Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of HKBN Limited, thank you all for joining the group's 2023 Annual Results Investor Presentation. Today's presentation and question and answer session will be conducted in English. Now, without further ado, may I now invite co-owner and group CEO, NiQ, to give us an overview of the group's annual results and also the business performance of enterprise solutions.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, everyone. Thank you everyone for attending today. What a beautiful day to host this event. Before I get into the investor presentation, I would like to take a minute to thank my 4,500 talents in our company, my colleagues, 'cause without these colleagues, we would not have this set of results today. A lot of companies talk about job security. We do not believe in job security. We offer career security. What career security means is to be upskilled and current, not to be working in a legacy industry, but working in the future industry. We wanna be the most headhunted company in Hong Kong because we're gonna lead the transition to the next stage of ICT. Hold on. Sorry. Transcendence. Let me start... Even though it's a beautiful day today, but let me start on a more somber note.
The days of a fixed telecom company trading at 12x EBITDA are behind us, and it's unlikely to ever come back. Let's be realistic. If we don't change, we will die. That's what we talk about every day in our company. If you look at our company, when we talk about transcendence and transformation, it's not a buzzword. It's something that we've been doing for the last 30 years. If you look at our transition, our transcendence from international direct dial, IDD, to fixed telecom, that was from 2000 to 2007. We lost money for seven years before becoming the largest alternative broadband player in Hong Kong. This time, this transformation is gonna be a lot quicker, and a lot more smooth.
If you look at when we IPO'd in 2015, we were a HKD 3 billion company, 80% residential. Today, we're a HKD 12 billion company, 80% enterprise in revenue terms. So transcendence is something that we do every decade. It's not easy, but we do it every decade. And every time we transcend, there's gonna be a big J-curve. Otherwise, other companies will transcend. Every time we change, there's gonna be an investment phase, and that's what we're going through now, and you will see it in the results. I am incredibly proud of these results. This is probably our best vintage in the last five years, because if you dig below the headline numbers, you will see the incredible change that the team is executing today. That will be realized this year in 2024 and harvested in 2025.
I can show you the math behind this. I'm not talking about a feeling that we will change by 2025. I can show you the actual math. These are a snapshot. Revenue up 1%. Difficult market conditions, but proud to say revenue is still up percent. EBITDA is down 12%. This is because we are investing in the future. There's no way that you can transform a company unless we, we make the costs, and the cost includes investing in the people, investing in the business before we reach critical mass. So these are calculated investments into the future. Our AFF is still very strong, which is how we support a HKD 0.40 full year dividend. Let me spend a little bit of time on our transformation.
You look at the network seven-layer model and just have a quick snapshot of what we are doing. So a couple of years ago, we bought JOS, one of the leading system integrator only companies in Hong Kong. When I say only, all they do is system integration. That was a HKD 4 billion revenue company when we bought it, and only HKD 100 million in net profit. So what's that? 5%, right? 5% net profit. We see about 20% net margin in that business, if we can transform it. How do we transform it? Well, if you look at a traditional system integrator-only company, it's basically a people business. They have no infrastructure. You're just buying the people. And when you have a people-only business, you tend to focus on complicated business applications. So what is a business application?
It's like designing a web, webpage or a membership program. A very, very custom system integration. And typically, there's always a lot of changes in between, and by the time you get to the end product, there's a very little margin left. That's why it's a HKD 4.1 billion net profit company. If you look at our business, our business is a beautiful business. There's only a couple of key providers with a citywide network. We enjoy a 70% gross margin. 70% gross margin. But our limitation is that this is a sunset industry. There's no growth. So if you keep staying in this industry, we're just gonna compete our way, a race down to the bottom. Now, when we combine the two businesses, the system integration business is 10x the size of ours.
We will focus on the core layers one, two, three, four, and leave alone five, six, seven. By doing this, we can focus on repeatable high gross margin infrastructure type system integration, such as cybersecurity, such as going from on-prem to cloud, such as networking. These are all scalable businesses that require less people, leaving more margin, because there's more reliance on the infrastructure. And by the way, where we have infrastructure that a SI-only company does not have. So this is a beautiful transition, but it would take time. You see the early signs of success. Now, our transformation, this is not an excuse, it's reality. Our transformation was delayed by a couple of years through COVID. It's impossible. We bought JOS at the end of 2019.
