Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to call. For your information, this call is recorded. I would like to give the floor to Mr. Grossman. You have the floor.
Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to today's investors' and analysts conference to the six-month results for 2022. Our board members, Ralph Dommermuth and Martin Mildner, will explain the developments of the first half of the year and the figures and give you a forecast for the second half of the year. After this presentation, the board will be available for your questions and answers. I would like to give the floor to Mr. Dommermuth now.
Well, thank you very much, Mr. Grossman. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our semi-annual conference. Mr. Mildner and I have split this up for this afternoon, that I will give you the company development for the first half year with the forecast of the overall year, and Mr. Mildner will then give the results, the figures in detail for the first half of the year. I'll start with business development. Many of you know this overview. It shows our business model. We distinguish between our Internet access business and the applications business. That's our applications area. Here we address, on the one hand, consumers and on the other hand, business customers. In the center, you can see our assets. We have more than 10,000 employees, of which approximately 3,600 in product management development and data centers. We are strong in sales. We generate more than 5,000 contracts per year.
On a daily basis, 50,000 people register for our free services. We operate 67 million accounts in 17 countries. We have 19 larger data centers and 400 micro data centers running a total of 100,000 servers in the U.S. and Europe. We have a powerful network infrastructure in Europe. We have a fiber network of more than 53,000 km length. In our group, there are different brands. In the access business, we address our consumers with our main brand, 1&1. We have several discount brands such as simplytel, smartmobil.de or WinSIM. Business customers we address via our 1&1 Versatel. For applications, GMX and WEB.DE are responsible for consumers. We address business customers via our main brand, IONOS, and we purchased a number of other companies over the years.
Brands with largely national characters such as Arsys in Spain, home.pl in Poland, world4you in Austria or STRATO in Germany and Holland. There's united-domains, [InterNetX] and we22. We have not only corporations with various companies, but also have minority stakes, usually between 20 to less than 50% of the various companies. Now let's speak about the first half of the year, starting with the access business. Here we make a distinction between broadband business and mobile phone business. For broadband, we are the largest DSL provider in Germany with 4.17 million broadband connections. We market above all VDSL and FTTH complete packages sold by 1&1 company. The preliminary services are provided by a sister company, 1&1 Versatel.
The last mile is provided by Deutsche Telekom and city carriers. You can see the map of the various connectors, the FTTH and VDSL network that uses Telekom and city carriers for the last mile. We have very good ratings. We have been given various awards. We're very good again this year in competitions, but it's been consistently good over the years. Next to the broadband business, we have a mobile business. We are leading for MVNO with 11.38 million mobile contracts. We have a broad market coverage with different brands, and we have very high customer satisfaction. I have included a logo by a study performed by Focus Money together with a partner.
355 companies from 81 industries were analyzed in this study. The industry winner for telecommunications is 1&1. But the 1,355 companies analyzed came in second. The top rank among the 1,355 companies was snatched up by our company, GMX, which is active in domain services and has the highest recommendation rates across industries. STRATO and got the second place and the first place again by 1&1 for our broadband business. I think we can offer our broadband business. We're very popular with our customers. As you know, we are building our own network and for our mobile access. Up until this becomes available, we use access points by Telefónica and Telekom.
Now, the figures for the first half of the year, 15.55 million customer contracts. That doesn't seem to be much for us because we won 190,000 contracts in mobile phones. You have to take into consideration that due to the change of the telco law, as per the beginning of the year, we have now a different situation where customers can give notice on contracts with a month's notice. That has a very noticeable impact in the first half of the year. The effect was 110,000 contracts lost, so that we had a net surplus of 190,000 contracts.
Similar with broadband connections, minus 60,000 telco effect, which led to a total loss of 70,000 contracts. Now, how come we distinguish the notice being given and its effectiveness? In 2022 and 2021, there was no more notices given, but the impact was much faster in 2022 than in 2021. Because under the old law, customers had to give notice of three months. Now they can give notice on a monthly basis, which means that notices become effective faster. This will have only a temporary effect and will peter out over the next few months, and then we'll see our normal business again. In terms of revenue, we increased by 1.3%.
