long. There will be no new deals coming soon.
Yeah. No vendor financing and T-Mobile has a constant level of finance leases that you know about, okay? That's it. Otherwise it's squeaky clean. With that, we move on, thank you, Josh, to Jakob at Credit Suisse.
Thanks for taking the questions. I had a few hopefully fairly straightforward questions. Firstly, you said you think DT is a sort of EUR 20+ stock, but also you won't buy back stock in the next two or three years. Can you just help us understand why don't you want to buy back stock? I appreciate you're growing the dividend, but why do buybacks make sense for T-Mobile but not for DT? Secondly, in fourth of the slides, you showed that you rejected two mergers with a European TowerCo and a 50/50 JV with a European TowerCo. Was that purely about price or can you maybe just sort of help us understand the rationales behind those decisions just to help understand how you think about this sort of concept of monetizing a TowerCo valuation?
Just finally, it sort of sounds like you've become more flexible around your ownership of mobile assets and also on the fixed line side where, as Srini mentioned yesterday, you expect to own 60%-70% of the fiber assets long term. I guess the question is, could you look at broader monetization of fixed line down the road? Could the German fiber networks that include development in a few years? I'm just interested in how you think about that. Thank you.
My God, Jakob, a very, very good question and I couldn't agree more on the buyback topic. You also know our leverage constraints, and you know our priority of retaining control in the U.S. First come first and then come second. Much to that, certainly it's not lost on me and on us here as a team what you are saying. On the, let's say, tower discussions, let me keep this private because we signed NDAs. I indicated to you before that M&A terms, price premiums, lease liabilities, they may hit you, which is kind of a very odd thing here in European accounting. Something that I don't understand. I'm coming from a cash world and not from an accounting world.
It's lost on me how you and why you have to capitalize this OpEx at these low NPVs, at these low discount rates, and then all the nice benefits of a deal are gone. I recognize that two things have moved a lot, especially last year when the first American came to Europe, and then the subsequent acquisition in the French market by Cellnex, that terms have improved significantly. Just take this as my answer on your very good questions.
Let me add two topics. The first one, by the way, I totally was Thorsten with you, why not doing earnings per share and then buybacks on the stock. My first observation in this regard is there is a difference between the U.S. and Europe when it comes to buybacks. In the European environment, I always see it a little bit like a lack of strategy if somebody's doing a buyback. Now, I would not say that we have a lack of strategy, but I think we have a lack of communication and conviction. Therefore, that we're holding nine hours, a Capital Markets Day, that we're constantly on the road, that we are trying to convince you guys on Deutsche Telekom stock. This is, let's say, our answer on this one. Rather buying back our stocks, we are trying to attract investors into our stocks. That's, I think, my approach on this one.
Dividend is for me, a more sustainable instrument, which shows our conviction into the future prospects and rather doing one or two times share buyback on our stocks to just be happy with the price we see. The undervaluation for us is obvious, and we have a lot of bets about that one in our team here. My second thing is about ownership on assets. I think we are, in principle, an infrastructure company, and therefore we should own the network. We are not a service provider. We are not a servco. We are an infrastructure company and a netco. Therefore our ownership on fixed and mobile gives us as well the credibility on this business. We have to run the networks. We have to build and run the infrastructure.
By the way, I even believe we do it better than a lot of other peoples are doing it. Therefore, the majority of our infrastructure should be under our control. This gives us much more flexibility, even from the technical solutions which we are providing. Nevertheless, if you can't fight the dragon, ride the dragon. Our balance sheet is stretched, and our capacities as well, and therefore, we cannot go for 100%. Impossible. Nobody is able to do so. If you can't fight it, then you have to ride it. Therefore, our logical step is then to say, "Okay, guys, there are others who have maybe the same issue of utilization of their infrastructure. There are others who have good technologies in areas where we have weaknesses.
Let's partner. Let's create a win-win." It's coming back to my earlier point that we are open to this one, and this gives us much more credibility. It's, by the way, good for the consumers because the extension of the infrastructure is broader, and the monetization of that infrastructure as well. Therefore, I think this is the change in our thinking. By the way, you're tapping a very important point because our network guys, our technology people, they love to own it 100%. They love to control the whole value chain. That is not how the world is developing, and therefore we have changed this paradigm successfully, and I think there's more to come.
I would add one additional point when it comes to separation complexity. We looked at this quite intensively a couple of years ago, it's not like that you open up a zipper and the left-hand side is the go-to-market organization and the right-hand side is your network. It's a complex undertaking to really separate out a fixed network out of an integrated telco and take a look what has happened in New Zealand. They are not through with it. It's a very complex project with questionable financial results. Well, this makes sense.
Yeah. If I may add one thing, I think Srini talked about this yesterday. It's actually, there's a lot of execution and capability opportunity and optionality in how you run the value chain and fixed-line networks, right? Ideally, you can let others build some stuff that you really don't want to build, and you get onto the chain of the value where the money is, and then you use joint ventures and so on. It's a whole range of opportunities and models that you have to orchestrate, and I think that's where a lot of the value creation will be in doing this in the right way, in Germany in particular.
Next. Thanks, Jakob. The next one is from Robert, Deutsche Bank. Robert, here you go.
