Good afternoon, everyone. On behalf of HKBN Ltd, thank you all for joining the Group's 2025 Interim Result Investor Presentation. Today's presentation and Q&A session will be conducted in English. The management will present the business performance of Enterprise Solutions and Residential Solutions, as well as the financial performance of the first half of 2025, followed by a Q&A section. Without further ado, now may I invite Executive Vice Chairman and Group CEO, William, and President and Group COO, Dr. Denis Yip, to walk us through the Group's overall performance and business performances of Enterprise Solutions and Residential Solutions. William and Denis, please.
Thank you. Thank you, all our partners coming to join our interim update. I will say our success is because of the full support from our talents and also your trust and support to us. I will start with this PowerPoint, a bit introduction, and then our COO and CFO will share with you on the details. Basically, revenue, EBITDA, net profits, AFF, all green, all blue, and I believe like the 5% year-on-year EBITDA growth is among the best or better than all the other market players. Before my team members share the details, I'd like to highlight three Rs, which will be our drivers to really continue to deliver the sustainable growth. The first R is recession resistance. Second R is recurrent revenue. Third R is robust number two.
I will further elaborate these three Rs as a conclusion to let you guys know why we are so confident to continue delivering sustainable growth. Over to you, Denis. Thank you.
Good afternoon, all the analysts. Let me walk you through what we call the Enterprise Solutions and the Residential Solutions, the years and our strategy. I will pass to the CFO, Derek, on some of the numbers. You see the EBITDA growth of 5%. If you look at the enterprise business, basically we see the enterprise solution revenue grew 4% in the first half of FY2025. The enterprise core telecom revenue grew 2%, and our system integration ICT business grew 10%. It is a solid growth in all the different areas. A lot of you have seen this chart. We have this chart in the full year 2024 results announcement. When I met with a lot of the analysts, they asked about this chart. One of the core values that we have is the left side is telecom.
The right side is the SI ICT box moving. Now, all of us know that telecom GP or margin is much better than the right side. What we want is actually the bundling so that the customers have more and more enjoying both our telecom and the right-sized solution ICT business. If you look at a year ago, we were 57% telecom, 40% SI ICT box moving with 47% overlapping of customers bundled. Now, we want to be on the right side now, which is much better in terms of 61% telecom backlogs, SI ICT 39%, and the total bundling of customers increased from 47% to 50%. This is a good story. I'll talk more about it. If you look at our RS business, our residential business, basically the left side, if you look at the core telecom revenue, we grew 1%.
The ARPU grew 3% around. Then we introduced a term called ARPH, average revenue per household. That is the household solutions. We have the numbers for the last one year for ARPH, and we grew 5% to HKD 212. The total RS backlog grew 8%. Very healthy business on our RS business. Now, let's deep dive into our strategy for enterprise business. If you remember, we started the FY2025 in September. We actually launched a GigaFast campaign on the enterprise business because we actually invested into the Nokia 25G, which is the only company that can do 25G on broadband. We also have Huawei, which can do 10G on the speed. We really want to push for customers to go from the traditional 1G to what we call the 2G plus.
You can see our uptick for the last eight months, actually very good growth. Right now we are on the enterprise business, we are 6.1% having what we call the 2G plus. If we continue to increase this trend, the customers will pay us more and we have more margin. This is good news of having a good uptick on our GigaFast campaign. The other side is I talk about telecom business having better margin. What we want is our solutions actually making sure that we bundle with the FTNS business. We have the extended connectivity solutions that have almost 40 wins and 20 plus million in terms of contract value over the last six months. This includes the software-defined wide area network. This includes the secure SASE service, secure bundling, multi-cloud connect. What together we call the extended connectivity solution.
We purposely push on the extended connectivity solution so that the customers don't just purely use our line. They have the connectivity solutions that bundle with the line business. We also launched the ITEA, what we call the InnoTech Ecosystem Alliance. Now, we signed this up in late January before Chinese New Year, 17 vendors. Now, 17 vendors, a lot of them are mainland China vendors. You hear in the news every day that actually a lot of mainland China vendors right now use Hong Kong as the hub to go overseas to the Belt and Road countries. This is the whole purpose of actually having more China vendors into the HKBN portfolio. With this, we actually grew our international data FH monthly fee of 40%.