What's important is our service revenue, that's where we make our money, and that increased by 2.6%. See why maybe you can't see it, but I can explain it to you. That in the first quarter we had a stronger growth than in the second quarter. This is due to the fact in the second quarter, we had to process more notices being given by customers. This is why we had lower growth. We had a growth for mobile business of 4.7% and then -0.9% in broadband due to these customer contract losses. Other revenues decreased by 4.2%.
That's not relevant for us because it's among other smartphones that are sold via our 24 months contracts, and it is compensated for by the contract. We don't have a big margin here. It really depends on the smartphones made available by the manufacturers and which promotions we can offer here. EBITDA in consumer access has grown very nicely by 9.8% to EUR 370.1 million. Just as a marginal note, we had EUR 400,000 extra phone costs, electricity costs compared to last year. We indicated this individually here. For consumer access, it doesn't play a role, but this is just to make it uniform. With consumer access, we have two subsegments.
One is the traditional business, i.e., with the broadband connections and with the MVNO mobile phone model. We had a growth of 9.7% EBITDA to EUR 386.2 million. The second segment is still running at a deficit. It's our mobile phone business. We had expenditures of EUR 16.1 million for the rollout of the mobile network, which is a bit more than last year minus EUR 14.9 million. With business access, our brand 1&1 Versatel is active there. I said they have a fiber-optic network of more than 53,000 km length, which connects companies, factories, but also authorities, because we connect them directly to our fiber-optic network.
There are the handover points to telecom and the city carriers that connect private individuals who are also serviced by this fiber optic network, but we only have direct connections to authorities and companies. Revenue increased by 1.3% in the first half year. This included negative regulatory effects. For the whole year, we expect an overall growth of 3.5%. If we discount or ignore the regulatory effects, it would be 5%. For the EBITDA, we see a decrease of 4.3% to EUR 75.7 billion, including however, start-up costs for the building of the infrastructure for the 1&1 mobile network. 1&1 Versatel makes the fiber optic network and the data centers available.
Versatel had EUR 9 million SDH migration cost one-offs. However, this will be positive for us next year because we'll use more modern technology that we can purchase more cheaply. Versatel had EUR 600 million higher electricity costs in the first half of the year. If we ignore these effects, we had an EBITDA of 2.9% above last year. The expectation for the year is that we will wind up at the EBITDA level of last year. If we ignore these one-off costs, the high electricity costs, we will have a growth of 77%. That is at least our plan for this year. Let's move on to the applications business. Let me start with the consumer business.
Here we are developing our email services to command centers for communication, information and identity management. This has worked very well. We now have 34.8 million active accounts. We have more than 50% market share in Germany with private emails. We have accounts abroad so that we have a total of more than 42.3 million accounts. We have a good market position for email, the AI ideas, the email cloud, storage, content, and ID management. The accounts have increased to a total of 43.34 million compared to last year's figure. That's a growth of 140,000. Compared to the 31st of December, it's a decrease of 450,000. This is seasonally motivated. For the whole year, we expect growth again.
The free accounts are at 39.83 million, pay accounts at 2.5 million. What's important for us is mobile use, i.e., that our users use our client rather than the pre-installed client, and the smartphone has increased to 27.8 million, and the utilization of a cloud storage to 22.1 million. Revenues increased by 4.4% in the first half of the year. We separated here the first and second half. In the first half, it was in a growth of 7.5%. In the second quarter, only 1.5%.
We have many free accounts here that are monetized via advertising, and we can see that in the second quarter we didn't have any growth in this area because advertising expenditure in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, that area, which is our main area, advertising revenues didn't increase there, and that affected us as well. Only 1.5% growth. We believe that is due to the uncertainties generated by the Ukrainian War, inflation and other external conditions. The EBITDA increased by 2.2%, including EUR 1.2 million higher electricity costs. If we'd had the same electricity costs as last year, then the EBITDA would have grown in line with sales by 4.3%. Last but not least, our business applications centering on IONOS.
