On the third quarter results for fiscal year 2024, which ended on the 13th of September. This call is limited to 120 minutes. In case of any follow-up questions, please let me know. I'm here today with Markus Oswald, Chief Executive Officer, and Nicolai Oswald, Chief Financial Officer. Now, I would like to remind you that if any lenders or rating agencies are on the call right now, that this is a public conference call in which only publicly available information will be discussed. I would therefore ask you to refrain from questions containing information belonging to the public domain. This conference call is intended for capital markets participants only and not for press representatives. If any journalists are on the line right now, we would highly appreciate it if you were leaving the conference call now.
Press representatives are welcome to call my colleague, Sebastian Artymiak, to discuss any outstanding questions. Having said that, it's my pleasure to hand over to you, Markus. The floor is yours.
Carmen, thank you. And yeah, good morning to everybody on the line. Yeah, first of all, I have to say again that I'm now with CFO Nicolai Oswald beside me and not interim anymore. So Nico, welcome into the company. Some of these questions might also arise in the past. Now we are again complete on the board. And let me introduce our call. So we will start with key messages, as usual, operational update on KPIs, and then I will hand over to Nico on the financial performance, and then both of us are available for questions and answers. Key messages and an overview about operational, financial, and liquidity. So yeah, the quarter for us is completely the future quarter. It lays down the ground. And for us, future is IP growth for the company. And again, we had an outstanding IP sales performance in Q3.
TC is still the fastest growing IP operator. And to be honest, the gap between competitors is growing right now. So there was a fantastic job in Q3 by our teams. Again, also the KPIs in that number. So we have a higher bandwidth again. So 50% of our growth, the customers are opting for 500, 1 Gig products throughout. And throughout the support of the TD migration, we have a 3P push on the IP numbers as well. And looking at the IP, looking at the TD migration, I would say we reach benchmark levels or the level which also our competitors were facing the transition as well. So we are now at a number of 49% of our retained TD customers. More details later on.
This is for me also fascinating to see and obvious when you look at the unique subscriber base. We are now more and more moving through a 3P provider. What I said on the Capital Markets Day in the other calls, a little bit also our hidden sales channel, which is base management, is now getting stronger and stronger thanks to the team here as well. We are now having 2.2, something around 2.2 RGUs per unique subscriber. Coming to the financials, these are numbers, of course, impacted by our TV migration. Revenues down to EUR 3.5 million throughout the migration, which is not yet compensated by increasing IP sales and the stable B2B revenue.
Reported EBITDA down to 105.5 million EUR, strongly impacted by our non-recurring activities, which was the completion of the AMD transfer action, which is still the TC bulk migration and which is still even that a lot of topics are completed, but phase two is now in front of us, the NetCo software transformation. Normalized EBITDA stable on a year-on-year basis with 141.6 million EUR, despite the TC bulk revenue losses and CapEx excluding leasing increased by 19%, of course, because of our investments into the network and in our consumer growth or customer growth, making the TC migration possible and making the IP growth possible. Good signs on the liquidity cash position of 58.4 million EUR as of September, with an undrawn shareholder loan of 105 million EUR.
Liquidity position is better than originally planned, primarily due to strict capital allocation investments and improvements in net working capital, which was made through our teams possible during the course of the year, and I have a focus on that as well for the upcoming quarters and years. Looking now deeper into our operational updates and KPIs, what we achieved in the first nine months of the year, so good to see and a good indication coming from DOCSIS 3.1, but as well from our fiber rollouts. Strong IP performance continues, like I said before. FTTH penetration shows great uplift in housing upgrade segments. I will come later on to that. Continuous efforts, of course, for doing the bulk migration and actually having a ServCo and a NetCo in place. What does this mean for our future? I also will comment on that.
Coming to page eight, of course, I love this chart. Best in class IP growth rate with increasing gap to our market partners, 13.5%. I mentioned it before this quarter. Actually, normally we expected some of this 13.5% growth a little bit earlier, but it was linked really to making gross adds possible from the 1st of July onwards because we approached a lot of our customers in the first quarter, and they are linked to the starting of IP contracts with a single start of the single TV customer contract, and here we see that huge push on IP, but nevertheless, it is the strongest growth since 2022, and now we are really fourth quarter in a row in double-digit growth, and this makes our future story. This is exactly what we aim to do also in the next quarters.
