Morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to freenet. Good morning. Welcome to the freenet AG conference call on the Q1 2026 results. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity to ask questions following the presentation. I will now hand over the call to Robin Harries, CEO of freenet AG.
Morning, everyone, welcome to our Q1 earnings call 2026. I'm Robin Harries, the CEO of freenet. We are very happy about the start into the year. We could see strong revenue growth and strong growth in terms of free cash flow. We had a solid and sustained customer growth across mobile and IPTV, and we had some nice operational highlights, for example, the relaunch of our domain, freenet.de, and we started further AI initiatives, so we brought AI bots live. We are keep integrating mobilezone Germany, the company that we acquired last year. We confirm our guidance for the full year 2026.
As I said, we are happy about the start into the new year. Next slide, please. On the following slides, I will focus on our two core segments, which are mobile and IPTV. I'm going to start with an update about developments in the mobile segment. One good thing is that the market is shifting to value over volume. As you know, we saw or we had very strong competition since 24, which had a very negative impact on pricing. It started in 24, we saw further negative developments over the course or in the beginning of 25.
The good thing is that in the end of 2025, during the Cyber Week, we could observe that it was the first time for years where prices didn't go down further. Normally, during the Cyber Week, prices go down further, last year this didn't happen, in the end of the year, we could even increase prices. This is what we keep doing. You know, in the beginning of this year, we increased our front book pricing, this is also something that we observe in the market. For example, our competitors, they increased the lower price, the lower prices, for example, from EUR 4.99 to EUR 6.99. You could see this when you look at 1&1 or if you look at Blau.
Other competitors, they started to increase prices. We did the same. I mean, front book prices went up 1%-2% at freenet, which is good. We believe that there's a shift and this is, I think, good for the entire industry. Another good thing is that we are in constructive discussions with the one network provider. We mentioned this last time that we have an unfavorable contract, this was the reason why we had an outlook for this year, which was between EUR 500 million and EUR 530 million adjusted EBITDA because there might be a negative impact of EUR 50 million, which is already included in our outlook.
We are talking to the partner. Yeah, we have C-level discussions every week, we see good progress, constructive progress. Outcome is still not predictable yet, so far we are also happy about the progress there. Next slide, please. One important thing when we talk about mobile is the development of our premium brand, freenet. freenet is the most important brand in our company and is our premium brand. We switched, or we had a relaunch. In the past, the domain for our mobile offerings was under the domain freenet-mobilfunk.de, we switched it. We moved it to freenet.de. Now you have our best offers under freenet.de. This was the start for our brand marketing investments.
Since the beginning of the year, since the move of the domain, we already had four TV campaigns, for example. The TV spots are clearly focused on brand messaging. We created spots where you can see the brand a lot, where you can feel the brand, and they're connected to strong mobile offerings where we sell mobile phones so that our customers connect the brand freenet to mobile phones. That's very important because if you look at unaided brand awareness, that's a big chance, a big opportunity for freenet because the people in Germany, they know the brand freenet. If you ask about where they want to buy their or where they could buy their next mobile phone.
If you look at unaided brand awareness, our numbers are just around 10%. This is a low number. If you compare it to our competitors, like 1&1, they are over 40%. The others are even higher. That's a big opportunity for us to increase our brand awareness. We are doing this through performance-based brand marketing investments that increase the traffic on our website, which also increase the sales for the brand freenet. This will help us to further drive more direct traffic to our website. So far, we are really happy about the developments. We could see significant uplifts in terms of visits.
Conversion rates are getting better because when you get branded traffic, this traffic has the highest quality. We will keep doing this, over the course, I guess, next months and also years to increase the performance-based brand marketing investments. We will also further improve our website. So far, there's still room for improvement in terms of user experience on the website. We will further increase the conversion rates, and we will also further increase our offerings. When you look at the, For example, we will include or also offer further bundles. Next slide, please. Here we have some nice numbers. As you can see, last quarter, we grew 29,000 net adds in the mobile business.
