Good afternoon, and welcome to Swisscom's Full Year Results Presentation 2023. My name is Louis Schmid, Head of Investor Relations. Let's start the online meeting with a short introduction, and move to slide number 2 with the agenda for today. Christoph Aeschlimann, our CEO, starts with Chapter 1: Successful 2023, where he dives into some of the achievements commercially, operationally and financially. Then in Chapter 2, Empowering the Digital Future as Inno-Innovators of Trust, our CEO presents the Swisscom Group story and strategy before explaining the strategic priorities for Switzerland and Italy.
Thereafter, we move to Chapter 3, Trusted Leader in Digital Life and Business in Switzerland and Italy, covering achievements, market trends, strategic priorities, including ambitions for Swiss B2C, presented by Dirk Wierzbitzki, our Head of Residential Customers, Swisscom Switzerland. For B2B, presented by Urs Lehner, Head of Business Customers, Swisscom Switzerland. For Swiss Networks and IT, presented by our CEO. And our Italian business, presented by Walter Renna, CEO of Fastweb. After Walter's presentation, our CFO, Eugen Stermetz, will present in Chapter 4, Our Rock-Solid Financials, including the Outlook 2024. In the wrap-up chapter, some final remarks from our CEO, Christoph Aeschlimann. After the presentation, we move directly into the Q&A session, which starts at around 4:00. With that, I would like to open the meeting and hand over to Christoph.
Thank you, Louis. We will move directly into the achievements of 2023. I think we can say that 2023 was again a very successful year for Swisscom, and Swisscom delivered, again, all operational and financial targets. We are leading in Switzerland. We were awarded the strongest brand in Switzerland. We have a very large NPS leadership, and were able to win many shop service and network tests in the past year. Also, in Italy, we had a strong growth. We continued to grow in IT, and Walter Renna took over successfully from Alberto in the CEO role. On the Swiss side, B2B had a strong development, especially on the IT side, with a strong growth, further positioning Swisscom as an integrated connectivity and IT leader. Last year, we have also seen a lot of innovation.
Many new products were launched, both on the B2C and the B2B side, to strengthen Swisscom's innovator image and to make sure that we can generate new revenues in the future years. On the ESG side, we made a major milestone by obtaining the accreditation or the approval of our SBTi targets, which we handed in, and we are now on track to execute against our 2035 net zero SBTi-approved target. On the next slide, we can see a brief overview of the operational performance of both Switzerland and Fastweb, and you can see that overall it is a very pleasing result. In Switzerland, we were able to continue our growth in Q4 on the mobile side and were able to attract 129,000 new customers on our postpaid offering, leading to a market share of 53%.
Broadband was roughly stable, slightly declining, but overall compensated by a slight growth on the wholesale side by +13,000 connections. We also had some structural changes, so you can see the TV decline continued in Q4. Also, the fixed voice decline continues in line with structural changes in the market, and many customers canceling their fixed voice lines or TV, behavior shifting more and more to other media content, such as OTT, streaming providers. On the Italian side, we had a very pleasing development on the mobile side, with +422,000 subscriptions, reaching 3.5 million customers year-end , representing nearly a 5% market share.
We also continued our value strategy on the broadband side and accept a certain decline in our broadband customer base, which we overcompensate largely by the growth in our wholesale business. Because as you know, last year or quarters have seen many new entrants in the Italian fixed line market with Iliad, with Sky, and lately, Enel. And these customers are customers of our wholesale division, leading to a very spectacular growth of 69,000 lines in Q4 and an overall growth year-on-year of 108,000 lines, largely overcompensating the loss we have on the B2C side. Overall, this led to very pleasing financial results. We had a stable group revenue of CHF 11 billion, representing 0.2% change.
We had a growing EBITDA at CHF 4.6 billion, up 4.9%, growing net income at CHF 7.1 billion, and with stable CapEx, a very strong growth in operating free cash flow proxy and overall free cash flow also growing to CHF 1.48 billion or +9.7%. And Eugen will later detail the financial numbers and go into more details on this. I will now move on to Swisscom Switzerland or Swisscom Group. First, the Swisscom Group story. So one year ago, we gave ourselves a new vision to clarify the purpose of Swisscom, which is helping all our customers achieving the maximum value in the digital world and extracting value from digital technology.
We believe that achieving value out of digital technology requires, on the one side, obviously, innovation and new digital technology, and on the other side, it also requires a trusted base between the customers and the company. This is why we established a new vision one year ago, Innovators of Trust, where we say that we want to be a trusted digital technology innovator, making new technology available to our customers in unique and easy-to-use customer experiences. We also focus on generating a positive impact for society with digital technology, because we strongly believe that this, again, generates new trust in digital technology and makes it easier for our customers to accept new technology, such as 5G or, at one point in the future, 6G. And now, in the past year, we also worked on our group strategy to decide how we want to achieve our vision.
We decided on the following four strategic pillars we want to work on within the Swisscom Group, and this new group strategy is valid for all our group companies in Switzerland and in Italy. The first two pillars are focused towards our customer base, and the second two pillars are focused more internally and are about the transformation within Swisscom. So as you know, Swisscom has always had a very high customer focus, and we want to continue to delight our customers as they are the basis of our future success. Delighting customers starts with the best network, both wireline and wireless, but obviously also extends into having an excellent sales and service excellence in the shops, in the call center, in the B2B sales force, or an excellent digital interaction for our customers. We also need to focus on the future to generate future growth.
This requires new products that we need to invent and build, both for consumers and for digital customers, which I will talk a bit more about, or Urs and Dirk in particular, will talk more about the new products that we are currently working on and launching that will generate new revenues in the coming years. Now, as you know, on the technology side, in particular in telecom, what is great today is average tomorrow, and customers will not be willing to pay the same amount, in the future for the a similar service. They expect more at a lower cost. So it is important to work on our own efficiency and cost base, and we need to make sure that we can achieve more with less resources to be able to satisfy future customer demands at a lower cost.
This we will achieve by implementing or focusing heavily on our future digitization internally at Swisscom, but also automating more and obviously applying artificial intelligence at scale across all sectors in our company. This will allow us to work in a different way and achieve more with less input, but it also requires our people to change, to perform together. So we also need to work on our collaboration within the company, but also constantly develop our employees. We need to learn new skills. We need to learn how to use artificial intelligence, train our people, that they are also fit for purpose in the future. This is what the last and final pillar of our strategy is about.
Now, I don't want to go into too much details of these pillars because my colleagues will talk about it with what it means regarding their relevant segments. But next to delighting customers within our interaction with the customers, obviously, branding is also an important aspect, and we will continue to work on the branding of both Fastweb and Swisscom in the future. And the basis for growth is obviously, as I talked about, new products in the future. Next to digitizing to achieve more with less and using AI, we will also focus on standardization, on simplifying continually our IT, and to focus also on excellence, both in service and sales organization. We also defined new Swisscom Group goals. We have defined five group goals for the overall group, which apply to all subsidiaries within Swisscom.
At today's presentation, we will focus on the first two ones: How do we become a trusted leader for both consumer and business in Switzerland and in Italy, and how do we achieve rock-solid financials in the future? But the other three are not less important, but you can find the details in the appendix of the presentation, and we are also happy to obviously answer any questions in the Q&A on the remaining three group goals. Now I'm at the end of my presentation, and I will hand over to Dirk Wierzbitzki to talk about consumer in Switzerland.
Okay, thank you very much, Christoph. Good afternoon, everybody. Looking back at 2023, we obviously utilized the group strategy framework, you know, to guide the presentation. Overall, we are happy with the results that we have achieved in the consumer segment in the last year. Obviously, key to this is, has been delighting customers, as always. We were able to extend our NPS leadership on the back of great connectivity and networks, great and outstanding experiences with products and entertainment, and obviously also great services, be it assisted or non-assisted.
Then all packaged in compelling propositions that are delivered via Swisscom and the Wingo brand and third brands in a segmented approach to the market, with a clear focus on value for customers that, you know, ultimately led also to a stable ARPU situation, which in turn then led to an almost stable service revenue situation in the B2C business for last year. Innovate for growth. Key topic last year was certainly entertainment. I'm going to explore that in a minute a bit more. But, you know, clearly, we upped up the experiences from a experience and functionality and content perspective both for our own content offerings, but equally also with liaisons for compelling third-party offerings that we brought to our customers.
These two pillars then also helped to achieve more with less. Happy to report that we have a stable EBITDA. So while the left and middle pillar clearly work, you know, for the top line, we are also busy on working on our cost structures, particularly on things like, you know, simplicity or stability, avoiding customer interaction, which is of no value for us and for the customer. So clearly, let's say we have a good workload reduction, and that shows in its results, you know, combined soon also with a push into digital experiences, that have helped, you know, to achieve this.