So as soon as we bought it, we had the social unrest, and then it was COVID. It's very hard to make a mass transcendence in the middle of COVID. So I would say that 2013, the year ended August 2023, is actually our first full year of transformation, where we got the team together, the team came together, and you're starting to see the results. Enterprise revenues up 9%. We have a pipeline, a wonderful pipeline, HKD 4 billion in discussion. We have 25 projects that are of HKD 20 million and above. These are unheard of numbers in our past when we were just a telecom company. We also recognize you cannot lead a transformation by a telco-only management team.
You have to bring in experts, system integration, or ICT native experts, to come in and supplement the skill sets that we have in telecom. And then we integrate them, and it takes time to integrate. It doesn't happen overnight. Another element is we are now very strong in China. We have almost 2,000 talents in China across 10 cities. So the critical mass that we developed with our great partners, some of many of whom are here today, such as. I won't name them, but such as the brand names. We can take that critical mass and incrementally expand selectively in China, essentially following our Hong Kong customers. Hong Kong customers with a presence in China. We start with that, and then we localize as we grow. The transformation is very systematic. It's not an ad hoc transformation.
How many companies do you know where one in two active companies are a monthly billing relationship? There's very few. We're one of those. One out of every two active companies are a monthly billing relationship. That means we have enormous scale that very few, none of the system integration only companies can say this. So out of these 110,000 active billing relationships, we categorize in, you know, three key tiers. There's the top 1,000, which is Fortune 500 like, very specialized, very high touch, very customized. These kind of sales processes take six-18 months to close. Then we have the next 10,000 accounts, which are very large companies, but they're not at the same scale or the multinational presence that you have in the top 1,000.
Then the cream of the crop for us. This is our home base. This is where we have an enormous competitive advantage that no system integrator-only company can touch. The next 100,000 customers. This is where our 2,000 people in Guangzhou can call in and make the connection and sell our system integration services, not just basic telecom services. So let me give you a couple of examples. A large enterprise. This is a brand name bank, global, recognized bank that world-class. In simple terms, HKD 10 million deal, HKD 10 million Hong Kong dollar deal, 20% relates to our system integration, 80% relates to our 70% gross margin business, but we closed the deal because of our system integration. Now, if you think about telecom, it's actually quite a simple service, relatively. I mean, in relative terms.
So telecom, point to point. So you have a bandwidth and you have a SLA, Service Level Agreement. That's predefined by the customer, so what's left? You tender on the price. So it's very price competitive in telecom, but system integration is actually sitting down with a CIO and developing his security posture. The ultra-low latency routing with diversity, all these complexities that go into it, but the margins are low. But in a bundle sale like us, 20% SI, 80% system, telecom, the margins are wonderful. You cannot do this if you're telco only or system integration only. We can. In the past, our main counterparty would actually be the junior IT person in a large company. Now we're talking... Now we're invited to the office of the CIO, and instead of just spec-in, we're actually budget-in.
What does that mean? Spec-in means if you have a good relationship, you determine the specification for the RFP, the request for proposal coming up, right? All the bankers in this room would know that, and we all try to do that. Budget-in means you speak to the CIO, and you help them apply for the next three-year budget, because that's how long it takes to revamp an IT system. That's the difference. That's the difference between selling commodity and selling solutions. Aegis, this is for our mid-tier, 1-10,000. Basically, with the experience and expertise that we developed in the super high-end, the same vendor partnerships that we have, we leverage and package it into very clear packages for the middle tier, the 1,000-10,000.
Now, in this group, they don't have the kind of IT resources that the Fortune 500 do, so they're very heavily reliant on us to give them packages. These are relatively simple programs to sell. It takes about two to maybe six months sales cycle, a little bit of personal touch, but nowhere close to the customization needed. Now, if you look at these brands, such as F5, Fortinet, Cisco, Check Point, NetBrain, most retail users would not have heard of these brand names, but these are enterprise-grade vendors that normally only serve the top 1,000 customers. We take that, package it into a solution, and sell it as a, a package for the 10,000. An example of this, there's a company in Hong Kong with a hundred... It's a chain stop, shop, with a hundred locations in Hong Kong.