Yes. Hi, thank you very much. I loved the vision and drama over the last two days. It's been the best box set I have seen all month. Going back to the rump discount, if I might. Either investors don't like the U.S., which is clearly not true, or they think the ex-U.S. part is worse than other telcos, which cannot be true. Which leaves the interface, which is the problem, and relates to intragroup cash flows and how cash gets back to shareholders. One issue causing confusion is the buyback versus the dividend from TMUS. Are they fully fungible and make no difference to you guys in your thinking, and how you take benefits? I'd like a comment on that. Going back to the payout ratio. Having a payout of earnings is entirely logical as a proportionate measure.
Compared to non-telcos, Deutsche Telekom has a high D&A versus CapEx. The dividend did get cut and interest rates are rising, yet it seems you are still cautious, especially at the low end. From the previous comments, it seems that it is the leverage target. If you monetize some of your portfolio, will that directly release cash for distribution and we can expect the payout to move up the range? Thank you.
Thanks. Let me start with the payout ratio. Look, first of all, yes, we're not paying at the same level, relative to other competitors, but other competitors don't have the same business profile as we have. We're growing much faster, by the way, across the Atlantic, meaning the U.S. and in ex-U.S. I think that should be considered as well. I'm not sure whether we're cautious. On the EPS, let me remind you, we said it's greater EUR 175, and greater EUR 175 means that the full potential is above that level which we're communicating right now. What was the question with the DT has a high D&A on CapEx? Can you help me out on this one, Robert?
Yeah, that was the point around the payout.
Okay.
Basically, your cash flow is growing far, far faster than your earnings is the main point. I think you've answered that. My other question is about the getting cash back from TMUS. Does it matter whether you get it through buybacks or dividends? Because investors think it somehow does. Is it fungible?
Fully fungible.
It is fully fungible. Actually, from a tax perspective, a share buyback is better than a dividend. You have heard the U.S. team saying we perceive ourselves as a growth company, therefore we prefer share buybacks way over the dividend. I think that was a very clear message.
They also said there's buybacks for three years, and they won't stop in 2025. As far as we are concerned, it's about as reliable as a dividend. Okay. Hope that's a good answer. Let's move on to, thanks, Robert, to Polo. Again, here we go. Polo.
Yeah. Hi, thanks for taking the questions. We've got three quick ones, hopefully. The first one is really just about German politics and also the EU Recovery Fund. Most of the German political parties have published their election manifestos and the Green Party, SDP, FDP, all seem to be proposing increased investment in broadband infrastructure. How do you think this will impact the evolution of the German broadband market, and could further government subsidies lower German CapEx for DT going forward? Also, how should we think about the impact of the EU Recovery Fund on the German communications market?
Second question is really just about German headcount, because Christian had a slide showing 85,000 FTEs in the German region, but with digitalization and also an acceleration in the number of people retiring, how should we think about German headcount in the longer term?
My final question is really just about risks and opportunities, because it's clear that the main message from the Capital Markets Day is about accelerating growth. If you look at your 2024 objectives, what is the one area, and this question for you, Tim, what's the one area that you're most excited about, or what do you see as the biggest opportunity? Similarly, what do you see as the main risk to achieving your targets?
Between 20 and 30, I don't know the exact number.
Polo, first thing, by the way, it is interesting that we had only one question to regulation so far during all these nine hours. That shows me that we all perceive the regulation is relaxing and it is getting better. When I talk for Germany in specific on the regulation side, I was preparing myself here for the session, I was thinking about what is good and what is bad and what is open. What is good is the new telecommunication law is opening up better ways of building infrastructure in Germany. It is an ex ante regulation. It supported all our wholesale deals which we had with the partners. The Nebenkostenprivileg has fallen. Now, okay, you can complain that it takes a few years too long, but in principle, it is decided. We had not a decrease of wholesale prices.
The opposite is taking place, and the regulation in principle is supporting this. The national roaming is not over yet, but it is still there with regard to 1&1, but the likelihood that it is legally enforced is not there. In principle, I would say, the regulator in Europe and in Germany are very much on a track to ease the situation than worsening the situation, which is a good signal. On top of that, Europe has EUR 750 billion funds available for the Recovery, Germany on top of that, EUR 140 billion, only for Germany, which are standing there. We have reacted on that one. We have built an own organization unit analyzing these different parts here and applying to this one appropriately. Honestly, I think the biggest problem is not the money. The biggest problem is the application process.
Therefore, I have even personally initiated at the BDI, which is the industrial association in Germany, an independent support that private partnerships getting built, that we find methods that this money is getting into the system quickly. In this organization unit, we found out that something like 25% of the whole money is relevant for us as Deutsche Telekom, including T-Systems business. For this money, we are now organizing ourselves to apply for that one. To give you a few relevant example. Schooling and the digitization of schools, not only talking about fiber, talking as well about the cloud, talking about the running of the system, is one of the elements. Second, we have seen all the things around the Corona Warn App. We have seen the elements about the exchange server. Deutsche Telekom is the one providing the global vaccine passport.
We have seen initiatives about more subsidization for rural areas for connectivity. By the way, they're not part of the German program because the money was available already before that. You should add them on top of that one. We have a discussion about Gaia-X money is available for that one. We have money for Open RAN. Deutsche Telekom with partners has opened up in Berlin an own lab for Open RAN, where in the field people can test it. The money is flowing already today. We are applying in a very professional manner to this one. Our involvement, and you see that I can talk an hour for that one, is high. I'm personally involved into a lot of, let's say, debates on how to allocate best the business that digitization is leapfrogging in Germany.
That is the way going forward. We will see that over the next years now how it comes into the system, and the application is the challenge which we see today.