Looking at the next page, you know, probably most of you know the market is slightly growing, which is basically really coming from the fact that roughly 100,000 population growth is there every year in Switzerland, which then in turn means roughly 40,000 new households, which we are profiting from. And then, particularly in the mobile space, there's still pre- to post-migration ongoing, which is another source of growth that we can participate from. We do that, as I said, you know, with our own brand and the second and third brand. Clearly, our focus here is value and quality, and not, you know, pricing.
What we also likewise see is an increased development of digital maturity, in the population overall, which is, you know, helping also the shift to digital as we service or as we address, customers. With respect to pricing, we expect that, you know, we, have an unchanged situation, as we had it last year, also, this year. I'm not going into the right-hand side here, as I touch upon, you know, most of the topics, later on. When we look ahead, and you would ask ChatGPT, "Tell me the difference between this chart and last year," you'll probably not find too many differences there. Which basically means, you know, the, we continue, our course, which is, along the street as delight customers, innovating and achieving, more with less.
The particular focus here on delighting customers is really, you know, our focus is on delivering great value for our customers with the best experiences there. Innovation, you know, next to, you know, further upping our experience in entertainment, we are looking into certain segments or product segments where we believe, let's say, we can serve customer needs and grow a bit more. Then achieving more with less, we're also maintaining course, and as Christoph said already, particularly with new possibilities like exploiting AI to serve customers, we see even further opportunities that we want to unleash. Looking into the value side of things that I touched upon, I'm really pleased that, you know, we have mostly stable ARPUs.
As you can see, in the middle on that graph, on wireless, there's a slight decline, which is mostly from the fact that we have a slight brand shift going on there, as you all know. But overall, the situation, let's say, is a rather stable situation. That also is a result of itself by focusing on value, which is the first point on the left-hand side, as you can see it. Some of you might remember, we talked about that already last year. We have reduced quite substantially, first, on the main brands, on the Swisscom brand, our promotional activity, in terms of promotional discounts, in terms of times, in terms of gifting promotions, and so on.
Last year, at around springtime frame, we also took back the aggressiveness in promotional activity on the second brand and also are focusing, even in the budget segment, more and more on delivering value for money as opposed to, like, the cheapest price around. That apparently, let's say, is a trend that we have begun with and we want to continue in 2024. We continue to execute our multi-brand play with a focus on value and quality all along. We do see certain opportunities, particularly also from the fact that the fiber network build-out is continuing.
That gives us great opportunities both in the customer base, but also then obviously to acquire new customers in those areas and regions where we beef up the network from copper to fiber. Next page, you see the RGU development, which, you know, consolidates. It is mostly flat. They're obviously looking underneath. There are a couple of changes. You know, we had quite a good growth on postpaid RGUs. We have a further decline on voice RGUs, so the kind of like fixed mobile substitution on voice is still ongoing. And we were mostly stable on broadband, and we had a slight decline on TV.
Some of that, you know, correlates obviously with the decline in broadband, and some of that also correlates with the effects that Christoph has already touched upon. As you can see also from the graphs in the middle of the page at the bottom, you know, we are pleased with the uptake of our blue portfolio, which we launched mid-2022, so most of the customers are already there.
The white spaces, to me and to you, should indicate that there's still possibility, you know, from some of the base customers that happen to be in older tariff schemes to bring them into the new blue tariff scheme, which then also is mostly then a more for more deal, meaning, you know, for a little more money, customers get much more in there, be it broadband, speed, performance, data or entertainment or whatever. On the FMC penetration, we also still see, you know, room for growth that we want to address and tackle. And equally also, there's not a graph for that here, but, you know, similarly for the household penetration, we see an opportunity, you know, for growth.
That not only then for the FMC part, for the main brand, for the Swisscom brand, but also for Wingo. We have a bit of an imbalance. We have many more mobile customers than broadband customers. Obviously, also to cross-sell broadband into the mobile base that we would have with, with Wingo. Looking at the customer satisfaction or NPS development, we are really pleased, you know, with what we have accomplished, not only according to our own measurements and insight, but also, you know, testified by third parties like consumer magazines and other organization, where we mostly won like each and every prize that is around there. Strong recognition also, again, from Brand Finance for the overall brand work, you know, for Swisscom.
And really, that to us is at the heart of our success. You know, happy customers stay and churn less, and obviously, a good company is a good reason, let's say, to join us, when everything works so well and the brand has such a high recognition. The churn rates you see at the bottom there, you know, more or less on a similar level than last year. So really something that we are pleased with, and we want to continue, which obviously goes without saying in a saturated market environment, you continue and have strong efforts into your customer base to have them happy and recommend us and our brand for others.
At page 19, then a bit of a deep dive into TV. TV is really, let's say, next to the connectivity product, if you wish, the reason to come and reason to stay, a main pillar of our proposition. As you remember, we have got from nowhere to market leader over the last decade, and we still do believe that we have the best proposition around. Nonetheless, obviously, we have upgraded the proposition, as I said, last year. So it gives people even more pleasure and choice of content and other possibilities in their connected home by utilizing the Google platform and the Google Play Store with the world of applications and content that is in there.
We also cut special deals with third-party streaming providers like Paramount and Disney, who are hugely relevant to our customers, and our customers then can profit, for instance, from special discount and prices, but also from a better convenience as you know, sign up and billing and so on and so forth, all come from one hand, and that is us. And obviously, that is something that we want to continue also this year.
Looking then the broader product and offering portfolio, then, obviously next to connectivity and entertainment, we see pockets of growth, in areas like accessories, connected devices, security offerings, and, we also want to expand our insurance offering that we already, you know, provide for, like device insurances and so on and so forth, into other insurance areas, you know, this year. As we believe, let's say, you know, we can leverage, the strengths of our brand and leverage the size of our customer base also in, in other product areas, that are correlated to our connectivity and our—to the relationship that we have with customers. Last part then, taking a look into the development of, service, in particular, the move from assisted service, to digital service.
But we are particularly pleased with, you know, how that has developed for e-care. Yeah, 70% of our workload and interaction already is brought about on, on the digital interface. You also see at the bottom of the page, you know, we have been immensely working upon, you know, reducing the contact center workload, which in turn, by the way, has had the side effects that customers are more happy because quite often, as customers call in, something new doesn't work, something isn't as simple as it should be, and so on and so forth.
So we have put a great deal of effort into working on high-performing networks and product and stability, but also on ease of use, simplicity, and so on and so forth, so that questions, you know, don't arise at all, and then leads into the workload reduction, you know, as we have it. And on the right-hand side, you see, you know, our focus areas for this year. We basically want to continue that route, leveraging also the possibilities that AI offers, you know, for the digitalization of the customer interface.
And also, you know, while we had quite a, you know, a focus on hotline and customer care since last year, we are also putting quite some focus on our retail network, where we equally believe that the retail network can profit from new ways of servicing customers and digital opportunities, and so on and so forth. So that's clearly a focus area, both for pleasing customers, but also to become leaner in operation for next year. Et voilà, that concludes the briefing on B2C, and I hand over to Urs Lehner for B2B.
Thank you very much, Dirk. Good afternoon from my side. Happy to share our results concerning the B2B segment in Switzerland and start with our core achievements in 2023. In the pillar of delighting customers, there for sure, we are really pleased that we have launched and strengthened our value differentiation by launching new products in the mobile space, in the SME segment last year, and a set of services also in the IT segment, where I will come to it further on. Then one really great remark and an outstanding achievement was our customer satisfaction score that we have achieved on NPS level, so all-time high in corporate and SME segment, where we are really proud of and thankful.
And last but not least, also improve our and addressing our customer business needs by transforming our go-to-market sales organization, the direct sales corporate segment, during the period of 2023. In the pocket of innovate for growth, we definitely can say we are pretty far ahead in transforming our, legacy or existing MPLS-based, business network solution in Switzerland to a full SD-WAN substitution, and, I will, dig into that a little bit later on. But there we are, really pretty advanced ahead, and, we see a lot of value by delivering, this flexibility and this innovation to our customer base here in Switzerland and also Swiss space with partners abroad.
In the SME IT market segment, we have strengthened our positioning by delivering a new offering, full integrated offering for SME customers, that we have piloted in 2023 and was fully launched now in January 2024. There is really an interesting opportunity ahead, also combined with some inorganic acquisitions done last year, looking forward, also driving that into 2024. Last but not least, in the dimension of achieving more with less, digitization is for sure all about what was in the SME segment, the first launch of a fully digitized mobile product last year, which will be scaled up now in the coming weeks and months ahead.
We have a positive development of the IT profitability, which I will, I will dig into it a little, little bit later on in detail. And last but not least, a successful organizational simplification in a few elements internally, but also in the go-to-market organization. If you look into the market perspective in two dimensions, first of all, starting with the telcos. With the telco segment, the B2B segment in Switzerland, is still declining from an overall market perspective point of view, due to price pressure and also due to technological conversion into SD-WAN and other elements. But on the other side, the Swiss IT market has a nice growth with 6% CAGR on average within the last years and also in the years ahead.