Now, the 17 vendors actually have different areas like Yonyou as the ERP vendor, Suanova as the AI GPU vendor, Lark OceanBase as the parallel one Oracle database type of vendors. We have a lot of different new vendors that we partner with. We see that actually is a very strong pipeline growth into our business. One example is you all heard about AI, NVIDIA. People are afraid that H20 will get sanctions or a lot of H20 orders. We actually partner with Meta X, which is the AI GPU Chinese vendor. We are the exclusive partner in Hong Kong. If NVIDIA is having issues in sanctioning, we actually have the China GPU that we can use for our customers. Next two pages, we'll talk about what we call the go global.
Actually, more and more Chinese companies are going to ASEAN, Middle East, Europe, Belt and Road countries. Not so much the U.S. It is more Belt and Road countries, not the U.S. countries. You see that Hong Kong is positioned to be an international hub. A lot of international headquarters is now moving to Hong Kong. You see the Chief Executive of Hong Kong went to Hangzhou looking at the Six More Dragons, which is the AI companies. Actually, he is inviting the six companies to be using Hong Kong as the international hub, international base. We in HKBN want to help this company to go global. How do we help? We have the connectivity. We have the digitization. We connect from Chinese headquarters into Hong Kong. We also connect from Hong Kong to ASEAN, to Middle East, to international.
This is a piece of business that we are growing very, very fast in terms of going overseas. This is the area of success that helped us to grow 5% EBITDA overall. The other thing is cybersecurity. Hong Kong is undergoing cybersecurity. Lucky enough, HKBN actually with the lines, we bundle with our cybersecurity solutions. Also, we have a new practice called CyberSafe. Hong Kong actually just launched the cybersecurity infrastructure bill in March. Basically, we have what we call the CyberSafe solutions. We have 30 plus green lights now on the launch of CyberSafe to help enterprise customers going through the different cybersecurity practice and using the different cybersecurity solutions that we have. Moving to the residential solutions, this is a study from OFCA, Office of Communications Authority. You can see that 70 plus % of the lines are 1G plus.
The fast speed is becoming more and more important in Hong Kong. Now, HKBN is the first company to launch 1G in 2005. In 2023, we actually are the only company that can do the dual guarantee. Last year, we are the first company that did the 25G. Like enterprise business, moving up the speed is very important for our ARPU . If our customers move up the speed, they are willing to pay more and our ARPU l increases and our margin increases. We did do very well. We have the GigaFast campaign since August, September last year. You can see that in the last six months, we actually grew 80% on our uptake of 2G plus customers. Right now, with our 900,000 customers, we have about 9% already at 2G plus.
Imagine if the rest of the 91% of the customers, let's say half of them will move up to 2G plus, our ARPU will increase a lot. This is the area that is very important for our strategy. Now, I talk about ARPU , I talk about average revenue per household, ARPH. You can see that ARPU l actually grew consistently. It's not that easy. You look at a chart, it's so easy. The pricing, we have competitors, and every day we need to work out very flexible pricing execution. We introduced ARPH a year ago because we want our broadband customer to bundle with solutions. We'll talk about why. Actually, bundling solutions, we want the household to be using the Hong Kong broadband. We call this the infinite play solutions. You see about 11 solutions here. Broadband is the core.
We go to MVNO, Nmobile. We go to OTT, which is a different TV platform. We have cybersecurity. We have Shoppy. We have the different Wi-Fi solutions. Actually, we sold a lot of Wi-Fi 7 routers bundled with our customers upgrading. We have the AXA travel insurance, home insurance. We have Global SIM. We have the different Bowtie insurance, health insurance, voice communications, aging or elderly solutions, or Gerontech that we are putting. We will introduce more and more solutions with broadband. The vision really is to increase our ARPH. Because the more solutions we use, the more sticky the customer is. Now, we look at OTT, for example. The top, we are the number one telco partner for Netflix, Disney+, and myTV SUPER, myTV Gold. We are introduced a new OTT service, iQIYI, Max, JOOX.