Now, you know, the last few years have been tough, right? So they're down to one IT manager serving 100 chain locations. Every time something goes wrong, he has to fix it. So if a shop, the Wi-Fi in one shop is not working, he has to figure out whether it's a router, or the connection, or something else. So he would take the MTR and go out to that shop and try and figure it out, or he would call the telecom operator, and takes four hours to respond. What we offer is real-time, live troubleshooting, so he can look on his handset exactly what's wrong, and if it's just a local, reboot, he can do a reboot remotely. It is a huge cost savings. So in this case, it's a win-win. He's, he's got 100 branches.
He's testing 10 branches with us, and we increased the ARPU by 45%. Let me emphasize that, 45%, because we are in a fixed cost industry. Most of that 45 cents goes down to free cash flow. System integration cannot get you this. This service is a combination of having your own infrastructure and having the intelligence on top, but simplified for the mid-tier. Now, this is an incredible service. We've launched this from about three months now, and the response has been phenomenal. I think the take-up rate is more than 50% of the people that we call. What is this? So broadband is a pure commodity. I'm talking about the broadband to your coffee shop, the broadband to your hair salon. You know, they range from as low as HKD 200 to a max of 500 per month, and everybody's competing.
This is a red ocean, but we have turned our SI solution into Dim Sum Menu, where you can pick the business solution that you want. Starting from cloud-based Wi-Fi, all the way to business intelligence and other applications ranging from, say, HKD 400 to 1,100. But these are set menus, so these can be sold by our Guangzhou core office, and that's how we can increase the traction, increase the ARPU, and differentiate ourselves from our peers. So far, this is a incredibly compelling results in the early three months. The beautiful thing is, our salespeople make a lot more money. It takes time. We have...
Out of 100 salespeople we have in Guangzhou, only 25% is able to sell this so far in the first three months, but that 25% is earning 50% more commission. The 75 will follow. This is what we have that other people don't have. LUCA. LUCA stands for Unfair Competitive Advantage. Just look at... If you are SI-only company, you cannot justify these people. Our friends, my colleagues on the right there. It's on the left, our Guangzhou-based tele center, tele call center. This is view, the products that we have at incremental margins on top of a fixed infrastructure. These are the results. All the backlog is heading north. This is what we see. This is what the market doesn't see. Until now, this is inside information, but now it's public information.
The order book will take three years to roll into—completely roll into revenue, 'cause you sign an order, it has a two-year contract, and then you cascade that over the three years. It takes three years to convert order book to revenue. So that's why I say our confidence in 2024, 2025, if we achieve our 2024 KPIs, 2025 will be a home run. This is a waterfall picture. This... If you're, if you follow the SI industry, this is kinda kindergarten stuff, but I myself came from residential broadband. You know, when I was an analyst, I was doing mainly ARPU times subscribers. This is a completely different ballgame. This is what I mean by the waterfall.
If we sign HKD 100 today, in backlog, we can only recognize HKD20 this year in this year's PNL, and HKD50 will be next year, and HKD 30 will be the following year, because they're two-year contracts, and you recognize, you amortize them over the life of the two years. I can show you the math. I have an Excel to show you this if you're interested. Now, this is what it looks like. If you consider 2023 as the first full year of transformation... All the hard work that we did, all the extra expenses that we incurred, all the extra people we hired, both in the front end and the back end, will only have a 20% impact on 2023. That impact is guaranteed.
These assigned orders will flow quarter four, 50% to next year, and then 30% over the next. If we do that again in 2024, same thing. So it takes 2025 to have the first full year of the transformation that we are seeing today. That's why this is the best vintage we've had in the last 5 years of this company. The results do not show that, but the operations do. Let me just summarize. This is the final slide, and this is what excites me. If you look at the SI industry is a dog. There's a couple of listed companies in Hong Kong. They get in aggregate, they have HKD3 billion in revenue, and I think they make less than HKD300 million. No, less than 3% net margin, so less than HKD100 million.