There we try to participate as much as possible in this market growth. The market trends that we see is an increase in conversions of network and IT as a main differentiation factor, and with our positioning, with strong positioning in the telco market space, but also in the IT market space, there we definitely see a play for B2B was an interesting and intensive evolution in 2023, which we are convinced will also be a strong positioning and base to further grow in this market. Our Swisscom's proposition in B2B is and will remain local proximity, which is a fundamental factor in the Swiss market, with its different environments from customer sides, but also from languages and proximity and cultural differences.
I guess there we have a solid and all over Switzerland good positioning where we can build on. We are the most trusted business and transformation partner within the ICT environment here in Switzerland, and service differentiation and excellent customer service is key and will remains key in our offering, and in our way of working with our customers and partners. If you look to the strategic priorities 2024, we lever on award-winning network, deliver products and services to defend our ARPU premium. So our value strategy, as it was also explained in the B2C segment by Dirk, is a fundamental pillar of our further evolution, where we are working on consistently and executing well.
We drive differentiation to the next level by bringing seamless customer experience and excellent services and trust for our B2B customer base, from the smallest SMEs to the largest, largest internationals. We innovate for growth by pioneering with the next generation connectivity offering, which I will elaborate a little bit more in detail further in a minute, and enhance our position as a leading IT services provider by benefiting from the market growth in an organic manner, but also in certain pockets with further inorganic growth. To achieve more with less, we transform our operating model and are continuously driving our excellence through digitization, standardization, but also by having the ability to manage real existing complexity in our B2B world, due to the fact that continuous growth in business means also having the capability and maturity to absorb complexity, which is driven by new business.
We continuously execute on the value strategy, as mentioned, in the B2B in the telco space. In the wireline, in the wireless environment, we launched a fully integrated Enterprise Mobile portfolio last year, and we will further expand on that to have an integrated offer for all B2B customers, independently of size, due to our conviction that the needs are fundamental, the same for smaller and largest corpo- larger corporates, and it's really an integrated play that we try to achieve there by delivering our excellent products and services for the whole B2B customer base.
Which is the family of product in the mobile space called Enterprise Mobile, and in the wireline space, our Enterprise Connect offering, where we are in full transformation of our historical MPLS installed base in the corporate segment, and already 100% on SD-WAN in the SME world since a lot of years. With this, we are able to defend our ARPU premium, and also able to win back customers, which really are looking for flexibility, value for money, and key differentiation to have a partner which is really able to serve their needs in various manners. We have by far been proven with external benchmarks the best business internet performance in Switzerland, and are building on that further on as a trusted partner, and where our customers can rely on with fundamental stability in our services, day and night.
Looking to 2024, we have the full launch of the Enterprise Mobile portfolio, which is going on with also some selective price adjustments ahead to stabilize our ARPU level. And on the wireline side, we enhance our offering alongside with additional services and push cross-selling into our customer base. The blended ARPU, you can see it, it has declined by 2 points in consideration to the previous year, and the ARPU base has a slight increase of 8K in the year-to-year relation. As mentioned, we try to drive our interaction with our customers as innovator of trust to the next level.
Our NPS result in regards of the Swiss environment and corporate segment, we achieved 45, in the SME segment, 30 points, which are all-time highs in our environment since we measure these values. We have converged all our business portals into one integrated, so-called My Swisscom Business portal, which is the one-stop shop for our B2B customers for self-service, but also for interacting with us over various channels. This was a very important transformation done last year, where we build on towards 2024, to push our digital self-care and sales capabilities further on, all into the SME, but also in the corporate segment.
As mentioned before, we are working on a next-generation connectivity portfolio for B2B customers, where in this next-generation offering, we will combine wireless, wireline, security, and value-added services in a new approach, and, looking forward to that, to launch that towards 2025. We are convinced there is a huge chance in it, but also some challenges ahead to solve with this innovation we try to drive within the B2B segments. If you look to our SD-WAN penetration, particularly in Switzerland, you can see that from a commercial perspective point of view. We are today or end of last year, at 84% of our install base, which has fully SD-WAN contracts in the wireline space, and 50% of these customers have already migrated in the corporate segment, to SD-WAN-only solutions.
Our intent is, commercially, we have this transformation fulfilled by the end of 2025, and technically, the migration by end of 2026. Then being getting rid of the last MPLS network resources here in Switzerland in the B2B segment. The launch of new business, a critical push-to-talk solution, but also further evolution of our IoT business is also a key element looking forward in 2024. The RGUs in IoT have doubled, more than doubled over the last two years, and we see a huge adoption of IoT solutions in rollouts for Swiss-based multinational customers all over the globe after the Corona waves. So there we definitely see also a solid evolution and a trend also looking forward into the space.
Coming to a further expand position in as a Swiss IT service provider, we had a 3% increase in turnover compared to 2022. If you look into a little bit the pockets of our IT portfolio, there we have environments like cloud, security, but also software business, which has a very solid double-digit growth. But we also have some substitutions in our install base, for example, in the UCC and workplace environment or in some cloud environments, where traditional workloads, which were operated today, fully in private cloud or in hybrid scenarios, migrating them together with our strategic partners on AWS or Microsoft in hybrid scenarios.
Therefore, some, let's say, value dilution takes place, but overall, we still have a solid growth in our IT services revenue and have also worked intensively in our profitability profile on IT, and also have there made steps forward in a roadmap, still doing more on that ahead. If you look into our portfolio of activities in the IT segment, we have a set of participation of companies which are fully consolidated within the B2B business, but which are acting on their own brands within Switzerland. Why are we doing that? First of all, there is not one, a one-size-fits-all approach in a go-to-market, in a very scattered market.
Therefore, we have some specialties in subsidiaries focused either, for example, for ERP solution in the SME segment or for some security consulting services, where a set of customers, especially the smaller and mid-sized customers, have a strong tendency also to work not only with large brands, but also with smaller brands, which companies fit commercial-wise or also cultural-wise in their perception better to them. And in this approach, we address this capability and use synergies in our ecosystem really to drive value for our customer. And in this partner ecosystem, we also had a very nice growth last year. Joining a new company was accepted, mentioned, and driving these synergies in our ecosystem way forward to create value for our customers and for Swisscom is still our strategy way ahead.
We have announced a collaboration with NVIDIA, looking forward in 2024, where we want really to build on. We are already working with NVIDIA in the B2B segment since two years here in Switzerland. Now, with this investment in an AI platform, in building up capabilities here to serve Swiss customers and also Italian customers, where Walter will, for sure, also dig into later. There, we are really going forward with an intent to be a solid partner for trustful AI adoption for solutions for Swiss-based B2B customers. And for sure, pushing cyber defense and also cloud adoption is and will remain a very important topic, also in 2024.
Last but not least, we have also ramp up of new offerings, by initiating direct go-to-market and approach in the SME segment, in addition to our partner ecosystem that we are evolving or, let's say, working with it, to make sure that all over Switzerland, our IT solution are the one-stop-shop fit for our SME customers here in Switzerland, where we have finally 600,000 SME customer base in the market. I told that we are working to on the improvement of our IT profitability, profitability. You see the evolution of, coming out of 2021, had a solid, a solid evolution in 2022. Also, a lot of work done in 2023, on which we will capitalize for sure, also ahead.
It is and will remain an important factor that we derive also the profitability profile of our IT solution portfolio, combined with a growth with an ambition, at least on market growth level. Looking to 2024, further enhancement in digital sales and self-service capabilities are for sure one focus we are working on. Then the transformation in our go-to-market approach, which I already mentioned, which has been initiated in 2023 for our key account management here in Switzerland. We will build on that further on, building up in industry-specific knowledge and capabilities to make sure that we are really the partner of choice for and trust for our B2B customers all over Switzerland.
And last but not least, we continuously work and improve our interaction capabilities that our B2B customer can select on their own, the channel in which they want to choose and to interact with us, by timing and also by their favor, either serving providing service self-service, or also delivered through service requests through our various channels in an integrated manner. There is still some work to do ahead, but fully convinced that by end of 2024, beginning of 2025, the full homework is done, that where we can execute on further into the market. And last but not least, with this, I will hand over Christoph to dig into the infrastructure in Switzerland. Thank you.
Thank you, Urs. So now, let me talk a bit about our infrastructure work in Switzerland, which I think we can say is the basis of our proposition, both in the consumer and business segment side. The basis of delighting customers is the best network, mobile and wireline, and we achieved many awards on this front in 2023. We were able to win all relevant benchmarks, both on the wireline and the wireless side, and we continue to or continued to heavily invest in the rollout of FTTH. We have the largest FTTH footprint in Switzerland, and we further increased our 5G+ coverage. Also, to be able to innovate for growth in the future, you need to make space for new things, and you need to clean the house. So we are also focused on further simplifying and automating our current landscape.