Going a little bit deeper into these numbers, we see that huge uplift in Q3 on page nine in comparison to Q3 2023 and also a double-digit in the revenue growth on a year-on-year basis. So this is fantastic compare, and we will see it later on also in our financials. I think it's something around 20 million EUR we see here year to date 2024 in comparison to 2023, an increase in our service revenue based on IP supported by our IP growth. Also deeper into the numbers, internet individual, this is what we are looking for because here the service revenue is in, we are progressing into the next step into 700,000 digit numbers. So this is not far away and in our expectation reachable till the end of the year.
In these 681 IP customers, they are incorporated a little bit more than 10% out of RGUs, which are linked to our FTTH rollouts. I will come later on to that because this also will support our future growth paths. Here, the penetration is higher, much higher than the overall penetration we are facing, where we are getting our growth on with right now 45% even growing quarter by quarter. I will show this a little bit later to you. Yeah, I think these are the main numbers. We now also adjusted our product portfolio, which we do on a regular basis, and all IP products now include telephone line with Fixed Net Flat Rate. Like I said before, the numbers in these growth numbers are looking also very good, so 53% right now on our gross adds at the end versus higher 500, so 501 Gig.
Looking also on our base, there is still uplift to grow, so gross adds by more than 50%, but based on that high numbers is something around 30% I have in mind, and this means transition and higher output will follow by working with sales management. Of course, on the three-play basis, right, the net adds we have a little bit lower, which was linked to the first goal of the bulk migrations. Now we are working with our sales teams to go through our base here again and again doing blocking works. I can later on to that on the migration first, but we expected that 45% or a little drop on the three-play basis as well. On page 12, we show you a little bit more insight on our work on FTTH, so let me run you through that slide.
So first of all, on the left-hand side, FTTH total, we have an RGU base in FTTH on IP by something around 71,000 customers on a base still steady growing of near to 160,000 households. So this leads to 44.9% of penetration. Coming to near to the middle, the green and bars and so on, here you see our total IP penetration number of 20.7%, which means that on the DOCSIS side, we are even lower on that number because this number is as well supported by that 44.9%. And when you are now looking at what is a mixture in FTTH, first of all, we also do by some infrastructure projects, some greenfield approaches, Le RAR, PLONE, and so on and so on, where we are working Markt Indersdorf here nearby in Bavaria.
So here we reached in the past and still growing 45.7% in our contracts FTTH upgrades linked with housing association contracts where a house is completely new build. We are seeing penetration of 49.8%. And I come later on to that FTTH share graph on the right side because if an object is upgraded, a house is upgraded, it still needs time to develop a higher penetration. But in new build, where people move into a new building, we reach immediately really high shares of higher than something around 70% and more. Housing upgrades, this means where we change from DOCSIS 3.1 to FTTH, we already see a penetration of 43.4%. And now coming to a cohort, which we subtracted out of our system and which shows what penetration paths we are facing to reach 43.4% and more. Don't be confused.
Here it is just a cohort of 35,000 homes connected out of these blue cohorts in the middle of the slide. We looked here in this 34,000 homes connected households. We upgraded the network from July 2023 to June 2024. When you look now down, you'll see exactly for that cohort, the FTTH share on the bottom of that graph, which goes up so we started in Q1 2023. Like I said before, we started the upgrade in July 2023 so now 0% FTTH share Q1 2023, Q2 2023 and then we started upgrading the households, 20% Q3 2023. We reached 58% in Q4 2023, 77% Q1 2024, and we finished the upgrade of these 34,000 households in Q2 2024 and look what takes place with the penetration without uplift or without the FTTH upgrade. We have a 1% change in penetration quarter by quarter.
FTTH steps in with a remarkable share of these households, and then we changed on a quarter-to-quarter basis to 3% or to 2%, so there was a lag in Q4 to Q1, but then we changed again to 2%, and this will go on, so what we expect and see by the blue column more in the middle that we will see the trend towards 40% and even higher, and this is the whole story and strategy of the company. Together with the housing association, find a plan when they want to build up, when they need to build up, when they renovate their households, like quarters or whatever in the city, and then be their partner building up FTTH, inform together with the housing associations, their tenants, and then penetration goes up.