So HKD3 billion in revenue and less than HKD100 million in net profit. So it's a break-even business at best. It's not a business that you, you wanna be in. And why is that? Let me try and explain it. If you look at the gross margin range in this sheet, it's huge, and the range is a function of scale and efficiency. Box moving. Box moving is very simple, selling desktops, laptops, the brand names. If you sell these laptops, typically 5%, but once you hit a multi hundreds of million dollar scale, you get another 5% rebate. But you have to have the scale. If you don't have the sale, you buy. Okay, so you have to have that scale. But even with the scale, it's still a 10% margin. What's next? Maintenance service.
So when you buy a laptop, you get two years standard manufacturing warranty, but you would like to buy another four years for the normal six-year useful life of a laptop in a company. You pay us. This is the AppleCare equivalent, and the margins here are fantastic. Why? Because we are the wholesale provider, the HP, for their manufacturing warranty. Something goes wrong in the first two years, you take it to our shop, and we, OEM, fix it for you on behalf of HP. So if we get another more business on top, the scalability is wonderful because we don't have to hire new people. We just run a couple of OT shifts. So that's why the margins are close to 50% if you have scale. Now, once we have the maintenance service, we go into managed service. What does that mean?
When you have a whole IT department in your office. Actually, a lot of the time, they're idle. Now, of course, if you have an attack, they go nuts. If you have to upgrade for Win 11, they go nuts, but most of the time, they're sitting there idle, waiting for the hotline to ring. So it's a very like, it's like owning a car versus Uber. So what we offer is a complete end-to-end managed service, 24/7 service, backed by our technicians, to outsource most of your IT functions, and this is a 20%-40% margin. Now, imagine having outsourced your IT function, we're gonna be on very good terms with your CIO. Then we start talking about budget-in, budget-in our services.
So to summarize this whole slide, the most important point about this whole slide is actually one bullet point, telco greater than 70% GP. Eventually, we want to sell more telco at 70% GP, but it is not a commodity. It's part of this whole virtuous circle. That's how we drive margins to unbelievable levels relative to an SI company. Hopefully, that was quite exciting. Now, I'm gonna actually move on to the real home run for this year. Not this year, for the, as in this year, 2024, because the momentum that you see in 2023, it's in the bag for 2024. For that, I'll pass to William.
Thank you, NiQ. Thank you, thank you. So, NiQ has shared with you how we are setting the foundation for the growth of enterprise in the near future, which all of us are very upbeat and confident. For the residential market, I would just want to highlight that, or some of you may have already known that, we are a strong number two player in the residential market in Hong Kong, having 36% of market share. And, the EBITDA contributed by, residential service is 48%. So this 48% EBITDA, from residential service is, in fact, a very stable cash cow for us to, have a adequate supply of, cash flow for our operations. So if you look at our, residential markets, financial year 2023, we have, increase of subscribers.
That is the efforts of better Wi-Fi solutions, higher bandwidth, and also the efforts of our salespeople calling the existing huge base to upgrade or top up some more very net services to increase our revenue per household. Apart from the fiber assets, we have our OTT, we have mobile, we have everything. So, this is a summary for financial year 2023. Our team is very good at execution. I will be very proud to say that when we want subscriber number. We use aggressive price to get more subscriber number. Like for the first half, we already got like more than 20K net addition of subscriber number. Then we think, 'Hey, that is the right number, right scale. Now let's grow the revenue.' Then we start to increase the price.
So you can see that the price of acquisition for new customers and also the retention ARPU is going up. So on August the ARPU is like more than HKD 200. So this HKD 200, when compared with the base of 179, you will see that it is a signal for higher service revenue from the whole base of residential customers. Why? Because we always call our customers six months or five months before the expiry date. So if today you are paying us like HKD 170, HKD 180, we call you, cross-sell some value-added service or upgrade the bandwidth, something like that, and then you pay us HKD 200, 210, 220, we sign up the contract now.
But the effective date of the new higher ARPU will be four months, five months, or six months later, for all those customers that renew, sign contract by this month. So this is the uptrend of our ARPU for our huge base of 920K. And the 26% increase in the base ARPU, if you use August number compared with the whole base, you will see that there will be a reflection of growth very, very soon. But of course, to take the whole base upgrade of ARPU, it will take, like, two years. So the question is whether this increase of price is sustainable or not? Let's see. It's the combination of internal efforts and also external environment.