So one important aspect of this is the launch or the renovation of our optical and IP core networks. We have both built the new optical core and the new IP core, and now we are continuously migrating the old or all the services from the old networks to the new optics and IP network, which will move us into a very different position in the future, operating completely automated networks, which are future-proof. Also, further decreasing the complexity in our IT landscape is of paramount importance to be able to decrease our cost base and move ahead and improve the resilience and stability of our networks and our IT.
For this, we also continue to invest in our in-house IT capabilities, because we strongly believe that being in control of DevOps and IT capabilities is a key to the future, as IT is becoming more and more important to run the business. Everything becomes digital, AI-driven, so we need to have these capabilities in-house, and we have started many years ago with this and have achieved major new milestones, I will talk a bit about later on. Overall, from a market trend perspective, I think we can say that the trends are largely unchanged. Data consumption continues to grow, both on the wireline and the mobile side, so we need to continue to invest in those networks.
We can still see a global public cloud shift, and I think on the wireline side, it is very clear now that FTTH and fiber is the future-proof technology that needs to be rolled out, and over time, copper networks will be substituted by an FTTH footprint. War for talent is also still the very important for us. Attracting and retaining the talent in IT and network is very important. There is still a lot of demand for these type of resources in the market. This has not changed from 2022, and we continue we expect this to continue also in 2024. So focusing on being a top ICT employer, having a strong value proposition as an employer, is a very important aspect that we continue to work on. Something that has probably changed quite substantially last year is the impact of AI.
So we are using AI since many years, probably about five years, that we have started to implement AI-related technologies and automation. But last year, with the appearance of GenAI, I think the game has changed and the importance of AI has further increased, and we will obviously also roll out this technology more and more across the whole company, all divisions and all functions, as also already Urs and Dirk highlighted before. So moving ahead, our strategy into 2024 is very similar to the strategy we executed last year in 2023. We will continue to focus on-...
Rolling out FTTH and 5G to ensure the best network in Switzerland for our customers, having a seamless experience, and also even further increasing network reliability and security, as this also has a direct impact on NPS and obviously, the cost base we have in the call centers by reducing the incidents or reasons to call for our customers.
We will also, I think Urs already explained it, put in place or expand our private cloud infrastructure with an NVIDIA-based type infrastructure to add AI compute resources for internal use, but also for our B, B2B customers, and we will continue our migration to the new optical and IP cores, which is a very important program that is running since nearly three years now and continues or will continue to run approximately another three years in parallel with the B2B migration of the customers moving from MPLS to the new SD-WAN product base. Achieving more with less will also be one of the key topics on the IT and network side. We will further reduce the complexity and remove IT platforms, but also applications.
We will continue to reduce the network complexity and focus also on sustainability, in particular, consuming less electricity, as this is not only good for the environment, but also good for our P&L, as it reduces the cost base on the energy side for the future. Now, if we have a look at the mobile side, which is really the mobile network, where the mobile network is the basis of a superior customer experience in the market, we were very pleased to achieve the highest-ever measured score in the Connect test , with 981 points out of 1,000.
I think this is a absolutely outstanding achievement of the Swisscom mobile team, which is only possible with really this very high focus, both on the rollout, but also working on our core infrastructure, making sure that it has an unprecedented reliability and performance. We will continue to work on this this year. We will continue to increase also the 5G+ population coverage. We hit the 81% mark end of last year, and we expect to reach 90% 5G+ coverage by 2025. We will also, in parallel, continue to execute the 3G phase-out, which will be completed by end of 2025, to be able to use our electromagnetic resources and power emission fully in the 4G and 5G network to the benefit of our customers. On the wireline side, we see a similar picture.
We're investing a lot in the quality, stability of the networks, and in parallel, the coverage. So you see, on the mid, middle in the top, that we reached 46% FTTH coverage in Switzerland, which is a 3% increase, where we provide up to 10 gig connectivity for our B2C customers, and we expect to reach 57% coverage by 2025, and between 75% and 80% coverage by 2030. All of this will be done within our current CapEx that we allocate in, Switzerland, which we intend to keep stable, and we are confident that we can reach this target with, the money that we are, have available for this activity. One point that we changed in, last year in the strategy of the FTTH rollout is the, the handling of our copper network.
So today, we have a copper network and a fiber network, which are entirely run in parallel, and we decided to starting to decommission our copper network, where we have fiber available, and over the coming years, we will gradually migrate our copper-based customers onto the FTTH connections. This will result in a 50% reduction of our production locations over the next years, until the rollout of fiber is complete in Switzerland. So this will be a more, sort of a 10-year plus undertaking, and over the time, we will completely phase out and entirely shut down our copper network by the end of the fiber rollout, and this will, according to our current estimation, enable us to save in excess of CHF 100 million OpEx annually.
We also made some decisions on the IT side, so we decided to change our architecture and move it or align it with the digital architecture of the TM Forum architecture, to simplify the future renovation of our IT estate. As all major suppliers in the telecom space are now also applying or building their product in accordance with the APIs and the architecture of TM Forum, it makes it easier to move to an API-based architecture to source certain specific functions across the board. And this is something that we will implement now in the coming years, next to continually simplifying and modernizing our IT estate.
At the end, this will put us in a situation where we have a simpler, leaner IT with a lower cost base, and maybe the most important point, it will enable us to implement new products and processes much faster than we are able to do it today with a more complex architectural setup. On the simplification side, no, sorry, on the stability and reliability side, I mentioned several times that this is an absolute key aspect for our customers, for the NPS of our customers, and we will continue to focus very heavily on reliability, but also security of our networks. We have reinforced our KPIs to go to zero escalated major incidents within this year to further increase customer satisfaction with stability.
With the increased stability, also continue to decrease the number of customer tickets and field force activities related to the network. So you can see that, year-on-year, we were able to decrease by 15% the number of customer tickets relating to network stability, leading directly to less field force activities, ultimately, eliminating this cost. And this will be something that we will continue to focus on this year to make sure that the increased, network reliability and security will also lead to less and less tickets and calls at the hotline. And ultimately, we might be able to move to a zero-touch approach in networks, but this will still require quite a lot of work, automation, AI investment, to really be able to move into this famous zero-touch approach that, all of us in Telco, dream about.
On the simplification side, we will continue to heavily simplify our IT and network landscape. So far, we have been able to remove 24% of our IT application estate since 2019. We have made really great progress, exactly according or slightly ahead of plan, actually, in 2023. We will continue on this journey towards 2026, with an expected target of minus 33% compared to 2019. Effectively eliminating 1/3 of the IT application landscape that we had a couple of years ago, which will further simplify, increase our speed, and reduce the cost base on the IT side. We have a similar picture on the IT and network platform side.
So we managed to phase out 12% of our IT platforms and network platforms, and we will continue to work on this to reach at least 36% less network and IT platforms by 2026. This is to some extent linked to the B2B product transformation, because many of the old networks are linked to the MPLS-based wireline products. So in line with the migration to new SD-WAN product base, we can also migrate and shut off the old IP legacy network, putting us into a space where we have completely decoupled products from the network, allowing us really much higher speed and facilitated life cycle management in the future years 2026 and beyond. I previously already mentioned the expansion or insourcing of IT development or capabilities. You can see this at the bottom in the middle.
In our DevOps centers in Riga and Rotterdam, we increased those centers to over 500 employees, meaning an increase of 43%, and we are very pleased with this result. We intend to hire some more people to reach approximately 700 people, both combined over Riga and Rotterdam, really strengthening our DevOps capabilities across the network and the IT space, which is an important aspect for the future. Now, one last word about our wholesale activities. I only want to focus on two points. We continue to focus on increasing our 5G roaming partnerships, as this is an important aspect for our customer experience when our customers are abroad in foreign countries, that they can effectively also profit from the 5G networks in the countries they visit.
We managed to sign a lot of contracts in the last year and increased by 33% to a coverage now of 64 countries. So there is obviously still some way to go, but also not all countries on the planet have already rolled out 5G networks to date. And the other point, which is increasingly important with the ongoing FTTH rollout and copper phase-out, we obviously want to increase the monetization of our fiber rollout and make sure that connections are maximized on our network, and also our competitors in the market use our FTTH network for their customers. With this, I will now hand over to Walter for Italy.
Thank you, Christoph. Good afternoon, everybody. 2023 has been a great year, not only for Swisscom , here represented, but also for Fastweb in Italy. Here, you can see the achievements of 2023, starting from the light customers. We have been growing in all metrics. Second-best performer in the mobile market development, growing double-digit into the enterprise top customers, growing significantly also in the wholesale business. On top of that, we have a very super-performing network, and I'm proud to say that for the third time in a row, we have been awarded for the best mobile network in Italy by Ookla. Also, in innovation, we have done big steps ahead. We launched in December a partnership with NVIDIA to implement in Italy the first supercomputer dedicated to artificial intelligence, which is a good opportunity to enter this market and win new customers.