We're developing from a web hoster, i.e., a provider of web hosting and storage, to an e-business solution provider with different tools and applications that allow our customers to do business online. We have a good market position here. We're the leading European provider, and we're active and the biggest or second largest provider in many countries, and we're also active in North America. Customer contracts have increased by 130,000, half of them abroad, half of them at home, to a total of 8.91 billion contracts by now. Revenue has increased by 18.2% to EUR 608 million. What is this strong growth due? Well, more customers, I mentioned that.
Increased up- and cross-selling in existing customers, but also strong growth in aftermarket business at Sedo, where we have a domain trading and parking platform. If you ignore this growth in this parking and domain trading and parking business, we have a 7.9% revenue increase for our business. With EBITDA, we can see a 0.7% decrease to EUR 164.5 million, including EUR 13.2 million additional marketing activities. We had announced that this year we would increase the marketing activities by about EUR 30 million this year in order to drive market awareness.
Higher electricity costs hit us at IONOS to the tune of EUR 8.9 million that are also included in these figures. Like for like, it would mean a growth of 14.3% in EBITDA. You can see our KPIs in an overview again here. 290,000 consumer contracts in the first half year. 4.5% more revenue, 3.5% more EBITDA, 3.3% more EBIT. EBT and EPS suffer from financial results due to the valuation of financial derivatives and equity results from the participation in Tele Columbus, which we hold together with Morgan Stanley Infrastructure in our investment vehicle, Kublai. About 95% of the Tele Columbus shares. So much on the first half of the year.
Now let me give you the outlook. We are confirming a forecast for the overall year. We would like to increase our revenue to EUR 5.85 billion. The EBITDA will be at prior year's level at EUR 1.2959 billion, including EUR 70 million expenses for the setup of the mobile network at 1&1. It was EUR 37.9 million last year. Then EUR 30 million for additional marketing activities at IONOS that I'd mentioned, and then an additional EUR 20 million of higher electricity costs that hadn't been planned for, but that we find easy to digest. CapEx, EUR 800 million-EUR 1 billion, particularly for the construction of the mobile network and the expansion of our fiber-optic network.
I think this slide really shows how our business is going. We had a revenue growth that we're predicting for 7.5%. In the first half of the year, we managed 4.5%. I think we will achieve this. With the EBITDA, we see an identical level. But if you take a look at the figures that we are integrating in the investment phase that we're in, they're actually 6.5%. We're doing fairly well. Business is going as planned, and we are optimistically looking at the second half of the year. I would like to give the floor to my colleague, Mr. Mildner.
Yes. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, analysts, investors, I'm happy to welcome you to this webcast as well. Mr. Dommermuth has already presented the major figures of our four segments here in detail, and I would like to present the development of these segments in the consolidated group level, especially with respect to our free cash flow and our key index figures. I would like to start with chart 31, summarizing what Mr. Dommermuth has just presented. At group level, the number of customer contracts to the end of the first half 2022, compared to the H1 2021 was increased by 800,000 to a total of 26.97 million contracts.
Our advertising-financed free accounts were increased to the end of the year, first half, compared to the end of first half of the year by 140,000. That gives us a total as per 30th of July to 39.83 million. Our group revenue was increased to EUR 2,901 million. Increase considering an increase to 4.5% compared to the year before at the end of the first half, 2021. The group EBITDA are results before taxes and so on. In 2022 was EUR 655.1 million.
Mr. Dommermuth has already mentioned that our EBITDA in 2022 as well as in the years before was on one hand affected by non-operating special effects and off-period accruals, which have been taken out of the figure for better comparison. As you'll see that in the footnotes. Taking out this figure, we could generate an EBITDA growth of 3.5%. The EBT adding up to EUR 379 is affected by three things, which are here at the first bullet point below the table. On one hand, the financial result was affected by a revaluation of financial derivatives with a minus of EUR 7.3 million, and a share of negative stock of Tele Columbus AG by Kublai at an amount of EUR 13.6 million was added over the full six months.