This, even though we increased the prices, as I said, we started to increase prices beginning of the year, we could see a solid growth. Especially when you look at our competitors, I think that's a really strong number, and we're happy about it. Besides the growth in terms of postpaid net adds, we could also increase our postpaid service revenues. That's always I think both is good development. On the right side, you can see postpaid reselling. This is new. We included this this time for the first time. These are reselling adds that we generate through our mobilezone business. I think overall, we see easing competition, which is good.
We are happy about the development in terms of postpaid. We have strong reselling business, and the combination of our service provider business and our reselling business is actually very interesting and gives us new opportunities. Of course, our objective is to get our own users and to focus on the server provider business, but it can also make sense to increase or to become more active in the reselling business. We look at actually the outcome and look at where we can earn the most money. This gives us more flexibility, more possibilities, and we are really happy about the new part of the business that we acquired last year. Next slide. Now I'm turning to our second core segment, the IPTV business.
There we saw a nice development as well. 42,000 net adds in the IPTV business, which is strong. Besides this, we could also generate a nice adjusted EBITDA. Since the beginning of last year, we see very good developments in terms of profitability. We are proving that this money can really contribute significantly to our bottom line. I mean, the product is really fantastic. If we look at ratings, if we look at tests, we see that it's not also our view that, but that our customers, that they also like the product a lot. For example, YuppTV was the winner of the connect test, which is a very important one, and also won the SATVISION test.
I mean, That's a stable subscriber business which is growing, adding more customers, contributing to the bottom line. It's not only that we earn money through subscribers, it's also that we earn money through targeted advertising. That's actually very interesting. Because here we have, for example, the Dynamic Ad Substitution. This is, for example, when you watch ProSieben, and you watch it through, or another channel, and you watch it through waipu.tv, you see different advertising. Advertising, which is really targeted on the audience. That's, I think, really powerful. Besides this, we also have FAST channels in waipu.tv, and there we have a Dynamic Ad Injection. That means that we include our ads and the advertising into those FAST channels.
This is, the targeted advertising is getting more and more important. We already have significant impressions. I think it's also a very good sign that the big German broadcasters are working with us. On the next slide, please. For us, mobile business is important. The IPTV business is important, but it's also very important for us to see progress in terms of AI. I mentioned during the last earnings call that we want to be the AI first telco company in Germany. I think we have a good advantage because we have flat hierarchies. We have a relatively small organization compared to our big competitors, and we are fast. We want to be the speedboat, the attacker in the market, and actually, that's what we're doing.
When you look at the speed, how we implement AI, I'm really impressed by this. I'm impressed by the team and also the capabilities to change, yeah. If you look at our teams, they're really hungry. They want this, yeah. They implement this and they are doing this in a very good way. For example, we started our first test with our AI voice bots. If you call our service lines today, there's already a small part which is operated by AI voice agents. Here we are still in the testing stage, but we are scaling this and this is already a interesting part.
We are keen to further scale this through the course of the year. This will improve our customer service a lot. This will help us to become more efficient. That's really good. We also started our new AI buddy in telesales. This is an AI tool for our call center agents. For example, when they do outbound calls, now they got much better information. They have a tool that shows them what to offer to the customer. This tool reacts to the reaction of the customers and suggests new offers and so on. This is I think also a big opportunity. We further developed our AI Smart Pricing.
If you consider that we have over 8 million customers, that's actually a lot of data and you need to know what to offer to the customer at what point in time, and you need to know what offer you should offer the customer. There we see a big advantage by using AI, and this is our Smart Pricing. We have now just rolled out our Smart Pricing 2.0, which is a further development of our initial activities. This is just a start. We focus on our customer segment at the moment. Besides this, we are also looking into, for example, new customer acquisition into things how we can further optimize the creation of our commercials.
We also hired one expert. This is also a nice story. He was already with mobilezone. Now he's reporting directly to me. He's responsible for our AI activities within the company. Yeah, there's a lot of focus. It's progressing. We are very happy about it, and I'm relatively sure that we will see further nice development and progress over the course of this year. With that, I would hand over to Ingo.