Talk about internal efforts, we started the infinite-play three years ago, beyond connectivity, not selling fiber or fixed broadband only, but bundled with mobile, OTT, cybersecurity, Wi-Fi, and then also upgrade to 2 gig with the Dual G uarantee on both speed and the latency. That is talking about money back deal guarantee. In Hong Kong, I'm quite sure that no competitors are offering the same. I don't know about global players, but from what I know, nobody even around the world is doing this guarantee with money back. So with all this contents, all these 5G stuff, whatever, it helps us to increase the ARPU from our base whenever we renew the contract. But that is what we do internally with our hard work.
But we should make sure that external markets, the players, what are they doing? So for HKBN, look at the number in March, we are saying like HKD 139, 187. Today... Or not today, in fact, it's two months ago, we are selling more than HKD 200. That is our selling price for new customers, for our bundled service, fixed broadband plus OTT or mobile, or cybersecurity, whatever, to increase our ARPU. To be honest, every month, we do not acquire too many new customers, but we renew many customers from our base. So this is the indicated list price to support us to increase price by adding more value to our huge base. That is where our EBITDA and cash flow come from, the residential huge base.
Well, what we are doing, look at the market that's who's doing. We have 36% market share. We believe the incumbents will have about, like, 40% or 41%, something like that. So together, the number one and us are having almost, like, 80% market share. I don't want to name the competitors, but when you look at this color, look at this logo, you notice that the our archrival has increased price from HKD108 to 148 within six months, which is a 36%, 37% increase of their price. We stay competitive, we also increase price, but we only increase, like, 26%, but that is still good. That means we can go and attack, but we can still defend. That is a good positioning for us.
And of course, there are some decent number three and decent number four players. They are still selling at 99 or 88, which because of their small coverage or because of their poor quality, we treat them as irrelevant. I don't want to say do some voting, but I'm quite sure that many of you are not using these number three or number four networks. It won't be something you are proud to share with. So what I want to say is, internal efforts of adding more value, external environment to sort of support the sustaining of our price increase will lead our enterprise, our residential service to a bigger jump in our revenue and also EBITDA.
So, while I finish the investment service, I also want to use one page to share with you where we are in the ESG. ESG, for many listed companies, they are just doing by order of the regulator to tick the boxes. We, because of our core purpose of make our home a better place to live, we want to make sure that we committed seriously deliver more than expected on ESG. That's why we have a ESG committee at board level, with board member leading and chairing the committee, and with senior executive having skin in the game in the ESG targets. That's why you look at the past few years, we are talking about single A, double A, and then triple A.
All the improvement that lead to the result that we are the number one among all the Hong Kong telcos for four consecutive years in ESG performance, but we are not satisfied with that. This benchmarking are basically regional or local benchmarking organizations. Our board is very demanding. The next stage, we are leading our team to have benchmarking with the top-notch global benchmarking organization to see where we are today. So, I will say if there are investors or whoever who are really serious on ESG, you should give us many takes on the ESG performance. Derek? Thank you.
Thank you, William Ho . Hello, everyone. For some of you might know, I've been with the company less than five months. I am super excited about this transformation. It present a tremendous opportunity and prospect for the company and for all the talent, including myself. FY 2023 was a very important transitioning year for Hong Kong Broadband Network. We deliver a very stable top line performances in a very challenging market. And if we're looking at the underlying businesses, our enterprise services continue to grow at a 9%, very strong year-over-year growth. As we are continuing to capture opportunity and drive the transformation, our ICT transformations continue to gain important momentum. Our residential businesses, with its very stable performances, and this will further accelerate as we continue to play our infinite play, creating more bundled value, like, you know, for our customers.
You know, this will drive, create tremendous, like, you know, value upside and the growth upside in this business for next year. Our product businesses shrink about 6%, as most of the product get refreshed and completed refresh during the COVID period back in 2021. Our overall EBITDA shrink about 12%. We are continue to invest in this business to for future growth and capitalize, like, you know, future opportunity. We actually invest, you know, some of the increases is actually in our bandwidth costs. NiQ talked about our backlog. Basically, our backlog will turn into future revenue, and this future revenue will contribute directly into our EBITDA, creating a significant pool of profitability for our future. Accounting adjustment on our goodwill. Let me reemphasize, this is a non-cash.