While the negative result of Tele Columbus AG in the first half of the year 2021 was only added for two months, which was because of the participation in the first four months were still as a sellable asset in our balance sheet, and only after the closing of the takeover bid it was involved in our balance sheet. These EBT effects have an effect of EUR 0.12 per share on the EPS, and that means that we add EUR 1.3 or EUR 1.23 if we look at the operative EPS prior to PPA. On the next chart I will look at the free cash flow on the first half of 2022.
As you see on the overview page of the bridge, the free cash flow towards the end of the half of the H1 in 2022 is EUR 126.2 million prior to leasing or EUR 62.3 million after the leasing payments considered. In combination with upfront payment to Deutsche Telekom, we have two shifts of phases in the first half 2022. As I said in the Q1 webcast, a cash effective figure of EUR 79.2 million, and the liability were already placed into the 2022 in the accrued amounts, and by that, it is adjusted to the phases in 2021.
The same applies for the upfront payment of EUR 198.2 million, compared to Telecom, which in the first half of 2022 was put on the balance sheet, but which will only take effect or payable in the third quarter. If these two off-balance sheet payments would be adjusted in the free cash flow, the free cash flow in the first half would be at minus EUR 29.7 million, which of course is due to the high CapEx expenditures, which we guided. Looking at chart 33 with the major balance sheet figures of United Internet AG as per 30 June 2022, which as we have given in the end of the last financial year, I'd like to start with the active assets outside of the balance sheet.
For better overview, we have taken out the short-term or summarized the short-term and long-term liabilities. The property and equipment and tangible assets, compared to end of December 2021, have increased by EUR 81 million to EUR 3,525 million, and this is especially due to our investments made in equipment. The company values have not changed and are now at EUR 3,000,625.4 million and are now at the level of the year before. The drop of financial assets by EUR 13 million result, as I said, from the share of the negative participation in Tele Columbus AG. The requirement from liabilities and performance of EUR 33.5 million compared to the end of 2021 has increased by EUR 25 million and reflects our growth.
The contract assets amount to EUR 828.1 million without major changes. The increase in inventories and deferred expenses from 589 the year before by EUR 222 million to a Total of EUR 830 million euros to the end of June 2022 is especially due to the explained payments to the FTTH connections to the Deutsche Telekom. The cash and cash equivalents have not changed very much. They are about 240 thousand, and our cash development toward the end of the first half is EUR 54.3 million . The decline toward the end of the year especially is due to the dividend payment in May this year.
Let me move on to the next chart to look at the liabilities and equity side of the balance sheet. Looking at the equity development, we can see that the equity has developed from EUR 4,923.2 million by about EUR 164.2 million to now EUR 5,087.4 million as per end of June. At the same time, the equity ratio has improved by 0.2 percentage points to a total of 51.1%. Our bank liabilities have slightly changed from the end of the year from 2022 to end of mid June.
Due to the lower payment, the net liabilities have slightly increased from 1.759 to 1.712 as per end of this month. First half, the other positions on the liability side, I don't want to detail on that, as the changes are mainly in harmony with the development of the operative business. If you would have questions to that, we are happy to answer these in the following Q&A session, and I would, for that, hand over back to the operator to open the Q&A session. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Mr. Mildner. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, please press the asterisk star button followed by the one on your board. Make sure that your speaker is muted. Asterisk one to ask. Moment. Asterisk one. It seems like we have no questions from the German conference. I'll hand over to the English side. Very much.