Okay, let me pick up on the headcount question, Polo. First of all, this is not a new process. We are reducing headcount in Germany since many, many years in the vicinity of 3%-5%. It depends on the year and the programs which are running. I think the basis for this, as I mentioned this in my presentation, is a very productive i nteraction between our HR organization and the social partner. We have a well-established process. We don't make this with a lot of noise. It's kind of a continuous decline of the headcount.
Do we see acceleration? I said in my IDC program, look, this is a lower ambition relative to the 1.5, the 1.2, and that is also due to the accelerated efforts which we're doing on fiber. We are, to a certain degree, restrained of letting people go because we're putting net capacity demand into the system in order to accelerate the fiber build-out. On the retirements, the retirements, to be honest, we can wait another couple of years and think they're kicking in in 2025, 2026, so we don't have the luxury like the French guys had that they could let people go because of retirements.
It will take quite a bit of time until we get to this, but in the middle of the 20th, then we're going to see an increase of natural leavers.
Great.
I think I'm maybe a veteran already in this scene here, especially when it goes to the Citi. There is this narrative that when you think about Germany, headcount reduction is impossible. We are anyhow not cost discipline because we are always on high quality, and we are not able to reduce headcount. If you see the constant decrease in our organization, if you see that we have over-delivered on the EUR 1.5 billion cost savings, which we have promised, I think this narrative is wrong, and you have to do it in a right way. It doesn't make sense to make that very loud and noisy and announce big programs. I think in Germany, the culture is to do that in a kind of competition and joint effort with our works council. There is no way that this is stopping.
With Srini on Germany, you have a no-bullshitter sitting on that business. He has started, by the way, in alliance with the unions, to think about how many SG&A, how many quality assurance, how many administrative people do we need in our organization. That is even a new push which came to the organization from that angle. I think when it comes to our 3%-5% EBITDA, you know that there is more cost discipline in every element needed to achieve it. Look, on the opportunities and risks, our plan is prudent, and we discussed it back and forth. If you take a look, I see currently more opportunities than I'm seeing risks, to be honest, because I think we have the worst times of COVID probably behind us in the next couple of months, and people are becoming more optimistic.
There is a significant backlog of digitalization efforts being in the public sector, being with smaller companies, and people actually value quality, which should help us in the proposition which we're providing to customers. We have a fairly rational market environment, and I hope that it continues to be. Obviously, I cannot influence that 100%, but what we've seen in the past actually gives me confidence that people are staying disciplined also and not becoming lunatics on pricing or something like this. Right now, I think I'm hopeful and confident that we actually achieve those numbers mid-term and short-term.
Excellent. There's some greater signs in front of some of the targets. Okay. Thank you, Polo. Next is Andrew. Hey, Andrew.
Hey, everyone. Thanks for the last 24 hours of answers. It answered a lot of our questions. I had one on Thorsten's slide 22, which is one we've all been struggling with. What gets DT to a EUR 20+ stock, and specifically the T-Mobile US valuation in DT. You guys obviously read analyst reports and speak to investors, and loads of people have highlighted that the DT European stub is cheap. Lots of people have highlighted it, but it hasn't really made any difference. Maybe DT Europe's super cheap. What it looks like is that DT investors aren't paying the right value for T-Mobile US within the DT share price, or at least not the same value as T-Mobile US investors are paying for the T-Mobile US listing.
The question is, why do you think this valuation discount exists? Outside of buybacks, is there anything you can do to make sure the DT shares better reflect the value you highlighted in TMUS and for DT overall? Great if you could also explain what you meant by seeing is believing. Thank you.
Thanks, Andrew. I know that you have written about this and quite smartly picked this up as well. It's a difficult question to answer, but we have seen this game being played out in many different sectors and also in our sector. For example, SoftBank and its stake in Alibaba not fully reflected in the SoftBank valuation. Sometimes you have then to crystallize this value, which we try to achieve by highlighting the value of our towers and of our Dutch operations. I think if it comes to the U.S., people are just waiting, as an investor in Deutsche Telekom, that they see the benefit of the value in the U.S. and the dividend, and that is what it means, seeing is believing. I think if we hit the EUR 1.75 in EPS, we can pay a much higher dividend and then the bots will buy.
I think it's a timing question. Keep in mind that over the last five years, T-Mobile US has appreciated significantly in value, but other than seeing it in the capital markets as a valuation, the DT investor, the DT shareholder, hasn't had the benefit of a higher dividend or cash coming out of this investment. I think this is a timing issue. We want to bridge this timing issue because it also gives us a greater pleasure to work and more optionality in the future if our share price is higher.
Therefore, as I said, it's not lost on me that some people are arguing, "Hey, why don't you buy back DT stock at this valuation if you are convinced in this?" By the way, we had a similar discussion a few years ago when DT's T-Mobile US stock was at $45, and some people internally were arguing, "Hey, why don't we sell some T-Mobile US stock in order to fund some stuff or buy back DT shares. I told these people the same thing that I tell them today. We have a leverage ratio that we want to bring down.
Second, we have a priority because it is financially very attractive in all of you to be invested in the U.S., and we don't want to get anywhere near a kind of trap where DT shareholders are not getting the benefits of the cash that is being generated in the U.S. It's not to say that we will not support kind of creative ways that Mike and the team comes up with investments in the U.S. I think to cut a long story short, seeing is believing. We need to see higher dividends, because that's the benefit that the DT shareholder wants to see.