Actually, our ARPU with OTT increased 12% over six months. You can see that why the solution is so important for our ARPH. Now, elderly solutions, we actually have partnered with a company that do what we call the Safety Bell, Peng On Tung in Hong Kong. Interesting enough, this is the only company that actually will call the elderly every month and using volunteer to call to make sure that they are safe, they are happy, etc. We did a survey. Actually, a lot of times when we try to do this business, we thought the Safety Bell is whenever people have real emergency, should we use our customer center to let them call, etc. It does not work that way. It is a total solution type of business that you need volunteer.
The old people will call you anyway to try to talk to the customer center. It is a very different business than broadband. We will be introducing this business. We also will be using AI to look at the Wi-Fi sensing, the radar technology for what we call the fall detection. Actually, the AI will study the household, where the table is, where the chair is, what means falling. It is an AI learning process that we will be introducing. The number of solutions, we also did a study. We call it Infinite Play. Whenever the customer has five plus solutions, we call it Infinite Play. It becomes more sticky and it is growing adoption of solutions for us. What we want is more than four solutions will be used in one household. We will be measuring that.
We'll be introducing new solutions to have more stickiness on our broadband and telco systems. This is my final chart. We talk about the left side on the backlog growth of telco, which is a more profitable business than the ICT and SI. We have strong demand for the tailored solutions. The right side is really important. You see the tall rise building. We have our infrastructure built already for the broadband. A lot of people really think about how much backlog we have, how much booking we have. One way to look at it is we have 900,000 subscribers on residential, not even mentioning enterprise. With the 900,000 subscribers, let's say they are paying us HKD 200 a month, the ARPU or the ARPH around HKD 200. Let's say an average contract is 30 months. This is HKD 5.4 billion of committing billing revenue already, HKD 5.4 billion.
It is a very huge numbers that we are dealing with. This is residential only, not even talking about enterprise. This is the state of the business we are at. We are very happy to have 5% EBITDA growth. We will continue to strive for what the term is, sustainable performance. Thank you very much.
Good afternoon. William and Denis have shared quite a bit of the highlights and also some of the strategic initiatives that have taken place during the first half. Here is all the financials coming together. Started with the enterprise businesses. Charged by our GigaFast solution, our SI businesses, our telecom businesses, and our ICT businesses in aggregate grew 10% year-over-year growth.
On our residential businesses, our residential businesses, the GigaFast and also the Infinite Play deliver a positive 1% year-over-year growth on the direct subscriptions business portfolio, 1% year-over-year growth on the direct subscriptions business portfolio. We continue to adjust our strategy. Basically, we scaled down our less profitable reselling businesses. In overall, the aggregate, the business is actually about very flat and also a slight decline. Our EBITDA continues to gain lots of good momentum. Together with the ES enterprise solutions and also residential solutions, Hong Kong Broadband delivers a 5% year-over-year growth on the EBITDA. In addition, we are seeing the benefit of the improving finance costs. Our net income for the first half is HKD 108 million. We are also seeing a very stable, sustainable AFF growth at 2%. Hong Kong Broadband continues to accelerate our operating efficiencies and generate a strong cash portfolio.
The journey to embark the digitalizations improves our operating expense ratios from 14.8 to 14.1. On a year-over-year comparison, it's actually a 5%, 8, 6% improvement. We increased our cash basically by 34% to more than HKD 1 billion balances. I'm very happy, very pleased to report it to you. Our net leverage ratio improved to 4.79. Compared a year ago, 12 months ago, it's basically more than 0.5 improvement and reduction. My priority remained the same. Number one, to generate very strong cash flow. Our cash conversions remain very high at about 80%-90%. In the other words, every EBITDA that we earn, we managed to bring home 80%-90%. This allows us to continue with very strong cash positions. The leveraging. The leveraging is a long-term journey, but it's also my day-to-day priorities. We successfully refinanced 6.75% the syndicate in a couple of months ago.