Once again, ladies and gentlemen, please press star one to ask a question. Star one to ask a question. We take our first question from Stephan Beyazian with ODDO. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. I've got two question if I can. Could we come back on the M&A? If you could update us on the plans regarding IONOS, and if I'm not mistaken, you might also consider perhaps a sale of the consumer applications. I'm just wondering whether you could update us on that. My second question is at IONOS especially regarding the energy cost whether you could give more color on the contract and the hedging that you have there. I'm just trying to see whether we should prepare for a much bigger jump in the energy cost at some point in time in the second half or in 2023. Thank you very much.
Yeah. Well, let me start with the consumer situation. We have strategic discussions. What can we combine with what? What would match? What would not match? Which cooperation options do we have? Right now we're not considering any change in shareholdings.
Then I'll take the other two questions. First of all, the question M&A IONOS. In the last calls we already said that we will be the IPO for IONOS as the preferred variant. Due to market conditions, we cannot see the IPO coming in the next weeks or two to three months. We're still targeting an IPO, and we are closely watching the market environment. Concerning the other question concerning IONOS with the energy costs. In principle, we hedge our energy costs very early on to a large extent. For instance, STRATO nearly hedges its energy costs nearly 100%, IONOS about to a level of 50%. We're speaking about a peak that we spend now.
We operate a lot of data centers that of course consume a lot of energy. We're also looking into the possibility of passing on this energy costs and are considering whether we will do that. We are actually well hedged, and we are speaking of peaks only, and Mr. Dommermuth has mentioned it already in his outlook. All additional electricity costs can currently be covered by our profitability perfectly. We have no serious impact on business development.
Thank you.
Thank you. We take our next question.
Thank you.
From Yemi Falana with Goldman Sachs.
Afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. Just as we touched on the prior call, I guess there are considerations for your business as the macro environment begins to slow, particularly on the advertising and e-commerce side. Could you maybe talk to some of the effects that you're seeing in terms of consumer confidence or the trading environment into the third quarter so far? Where are you seeing pressure? Where are you seeing more opportunity? Any color there would be really appreciated.
Well, we have the pleasant situation that our business is almost 100% subscription-based. In terms of the subscription growth, we are in the range of our expectations, so we can't see any impact by the macroeconomic environment yet. That's our experience from prior crises before companies shut down their websites or before people will give notice on their mobile phone contracts or their DSL connection or their internet access. A lot of things have to happen before people do that. We do believe that this will not affect us very seriously in our core business.
Where we can see the impact is with advertising revenues on our portals, but we have to say that we're speaking of less than 2% of our overall revenue or turnover in our group. Within this less than 10% in the second quarter, we had no growth anymore. In the first quarter we had nice growth. Now how this will continue in the third and fourth quarters, we'll have to see. Our experience from previous crises, for instance, in the financial crisis, that we're speaking of an order of magnitude of ±2%, compared to prior year. Sometimes it's a bit poorer than the previous year, then it's doing a bit better, and that's what it feels like right now.
Very helpful. Thank you.
We take our next question from James Ratcliffe with New Street Research. Your line is open.
Hi. Yes, good afternoon. Thank you for taking the question. I had a slightly technical accounting question I was wondering if you could help on, please. If I look at the accounts from 1&1 published today, they are saying that their liabilities due to associated companies has risen from EUR 85 million at the end of last year to EUR 253 million as of today. That mostly, I think, relates to the cross-trading with Versatel. I was just interested if you could explain to me how that's gonna be accounted going forward through those P&Ls from either an EBITDA or CapEx perspective. In particular, when should we see the growth start to grow in Versatel as a result of this? And how will that cost be booked at 1&1? Is that going to be CapEx ultimately or will it be OpEx? Thank you.
Thank you very much for the question. September of last year or at the beginning of this year, I'm not quite sure anymore when the contract was signed. We made an intercompany agreement between 1&1&1 Versatel, under which 1&1 Versatel will be providing an important module of the extension of the 5G network of 1&1. What we had announced is that with the extension of the mobile network will start now. That means that these business relations will then lead to orders placed by 1&1 to 1&1 Versatel. Ralf Hartings in his pre-call had already said that by the end of the year or in Q4, we will have a CMD where we will speak in more detail about what will be CapEx, what will be OpEx.