Good morning, everybody from my side. I start with the group overview. I think you will see that the structure of the pages, we changed it a little bit. We got some hints from your side. I think investor relations department was here very creative. I hope that the new structure will give you more transparency than before. On this first page here, you see the group figures. Revenue, a strong increase based on first time of mobilezone consolidation. Gross profit with an increase of 2.2% to EUR 242 million. In the adjusted EBITDA, we see a decrease, I think Robin already mentioned it.
We have this network operator contract, which we are in negotiation about at the moment, the effect from this is minus EUR 12.5 million versus last year. Without this effect, it would be an increase of 6%. I think we are happy with the basic business and definitely happy with the adjusted free cash flow, which is EUR 85.7 million in the 1st quarter of 2026. I think I discuss it later on, but it's a good development in net working capital because of bonus payment from the networks. Moving to the revenues. What we see here, definitely, and I already mentioned, is the first consolidation of mobilezone and the strong growth.
We see an increase in hardware sales. From the past you know that we were not that interested in increasing hardware revenues. But here the situation is different because, as you know, they, mobilezone, they have a contract with Apple. First time we get the iPhone directly from this contract. There is the possibility to get more iPhones, which was a problem in the past. I think here in this case, I'm not that unhappy about the increasing hardware revenues therefore. What you see in the other business here, which is increasing, this is based on the 182,000 reselling customers which were gained in the first quarter.
Because in resale, you get provisions, and you do see these provisions here under other, and this is the reason for the increase. Moving to the IPTV business. Yeah, I think it is all as expected. We see an increase in revenues. Definitely main or mainly driven by subscription revenues, where we saw an increase of EUR 4.5 million, which is more than 10%. I think I mentioned it during 2025 several times that from the that we were unhappy to lose the contract with Telefónica, but on a profit and revenue base, this was not that big problem for us, and therefore, here also the headwind is not that big. Advertising is also increasing. Robin already referred to it.
Other holding, now here the, in the new segment structure, much bigger, because in the other holding segment, we show Media Broadcast now, the antenna broadcasting business, which is relatively stable, but the B2C customers are still shrinking here. Moving to the gross profit. It's, it's I think it is a, it's a very good picture, because we see the increase by EUR 2.5 million here in mobile in the first quarter. If you put into consideration that we have the negative effect of EUR 12.5 million from from the Telefónica or from the, yeah, from the Telefónica agreement which is under negotiation now.
On the other hand, you see that we gain gross profit from mobilezone of EUR 17 million in the first quarter. In addition, you see that we lost or that we sold the cloud, our Wi-Fi business mid of last year, but in the first quarter, it was still part of the figures. We lost EUR 3.5 million from this business here. All in, the margin decreased to 26.7%. This is mainly linked to the higher hardware sales, what we did in the quarter. IPTV, stable, strong development. I think you see based on the revenue increase, you see the gross profit increase.
Subscription is gaining traction, so we increased it, and we also increased advertising gross profit. From both sides, this is very successful. Other holding, we see the slight increase based of the shrinking B2C antenna business here, but it's also relatively stable what we see here. All these effects you can find in the EBITDA on the next page. Mobile looks bad, if you know the effect, if you normalize the Q1 of 25 by reduction of the EBITDA from the cloud, the base is something like EUR 101.9 million.
If you also normalize Q1 2026 by the negative effect from this MNO contract, then you would see that there is an increase in the. It shows that the underlying business is very solid, it's stable, so we are fine with the mobile results, what we see. IPTV, an increase by EUR 3 million. It's, in relative terms, it's impressive, nearly 50%. I think on the one hand, you saw on the gross profit level an increase by EUR 2.2 million. This was even possible with a reduction of cost.
We spent less for marketing in this first quarter, and therefore we see the increase of EUR 3 million and margin step up here to 17.1%. In the other holding segment here on the right-hand side, yeah, we see an increase in results. This is not based on the antenna business, it is based on the reduction on the board level here. Therefore, I think this was something what will be seen during the year. Moving to the free cash flow bridge. Here also a slight change in the structure, how we show it. I think what you can see is that in net working capital, we are much more successful than last year.