It's not gonna impact our dividend model, will not impact our interest payment model, will not impact our future operations. As we have a very strong core fundamental, but as we are facing a very difficult environment for the business, especially during the second half, we recalibrate, you know, our accounting assumptions, including the growth rate, including the discount rate, including our cash flow model. As a result, we make an accounting adjustment and write down this goodwill. And again, this is an accounting adjustment, will not impact any cash flow, will not impact any interest payment, will not impact our dividend model, will not impact our future operations. We continue to invest in our transformations, and yet we managed to deliver a strong set of efficiency improvement. We are spending less on our operating expenses.
We have a lower CapEx ratio, and more importantly, we generate a lot more cash flow from our operations. We have increased about 10% cash flow from our operations, and the cash conversions for the EBITDA is actually improved to 97%. Meaning, every HKD 1 that we earn, HKD 0.97 that we can actually convert that into a cash. It's a very strong model on the cash flow operations. With this set of strong operating efficiency, I would like to conclude our FY 2023 operations, and we are looking forward to a very exciting FY 2024 opportunity and a successful executions. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Derek, and also all the management for the detailed sharing. We now move on to the question and answer session. For investors joining us in person today or through our webcast, you're welcome to raise your questions. We will take one question from the floor first, followed by another question online. For investors on the floor, please raise your hand, and our staff will pass the mic to you. While for the investors joining from webcast, will you please type your question in the question box, and I'll read out your questions accordingly. So we'll take the first question from the floor-
Neale.
The gentleman over there.
Hi, there. Thank you. Neale from HSBC. I had two queries, please. One is on where you're seeing the growth in enterprise services. At the half year, you had quite a lot of discussion on the GBA trends, which I didn't see you mention, so maybe you could expand on that. And the second one is your thoughts on the debt. I understand probably constrained in the near term, and you've implemented the hedge, but how are you thinking about that on, say, a two to three-year basis?
Okay, well, I'll take the first question, then, Derek, you take the second. We are seeing growth. Actually, the beautiful thing about moving from telco to system integrator ICT is a 10x increase in the TAM, the Total Addressable Market. So I encourage any of you, if you want to fact-check this, go back to your office, speak to your CIO, ask about his total budget and what percentage goes down into telco, and what percentage goes into, you know, ICT costs, IT costs. It's about 5% goes into telco, 95% goes into ICT, internet security, laptops, networking, digitalization, ERPs, et cetera, et cetera, right? So it doesn't matter whether the market's growing or not for us anymore, 'cause we're coming in into a much bigger market that's 10x the size of our telco space, as long as we take market share.
Whereas we were highly constrained in telco, everyone who wants a broadband in Hong Kong probably has a broadband. Whether you're residential or corporate, you already have a broadband. And we're not getting the kind of price increases that we used to get just by increasing the bandwidth. So, going back to your question is, now we are jumping from a very small pond. It sounds like a cliché, but we are jumping into deep blue ocean, and our competition is no longer just a big incumbent in the telco space. It's hundreds, if not thousands, of small SIs that have no hope in competing against us.
And I just want to also let Neale know this, today we have about 4,500 talents for the whole company, but we have close to 2,000 talents stationing in China, over 10 offices. So you see, we do have many, many resources supporting the future growth, particularly in GPA.
Actually, I was too, I was too passionate about the first part of your question one, but you tend to ask these kind of multi-tier questions, so I get lost. Second part, what's our outlook on the GPA? Well, China, we were expecting that they would come back strong, but the reality is, it didn't. But we are fully prepared for when it eventually does come back strong. You saw we have 10 offices. We're making great traction, and as I said, our approach to entering China is on the incremental economics that we already established in Hong Kong. So when you're talking about the rebates and you're talking about the scale relationships, we already have scale in Hong Kong, so China is incremental. When we talk about 10 offices, they're not all large offices.
Many of them are relatively small offices, 10, 20 people, salespeople, but the services that they bring in, the margins are very compelling. So China is a, especially the GBA area, is a major growth focus for us, starting from an immaterial market share.
Okay. Derek?