From a United Internet perspective, what happens is that both at the level of 1&1 AG and 1&1 Versatel, there will be massive expenditures that will have an impact on CapEx and OpEx, and already have it today. As you can see, the split of what is OpEx, what's CapEx, that is something we would like to tell you in the Capital Markets Day in more detail. Actually I would like to refer you to that conference.
Okay. No. Thank you. Could I just then maybe ask you a follow-up rather than I hear you on the OpEx and CapEx point, and we can wait on that. Presumably then Versatel should also start seeing an acceleration in its revenue growth as a result of these contracts. I mean, I know it will net out as an intercompany transaction, but when will we start to see the revenue growth from this come through in Versatel? Does that come in the second half of this year?
Sorry, I'll do it in German. Well, of course, when such an intercompany agreement is made, you will see the revenue on the 1&1 Versatel side from the contract and the contract fulfillment. As the contract is only starting up and because the deliveries obligations will only start now and will extend over a period, it will only build up over time. In the second half of the year, you will certainly see a certain revenue share for this intercompany contract, but the bulk will only come in the future.
Great. Thanks very much.
Thank you. We take our next question from Joshua Mills with BNP Paribas. Your line is open.
Hi, guys. Thanks for the questions. I've got two, please. The first is just whether you could comment or give an update on Kublai or Tele Columbus and their network upgrade plans. I think that they've signed a deal recently with Altice or Geodesia to upgrade [200,000] homes to fiber. Could you just remind us what the fiber strategy at Tele Columbus is?
As said, Joshua, the answer is a bit difficult to give because we are just a minority shareholder in Kublai GmbH, and Kublai has about 95% of Tele Columbus AG. That formally, I probably have to refer you to Tele Columbus AG, who is stock rated. As far as there haven't any statements, that is a clear strategic alignment of Tele Columbus the fiber strategy to be rolled out, especially in the housing and housing corporations to provide FTTH connections there. Due to our shareholder situation, I'd like to ask you to question Tele Columbus directly.
We're moving forward to the next question. Nizla Naizer, with Deutsche Bank, your line is open. Please go ahead.
Thank you. I have two questions from my end. The first is related to IONOS. Just trying to understand what's driving the aftermarket business within IONOS. Would this also continue in Q3 and Q4? I'm trying to understand, could the underlying growth, which was 8% in Q2, then accelerate in Q3 and Q4? What are your expectations there? Some color would be great. My second question is on the United Group leverage. Are you comfortable with where leverage is given the CapEx requirement for this year? In other words, would you see the need for more funding as CapEx accelerates? Just some color there would be great. Thank you.
As far as IONOS after market business is concerned, we do see strong growth in Q4 and Q3. The business is currently driven by the domain parking. Currently, on the domain trade platform, we don't have any specifically big trades so far. The main growth is generated by the parking.
Let me answer the CapEx question and the question on funding. I think what we did very well was to have a high credit note of EUR 750 million last year at an average rate, which is fixed and not only concerns the margin, but it's at 0.79%. So that is quite comfortable at the moment, and that is why, in the near future, we don't really see any funding needs and in order to drive our investments forward. Of course, we, again and again, see maturities of other credits in the future, which we would consider refunding possibly. At the moment, we don't see any.
Thank you.
Thank you. We take our next question from Polo Tang with UBS. Your line is open.
Hi. Thanks for taking the questions. I have a few different ones. Just coming back to the Handelsblatt story, it suggested that you were looking at options to monetize consumer applications to help fund the investment in your mobile network build. My question is really how strategic are other units in your portfolio, specifically Versatel? If you're looking at selling assets to fund a mobile network build, does this mean that the build-out costs are potentially a lot higher than what the market is currently expecting? The next question is really just about the trajectory of your business applications revenue growth, because the bulk of the growth currently is coming from your domain parking business. I'm just trying to understand how sustainable is this revenue stream from domain parking?