Thank you for it. We get very strong support with a lot of the relationship lenders. And many of them actually in this room. Thank you very much. We actually have an oversubscription, basically more than two times. Finally, EBITDA growth. We will continue to grow the EBITDA more than 5%. That is how we target for the longer-term perspective. These are the key priorities for me: generating a strong cash flow, the leveraging, and continue the EBITDA growth.
Thank you, Derek. Before my conclusion, I want to share with you this page. This is talking about the ESG, the sustainability, that in our industry, we are still getting those benchmarks like AAA, something like that, that is above the players in the same industry. Talking about, we are already sort of secured HKD 6.75 billion syndicate loan.
Now we have remaining HKD 4 billion to be due in April next year. Go back to this page. The 6.75 for the first one, we got two-time subscription. Thank you for the support of our relationship banks and many friends here to date. Many of you are helping us, committing to promise and secure the refinancing for us now, even though the due date is in April next year. With a rate, effectively, we believe it's even better than the first tranche. First tranche, two-time subscription. Now for the second tranche of our remaining HKD 4 billion, we have 4.5 times subscription or oversubscriptions. Derek and Perry or our refinancing committee, they are taking different calls. Now they have a heavy problem from our friends. Be patient with us. We will try our best.
At least we want to let everybody know this, that refinancing is something that we have done. We are certain. No more uncertainty from any light fluctuation in interest rate, whatever. Sustainable growth, we delivered and we will continue to deliver. Back to the three Rs. The first R, recession resistance. Our industry, basically almost 100% local domestic use. The fixed telecom or the fiber broadband for households and for companies. Nothing related to the geopolitics or the tariff war that involves import and export. In fact, we won't be complacent with this study about the impact. The tariff war won't impact our industry, but may be impacting some of our enterprise customers, like those involving in export. We look at our enterprise customers. We do have 5% customers in the export industry.
According to the figure of the Industry and Trade Department of Hong Kong government, there are only 6.5% of the companies or players involving in exports to the US being impacted. Our 5% revenue related to exports times 6.5%, it is 0.3% of exposure on this revenue. I will treat it as zero. Basically, broadband is like utility, even better than electricity or water. You can use less water or less electricity at home or at the office to save some of those costs. For us, we have fixed monthly fee on contract. Like this one, look at all these high-rise buildings. For our business, very simple. In Hong Kong, many high-rise buildings, majority being high-rise buildings.
The broadband, the main trunk of broadband, the cost to enable connectivity to all these like 400 apartments within one building, just HKD 80,000 on average, or HKD 200 per home, over those 400 homes per building. The cost for us is minimal at one go. Then we'll continue to support the service for the next three or four decades. All our customers, I take residential customers as an example. They are paying us HKD 200 per month. On average, already signed 30 months contracts because we have 24 months, 36 months, or 48 months contracts. On average, like 30 months. Times 900,000 households, it is HKD 5.4 billion contract dollars secured. I myself don't look at this.
For you guys or some of the analysts who have been following with us for the last decade since our IPO in year 2015, our monthly churn rate is below 1%. For these 900,000 residential customers, on average, they have been staying with us for over eight years. One should imagine and use your own calculator to estimate, and then you will know how much we are going to get in the coming decade when you have low churn rate, when you have a competitive scenario that is favorable to us, which I will mention later. Basically, we are sort of we will not be impacted by geopolitical issues or macroeconomic downturn because of our utility nature of business. We are just having two money printing machines. One is in residential, another is in enterprise. I will not disclose the number in enterprise.
Look at how excited Denis is talking about. You will notice that our enterprise contribution is even bigger than our residential. To be honest, we only are having less than 20% market share of revenue in the enterprise area. That means we have huge room to grow. That is why recession resistance, point number one. Point two, recurrent income, recurrent revenue, I just mentioned. Point three is the robust number two. Robust number two, I refer to we mainly have one arch rival, the incumbents. We have two decent number three and four who do not have scale and do not have any strength to compete with us. When we face the incumbents, we are on the offensive. When we look back on the decent number three and four, we are on the defensive because we are scalable.