But we have also released new product in all our markets, consumer, enterprise, and wholesale, in order to serve better our customer. Again, the network has continued to grow, both the FTTH and 5G, which are the pillars of our development over the next future. Then efficiency. We are on the way to become an efficient operator. We have worked a lot on the energy side, trying to reduce and optimize not only the consumption, but also the pricing structure in order to lower down cost. IT is another interesting area of efficiency, where we have delivered in terms of reduction of IT incidents, which means lower operational costs, at the end, a better customer service. The very last point, we've also continued to work on reducing our space in the offices, also leveraging on smart working.
If we look to the markets, the market in Italy remain very competitive. This is true. If you look to the consumer market, wireline is flattish in terms of line. On the mobile side, we see a slight growth, driven by the 2nd and 3rd SIMs related to IoT. Different story for the B2B. Yes, the telco market is flattish, but the ICT market is growing significantly. In terms of pricing in the consumer market, in 2023, prices were stable, but still low, with a strong competition, driven by over 20 brands competing in the market. And during the course of 2023, also, Enel joined the wireline market. Enel is the incumbent on the electricity market in Italy, so they are very strong. From one side, this is a threat for the consumer market, but it's also an opportunity, being one of our major wholesale customer.
In terms of opportunity going forward, the low level of penetration of FTTH and 5G is for sure something that we would like to exploit, thanks to our positioning. A position which is based on the quality of the network, FTTH, 5G, quality of the service that we deliver, thanks to a very high NPS in all markets, and our strong proposition in the B2B, especially in the PA market. Also, in wholesale, we have strong position, thanks to our network, and we are investing a lot in IT and AI in order to exploit also these new markets. Our brand positioning with Tu Sei Futuro and our significant ESG achievements are also playing a role in differentiating ourselves in this very crowded market. Looking ahead, very simple strategy: delight customer, work on the quality of service.
We need to improve and deliver superior performance compared to the other players in the market. For sure, we'll implement the new AI tools to be fast in adopting this technology and differentiate from the others, but also sell and upsell new services in order to increase revenues, but at the same time, lower churn, and then expand our network, FTTH and 5G. Innovation will continue. As said, new services will be launched in all markets. For B2C, we would like to enter new markets like energy. For enterprise, cloud, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. But also on wholesale, we see opportunity in the mobile and international business. And efficiency. We have put in place an organization with a tight cost management and control. We are boosting the agile adoption within our processes, and we would like to scale up AI.
Thanks to GenAI, we believe we can implement AI in all processes of the organization, driving up productivity and efficiency. Looking to our three business unit, Consumer, during the course of 2023, we deliver on a value strategy. We decided not to follow in the price war. We keep a premium offer in the wireline market. Yes, it's true, we are losing few lines in the non-ultra broadband market, but we were able to increase ARPU. On mobile is a different story. We are aggressive and growing. We have reached 3.5 million customer, growing 14% if compared to last year. And then churn is going down, thanks to all the push and investment that we are doing in offering the best service to our customer. Looking to the future, quality will remain key. I said, we will invest in AI to strengthen our service.
We will also support our customer operation, thanks to GenAI tools and growing mobile. On top to that, we'll develop a domestic ecosystem of products, including energy, security, and insurance. A push on sales. We are extending our network, our sales network, but we will also leverage an agreement that we signed with Sky in order to let them resell our offer under the Sky Mobile brand and revamp the SME business. Small-medium business is an interesting segment. We would like to push there because we see room for growth. Enterprise is growing very well. We hit CHF 1.1 billion, growing 10%, over 10% compared to last year. It's interesting to notice that 60% of revenues already today come from value-added services, meaning we are growing in beyond the core services. Overall, market share is growing.
We are at 35%, and we have a leading position in all markets. If I look to the future, we will continue to push on FTTH. We will scale up cloud and cybersecurity business, where we bought few small companies over the course of, of last year. We would like to consolidate and scale up our revenues there. 5G is another opportunity we just entered 18 months ago. We are growing very well. We see another opportunity there together with the AI market. I said that the partnership with NVIDIA put us in a distinctive position in Italian market, which is worth today EUR 500 million, but is expected to reach EUR 1.5 billion in the next five years. Wholesale, we have delivered on our major customer deals, namely Iliad and Enel, that we implemented over the course of 2023, and the results are super.
We reached 650,000 lines, +40% compared to last year, and we will continue to offer to our customer new solution, like voice services, which is unique in the market because the other operator, wholesale operator, are just offering naked line or data lines. Looking to the future, we would like to continue to develop our key customers. We'll implement digitalization in all processes, and we would like to enter the mobile business, the international business, leveraging on the Italian strategic positioning of being a data hub for the Middle East and Africa data traffic. Network and IT, we focused on simplifying our access strategy during the course of 2023. We decided to focus gray and black areas on FTTH, which is going very well, and to move FWA technology to white areas.
So we have stopped any rollout activities of own infrastructure, FWA, in order to leverage the existing mobile 5G network that we are building together with Wind Tre. But also, we are investing on IT. We believe that IT can be a driver to improve the customer experience to our customer. We are transforming our app ecosystem and changing the way of working in the business operation in order to be more customer-centric in our assistance.
For the future, FTTH and 5G will be the key technology. As said, FTTH, our target is to reach 39% population in 2024, and for 5G, 80% population. And we will continue to invest in IT. We'll source key application, we will invest in cloud, we will invest in our own people, and develop state-of-the-art AI within our processes. Last but not least, our positioning, Tu Sei Futuro , was way to differentiate in the market.
We have successfully delivered on ESG. We got several certification, which are key to demonstrate our commitment to the society. Standard Ethics , Gender Equality , Great Place to Work , Climate Leader , are among the most important one that show our commitment and seriousness when it comes to ESG. For the future, we would like to continue like that. We'd like to reach our target to become CO2 neutral by 2025. We will continue to spread digital skills through our Digital Academy and to, and to deliver on this matter. As a final remark, I will only say that I'm very happy about the development of Fastweb. We have been able to grow in revenues, EBITDA, and free cash flow proxy, and we would like to continue like that also in 2024. With that, I leave the floor to Eugen.
Thank you, Walter. Hello, everybody, from my side. Last but not least, rock-solid financials. So I'll walk you through the numbers as usual, starting with group revenue for 2023, which was CHF 11.072 billion, up CHF 21 million, and exactly in line with our updated guidance. Net of the currency impact, the revenue is 11.155, and that's exactly in line with our original guidance at the beginning of the year. So underlying growth +CHF 104 million, Swisscom Switzerland -CHF 63 million, and Fastweb up +CHF 151 million. I'll walk you quickly through the individual segments in Switzerland. B2C -CHF 24 million. Service revenue was down by just CHF 18 million, but hardware revenues were also down.
You remember we talked about this in the third quarter, when we talked about smartphone sales being down. Other revenues, on the other hand, were up, with cinema revenues up year-over-year, so that gives a net - CHF 24 million. B2B was down CHF 27 million. Telco service revenue down -CHF 54 million. Compensating for that partly, IT service revenue up +CHF 32 million, but not fully compensating the service revenue decline. Wholesale, -CHF 10 million. Excess revenues are actually up, but there are also some more volatile items to the wholesale P&L, like mobile backhauling, et cetera, and some of these were down termination, so a net - CHF 10 million.
On the Fastweb side, as we have heard, an impressive +CHF 151 million, that's +6.1% growth across all segments, but obviously mainly driven by the enterprise segment. The Q4 was again very strong. You may remember in Q3, I flagged the risk of Q4 being not as strong as Q3, because in Q3, we had very strong one-off and hardware revenues. Now, that has repeated itself in Q4. Another quarter of strong one-off and hardware revenues with some of the large accounts, our customers. So I'm going to push forward with that flag that I did in Q3, and probably growth in 2024 in the enterprise segment will be softer than what we saw over the last two quarters.
You can't do that every quarter, but I'll get to that when we talk about the guidance. On to Swiss revenue. No big news, no big surprises, certainly. So if you look at the composition of Swiss revenue, service revenue, -CHF 72 million, mostly driven by B2B, -CHF 40 million, -CHF 54 million. B2C was almost flat, with -CHF 18 million, very much in line with what we have seen over the whole year. IT service revenue was up. We heard from Urs. That's very positive, 2.8% up, +CHF 32 million. Part of it was non-organic, +CHF 14 million, but still, as we heard, there are pockets of organic growth that we were able to exploit this year.