If the revenue stream is temporary, is there a risk that business applications revenue growth starts to decelerate or even turn negative in the coming quarters as you start to face more, difficult comparables for the business? My third question is a quick clarification question. Can you clarify what your current stake is in 1&1? Thank you.
Let me start at the back. The stake at 1&1 is a bit above 78%. The domain parking business, that is a volatile business. It's no subscriber business as we have in IONOS and other places. This is why, for many quarters, we have been setting out these values separately so that you know what comes from where. Concerning the question, sales of shares of 1&1 Versatel. I got you right. That was the question. That is not in question at the moment. We have a moderate leverage through the first half of the year. First half, we have the 1.4x the EBITDA. Mr. Mildner has just explained that we have taken these credits quite cost-effectively.
Even if the interests have increased, we are still in a low interest phase historically, so we don't think of selling assets to fund our mobile network. In 1&1 since 2019, we didn't pay any dividends. We're gonna use that money. We generate good cash flow. We're gonna use that money and are also going to take some credit line at the peak, but that is gonna be temporarily only. At least that's our plans. How is it gonna work? Well, it's gonna work because we have antenna sites that we do rent and do not build them ourselves. That takes a strain of the financial needs. As Telekom, Telefónica, and others have the frequency costs from the auction in 2019, and we got these postponed in payments for 12 years. That was over EUR 1 billion.
If we look at the glass fiber development and connecting our antennas, in the first level, where we had 50%, we're gonna reach 50% of the households in 390 cities. In these cities there is fiber optics from 1&1 Versatel, so it's only short distances to connect to a new antenna, or if 1&1 Versatel is not close enough, we will rent optic fiber networks from city carriers. That makes sense, not to build it if it's there and we can rent it and we don't have our own infrastructure. In that respect, we do think that we'll manage to fund this financially, the growth in 1&1 as well as the 1&1 Versatel growth as well as with IONOS or United Internet Media.
What we also have to note, however, is that if we think about Versatel, then we do have inquiries, especially from the infrastructure investment area, where funds are discussing with us whether we should go along. That sounds promising because that have higher valuations. As we said, we don't need the money at the moment. May change, but for the time being, we don't need it.
If I would rather look out for a partner who will bring something to the marriage, not just money, but maybe their own infrastructure that could be combined to make it bigger, to create synergies, that would be, for me, at first sight, the more interesting approach than selling a part of Versatel against cash. At the moment, this is not planned, but that would be rather the way for us to think than just take a check and pay back credits that we fund for 0.79%.
Thanks.
Thank you. We take our next question from Usman Ghazi with Berenberg. Your line is open.
Hello. Thank you for the opportunity. I just wanted to come back on the IONOS business. You're saying that you're not currently seeing any macro-related impact, but you know, I mean, the net additions run rate, you know, has slowed from the peak of 90,000 in Q4 of 2021, and it's lower in Q2 versus Q1 as well. I just wanted to understand, you know, what was driving the slightly lower demand, and whether you expect the net additions run rate to be stable at this, you know, 40,000-50,000, or whether you would expect it to slow down further. Thank you.
Thank you for that question. I think what we have to differentiate is the number of customers and the number of contracts. In our business, we report the number of contracts. In IONOS we had the situation that I think was InterNetX or united-domains, where we have wholesale business, and I think 60,000 domains were relocated by a single customer. This is directly reflected in our contractual statistics. In the customer statistics, that would not have made any difference. In profitability, such a wholesale customer does not have a big effect either. In that sense, we have a normal business development here. It goes back and forth and whatever in some of the brands. Altogether, we're doing well. We have to cover these peaks and calculate them, but these are not visible here.
Thank you.
We take a follow-up question from Joshua Mills with BNP Paribas. Your line is open.
Hi there. Apologies earlier. I think I might have had a technical issue. If I'm repeating myself and you've rolled the answer part of this, please ignore it. The two questions I had were on Tele Columbus. Could you just remind us of the fiber upgrade strategy? I believe that Altice has started building homes or agreed to start building more fiber homes for them. Any progress you're making on reaching a wholesale deal with the company, 'cause I believe you don't have one formally in place at the moment.