And this is exactly what supports our penetration rising project, we would say, by the growth of our points of sale, let it be on retail, let it be on sales agents. Our growth path is supported. And in addition, our growth path is supported by these FTTH projects. So even here, an acceleration of growth on the IP side will be seen in the future. When we look at our Bulk Migration, this, everybody knows, is a fact. It happens this year. We will work on that. Sorry, I was a little bit confused with my printouts here. So when we look at page 13, we see that we started on a Bulk Migration potential households with nearly 1.2 million households. The number changed a little bit thanks to one of the analysts on that question, because we also lost some of these customers.
What we are looking at here for retained customers, we are only facing a potential where we can play. I think the number was before 1.19 something. There was a loss of contracts here. At the end, we have a stable and steady rising customer base with housing associations, but especially here in that cohort or in that group, we lost some of these contracts. There is no bulk migration anymore here. We retained customers. Retained customers, 49% right now. This is what we are aiming for the end of the year. Retained is a subtract or an addition between single contracts and also contracts which stay in a bulk similar or equal model. We will, of course, be in that footprint again and again.
For that, which is very important and will have the biggest impact on these customers we face right now, we call it our Disconnect Project, which we already did in the past, 2024. We will continue into 2025 to block these customers. We will see an uplift because also if you are an unknown, we call it as well black user or non-customer, it might be that you are still thinking that you are somebody pays for the contract. There will be a switch of SD channels and migration to HD in Gen, Gen or FEP, I think it's in Gen, which also lead that customers who aren't our customers will call our customer center and we say, "Okay, of course, you can continue watching TV, but now we need a contract." And of course, we are using our direct sales approach.
Our growth is here still, so we are still growing on this point of sale, and through that, we will also continue to see a TV growth in the upcoming year 2025 to close the gap between the 49% to hopefully 55% at the end. These are the exact numbers. We are now at 1.116 million customers on TV access, which is remaining bulk and individual, like I said before. Good trend on the TV basis, and which also makes us really confident. Confident. This was the word I'm looking for. Thank you, Nico, and that we will see a growing trend when you look at the individual contract. In the past, it was normal that we are losing, even without migration projects, 20,000 contracts after nine months, for example, the year before, and this year, we are stable.
And this is the individual contracts where we don't see a migration. This means by growing our point of sales, by growing the attitude of the company that HGUs not only on the IP side, but also on the TV side, which you need to have to deliver service revenue on your network is very important. So here we also see a growth path. So expecting for 2025 as well a TV growth on our networks. As well on the premium TV side, and of course, the SD shutdown by the public broadcasters, ID and ZDF will help us as well to grow on the premium TV and of course on the HD side. Last topic on my operational list is again the NetCo/ServCo because this is heavy load for the company.
And the good thing is it has a great impact for our company, also for the future. So first of all, we talked in the past about it, but it is simplification very important. So concentrate where focus has to lie on concentrate on growth for IP, concentrate on growth for wholesale, concentrate on growth on TV, and not concentrate to manage 35 or whatever subsidiaries. So we reduce them to 15 and have a plan for the next reductions in place, which coming 2025, 2026. So this target's achieved till end of August. Separation of both companies target achieved end of August. Migration by doing that separation of 2.9 million customers B2B as well as B2C into NetCo, ServCo achieved by 100%. Intercompany agreements, how NetCo and ServCo work together. And also this linked to a master service agreement between both companies, both up and running and signed to 100%.
So also from my side here in that round, yeah, great work for the team. Thanks for the team to manage this in such a competitive year is really extraordinary and makes life much more easier and transparent for the next years. And this, what are the benefits, like I mentioned before, reduction of complexity enables us as a Tele Columbus Group in an operational efficient way. We now have transparency, focus, and rely on accountability. And of course, this structure gives us flexibility for future financing and monetization projects as well. That's from my side for now. And I'm handing now over to Nico for the financial performance of our company.
Thank you, Markus. Coming to slide 18, just the normal view on a bit more details on revenues and the revenue composition. What we've broken out basically is the TV bulk access revenues.