We want to help a little bit by crystallizing that, just look at it, Germany and this wonderful European operation, which is growth, which is EBITDA margins and it's cash conversion. If you really look at this, sometimes I think, hopefully we can list Europe for a second, yeah? Put a value on this as well, then the market would better understand the benefit of having these assets not fully reflected in the share price.
You know, if Thorsten will be the CEO, I will be the chairman of 20 companies, I can tell you, because everything would be in the market. Europe in the market, T-Systems in the market, Telekom Deutschland in the market, U.S. in the market. Our Mr. Portfolio here. That's a funny remark. I can tell you two things. We have a lot of internal bets about the EUR 20. There are bets like, the moment we get it, we make a big donation to a good purpose. Thorsten was even dancing on the table in our supervisory board promising the EUR 20. Andrew, that was a big commitment. I was sitting under the table. We had the discussion as well internally on what can we do and what is the reason that we're not there yet.
One of the observation is that a lot of the machines are buying our stock. You're looking at it, and I think you're spot on. I saw your report recently, and I think you got the points and you understand our business. The machines, they're looking on different criterias. One of the reasons that we are focusing on earnings per shares seriously is that we believe that we can trigger additional demand on our stock by focusing on understanding better what machines are doing. That is one of the reasons that we are changing the paradigm here a bit. This is one of the elements. It's not about our fundamentals. It's not about the future prospects of our business that we are doubting. I think it's the way of communicating and addressing the market.
The second thing is, I have to say that, because I got some harsh mail from one of our competitors about my presentation where he said, "Look, it's totally unfair that you compare your total share return with ours, and you show yours growing while mine is shrinking. This is unfair. This is criticizing my work or whatsoever." I can tell you, I was not criticizing the work of the European peers. I know how tough the work is for Orange, Vodafone, and how great they're doing, by the way. The only issue is, if you're living Europe alone, we are in this narrative, Europe is a lost cause. Nobody gives a dollar on Europe in the telecommunication space, which has accelerated the issue. I think we are in Europe, all telcos, the good ones, are undervalued in the way how they're doing.
That was, I think, the story. If you cannot win in Europe, then you have to find ways, and you have to manage with the situation. That is, I think, what we did. Changing the portfolio, focusing on the U.S., investing heavily into that business, having the merger on hand, doing some structural changes. This is, I think, the message we did. We did okay in this regard. We think we can do significantly better. We believe we are a EUR 100 billion stock prospectively. Therefore, that's what we fight for. The third answer, Andrew. When we run out of this Capital Markets Day, and we were not allowed to do that earlier, this team is buying a big pile of stock. This is another commitment because we believe in our shares.
We were not able to do this beforehand because of the insider information we had, but we will do that right after that event. Please follow up on that one Monday. It is even put your money where your mouth is. I'm heavy invested in the stock, double digit, and I believe it's coming. It's a question of time that we see that, and I feel like an entrepreneur in that company, and we have to move on. Honestly, I believe we will see it. It's only a question of time.
Thanks, Tim. Just to repeat some of the numbers. Greater EUR 1. 75 in 2024. Christian said it's going to go there in a basically straight line. Next year, earnings are up. Over EUR 2 free cash flow per share, proportionate free cash flow per share in 2024. It's not a J curve. It's a straight line. That's what people will be looking at. That gives us confidence, and it's not a gem, the future story, right? Okay, let's move on. Thank you, Andrew. Move on to Usman. Hey, Usman.
Hey, thanks for the opportunity again. I have two questions, please. Firstly, on the special factors, cash outs in the ex-U.S. business. You spoke about some of the reasons why the cash flow guidance in the ex-U.S. business was a bit lower than the CMD in 2018. I guess one of the factors I can see is that the special factors cash are slightly higher, EUR 100 million-EUR 200 million higher than what was expected. I just wanted to understand what happened there and what is the outlook here to 2024? I know in the CMD 2018 presentation, there was a chart showing the special factors cash items going down to around EUR 700 million. Is that still the outlook or is it different? If so, why?
The second question is for Thorsten. Just on maybe pushing back a bit on what is in group development and what isn't at the moment. T-Mobile Netherlands, obviously doing really well. There's fiber optic happening in the Netherlands, their ARPU uplift in the market seems to be in a very good place. Why should it not go back into DT's ownership rather than you wanting to monetize that asset? Just related to that, I guess, is there any scope in T-Systems where I know a deal was attempted with IBM in the past. I mean, is there any scope to do anything, with regards to T-Systems that can better surface the value of that business?
Let me start with the special factors. First of all, Usman, you're right. We predicted a significant decrease towards 2021. I think we have been in the previous Capital Markets Day a little bit too optimistic. On the other hand, we also have reduced costs significantly higher than we anticipated to be, and therefore, we needed some additional special factors in order to fund this. If you take a look forward. Let me basically describe it in a free cash flow environment. We have EBITDA growth, which funds our expanded CapEx envelope and the free cash flow growth in the European business to EUR 4 billion. All of the other items are basically neutralizing themselves out. What we're going to do is, we expect obviously higher cash taxes in the upcoming years.
At the same time, we're going to see an improvement on the working capital, and we're going to see an improvement on the special factors. By this, at the outer years of the current projection, and we see whether we get there, but the last Capital Markets Day was a bit too optimistic on this one. I think it's worthwhile to spend those special factors. You have seen our indirect cost structure, and especially the significant amount of people, which we let go over the past four years.
Thorsten, you want to talk about the Netherlands?