Secondly, a kind of bigger picture one, just based on what you've said today and the quite high levels of integration and cross working that we're seeing between United Internet and the other parts of United Internet. What do you see as the advantage of keeping United Internet separately listed at the moment? If you could just remind us of that and how you view the minorities. Thanks very much.
Quite right. If we look at the stock exchange rate of 1&1, the advantage seems to be quite low. Of course, we do hope that the exchange rate is gonna improve and that we'll have an option to raise capital that we won't have. At the rate that we have at the moment, of course, transactions with the shares are not allowed.
Coming back to Tele Columbus, the question was. Again, I can just repeat my answer that, I'd like to refer you to Tele Columbus, because as a shareholder, we don't, we can't explain the strategy of Tele Columbus. But one of the questions, if I got that right, was if there's a wholesale contract between Tele Columbus and 1&1, if I caught you right. That is not quite yet the case, but Tele Columbus is in quite close negotiations contract wise with Tele Columbus and 1&1. I do expect to have a wholesale contract at some point in time.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. We take our next question from Adam Fox-Rumley with HSBC. Your line is open.
Thank you very much. I had two brief questions, please. Firstly, just on the CapEx guidance. We discussed this a moment ago on the United Internet call. But reiterating that amount, that CapEx guidance, I suppose I'd be interested to know what triggers the upper or lower end of the CapEx guidance that's being reiterated also for United Internet at this stage. Secondly, we've often spoken about the additional marketing costs spend at IONOS, and I know it's hard to talk about the return on that additional investment. But I guess in light of the growth rates ex-Sedo, are you happy with the returns on those high levels of spend at the moment? Thank you.
Yeah. Well, thank you very much. That's a very good question that we always discuss passionately with our shareholder, Markus Huhn. I hope I'm not telling you any secrets here. If you invest into a brand, it takes a while for these investments to have an impact, and that's what it's all about now. We are running campaigns with videos on TV on the internet in Germany and the U.K., then in Spain and Poland after that. That doesn't immediately pay out in the form of additional contracts. A better brand will have a mid to long-term effect because your brand will become more relevant, because your existing customers have a better image of the brand that they're patronizing, or because you find it easier to recruit additional staff.
You can't really see any one-to-one relationship here. Getting back to our dialogue with Markus Huhn. These are measures that have a mid to long-term effect. We are a company that has a mid to long-term horizon with everything we do, and we have good growth with IONOS now. That is something that we want to underpin and ensure going forward. We want to increase it going forward. That's why we invest into the future. It would be easy not to invest into marketing, into the brand anymore. This EUR 30 million that you saw is on top of the money that we spend already. We don't see any reason for this.
We prefer to stabilize the growth and making IONOS a brand that any small company, any freelancer, thinks of when they think of hosting or cloud services. Before we get there, we still have some way to go. Well, you had the other question concerning the CapEx guidance and where we will be at the end of the year. Will be at the lower or upper range of it, and which are the triggering points that will have an influence here. If I repeated your question well enough. Now, the CapEx guidance, I think, is somewhere between EUR 800 million and EUR 1 billion. 1&1 guided EUR 400 million.
I think Ralf Hartings said that he will arrive there in the earlier call, 1&1. Then it depends on market developments that we can hardly influence right now. That is why we confirmed the guidance. We still believe that we will stay within this corridor. If I say, I might say that it's actually pretty much in the middle of this corridor. A little bit on the one side or to the other side. But right now, we don't see any major issues that will prompt us to change this guidance.
Thank you very much. I can confirm I've seen the adverts in the U.K.
Thank you. it appears there are no further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the call back to your host for any additional closing comments.
Well, if there are no further questions, we would like to thank the participants for your interest. We are available, subsequently, should you have any further questions. I wish you all the best of luck and see you.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.