Clearly, we see a drop from the Q2 to Q3. At the same time, we do see a stronger uplift on the other revenue categories. Unfortunately, it's not yet compensating and offsetting the bulk losses, the headwind we have seen in Q3. As Markus said, we do believe that the impact is simply delayed. It's not completely lost. It will just take longer. We expect to reach the retained customers with above the 50%-55% by year-end next year, and then hopefully uplifting the individual TV segment again and compensating for some of the losses that we've seen. As Markus also mentioned, we're pretty much on par with the industry benchmark currently in terms of the retention rate. Again, as we said, that we will need more time going through the customer base again to talk to the customers and get them to sign up.
In the end, what you can then clearly see is on the revenue composition, we are now above 50% in terms of internet and phone revenues, TV reduced to around 30% after the drop in the bulk revenues. In terms of EBITDA, if we look at the normalized EBITDA, which is broadly stable on an adjusted normalized base, we are slightly down. We did see a few topics. One is obviously the revenue loss strongly impacted by the bulk migrations. We did have some positive and also one-offs in terms of operating income and the direct costs on the signal fees, which helped a lot. Personnel and marketing, both growing. Personnel, the same as the previous quarters. We have the FTEs on payroll and salary increases. We do seek to also deliver the B2C growth.
At the same time, we've had higher marketing expenses, which also led to the higher net sales and sales performance that we've seen. And if we look at the reported EBITDA, it dropped significantly due to the non-recurring expenses, which is what we previously discussed, basically a double-digit figure in refinancing, also a double-digit figure in the TV migration topics, the separation close to a double-digit figure, and the rest is personnel initiatives that we are anticipating. So all in all, we had roughly 36 million EUR in non-recs, and anticipate to have a similar magnitude of an additional 8-10 million EUR in the Q4 going forward, also related to basically to still the migration topics and the transformation activities that continue. Looking at CapEx on page 20, we have changed this slide to show CapEx excluding leasing.
We had a few feedbacks from the market side, from analysts, while we discussed that it would be easier if we get this closer to the investing cash flow if we excluded leasing. So therefore, we adjusted the numbers retrospectively. So therefore, here you will see the CapEx numbers excluding leasing. In the toolkit, you still have both views, including excluding, so you have like-for-like comparison to the past. In general, what you can see is, as we've previously mentioned, the full year 2024 is on a slightly higher base than 2023. CapEx numbers increased year-on-year roughly 25%. It's basically driven by the higher invest connected to the end customer business for growth and the fiber deployment, basically seen in the first dark blue column, network infrastructures basically being higher.
We see Q2, Q3 already higher, and we expect as the normal seasonality kicks in for Q4 also to have a stronger CapEx on networks in Q4. Also, the end customer-related CapEx with the 17 million EUR is slightly higher than the 14 million EUR a year ago, in line with expectations on growth. You may have seen still that the subscriber acquisition cost has come down in Q3 after we knew the push in the TV migration, summer Q1 and Q2, where we had extraordinary spends, 3P share, and a lot of mailing communication activities to the market. That has come down to, let's say, a more broadly average that we had seen in the past, which is good. So we're balancing again cash out on the sales channels as well as on the network.
It is pretty much, again, a bit back up quarter on quarter after we had a lot of focus on the transformation activities on the network separation. It has come back to a bit more of internal activities and increased activities here. If we look on the revenues, nine months, basically not surprising, we see the drop in TVs by EUR 27 million down and see an offsetting EUR 22 million increase on internet and phone. And therefore, like-for-like, we included wholesale and the hardware just to have a better comparison. We are not offsetting. There's a EUR 5 million delta that we're working on first by increasing the TV revenues and then also accelerating internet growth. B2B broadly stable.
And on the other side, we did see a reduction on the interconnection revenues, which is related to the loss of Marienfeld, which is basically an EBITDA wash because we have decreased costs as well. So there's almost no EBITDA impact out of that. Finally, let's quickly summarize the financials, and then we'll give you the time for questions. The nine-month performance, the revenue we just discussed in a bit more details, normalized EBITDA broadly stable around EUR 142 million. CapEx up as expected, but slightly lower than we originally planned, also to carefully manage cash flows and offset the pressure we see on the top line. And then we added the operational cash flows, which show that we did improve compared to last year. Although we had higher investments, we also had positive impacts from net working capital management, which helped to manage cash flows basically.