On the one hand, we get more bonus payments from the networks. On the other hand, we had to increase our inventories because we do not know if hardware will be available during the year. Therefore, we increased our inventories to more than EUR 100 million. This I have not seen before as a CFO and all this hardware, most of the hardware is already paid. It's, I think it's even more impressive, this net working capital development in the first quarter. Taxes, no big changes, on the same level as last year. CapEx, slightly higher investments, based on the digital radio side mainly, but again, all in a very low CapEx level. We are still CapEx light. No changes here.
Lease payments on a comparable level. Interest payments a little bit higher because we had this bridge financing for the acquisition of mobilezone, which we could repay in April with a new promissory note. Yeah, interest had to be paid, and therefore the higher interest payments here. All in, I think we are happy with nearly EUR 86 million of free cash flow in the first quarter. I think with this last very good figure and with the hint to the very, very healthy balance sheet what we do have, I hand over to the operator again and ask you to start the Q&A, please.
Thank you very much. Dear ladies and gentlemen, if you are dialed in the conference call, please dial star 9 and the pound key to raise a question. I repeat, the combination is star 9 pound key. You can also raise your question via the web interface if you click on the dial-in button and then raise your hand. We have a couple questions already incoming. The first one is from Slobodan Rakonjac, Goldman Sachs. Slobodan, it's you.
Hi. Hi, good morning, everyone. Two questions from me this morning. The first one on Telefónica Deutschland. When should we expect an update on a potential agreement or a renegotiation? Would this be communicated via a stock market announcement or as a part of two-tier results? Could you just give us some color on this, please, given that you're meeting with their management often? The second one is: How are you thinking about postpaid net adds for full year, both in total and also split between the core business ex mobilezone and mobilezone? Thank you.
Sophia, thanks a lot for your questions. I take the first one. I would have the hope from today's point of view that we get a good agreement, a good new agreement with Telefónica. This would lead to a Yeah, I would expect a change in the guidance, and therefore a stock market announcement would be necessary. It is our hope that on the base of an agreement, a stock market announcement would be necessary. I think therefore, yes, definitely yes. I The postpaid question, I think, Robin.
Regarding postpaid, we gave the guidance that we expect moderate growth here. We showed last year, especially in the second half of the year, our muscles and the ability to grow, to show strong growth. We are happy about the start into the quarter with almost 30,000. We have opportunities the next quarters. This also depends on our competitors. At the moment, I think it looks quite good. As you know, the price is always a lever. It's a driver. I think we have or we are able to steer the customer growth. Therefore, I mean, we keep our guidance with moderate growth.
Okay. Thank you.
Much. The next question comes from Polo Tang, UBS. Polo Tang
Morning. Thank you for taking the questions. I have 3. The first one is just about your MNO agreements. You mentioned that you're in constructive negotiations with Telefónica Deutschland about a new agreement. If you do get a new deal, will the step up in EBITDA be EUR 50 million, or is that number up for negotiation? Just related to your MNO agreements, can you confirm if your other MNOs have approached you about renegotiating their existing agreements? Can you remind us if these MNO deals require you to deliver a minimum level of volume in order to maximize the bonus payments? Second question is really just about waipu.tv. Revenue trends and subscriber trends were perhaps lighter than consensus expected.
How confident are you that subscriber net adds at waipu.tv can accelerate to the 300,000-400,000 per annum, that you were, basically that you need to achieve to get to your 2.7 million-3 million subscriber target by 2028? Given that Deutsche Telekom has exclusive rights to the FIFA World Cup, do you see a risk that Deutsche Telekom's MagentaTV will take share in Q2, Q3? My final question is really just about mobile consolidation. We've also had a lot of headlines about potential mobile consolidation in the German market. If this does happen, how should we think about the potential impact on freenet? Thank you.