With the Netherlands, First of all, Usman, it's a very fair point. It's our crown jewel in the European portfolio. Having said that, it's mobile only in Europe, in a market where you have two converged players. This is something that doesn't fit into our long-term, let me stress it, European strategy of owning FMC converged operators. That's the reason why we've also taken it apart from the group in 2017, not only to focus in intensive care on this, I don't say this word again, chicken excrement turning it into chicken salad, and I think now it's a coq au vin. I didn't say that. From that perspective, it's now the time to crystallize the value. Don't get me wrong.
If the value that someone is offering us for the next, let's say, five years of journey with this fantastic team and fantastic company, we may not sell it. It's just now we put it out there so that you see that on the sum of the parts value, there is something that has a value of about EUR 6 billion, according to your guesstimates. It gives us not huge deleveraging because we also lose some free cash flow. It gives us an opportunity to do other stuff that we may want to do, which I don't want to talk about for obvious reasons. Flexibility is king. You know how much I like optionality, picking in different buckets and seeing how we want to play around. We cannot say all in everything.
We have good ideas what we want to do, and as much as I love the company, as much as I love the management team and the employees, sometimes you have to do stuff and to relocate your focus. Let's put it this way. In terms of T-Systems, I think it's the same like on T-Mobile. First you need to fix an asset. Adel started on a tough journey in 2018, and then he ran into Corona before you can think about doing something with these assets.
Okay. Thank you, Thorsten. Next we have Ottavio at SocGen, please.
Hi. Thank you for taking the question and congratulations on the results so far. The first one, it's on the leverage, and it's for Christian. What I appreciate about Deutsche is that your target is always been very consistent, clear, and I would like if you can actually give a bit more granularity assumptions behind. One thing I talk about Deutsche that differentiates from a lot of peers is that you have room around your targets. You don't really go very straight to what you can achieve.
If you can tell us in terms of assumption, what you have baked in the participation to the TMUS buyback , if you do? Any segment of the SoftBank options? I believe that you assume only cash, despite you've got the option of delivering shares, DT shares in case. You mentioned about the renewal of the tower leases with Crown Castle and SBA Communications in the U.S. Do you have anything in that targets or any assumptions aligned to that one? Effectively, if you can talk around the assumptions, because the target is clear and your commitment is even more clear, but it would be interesting to know what's behind them, the assumptions.
The second one is to Thorsten the question. Your preferred partner, at least so far in the tower space, has been Cellnex. What management of Cellnex keeps saying is that the value is not on the towers per se, but on the size and the future cash profile guaranteed by the tenants. Therefore, my question is, what is the contractual relationship between GD Towers and DT at the moment, particularly on the length of the contracts? Any savings that has basically been granted to DT with new contracts assigned? Is there any escalator including these contracts?
The third, it's again to Thorsten. It's a bit of clarification. When you talk about market leading on third-party share of revenues, that's impressive. I always wonder if the 23% ratio you show in the slides, they only reflect the revenue from hosting the antenna, but also additional services such as the backhaul services provided to third parties such as Deutsche Telekom. When you talk about monetization, do you also plan to crystallize the value of the backhaul that's a bit differentiating for Deutsche in Germany and I guess in other markets? Thank you.
Okay, let me start with the first question on the leverage, Ottavio. Look, as I said early on, I don't want to change the corridor because I want to keep the discipline in the group, and I think there's a violent agreement among the board to basically stay like this. The second one is, look, we have clear visibility what we need in order to get to 50.1%. How many shares this mean? Obviously, you've heard Peter Osvaldik yesterday talking about a share buyback of up to two times 20 in the years 2023, 2024. Obviously, the share buybacks will help us to increase our position.
Obviously, we got the $45 million fixed price option, which will be accretive from my perspective, massively accretive, and gives us access to a low price to T-Mobile US and another $56 million on the floating option, which obviously need to be converted at a market price. There are other levers in place which we will not declare and explain. Thorsten's always talking about optionality along two different dimensions. One is the tools which we can use. The second one is timing. I think we have time until 2024, we will let you know whenever we have done something, what we have done, but I don't want to do a front-running. [crosstalk]
Real Madrid. [Non-English content] of course, i t will be as Jose and Alex are right when they say the value is not determined by the number of towers, but the size and the cash flow profile from the tenants. Absolutely. We do have a market standard MLA in place between Group Development and-- not Group Development, but our tower operations and TDG. It wouldn't be a good use of our time if I now dwell on what are the terms, because in a year, this will be completely started from scratch on, that you discuss the things that are important to us and important to them. That is where you see that a lot of things have changed.
Renewal clauses all or nothing, or the kind of as a number one or number two in the market, you may or may not like if a tower company is offering, which I could do today, Most likely we are not going to do this, to offer a very low price to get someone else on the tower. This needs to be negotiated and be balanced out. I found it very interesting the MLA terms to see on the last two transactions that were happening in the European place. We cross that bridge if we get there. In principle, it's absolutely right. The size and the cash flow profile and the commitment that you may give as an anchor tenant on the build-to-suit program that the TowerCo wants to offer.
As I said to you, we have an attractive company because the cash flow is very interesting that this TowerCo would get because we are going to build out a lot of towers over the next three years. As I said, this year alone, we are building out about 1,500 towers. In terms of third-party share revenues at 23%, yes, that's revenues from other TowerCos. It's not hosting of any, let's say, additional services. There's a little bit of broadcasting in there, but that's not significant. There's no backhaul in there. Of course, Bruno is always knocking on my door and say, "Hey, can we do this as well?" No, it's not. It's also not planned to monetize this
Great. Thank you, Thorsten. We've got time for two more questions. The next one, thanks Ottavio, is from James at. James, hello.