And that is what we continuously do and monitor closely in order to actually have a clear view on cash and cash reach. So everything is in order. That was a quick run-through around the financials. So happy to take your questions now. And I would give it back to Sandra.
Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may click the Q&A button on the left side of your screen and then raise your hand. If you are connected via phone, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press the star key followed by two or press the lower your hand button. Anyone with a question may click star and one at this time.
Our first question comes from Polo Tang. Please go ahead.
It's Polo Tang at UBS. I just have two questions. The first question is, can you talk through what you're seeing in terms of competitive dynamics in the German broadband market? If you look at German mobile, promotional activity has become quite aggressive. So I'm just wondering if this is spilling over into the German broadband market. Second question relates to Deutsche Telekom because at its recent capital markets day, Deutsche Telekom was making the point it is seeing greater success in accessing MDUs and deploying fiber. Depending on which vintage you look at, Deutsche Telekom was saying that they were able to access 40%-60% of the MDUs that they were passing.
So I'm just wondering, are you seeing much impact from DT deploying fiber and MDUs in your footprint, or do you think that DT is mainly focused on the Vodafone footprint? Thanks.
Polo, I take these questions, Markus here. And what we see is a competitive environment right now on the broadband market. So what we saw, I think, was also in the last quarter, this Vodafone comes out with new broadband towers. But to be honest, on the growth path on the IP side, there is no question mark on my side that we will continue on that side. You mentioned the mobile packaging of three or four play that competitors are doing here that might impact a little bit the competitive market.
But what my experience in the past from other companies was that, funny enough, everybody is looking for those bundles, but customers are still thinking mobile and broadband in some of these occasions a little bit different. But nevertheless, we watched here where we opened the market. But right now, from that, we can't see any impact on our growth path on broadband. Coming to the comment on the capital markets day of Deutsche, what we did, I mentioned it before. I think what we did or what we are doing with our base management on consumer sales, so very exact extrapolations, churn management, retention offers, and so on and so on, we do at the same side on our housing side, and here, right now, we can't see that huge outlier numbers, which are expressed by Deutsche on their capital markets day.
Access to housing associations in that way, there might be a loss to Deutsche on a fiber deal, but we also gain customers back from Deutsche, from Vodafone as well, and other competitors. So on our base on housing, we actually are growing during the course of this year, 2024, by a few thousand customers. I think it's 10 or 15,000 customers we are growing here. I can't see that access approach by Deutsche in a huge way into our customer base. This is what I can say to your question. Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question comes from James Ratzer. Please go ahead. Good morning, Markus and Nico. Thank you for the call and taking questions. Two questions, please.
The first one would just be really interested to get a bit more insight into your outlook for EBITDA for this year and maybe looking as well into 2025. In the release, you've now lowered the EBITDA guidance on a reported basis to be slightly down year on year. I think, Nicolai, you were saying 8-10 million EUR of one-off items in Q4. That would seem to imply EBITDA of around 185-188 million EUR for the full year. Am I doing my math there correctly? If that is broadly right, how are you thinking about, can you give any comments on the outlook going into 2025, given what you were saying around TV and your hopes on internet growth? Then secondly, congratulations on all the progress made around the NetCo-OpCo split.
I mean, given that you've now signed the MSA that's in place, are you able to give us any pro forma guidance on how the NetCo might look from a revenue EBITDA CapEx perspective? And any thoughts you can give on next steps with that separation over the next six months, i.e., potentially a refinancing or M&A, what your current thinking is now a split is complete? Thank you.
Thank you, James. I will take these questions. Nicolai here speaking. First, on your broad outlook 2024, I would probably just comment you're on the ballpark numbers. You're probably right. Due to the heavy impact that we've seen in Q3, we're still working on what's happening in 2025. So I would probably not go into details here today.
In terms of NetCo/ServCo, your questions, we are not in a position yet to really show individual numbers or guidance on the trajectory yet. What comes next is bringing this what we've achieved to be more on an operational level going forward and get all these things. You might remember from Q2 that we still have the lift and shift of people being done, which follows in the next couple of months. And from that on, we will start to basically work as these two separate entities going forward. But we are not in a position to show individual numbers yet.