Hard and software sales were down, B2C and B2B, but mostly driven by the B2C effect of lower lower handset sales. This seems to be a market trend that we see in our own channels, but also in partner channels. It has gone back a little bit in Q4, but in Q3, it was quite a pronounced effect. Wholesale, we talked about. Other revenues were up by CHF 12 million, among others, driven by improved revenues of our cinema business. Top right, service revenue evolution over the last couple of quarters, a very, very stable trend. As you can see, since the first quarter of this year, B2C almost flat throughout the year. B2B with a run rate, quarterly run rate of about -CHF 10 million to -CHF 15 million. Right now, we don't see any change in this trend.
There is no structural disruption to this trend, except for one point, which I'll get to when I talk about the guidance later. Bottom right, the individual drivers of service revenue, this time, the annual figures. Normally, we show the quarterly figures here, this time, the annual figures. So it gives a very good overview of what's going on behind, the service revenue evolution. B2C wireless, basically stable. So we gain from new subscription, mainly on the second and third brands, and there is a balancing, ARPU dilution effect that, Dirk already talked about. And all in all, it's a stable development, which is obviously very positive.
Also, on the wireline side, the -15 wireline B2C, there is a lot of movements behind, but essentially, what we find in the end is the net effect of voice line losses, which is about CHF 20 million per year, and all the other effects we are able to compensate via higher ARPU. On the B2B side, wireless, -21, wireline, -33. So there's two different drivers behind there. In the SME business, we are slowly losing customers, but at stable ARPUs. And in the corporate business, it's a bit the other way around. We retain our customers, but prices go down. Although the price decreases, in particular on the wireless side, have flattened out a bit, as you can see, if you compare the numbers to the same numbers in the previous years.
Next page, group EBITDA. Group EBITDA was CHF 4.622 billion, up CHF 216 million. Now, we know already since the beginning of the year that we have two special effects in these numbers. One is the famous pension effect. We had lower pension expense according to IFRS this year, due to the higher interest rate compared to 2022. This was +CHF 90 million. I'm not going to talk about this anymore. I explained it a couple of times. And there is a number of exceptionals, +CHF 109 million. And before I go to the operating items, I briefly explain what's going on behind this number. Now, first of all, last year, we had exceptionals of CHF 152 million. You may remember the provisions we booked for regulatory and competition law proceedings.
So that was CHF 152 million. These obviously now show up as a plus in the year-over-year numbers. Point number one. Point number two, this year in 2023, we had net adjustments of -CHF 16 million. Net adjustments of -16 million, and there are two components behind that. On the one hand, on the Swisscom side, we had releases of provisions, in particular, in the fourth quarter, but there was also a small item in the second quarter of CHF 57 million in total. And on the other hand, also in the fourth quarter, we booked CHF 60 million one-off expense at Fastweb in connection with the strategy change of fixed wireless access. And in the second quarter, we booked CHF 13 million provision in connection with the four weeks billing case that I explained in Q2.
That nets out to -16 in the fourth quarter, and then on top of that, we had an FX effect of -CHF 27 million with the weaker euro, and all these numbers add up to +CHF 109 million. All of this is hopefully well explained on page 69 of the analyst presentation. It's a bit spread out over the individual segments, as you will see in the facts and figures, and it's also a bit spread out over cost categories. So the reported numbers may look a bit confusing, but if you have any further questions on top of page 69, you know, please get in touch with our IR department, and I'm sure they will be happy to serve as always with additional explanations.
So with that out of the way, let's talk about the operating performance of the business. Swisscom Switzerland, stable, as guided at the beginning of the year, with an EBITDA of +CHF 8 million. First, B2C. B2C was stable, so we were able to compensate for the little service revenue decline we had by cost savings. That's +1 year-over-year. B2B, -CHF 23 million. Service revenue decline is more pronounced in B2B, as we saw. So cost savings and additional profits from the IT services business cannot fully compensate the service revenue decline. Wholesale was flat, infrastructure and support functions obviously up +CHF 35 million, with the cost savings occurring in this segment.
Then on to Fastweb, +CHF 18 million or +2.1% in EBITDA, also as guided, and this is obviously the consequence of the higher revenues. The marginality of these additional revenues is somewhat lower, as the mix is very much biased towards B2B, and within B2B, biased towards hardware and one-off. And so, the EBITDA growth is obviously not in line with the revenue growth. I'll move on to the next page. EBITDA in Switzerland, not much to say, except for one very important part of this chart, which is the change in indirect costs in the telco business. We again delivered on our promise to save costs in the telco business, so we had +CHF 60 million or CHF 60 million less cost, less indirect costs in the telco business, in Switzerland.
The quarterly run rate is quite interesting. If you look at it, you can see what happened over the course of this year. So starting from Q2, the quarterly run rate is a bit lower. I always caution against, you know, too much attention to quarterly rates, but it's quite notable here. In Q2, the salary increases due to inflation in Switzerland hit, and so the net savings figure has come down and totals CHF 60 million, as shown on the chart. Speaking of cost savings, the next page, 56, shows the buildup of the cost savings over the course of the year, with the CHF 60 million delivered for the full year. This corresponds roughly, not entirely, but roughly to CHF 100 million gross savings. Now, what is in between the net savings and the gross savings? There are two items in there.
One is the salary increases I just alluded to, which costs us about CHF 20 million, and the other item is increased energy costs, this time on the Swiss side, which increased cost in a similar amount. So the 60 million correspond to roughly CHF 100 million gross. Now, on the right-hand side, we talk about our ambition. Obviously, looking ahead, achieving more with less, as Christoph already pointed out, remains a top priority in the business. Our ambition to realize cost savings in the telco business is unchanged, and we are planning for cost savings net, I'm talking about the net figure, at the minimum of CHF 50 million per year, with the ambition to compensate for any future telco service revenue pressure that we might see. On to CapEx, not much news.
Overall, CapEx was stable at CHF 2.3 billion. I would like to point out on the Swiss side, a very important bucket is the fiber CapEx. We spent CHF 466 million in Switzerland on the fiber rollout. Now, this number is somewhat lower than the envelope we communicated for the fiber rollout in 2023. We finished the FTTS rollout, and at the same time, we redesigned the FTTH rollout from the point-to-multipoint to the point-to-point topology. And so this slowed down things a little bit, but the guidance, looking ahead, is CHF 500 million-CHF 550 million of fiber CapEx in Switzerland within an overall CapEx envelope of CHF 2.3 billion, which is unchanged, as Christoph already pointed out. Free cash flow next.
Free cash flow was at CHF 1.48 billion, up CHF 131 million. Obviously, very much driven by the increase in EBITDA. There is just two compensating factors. One is negative net working capital. This was very much driven by the decrease in provisions we had from 2022 to 2023. So that's a negative net working capital position for this year, but nothing structural going forward. And secondly, also, obviously, the famous pension expense, which came down in 2023, thereby increased EBITDA, but it's a non-cash position, so it drops out here in the free cash flow bridge again, and this leaves us with a plus in free cash flow of CHF 131 million. Net income.
Next, net income is CHF 1.711 billion, up CHF 109 million, obviously driven by the increase in EBITDA and EBIT. The only compensating factor here is the financial result, which was lower than last year. We had an exceptional positive effect in the previous year, so this is why there is a change. But, going forward, the minus CHF 130 million are the relevant number, and apart from that, there are no big changes here in the bridge. Obviously, we are very happy with this result. On the balance sheet, we decreased our net debt to CHF 7.071 billion. So net debt has come down, and at the same time, leverage has come down to 1.5x. Our credit ratings are excellent.
Standard & Poor's put us on a positive outlook during the year, and Moody's upgraded us by one notch to A1 stable. And all in all, obviously, our balance sheet with these numbers is as strong as ever. Now, finally, outlook for 2024 guidance. The guidance for 2024 is revenue, CHF 11 billion, approximately CHF 11 billion. EBITDA, CHF 4.5 billion-CHF 4.6 billion, and CapEx, CHF 2.3 billion. I'll walk you step by step through the individual items. Revenue first. So revenue was CHF 11.02 billion in 2023. Outlook is CHF 11.0, so there is a minus implied by that guidance. Where does it come from? Quite simply, foreign exchange.
We used for the guidance a Euro-Swiss franc exchange rate of 0.93, so much lower than the one we had in the financials in 2022, and this alone is a minus of CHF 100 million on revenue. Apart from this technical effect, on the Swiss side, we guide for a stable revenue, with service revenue, service revenue down on the one hand, but IT service revenue up on the other hand and compensating for the service revenue decline. On the Fastweb side, the guidance is for an increase in revenue by 2%-3%. So opposed to the 6%+ we saw this year, that's a lower guidance for the growth.