Yeah, thanks for your question. Regarding the Telefónica contract. Yeah, I mean, we are. I mean, it depends. Yeah, we are in negotiations there. So far, there's nothing to close. It's still unpredictable. We see good progress, as Ingo just mentioned. It's also important for a new contract, or if we want to have a fruitful and healthy, long-lasting partnership, it's important that we create win-win situations. I think that's important, yeah, if you think about the following years. I think this is also something that the new management understands, and therefore we are, I think, quite positive. Yeah. Regarding the other network providers, no, they haven't approached us regarding renegotiations.
I mean, we are in discussions and we have good relationships with them. We are in close touch. That's normal business. I think there's nothing special. In terms of subscriber trends with waipu.tv, I think the quarter is quite strong if you look at the last quarters. I mean, we grew with over 40,000. That's strong. That's really healthy. It's a good start. When you think about the rest of the year, I mean, the fourth quarter is always strong. Yeah. We believe there will further increase. If you think about the soccer championship, this is also good.
If you look at our competitors or competitor, one competitor, they have a massive marketing campaign, and this is always good for the IPTV market. Yeah. The more people learn the product, yeah, the more people that switch from traditional cable to IPTV and know and experience the benefits, that's good for the market, that's good for us. Besides this, I mean, we have our own marketing campaigns. We prepare things. We are at Waipu, we are very fast in creating new campaigns, in creating new business relationships and then to come out. There we are, we are quite confident that we will see further positive development here. Your last question was related to a possible mobile consolidation.
For us, that's actually not important if there are 3 or 4 mobile network providers. I mean, I was also a board member of 1&1 for 6 years, there we had only 1 relationship with Telefónica. This worked also quite well. I mean, in the end, it's important that you have at least 1 partner. We are now at the moment in a very good situation. Where we have contracts with all 4 network providers, also with 1&1 beside this. With 1&1, for example, we started to integrate them into our shops. Yeah. There we already have over 30 shops where we also already started to sell 1&1 contracts. Yeah.
At the moment, we have contracts with all four of them. If there's only three instead of four, I don't think that this will have a negative impact on us. Yeah.
Okay
answered your question.
Clear. Thank you.
Yeah.
More questions. The next question is from Stephane Beyazian, Oddo BHF. Please over to you.
Yes. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I was just curious, starting with mobile, if you could help us, you know, which competitors are playing the front book and which are not actually playing the front book and still potentially dragging the industry. My second question still regarding mobile is, can you help us understand how significant is the gap between the front book and the back book pricing to try to understand, you know, how long it could take for mobile ARPU to stabilize and bounce back?
Finally, if that's possible, I was just curious to know, when do you think the O2 MVNO contract would be at zero? Thank you.
Good morning, Stephan. I take the last one. It is already at zero. I think there were still some customers in the 1st quarter. I think we still have 1,000 or 2,000 customers. This I would call zero. I take the other questions regarding the front book pricing. I mean, at the moment, if you look at our competitors, Telekom increased prices. Then you have Vodafone, they increased prices. You have Telefónica, especially with Blau, they increased prices. They were very aggressive in the past, but they increased it, and we did the same. We did this especially in our channels, where we have price-sensitive customers, there we increased a lot.
Overall, I think everybody does smart things at the moment. It's like not last year, this was sometimes unhealthy. You know, there you could see offers that actually did not create value. They were too cheap. This has changed. When you look at the overall ARPU, I mean, front price booking went up. If you look at the overall ARPU, it's still going down. This is something that you can also see with our competitors. That's the same with freenet. This will take time a little bit because, I mean, yes, you have churn. You have old customers with higher ARPUs that with in the normal churn, they leave us.
You have new customers from 2024, 2025 that were cheaper. Overall, the impact of the overall ARPU is still decreasing. I mean, if you do the right things today, this year, so this will be also play out positively in the near future. That's it.
All right. Thank you.
Welcome.
Thank you very much. Next question is from Karsten Oblinger, DZ Bank. Please over to you.
Good morning, everyone. The first question is about the difference of the adjusted EBITDA and the reported EBITDA. Could you remind us of the EUR 2 million? The second one is about the possible IPO of Waipu. Is there any new idea about timing or the IPO in general?