Thank you, Nicolai. Are you able to give any thoughts more on kind of some of the strategic next steps to give us any more color? Could you imagine a refinancing along the two business lines or any M&A?
I'm just trying to think about you've put a lot of effort into this. Is how some of the creditors and equity backers then will see a change for the company as a result of this?
James, like I said during the presentation, we have a two-sided approach here. It makes us more efficient, focused in the company, and it gives us exactly the opportunities you are asking for for refinancing and other topics. And this is now exactly finishing the work on NetCo split here and then looking at what is possible in the market and what options are there. This is exactly our path for 2025.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you, James.
As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star followed by one or raise your hand button. The next question comes from Jean-Yves Guibert. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning.
Can you hear me? Yep. Yes. Yeah. Thank you very much. A couple of questions. The first one, maybe I was keeping a question on slide 13 when you say the bulk migration potential of 1,161. Does it exclude the still around 200,000 of bulk contracts you were expecting to retain, i.e., not to migrate?
Yes. That is the full number. Exactly.
I mean, so it excludes the 200,000 or it includes the 200,000?
It includes the amount of customers that we retain on a bulk-like contract. Yes. Okay. So as you think you indicated previously, because through the web link, I was cut at some points, it's slightly below the above 1.2 initial base you reported in mid-2023 about this bulk customer base to potentially migrate?
What I'm referring to, the number, which is our number we are concentrating in to put our work on, is this 1.161.
It was a little bit higher starting the migration. But in these cases, there are also contract churns or losses. So what I said is that in the 49% number, which is linked to the 1161, these are the number which are single contracts and contracts who stay in a bulk similar way of contracts. So yeah.
Okay. But so far, so since Q4 2023, 1000 or 1037 of those bulk contracts have gone, partially migrated to individual customers. So should we expect a very small further end of bulk contract in Q4 2024? Less than 100?
No. We expect to be something around 200 or whatever staying in that system. And maybe there will be a change also next year because customers by law can change if they stay in a similar system or if they are not.
This is then what we also have to manage, that there might be a smaller part, but much, much, much, much smaller when we have to deal with 5,000, 10,000, or whatever, again, on a quarterly basis, but not more coming 24.
In terms of your.
Jean, just one comment. So now we are on 253,000 on bulk left per end of quarter. And we do expect some more additional switches out of this from bulk to individual. So there will be a few. This is not then going forward. This is not going to be the number. And it might be a bit lower than what we currently see. So there will be additional projects going forward in the next couple of months that haven't had the time to decide yet. Or it's the smaller footprint that Markus was just mentioning.
So there will be a bit more of smaller scale migration projects. And therefore, we do expect some losses here over the next couple of weeks.
Okay. Thank you. In terms of your revenue, TV revenue, so the split between the access bulk rated TV revenue and excluding the TV access bulk. So you're running in Q3 at around 27 million of TV revenue, excluding the access bulk contracts, which would imply around a rated monthly output for those customers that's close to EUR 12. Is that a fair assumption? And should we expect that to remain around that level? Or you expect to be able to grow B2C TV output from that around EUR 12?
Honestly, it sounds a bit high to me at the moment. And definitely, we can't grow the output above that. So
is that fair?
I mean, your TV revenue is 30.2 million minus 3.9 million of bulk TV revenue. That's 26.8 million of TV revenue, excluding the bulk contract. So that's from your numbers, 26.8 million. And you have an average base of B2C TV customers of around 750,000 during the quarter, Q3. So from that, I derived 11.8 EUR output. So unless there are some data which are not recorded in terms of TV customers, I mean, we can follow up, but that's a very simple mathematics taken from your reporting numbers.
Yeah. I would propose to follow it up. I'm not 100% sure I can follow you with the numbers, but let's have a look. And why don't you just send me a short email, and I'll have a look at it?
Yeah. Sure.
Last question, I think you have referenced some positive one-off in your reported normalized EBITDA, which implied a relatively high margin of 47.5%, but not sure whether you have quantified those one-offs. So just trying to understand what could be the normalized run rate EBITDA margin we should expect.
You're referring to the signal fees, and you probably see something around EUR 5 million in one-offs.