2%-3%, still very strong growth, but that takes account of the fact that we had a lot of one-off business in the B2B segment in the third and the fourth quarter of 2023. That's revenue. EBITDA next. So for EBITDA, I'll start with the technicalities to get that out of the way. First of all, starting with CHF 4.622 billion in 2023, we have to add back the adjustments of 2023, which are a net -CHF 16 million, as I explained previously. So that yields an adjusted EBITDA of 4.638, as you will find on page 6, page 69 of the analyst presentation. Now, the next step is FX again, the lower euro-Swiss franc exchange rate. That will cost us, compared to 2023, -CHF 40 million. Next step, again, pension.
Fortunately, not as big as this year, but still an effect, this time the other way around. So from pension, we have an effect of -CHF 20 million, because interest rates have come down again a little bit, and so this pension expense goes up again. So I repeat, adjusted EBITDA CHF 4,638, -CHF 40 million FX, -CHF 20 million pension. So the starting point for the EBITDA guidance, for the operating EBITDA guidance, is really CHF 4,580, and already in those brackets of 4.5-4.6. Now, operating. On the Swiss side, we see a risk of -CHF 50 million on top of these technical effects. Why is that?
I said before that we plan and expect a service revenue decline and cost savings, in principle, in line with what we saw in 2023, where we had a small gap of maybe CHF 10 million or CHF 12 million between the two. And we do expect the same for 2024. However, there are two factors that might drive a wedge between those two, the service revenue decline and the cost savings, and I'll walk you through them. One is VAT. VAT rate already went up in Switzerland, beginning of the year, and already last year, we decided not to pass on the VAT increase to our end customers. And this decision, we are very happy with this decision. We think it's a very good investment in our future, customer satisfaction and NPS numbers.
But this decision will cost, in particular, in 2024, and that's an amount of about CHF 20 million. So it's a risk to the service revenue decline, which we might not be able to compensate for. Point number one. Point number two, on the cost side of the equation, we decided to invest in some of these growth areas that will ensure the stability of the Telco business in the future. Some of these were mentioned today, like the insurance business, the converged connectivity offering on the B2B side. And we will have start-up expenses on the OpEx side for launching these initiatives in 2024, and the amount is about the same, also CHF 20 million. A risk to the cost side, which we might not be able to compensate for.
So all in all, this gives a risk of -CHF 50 million on the Swiss, on the Swiss side. Finally, Italy. In Italy, we expect growth of EBITDA in line with revenue, 2%-3% growth, which is a plus of about EUR 20 million. CapEx, simple. CapEx will stay flat at EUR 2.3 million, fully accommodating the accelerated fiber rollout that we talked about. And if all those numbers come as planned, we will propose again a dividend of CHF 22 per share, payable in 2025. Over to you, Louis.
No? There's a wrap-up.
Over to you, Christoph, for the wrap-up. Sorry.
One final slide before we move into Q&A. I believe that we delivered on all the 2023 goals, which provides us with an excellent basis for success in this coming year. We have a solid strategy in place with very ambitious targets for 2024. We have also, last year and this year, worked on innovative new propositions, new products, new services, which is an important element to stimulate future revenue growth. Obviously, this revenue growth will not come immediately in the next month, but has to build up over quarters or years, but I think it's an important investment in the future of the company, 2025 and beyond.
This puts us in a position where we continue to focus on free cash flow generation, which is at the heart of what we do at Swisscom, to enable you or to enable us to pay you attractive dividends also in the future. With this, I hand over to Louis.
Thank you, Christoph, and now it's time for the Q&A session. A few remarks to the people being registered for raising questions. First, use Raise Your Hand feature to ask your questions. Then please indicate your name and institute you're representing at the beginning, and please speak loud and clear so that everyone on the webcast can follow the discussion. Let's now start the second part of the meeting, and the first question comes from Polo Tang.
I think we just lost Polo.
All right. Maybe we should move to the next one.
Sorry, can you hear me?
Josh Mills.
Can you hear me now?
Ah, okay, Polo. Yeah, now we can hear you.
Okay.
Hi.
Good. Thank you. So, thank you for the presentations. I just have three questions. The first one is really just about the trajectory of the Swiss service revenues. Because if I look at Q4 2023 versus Q3, there's obviously a bit of an improvement. But how should we think about the trajectory of service revenues into 2024, but also beyond? You obviously flagged the CHF 20 million impact from the increase in VAT, but offsetting that, is there any signs of easing promotional activity? And is there any potential to increase prices or reduce promotions in 2025? So that's the first question. Second question is really just a bigger picture question on M&A. I just want to understand how you think about the parameters for what Swisscom can or cannot do.
So specifically, is the government-imposed threshold of 2.3 times leverage a ceiling, or is there flexibility to increase this? Separately, would there be circumstances where you would consider M&A that would result in free cash flow not covering the dividend? And my third question is just on Fastweb. You mentioned that you're continuing your joint 5G rollout with Wind Tre and stopping your own fixed wireless access rollout, but how easy would it be to unwind the Wind Tre partnership? Thanks.
Thank you, Polo. The second question will be answered by Christoph and the third by Walter, and then we decide on the first one. Christoph, on M&A?
You don't want to answer the first question, the first one?
Sorry?
The first question.
The first question we take at the end or
Okay. So, I mean, on the M&A side, if we look at Switzerland, we have continuously, you know, invested in strengthening our IT positioning and acquiring small to mid-size type IT specialist companies. And we will continue to do this in the coming years. But typically, these are rather small-sized investments which are not concerned by, let's say, the caps you alluded to by the majority shareholder or creating a dilution on the free cash flow. So I think that's for the Swiss side, where M&A is mostly focused on enhancing our IT service capabilities. Now, if we look at the Italian side, we are happy shareholders of Fastweb. We have seen 10 years of consecutive growth.
We have now guided again for another year of growth in Italy, so we strongly believe in the success of Fastweb, and we are committed to Fastweb and Italy. I understand that the potential, you know, around consolidation is an exciting topic, but you will also understand that I will not comment on potential consolidation questions in Italy and the impacts on leverage and free cash flow generation.
Thank you, Christoph. And Walter?
Yeah. On FWA, if I got, well, the question, we can use the mobile 5G network that we are rolling out with Wind Tre to offer also FWA service. This is perfect allowed and in line with what also Wind Tre is doing on its own.
Thank you, Walter. I think the service revenue question will be answered by-
I can start technically and maybe then Dirk,
Okay.
From the technical side, as I explained, right now, we don't see any drivers that would significantly change the dynamics that you have seen over the last couple of quarters. I would not read too much into a quarter-over-quarter fluctuation from the third to the fourth quarter, but rather look at the stable picture over the last couple of quarters. This is the best information we have, and we don't see any structural changes, except obviously for the point I flagged around VAT. In terms of potential to increase prices, et cetera, et cetera, on the B2C side, maybe, Dirk, it's much better if you
Okay
say a few words on that topic.
Sure. So there was also the part of the question in terms of, where do we see the promotional activity going? And, you know, as I explained, already, in 2022, on the main brand, we have substantially reduced our promotional activity. If you look at mobile subscription, there's hardly any promotional activity on the broadband side of the business. And also important is that, you know, last year in, I think it was the Q2, we also changed the promotional activity on the second brand, on the third brand. Particularly the second brand, you know, for a little while, we used to also in certain promotional activity times to do some price matching with the competition.
We are going away or we have gone away from that. We believe that, you know, for the products that we have, for the network that we have, and so on, we can also ask for price premium, even in the budget segment. So our prices are on the order of, it should, 10%-15% higher. And, you know, I think we want to continue that approach also into 2024. And then, as I said earlier on, we do see opportunities, you know, working with the customer base. There's quite some customers that are on older tariff plans that also then obviously has less into it, less speed, less entertainment, less this and that.
We wanna, you know, strengthen our effort to develop them also into the contemporary, into the front book tariff plans. Which does mean a bit of an ARPU or revenue uplift from the customer. In exchange, obviously, they get, you know, much more for that. And then as I said, you know, we do see opportunities, you know, in cross-selling, you know, the FMC penetration, I think, you know, offers room for growth. Similarly, also the household penetration, you know. How that all then pans out, you know, across the year, I think, you know, is really also depending upon how the competitive plays then pans out. Yeah.
We have seen, you know, various movements in the last year. You know, at times also reduced promotional activity from competition, but then at times, for instance, around Black Friday or Black November, again intense promotional activity. I think, you know, it's too early to say how everything, you know, really shapes up there. Yeah, but clearly, our strategy is one of focus on quality and value and attractive offerings and not on the lowest price. Thank you, Dirk. We can't hear you, Polo.
Sorry, can I just check if you mentioned price rises in B2B?
Sorry? What?
Price rises in B2B?
No. No, we're not mentioned.
No.
Thanks.
All right. Thank you very much, Polo. Next questions comes from Joshua Mills . Shall we take the next? Okay, Josh. Okay. Hi, Josh.
Louis, can you hear me now?
Now I can hear you, yeah, or we can hear you. And see you.