Good morning, Karsten. Thanks for your questions. The adjusted EBITDA, most of the EUR 2 million is linked to an old board to a contract of an board member who resigned, there was still a payment which was necessary. This could be concluded in the first quarter, it is mainly driven by HR. On the waipu.tv IPO side, all what I know is that we did the soft announcement. I think you know our position. We have to support this IPO because the minority shareholders have the right to start it. It is started. We support it, as I know, there will also be a roadshow from the board members here from Exaring AG.
Yeah. This is all what I can say. I think our position has not changed. We are happy with the 75% what we do have. We would not need an IPO, but yeah, I think we have contracts, and I think this is how you know us. If we have a contract, then we act corresponding to what we signed some years ago. Yeah, I think we have to wait and see what happens. You are nearer to the investors. At the end of the day, the investors will decide, and I think we support it, but we do not need it.
Okay. Thank you.
The next question is from Florian Treisch, Kepler Cheuvreux. Go ahead, please.
Yes. Good morning, everybody. One question left on my list. I think in a recent newspaper article, you mentioned that you're thinking about extending into new verticals. I think you also touched on that in a recent conference call. I think you mentioned that fiber might be an interesting idea to enter. I mean, we have seen decent positive feedback from 1&1 in the call some days ago. Can you give us an update here what to expect from your end? Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks for the question. Good one. Yes, this is, I think a very nice opportunity for us, and we are on it. I mean especially when you talk about fiber. It's difficult to do marketing. It's important that you talk to your customers. It's, like, not easy to sell it because you cannot just do display advertising or so. It's a complicated product that you need to explain to people because, yeah, you have to go into their house and that stuff, and so on. Therefore, it's-
Helpful if you have shops. We have around 500 shops, and where we good locations, and then we also have good partnerships, for example, with MediaMarktSaturn. We have a very good footprint in Germany and we have a huge customer base of over 10 million customers. Therefore, I think it makes a lot of sense to also start doing marketing and to create a nice broadband product. We are in discussions with partners, we are proceeding here. It's something that will take some months, but we will do something here, and this will be a further nice opportunity for us.
Thank you.
Welcome.
Thank you very much. The next question is from Usman Ghazi, Berenberg. Please, over to you.
Hi. Thank you for the question. The first one is on the MNO headwind. In Q4, it was positioned that the worst case would be for about EUR 50 million in the year, and in Q1, you sort of did EUR 12.5 million. Has anything changed with how we should think about the worst case and best case with this? Second question on mobile net adds. How much of these are coming from the mobilezone sort of sales channel versus own freenet? Thank you.
Good morning. I'm not sure if I understood the first question correctly. We said there could be a headwind of something like EUR 50 million. In the first quarter, it was EUR 12.5 million. If you do the math and if we already had EUR 13 million last year in the fourth quarter, you are correct. I think the effect from the MNO contract in the full year will be EUR 50 million. It will be something like EUR 37 million higher than last year. If I got the question correct.
I think with the EUR 12.5 million in the first quarter, we are, and I'm not happy about it, we are on track to reach the EUR 50 million for the year if it works linear. The second one.
Yeah. This is, as you can see, we now report postpaid customers. There we grew around 30,000, which is mainly from freenet. We also show our reselling contracts, which are around 180,000. This is the mobilezone business. There are also some customers included from mobilezone, through the brand Hi, in the postpaid customers, but this is a rather small number.
Okay. Yeah. That's clear. Thank you.
Yeah.
Very much. Dear ladies and gentlemen, as there are no more questions in the queue, I am closing the Q&A session and handing the floor back over to the hosts.
Yeah. Thanks a lot. We want to thank all our employees for this fantastic job. We know that we are demanding and that there's a lot on their plate at the moment. Together, we are sure we will move forward step by step. We have many opportunities about us, and that is really great and besides, it's also a lot of fun. Thanks to all of us, and thanks for joining this call. Bye-bye. We wish you a nice day.
Bye-bye.