Regarding the refinancing questions, we always look for opportunity to optimize our capital structure and reduce our cost of capital. The immediate or the day-to-day priority for us to do is to continue to execute our cash from operation conversions. You know, that will allow us to generate like, you know, very good source of cash and give us a lot of freedom to decide, like, you know, what we're gonna do next in terms of the capital structure. Thank you.
Thank you, management. Now move on to take the question from online. And this question is from Patrick Pan of Sanford C. Bernstein, and he asked: What's the reason behind the huge goodwill impairment? And also he has a second question, which is: If interest rate stays at the current level in the coming years, interest expenses with either most of the profit generated from the business, will dividend payout be sustainable in the coming future?
Back to the goodwill adjustment. And again, I would like to reemphasize, this is a non-cash, no impact on our dividend model, no impact on our interest, and no impact on our future operations. It's primarily accounting-related, and given that our current macro economy environment, we recalibrate, you know, our accounting model on the assumptions... on the risk factor, on the interest rate, discount rate, on our future cash flow, on, all the assumptions, and we recalibrate it, and then make decisions, to do a accounting adjustments, basically, to, write down the, carrying value on that. But again, you know, this is primarily a accounting adjustment, not impacting, like, on our operation in any front. And in terms of the second question is?
About the interest rate. If the interest rate stays high at the current level in the coming years, will dividend payout be sustainable in the coming future?
So when we look at the interest rate, half of our corporate debt is under a swap, interest rate swap. We actually have a lock in a very favorable rate. So that actually really help us mitigate a lot of our cash flow risk already. And in terms of the, you know, the dividend payout, we will continue to review our company financial situations. We want to make sure that we're taking the best interest of the company and, and look at our, dividend payout policy. Right now, we have been following our dividend payout policy, but again, a very important that we want to continuous to measure against our, our company financial health. And I think that's the best interest of the, of the company.
Can you bring the pointer? Two elements I would like to emphasize. Every HKD 10 of ARPU increase in residential is a HKD 100 million impact. HKD 10 x 920,000 subscribers, x 12 months. If it's a price increase, that essentially forwards to the AFF line, the free cash flow line, because it's existing cost base, adding, you know, the revenue. Very minimal cost involved in a price increase. This is different to growing the subscriber base by 10% or by the equivalent, because if you grow a subscriber, we pay for the installation cost, there's network elements involved, heavy acquisition costs, et cetera, et cetera. The reason we are able to raise prices is because we went on a acquisition, subscriber acquisition, spurt for the last couple of years.
We've cut price in order to grow the subscriber base so that we can raise ARPU. Now, if you look at our history, why is it that we are 900,000 subscribers, and the next carrier is 200,000 and below? It's because of the way we execute. That's residential. On enterprise, let me show you this. Let me just remind you of this, slide. What you see is a very wide range... Well, I have to go back a few ones. Okay. A very wide range of gross, gross profit margins for these, elements of the business. We are, at the moment, maybe a little bit towards the left, in the middle, but a little bit towards the left of this range. But in the next HKD 1 billion of revenue that we bring in, is gonna be on the right-hand side.
The incremental margin of the next HKD 1 billion we bring in will be at the right-hand side of these ranges. That's the difference. So that's why we are incredibly excited. That's why we've done the hard work in 2023. That's why I say 2023 is the best vintage we've had in the last five years. 2024 is gonna be hard work, but 2025 is in the bag. If we get through 2024 in the same momentum as we had in 2023, 2025 is a home run. Mathematically, a home run, not a feeling. Mathematically, a home run.
Thank you, NiQ and Derek. We'll proceed to take another question from the floor. If you have any questions, please raise your hand.
[Uncertain], any questions?
So if not, I'll move on to another question taken online. So here's another follow-up question from Patrick. He asked, "Roughly how long can the orders generated from enterprise business be converted into cash?
So it goes back to the waterfall. I'm trying to figure out where the waterfall is. There. Okay, so the waterfall. So think about this: if you do HKD 100 every month for 12 months in a row, but every month is a 24-month contract. So think of a waterfall. It looks like a waterfall, that's why it's called a waterfall. So if we do that, it takes, for HKD 100... If we sign on—let's say, HKD 1,200 this year, 'cause it's HKD 100 per month, only 20% of that will actually get recognized as P&L this year. And by the way, we pay commission upfront for the two-year contract at the start of bill. So there's a bit of a timing mismatch.