Okay. Okay. Thank you very much. That's it. Thank you.
The next question comes from Vivek Khanna. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good afternoon. Good morning, rather. Two questions, if I may. First of all, just on the signal fees, just remind me I couldn't quite hear what that quantum is and over what period that is having an impact. And then moving away from that on one-offs, thank you for the guidance for the incremental spend for Q4.
I'm just wondering, if you look into 2025, do we expect additional sort of NetCo separation charges, or is most of that now already being captured? And then related to that, I think you mentioned that some of these one-off charges are linked to headcount optimization. So I'm just wondering if you could provide us a little bit of color as to what you expect to benefit from over time from that initiative. And the final question is on the NetCo-OpCo split.
While I appreciate today you don't want to provide additional or incremental financial information, I'm just wondering if you would provide us some color as to what you think is the appropriate wholesale rate for NetCo to be charging to ServCo today, considering that that access probably will be a DOCSIS 3.0 access connection and potentially how that wholesale rate could change over the medium term as the network moves from DOCSIS 3 to fiber. Thank you.
Vivek, thanks for your questions. Could you possibly rephrase the first one? I did not really capture that one.
It was just going back to Johnny's question on one-offs, which how much and which quarter. I couldn't catch that.
But that's what I answered with the question, right? So I said roughly EUR 5 million in the quarter for signal delivery, please.
In the quarter. Perfect. That's perfect.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thanks.
And then
Let me answer the question to the social plan or something like that. To be honest, we are right now in negotiations and hopefully near to finalize these negotiations on the social plan with our workers' council. And for that, I'm happy to share some of these when we have a signed deal. For me, it is important to meet with the workers' council before and then also with our employees and so on and so on. But there is coming from ServCo NetCo split, making the company more efficient, focused on what is necessary. There is also, I would say, a fit-for-growth program on that side, but it isn't signed. But we have some ideas, but let me talk about that when we have the signed deal.
And maybe in addition to that, your question on 2025 and on the personnel costs we already see this year, it's basically an ongoing business besides the one Markus was just describing that we also have smaller measures that do not really rely on a workers' council agreement. So those costs then are put into non-reg when we do have here and there changes in the organizational structure in a bit of a smaller scale program. The one that Markus just described is just a bigger one that we will hopefully look forward and then get into books probably next year and not this year. And in terms of other one-offs, yes, obviously, we have phase one of the NetCo-ServCo separation completed. There is still a bit more to do. Markus mentioned the amount of legal entities that we have still left.
So there might be additional topics coming up next year in order to simplify the organization. So yes, we do anticipate to have one-offs. They are hopefully in a much smaller range compared to this year and last year. So therefore, but yes, they won't be zero next year. And maybe on the final question, please do understand that we cannot share any numbers on wholesale fees being in DOCSIS 3.1 or fiber as we are in negotiations with players on the market. So therefore, we cannot really disclose any concrete numbers as this is currently ongoing.
And sorry, can I just ask one quick point of clarification out here? I mean, you're saying you're in discussions with other people, but other operators in the market. I mean, obviously, your largest customer on day one is going to be Tele Columbus and ServCo itself.
Just to confirm, I'm assuming that whatever the wholesale rate is charged, will it be the same to Tele Columbus ServCo versus other competitors, or can there be a volume-based discount or separate pricing because I guess it's not really regulated? But I'm just trying to understand whether that's something the market would digest or accept or not.
Yeah. Vivek, of course, it is volume-based driven price models which are used in the market. And so this is a normal standard which we are also using for that split.
Understood. Thank you. Okay.
If there aren't any questions, we have one hour more for a working day, which is great for everybody. So Sandra, if you can't see any questions anymore on the line, I can't see. And then I will.
So far, there are no further questions, sir.
But I can kindly remind the participants that if they wish to ask a question, they can raise your hand button or press star and one on the telephone. So far, there are no further questions.
Okay. This is not the case. Wonderful. Yeah. We will have our first Christmas party on our offices in Leipzig tomorrow. So have a wonderful Christmas time and use the time between the years to stay with your family and speak to you soon. And yeah, see you or speak to you next year as well. Thank you very much. Bye.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded, and you may disconnect. Thank you for joining, and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.