Hi, everyone. Can you hear me okay? Hello?
Yes.
Hi there. Great. Thank you. Yes, I have two questions, please. The first one, actually a little bit of a follow-up to Ottavio's just now. For Christian, I'd love to go a bit more into detail about the thinking about how you might be allocating cash towards TMUS. I'm a big fan of your decision today to push the leverage target out from 2023 to 2024. Certainly on my numbers, that would seem to give you now flexibility to exercise that SoftBank option before 2023, which might not have been there before. I suppose what I'm really wondering is, given you've announced the moving out of that target by a year, why are you also not announcing today exercising the SoftBank option? I presume if you're bullish on the T-Mobile share price going up, it'd be in your interest to exercise sooner rather than later.
Just interested to understand a bit more about what are the factors you're thinking about there. Similarly, with the buyback, I think Thorsten suggested you might sell in pro rata, you might not. Given again, presumably you're bullish on the asset and you're wanting to increase your stake, what would be then the thinking on then going ahead and selling shares into a buyback, which might be seen as slightly contradictory if you're bullish on the long-term view on the asset? Then question for Tim. I know, Tim, you were bemoaning the fact there were no questions about regulations. Here goes with one, which I think we've lived through probably 10 years of returns on capital declining in European telecoms, and now we're seeing really clear signs of it going up.
I just wonder, in your discussions with the regulators, how that metric is coming into play in your decisions. Do you find regulators have ideas of where returns on capital should be within the industry? Do you think regulators are happy with where your targeting returns should be going? Do you see scope for further upside in returns beyond that before regulators might look to come in at some point intervene again? Thank you.
Let me start with the leverage question and why don't we exercise the options right now. First of all, 45 million shares are basically being determined on the transaction price, which is $101. Why should I do it right now? I have a guarantee on this American option to do it until the end of the period, which is 2024. The second piece is the factor that I have declared I'm out of the comfort zone does not mean I can do whatever I want to. We expect this leverage right now to peak this year around 3.2-ish. We'll see how it plays out. If I basically would exercise the floating options because I assume a higher T-Mobile US price, obviously that would increase my net debt, and we don't want to do this. I think there's also a sequence, Thorsten, right?
Do we have to do the floating option first or the fixed price option first?
First.
We have to do the fixed price option first. That's a theoretical argument. There are other tools, I think you can think of how you basically secure a lower price. We don't have to exercise the options right now, but we have clear visibility on how we get to that 50.1%. The question hasn't been asked, but this group is really determined to get the majority to 50.1% and not 60% or something like this, because there are other things which need to be done in the overall portfolio as well.
I do not want to be disrespectful, there is no politician in the world who knows what a ROCE is. Maybe Thierry Breton understands it, return on capital employed and the definition of this one is something internal rate of return. I even had a discussion where I talked about market capitalization, and they were questioning what that is. Therefore, this is not something which is in school books of politicians in Europe or in Germany. Therefore, make it simple. Talk about what's going on. The pitch which we constantly do is, look, it's good that we have connectivity as a human right, and we understand that it should come for cheap, that people don't have to overpay on their expenses on communication. If it's too cheap, then we might reduce the costs. Allow synergies.
If you don't allow synergies because you don't want to see intra-market consolidation beyond what we have today, then you have to do something that there is enough funds available to invest into the expectation of higher fiber deployments and higher 5G. This flywheel, which we have shown, has to work. I have to admit that in Germany, this flywheel works better than in maybe in other markets like Spain or alike. That said, this is the way how they understand it. Now talking to Thierry Breton, talking to the German Chancellor's office, talking to the ministers here in Germany, my feedback is that they have changed horses. Their horse is, how can we create a digital sovereignty, especially from China? How can we guarantee security of the infrastructure going forward? That nothing is happening, that we never can get blackmail from the outside world.
How can we create innovation in Europe and enable digitization of businesses? What is your contribution to this one? How can you create an ecosystem for venture capitalists and cloudify this world? Gaia-X, this high topic of political leaders, wherever you are, you have this topic. That is impressive piece. I just had the day before yesterday, a session with the Bundeskanzler, where she was talking to the industry on ID management. There is a super big initiative going on ID management in Germany, which shows that these guys are more on the use cases now than on the classical infrastructure. This shows me as well that this ex-ante regulation is not that they are trying to steer it from political angle, but that they leave it to the industries.
I can tell you, we will hear a lot of noise now during the course of this year in Germany, because every party will guarantee something to the citizen with regards to bandwidth, with regard to coverage and other topics. We'll see how this is practically turn out at the end of the day, how it's getting financed. Nobody's talking about that. Nobody's talking about when and how this is going to take place, but they think it's needed. That is, I think, the opening for us or for me to say, "Guys, we are willing to do so. We need that for our society. We're a big enabler for digitization and future wealth. Here we are. We need your support on this one." ROCE and internal rate of return and the amortization rate can be explained.
Therefore, I think the balance of consumer prices to sustainable investments is getting into a much better equilibrium.
Thank you, Tim. Okay, good. It's all about equilibrium, right? Yeah, that one. In Germany, since 1st of April, bitstream fees are no longer ex-ante regulated, right? They are subject to commercial regulation and general cartel law. Okay. Thank you, James. Let's move on to Steve at Redburn. Steve, hey.
Good afternoon, guys, and thanks again for the excellent presentations you've given. I'll go for three, if I can. I want to come back on towers, but I actually want to ask Srini, not Thorsten, who understandably has garnered most of the attention. Srini, is Hello? I'm hoping Srini's there to answer the question.