When we place an order to Huawei, Nokia, we are talking about buying things for more than 900,000 homes or almost 100,000 enterprise customers. The order size from the decent number three or number four, I think they can never commit any MOQ or get any discounts or better terms from any business partners. We are well positioned to play, to attack the first one, but neglect the third or fourth one. This triple R will help us to sustain our growth in coming years. Last but not the least, I always like to use the old model of younger guys maybe do not know, Michael Porter, competitive advantage, right? Talking about new entrance competition, look at our industry. For the last two decades, there is no new entrance in the fixed broadband industry. It is very, very difficult. We have acquired New World. We have acquired Wharf.
Together with HKBN's fiber network, with three fiber networks underground and many infrastructure inside the buildings, with more than 25 years' time to build a network and own the customers and revenue to be where we are today. For anyone who wants to replicate and compete with us, even if they are two times better than us, it will be like 15 years later and also with more money. Because when we build our network, like having the fiber inside the building there, we have still enough space. When we build, we jump into the space. There is no more space for other new entrants. That is why we are in a very well position to grow our business. One more point is that I think no one can speak louder than me. I am having 20 years' experience in the fixed broadband business.
Before, I have 10 years in the mobile industry. I am still supporting our friends in the mobile industry. I need to tell the truth. 5G or mobile cannot replace fixed broadband. It is two different engines, totally different. If people tell you that 5G or you use 5G router, then you do not need to use fixed broadband, not reliable, not trusted. They can never deliver 10 gig to 25 gig dedicated speed, not sharing with others. For the mobile, it is almost shared, not reliable. Ask all your 5G friends or those shareholders, if they are so confident on the 5G, ask them to cut their fixed broadband at their office. Cut the fixed broadband in your banks, in the outlets, and see who is right. The truth will come. We are very upbeat on our future growth, sustainable, and will be above all the other players.
Denis and Derek, can we come? Guys, see if you have any questions for us. Thank you.
Thank you. Let's move on to our Q&A session, right? For all you interested here with us today, whether in person or joining through the webcast, feel free to ask any questions you have. We'll start with a question from the floor, then we'll take a question from online participants. After that, we'll switch it up and go back and forth. If you're here in person, just raise your hand and our team will bring you the microphone. For those joining via the webcast, simply type your questions into the Q&A box and I'll make sure to read them out loud for everyone to hear. Let's welcome our first question from the floor, please. Any question? I guess our presentation is too detailed, very comprehensive.
Oh, okay, let's move on to our first online question we got, which is for the management. To what extent do you think the current trade war affects HKBN's business?
Oh, as I mentioned, we don't see any impact. I won't say any significant impact. We won't see any impact on our business. We are very robust, utility-like, recession resilient, having recurrent income secured. So we are all good.
Sure, thank you. Any question from the floor, please? Don't be shy. Nope. Let's see if we have any from the online participants.
Oh, I mean, I asked a question. Any concern that you can think of that we will miss if you were us sitting here leading HKBN for the growth path? Anything that makes you awake in the middle of the night when you think of HKBN?
Yeah, even if it's not a question, just a comment, any concerns, you're welcome.
Yeah, yeah, please.
Let's see if we get anything from online.
Yep, please.
Oh, there is one question, this gentleman.
Yes, thank you. Tibor Papp from ING. We read the announcement that China Mobile is acquiring TPG Stake. I'm just curious, has this had any impact on your strategy? Have you had any discussions with China Mobile?
As of today, up to this moment, the transition between these two, China Mobile and TPG, not yet complete. I won't answer on behalf of them. For us, like my internal email to all our talents, we are business as usual. We continue to grow our EBITDA, continue to improve our cash position, continue to deliverage. Everything is fine. We are still talking to our vendors like Huawei, Nokia to speed up our network upgrade.
All the operations are in full force. Internally, I sent an email, Chinese email to my team. I can translate in English later, but for those who know Chinese, [Foreign language] . We are still fighting. We are still eating in the lunch and dinner of competitors to help our business performance.
Sure, thank you. Any more questions, please? I guess everybody is as confident as our management. Cool. This concludes today's presentation. Thank you so much for coming, and thank you, management, for your presentation today. Hope to see you next time.
Thank you. Thank you.