You have 20% of the revenue, but 100% of the expenses this year. That's one of the reasons why you have a -12% on EBITDA. Then next year, you get 50% of the waterfall coming in, and the following year, you get, thirty - the remainder 30%. By the way, the second and third year, we already paid the, acquisition costs upfront in the first year. So this is what a situation looks like. So if you look at just 2023, if we add HKD 100 here, 20%, gets recognized, 50%-... 20%. Now, what I emphasize is, these were really bad years. These were the COVID years, and we were struggling to integrate the business. It's very, very hard to put in a brand new management team by Teams conference call, right?
We have added about 30 people, systems from the ICT industry to join our company, to supplement the very strong team we have in telco. But you could not do that during the COVID period. So this is what it looks like. We had to carry two bad years this year, and then next year, we only have to carry one bad year. We've had two good years, assuming next year is strong. We have two good years and one bad year, and then by 2025, you have the full impact of our 2023 will come through in 2025. That's why 2025 is mathematically a home run.
Thank you, NiQ. So any other questions from the floor? This gentleman.
Thanks. Andy, from Morgan Stanley, here. Just on residential, could you share a little bit on what portion of customers we have locked in for those new higher rate plans? And what has been customer churn rate been trending over the past couple months that you raised your prices? Thank you.
Okay. Customer churn rate is lower than 1% per month. I will say about, roughly about 40% of customers acquired will be between 1 gig and 2 gig. Or in fact, no, in fact, I would say one third being 2 gig, and then maybe another 30% or 40% being 1 gig. So 1 gig plus 2 gig will be a high bandwidth one, or high pay one. High output one will be around, probably, more than two-thirds.
Thank you, Michael. We now proceed to another question taken online. This is the question from Raymond of OCBC: Could you please provide guidance on the upcoming dividend, leverage, and CapEx?
Home run, 2025. Now, on a more serious note, you know, I think you can see the fraction. I think it's up to us, as a community, to project your own assumptions onto those numbers. Thank you.
Thank you, NiQ. Is there any other question from the floor? If not, we have got another question online, which is from Scott of Radisson Group. The number of permanent full-time staff has decreased by over 4,400. Is there a layoff by company, and how does it impact the future of the company?
No, it's attrition. We were 5,700 people upon acquisition of the two major acquisitions in 2019, WTT and JOS. If you look at here, there's only one in the management team, the best of the breed. We have one person serving the full suite of services. We only have one network team running three networks, et cetera. So there's massive synergies, and we intend to continue to buy more companies going forward. There are some very marginal players in Hong Kong that are really struggling, and we think we can pick them up at very good value. So that trend will continue.
Thank you. Due to the time, we will take the last two questions from both online and from the floor. Any other investors would like to ask questions from the floor? If not, then I'll move on to another question taken online. Would you please elaborate more on network cost increase, and how should we think about EBITDA margin or growth going forward?
Let me take this. If you live in Hong Kong, look at your electricity bill in the last year or so, and one day you come home from work and you notice that your price has gone up by 40% if you live on Hong Kong Island, and 20% in Kowloon side. And that impacts all of us living in Hong Kong within one month billing cycle. For us, if you look at these price increases, it would take about 32 months before we punch that price increase through the customer base. Why? 'Cause we call you six months before you expire. You sign the contract, but it's not effective for six months. And then, the average contract length that we have in our existing base is about 28 or 29 months, so it will take time. Our cost of network services fluctuates month by month.
We are carrying a higher electricity cost. So when costs... That's the, the good and bad nature of having a fixed price business, fixed price long-term contract business. There's a timing mismatch between revenue and costs. So the costs, network-related costs.
Thank you, NiQ. So if there are no other questions from the floor, this is the end of our question and answer session, and thank you, management. To thank all of you for your continuous support towards HKBN, and the group has prepared special gifts for all the investors who attend the presentation in person today, which is a Global SIM travel data service that includes 14 days of free travel data to 14 hot APAC destinations. So we hope you all will enjoy the high speed internet access, and also the unparalleled flexibility offered by the group. Thank you all for joining today. Thank you.
Thank you.