Yeah, he's here.
Srini, come on the screen.
Yeah. I guess, Srini, you've been on. Take a mic.
You've been on both sides of the fence in terms of running challenger operators being in India now running incumbent in Germany. Just interested to hear your thoughts on the importance of tower ownership in Germany compared to the other markets you operated in, and how active the discussion is between you and Thorsten in terms of the future of towers within the German unit. That'd be super interesting to hear.
A question for Thorsten. Clearly a lot of funky infrastructure models out there on the wireline side. You can sort of goose the numbers in lots of different ways, but what's most important tends to be market penetration on network, how many customers you can get onto your fiber infrastructure. I'm kind of curious in that, how you think you'll make a return in Netherlands, where T-Mobile's got less than 10% retail share on fixed.
The thinking about that CapEx building to 80% of the country. How you're thinking you'll make a return on that investment. Then just a couple of sort of detailed ones on the earnings guidance. Can you just confirm that we should assume 50% stake in T-Mobile in the EUR 1.75? Christian, did you effectively place a ceiling on that stake at 50% in the last comment? Also just the tax rate you're assuming for the next three or four years in that guidance would be very helpful as well. Thanks.
Let me start. Steve, I want to hire you for my finance organization because your face is always looking that serious and grumpy. I think you are very much qualified for our finance department. After that charm offensive. [crosstalk]
Great takes up two questions.
Yeah.
Steve, rather disappointingly, I agree with a lot of what Thorsten said. It's a lot more fun when I disagree with it. Let me give you a couple of perspectives on things that I agree with, right. First, on Germany itself, I think Thorsten's right. There's a smaller than you think number of strategic sites, and those ones I'm absolutely interested in making sure that we keep those golden sites or however you want to call them, right. Piece two for me, which is kind of just read across from some of the India experience on towers, how that compares to more mature markets. I think there's kind of a couple of different tower players, right. There's one which is effectively a pure financing play, right, which is effectively exploiting arbitrage in the market.
I think you need to do it when you need to do it, depending on the state of your balance sheet. I think there's a more interesting structural play, which is bringing in genuine expertise into managing towers and creating real value from the towers themselves, by either getting in a team that's been there, done it before, or actually creating more value through greater tenancy. My instinct is always more on the second side rather than on the first side. As in when we do stuff with the Kingmaker asset, I think what you will land up seeing is much more a sense of how do we create genuine economic value from this, and also how do we give ourselves exposure to an asset class that my personal belief is going to grow with time, right?
I think that's the way in which more and more mature markets are going to get structured. I hope that answers some of the questions at least that you had on it.
Okay. We can't hear you, Steve.
Sorry. [crosstalk]
Okay. Go ahead.
All right. Okay. Sorry, Steve, let me dwell on this and that you see that we are sitting here not fighting. It's the lessons learned over the last three years on towers. I tell you, this is happening at every number one and number two operator in the market where you have a guy who's running the NatCo , and then there's a guy who's running the towers, and it starts with just the CTIO running the towers, and then the fight starts. You see the power of this team. We've lived through this discussion together over the last three years. We have a CEO in the German region who understands shareholder value and who understands how we can participate in this asset class, and that actually the towers are not a strategic control point.
As long as you have an MLA in place that is protecting you via the golden sites, as long as you have an MLA in place that is protecting you from the TowerCo of dumping tower capacity to other operators at very low price, as long as you are not at the mercy of the TowerCo and price renegotiations and picking the towers and if you touch the towers with new antennas. I think that gives you a good indication that we are fairly advanced in our thinking of what we need in order to get the best out for our shareholders. In terms of Netherlands, this is a question not for me. This is a question that you should ask, obviously, the investors.
It's not lost on me that you look at it from this perspective, how you make a return in this three-player market where you only have one tenant at the get-go. We have given, obviously, certain commitments. Of course, it goes without saying that this smart team that is committing to build our 1 million fiber lines for us needs another tenant on it, and it will come over time. There are obviously also interesting discussions in this market about public to private and what may or may not happen. Steve, forgive me, this is a question that you have asked the fiber co., whether they make a return on it and not so much for me. I like it because it gives me a showcase. I know what I pay for it.
I can go to the regulator in a non-regulated market and say, "Hey, there's a huge asymmetry." Second, it gives me something to support us on FMC in the future.
Okay. On the earnings guidance, Steve, first of all, yes, we assumed the 50% stake in T-Mobile US. Again, let me repeat, this is why we said greater EUR 1.75, and we assumed the current tax regime, which we have in the U.S. because we don't want to speculate where the corporate income tax is moving towards from 21%, nor do we want to speculate on a minimum tax burden, which is also being discussed. I think we wait until the environment has come to a conclusion or the politicians have come to a conclusion. That's the answer for your answer. For your question, sorry.
Very good. Steve, let me say, I work in the finance department of Deutsche Telekom, and I'd love to welcome you as a colleague, okay? Let's work on that. Before I pass on to Tim for his closing statement, let me just thank you all for your kind and patient attention, the many good questions we have had. Also thank the management team and all those who have supported them to prepare these presentations. I'd like to thank my team for their dedication and their hard work. I hope you take something away from this Investor Day that is what we wanted to convey, which is our spirit of acceleration and excitement about the future, and it's a very significant, highly visible, and great earnings growth that is ahead and how we will balance our capital allocation so it's to the maximum benefit of our shareholders.
With that, I pass on to Tim for his closing statement. Thank you.
Thank you very much, everybody. Before I go into the very short summary, let me say thank you as well. I'd like to thank Hannes for making this Capital Markets possible again and all the content. I can tell you cannot believe how much work we have spent into that one. I'd like to thank his investor relation team and our strategy team on bringing all this stuff together. I'd like to thank my board colleagues and the U.S. team for making this event happening. I can tell you, it feels a little bit here like X Factor. We are sitting since nine hours in one studio here all together, and I can tell you, always when somebody is coming off stage, we do this or we do that.
I can tell you, there's one guy who is going into extension, which is Thorsten. Real Madrid against Bayern Munich, it is nil-nil, and therefore he has to work on his presentation style and especially on the pictures on me. There's another thing I'd like to thank everybody who made this event here, even from a COVID safe working environment possible. You cannot believe how difficult it was, and hopefully it was the last time that we had these difficulties and even the technical stuff here. I'm very proud about technicians, about the camera people, and all the people in the studios here because it showed the digitization and the virtual world is really working. There was no slippery, nothing. Our work, our network was always stable allocating all the details. Great work. Thank you for that one.
Summary. I do that quickly because I know. You are tired. I'd like to thank you for listening to us for nine hours. I was thinking about a picture, and you sitting at your home offices and watching us for nine hours. Think about watching nine hours of a Netflix series, how you feel after this. This binge-watching of Deutsche Telekom. I feel sorry for that one. Look, this was the fourth episode of binge-watching Capital Markets Days of Deutsche Telekom. I'm a main actor. I'm still alive. This is surprising in a Netflix series, but that is good. The rest of the team is there. Thank you for nine hours of binge-watching Capital Markets Day. I hope you got something. I have to say, there's one colleague. She didn't join us today, which is Birgit Bohle, our Head of HR.
She deserves an appreciation as well because she was listening for nine hours, her team here. Look, I thought we can compensate that. For all of you, we make an extra episode, nine hours of HR. You will really enjoy that, I would say. Coming to some serious comments here a bit. Remember on the last Capital Markets Days, I was on stage at the end, and I was talking about the European market, a single market. I was talking about the regulation which is going to improve. I was talking about the opportunities of digitization. I was talking about the opportunities one might have in the U.S. with a deal, and I was talking about growth. At that point in time, I was sharing a lot of optimism in an industry which was in really dire straits and a very pessimistic and negative approach.
Honestly, now four years down the road, we delivered. We were able to deliver a company and to show you a company which is growing. I will do that again. I do it again. I know that now we have accelerated on what we did. We have delivered on a lot of things. We even say our targets should be higher than they were the last time. I do that again because I am optimistic about the opportunities around digitization. I am optimistic about the setup of Deutsche Telekom and its portfolio where we are today. I am very optimistic about the team and the attitude, the culture Deutsche Telekom has evolved over the last years, which gives us a lot of self-confidence to tackle the challenges which are lying in front of us.
Therefore, I hope that we were able to share a bit of that optimism around that we believe we have a real right to play, and we should be the choice, the pick, which you should choose in the telco industry going forward. I think Deutsche Telekom is not a one-bet company. We are a multi-bet opportunity. From all the angles which we are playing in the U.S. with the synergies, in Germany now with our fiber attack, when it comes to the 5G deployment, the B2B opportunities where we, as a former incumbent, have all the right to play and to grow. This is a multi-bet opportunity, hopefully we came across that way. Now the but. I can tell you, if the cameras are off, I will tell my team one thing. Do you believe everything you have said? This leading here, this kind of premium there.
We are the best. We are outperforming all the others. I can promise you one thing. We are coming down to Earth. This is something which we are striving for. This is something we maybe get as feedback in our industry. I can tell you, only the paranoid survives. If you talk about leading is not, for me, something static. Leading is dynamic. If we talk about leading European telco, leading is not something which is a benchmark to others. Leading is an attitude. It's the way how we're striving all the time to do the best for this company. I cannot promise you that we will deliver on all these ambitious targets which we have laid out. I can promise you one thing, that we have the attitude to always do the best to achieve what we have committed over the last nine hours.
This is our playbook for the future, and we are trying to play that playbook as best with a leading attitude going forward. This world is not going to be easier over the next three to four years. We have this big conflict between China and the Americas. These two hemispheres which are decoupling. This is triggering challenges on the supply chain. This is triggering challenges about the volatility of markets. We have this huge indebtedness of our societies after COVID-19. We have the nationalism in a lot of countries who feel challenged from the rest of the world. We have political unrest in our society.
Therefore, I think that the purpose of trying to help societies to become better, to enable societies for future wealth, to be sustainable in what you're doing, the purpose to bring that across into the companies and to your employees, this is a big driver for the energy which is needed to give orientation this time. Telekom will be a lighthouse, an orientation point for the society and its employees, and this, I think, is releasing a lot of additional energy, which makes us possible to fulfill the commitments which we're given. Exactly that is, let's say, what we are about. It's about the passion for our brand. It's about the passion for the purpose of what we are doing for societies. The good thing is, we are not stretched. We have one clear area where we are. We are the transatlantic telco.
We are in one hemisphere where we can play this playbook. This is a big advantage, not only from a risk and a volatility perspective, but even as well from an identity perspective. We hope that we can convince more buyers into our stock, more people who trust in Deutsche Telekom, the transatlantic leader. Thank you very much for joining us and hope to see you soon, healthy and physically.