Sorry. Okay, thanks. Yeah, so a couple of questions from my side, and I'll keep them focused on the fiber. During the presentation, you've talked repeatedly around the evidence that this is now the kind of preferred technology within the market. I wonder if you could put some more color around that, either by giving an indication on the kind of ARPU uplift or net promoter scores you see in fiber areas versus non-fiber areas, and how you're using this technology to win back from cable. Would be the first question. And then on the second question, I don't believe you're doing any more expansion at the moment with the Swiss Fibre Net and the utility companies where you used to co-invest. But has there been any more co-investment or changes to that relationship in the last year or so? Thanks.
Thank you, Josh. I think, the first question might be answered by you, Dirk, and the second one by you, Christoph.
Okay, so in fiber, obviously, there's you know, the portfolio that offers then speeds that you can only get with fiber. There's 10G for what we call the L offer, or the medium-sized offer is 1 Gb, where you actually on copper with G.fast you get around, you know, depending upon how far you live from the distribution point, you get like 200-400. So you get a full 1 gig in the at the M tier, and at the L tier, you get the 10 gig.
And that, obviously, you know, is something that we do see in the mix that we have, which is, you know, skewed towards the higher tier tariff plans that we have. Yeah. From the top of my head, you know, an ARPU figure, I would need to really look that up, but, you know, it's in the order of maybe it will, I believe, CHF 4-CHF 5 that we get when we look at copper towards fiber as a difference. Yeah. Then, it's the same portfolio, but, you know, obviously with fiber, you get speeds that you otherwise cannot get, or you get the full fulfillment of the speed as advertised and sold in the subscription. Yeah.
So that's, that's probably the difference that we see there, and that's also an opportunity that we unleash. And what we also see is, in areas where we build out fiber, we can achieve within the first 12 to 18 months, roughly 3%-4%, sometimes 3%-5% penetration gain. Yeah, so really, a, a new technology, new opportunity, credible competition against, you know, for instance, customers that have been, served with cable, you know, does yield us, penetration gain where we build out fiber.
Thank you, Dirk.
Okay, so on the second question, Swiss Fibre Net is, let's say a provisioning or wholesale platform aggregating the utility footprint in Switzerland. And to my knowledge, we have never built out FTTH footprint with SFN in the past. We have explored the potential collaboration in some municipalities, but so far, we did not build a joint footprint together. What is important, though, is that we are continuously looking for partnerships to build out fiber footprint.
So year to date, or let's say to date, about 70% of our fiber connections have been built in collaboration with local utility companies, and we are continuing to negotiate with a number of utility companies all the time to make sure that we can actually lower the cost of rollout and move faster or build more footprint with the same CapEx envelope. We will continue to do this in the coming years when we roll out fiber throughout Switzerland.
Thank you. Christoph, all good? Josh?
Very clear. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Bye. Next question comes from Georgios.
Hi, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. It's Georgios from Citi. If I could start with the first one, is actually on the B2B side. You mentioned, I think again, that you are seeing an improvement on the mobile pricing, and indeed, the service revenue has been improving during the year. What we have seen is on the fixed line side, at least in the fourth quarter, there's been some deterioration in service revenue. So I'm wondering if there is other dynamics on the fixed line we should worry about, or whether this is a temporary, maybe special event for the fourth quarter. And any comments you can make on the profitability going forward with this growth in ICT? You highlighted the potential to improve margins there.
If you can perhaps give us some indications as to how you are thinking about the next couple of years on B2B margins. Then my next questions are mainly on Fastweb. In a couple of areas, the first is a follow-up on what Polo asked earlier around the move to these network sharing with Wind Tre. My understanding is this agreement has been there for five years, but you chose not to put all the spectrum that you have in the sharing. So why the change now? The EUR 60 million, is it just to terminate leases with tower companies, or is it some investment you need to make to get access to the network? Just curious as to how it works in terms of the commitment you have to the network itself.
As a follow-up, in the future, if you wanted to add a lot more spectrum, whether that will come at an extra cost or whether that wouldn't be the case. Thank you.
Thank you, Georgios. First question will be answered by Urs.
Yeah, pleasure. Starting with a question around the fixed evolution in Q4, I would definitely see it more as a special event due to certain specific customer decisions and implementations of projects in Q4. I don't see an underlying trend in a fundamental manner towards the future. Your second question concerning profitability improvement, I definitely can say that our ambition is at least to deliver a 1%+ margin per year over the next three years. Reaching to a, let's say, a sustainable level, which is at least on a market level as a medium or a profile of profitability in IT services. So, I would argue over the next three years, you can expect some improvements as they have been showed over the last two years. Yeah.
Urs, and the last part
Yeah.
To you, Walter.
Yep. On FWA, just to clarify, we hold 40 MHz, 3.5 GHz spectrum that we have been, since beginning, put within the slice network with Wind Tre to develop the 5G mobile network, right? The second question is why now and not before? The reason is that with the acceleration of FTTH plans in Italy, thanks to FiberCop, we decided to focus FTTH in gray and black areas, and then utilize the slice 5G network for FWA in white areas. Since now, the coverage allow us to cover such areas. As I said, now we are at 72% of population coverage, so we are now covering exactly the white areas where we want to develop FWA. Regarding to the cost, Eugen, if you want.
Yeah, related to the CHF 60 million you mentioned, this relates more to write-offs in current assets, such as inventory commitments to suppliers, also write-off of short-term assets, such as prepayments and the like. So it's a whole list of smaller things, contractual payments, et cetera. This is the amount reflected in EBITDA.
Sorry, just so I understand a bit better, there is some spectrum at 28 gigahertz that you are gonna be utilizing now within the slice as well, or is it just the 3.4 that will be used for this service?
Just the 3.5.
Just the 3.4?
Yeah.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you, Georgios. Let's move to the next question coming from Nawar. Hello, Nawar?
Hello, are you able to hear me?
Yes, now it works. Hello.
Brilliant. Thank you very much. Thank you for the helpful presentation. I have some questions on Switzerland first, and then on the guidance at the group level. So starting with Switzerland, you have discussed in the presentation the wholesale opportunity, and you've mentioned that both your competitors are gradually moving their subscribers to your fiber network. How excited are you about this wholesale opportunity? How large is it? If you could give us a bit of color about how big could be this opportunity for Swisscom, that would be helpful. And also, if you could discuss the timing, because I guess that we're talking more medium and long term.
So any color on the timing as well, when this will be visible in the numbers, would be very helpful. And then, on the guidance, when discussing the guidance, building blocks, you have called out a risk of CHF 50 million, from the VAT elements and also the startup costs from the growth opportunities. And if I'm correct, you mentioned that you might not be able to compensate for these elements, which gave me the impression that maybe you might be able to compensate for those elements. And also, the fact that you are calling them risk opens up that question. So could you discuss what are the other elements on the upside which could help you neutralize parts of or all of this risk? That will be very helpful.
Lastly, on the cost savings, you are guiding for more than CHF 50 million. It will be helpful if you could give us some color about the building blocks in terms of the gross savings and the headwinds coming from the salaries and energy costs. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Nawar. First question goes to you, Christoph, and second and third question mostly to you, Eugen.
So thank you, Nawar, for the wholesale question. I think, I mean, in general, I am quite excited about the wholesale opportunity because it is the first time since a long time that there is actually a growth opportunity in wholesale. So from a structural perspective, now that fiber is growing, that you can actually try to attract more broadband connections also from the cable base and try to move them to the fiber base, which was obviously not possible before when copper was competing against the cable footprint. How big this opportunity is, is really hard to tell. What I can tell you, it's not a short-term silver bullet, and so I think it is rather a medium to long-term trajectory we are looking at.
Because on the one side, first, we need to build out the more fiber footprint to cover a large part of the country, which will already take us until the end of the decade. Then over time, I think we need to see also customer behavior. Are customers really moving to fiber? How is the competitive dynamics of the cable footprint versus the fiber footprint? And this will determine how big the opportunity really is. That's sort of my take on it. Too early to give numbers, but definitely, I would say a watch point or a positive watch point for the future.
Okay. On your second question, so you understood me perfectly well, Nawar. It's exactly how I phrased it and the why I phrased it this way. Obviously, we do have the ambition to compensate, but we don't have the specifics right now. Otherwise, we would have talked about it. What are the levers we have short term in such a situation? Mainly on the cost side. Mainly on the cost side. But as you know, always on the cost side, we go about cost saving in a very long-term, long-term manner, with long-term projects focusing on the main levers that deliver long term. So yes, maybe on the short, on the short term, we have a lever on the cost side. On the service revenue side, it's not really in our hands. It depends much more short term on the competitive intensity.
Obviously, we're talking about small numbers, so, you know, shifts in service revenue could make a difference, but as I said, that's not in our hands. But on the check. In terms of general intent of our communication, you got it right. Point number three, the buildup of the savings. So I talked about CHF 50 million minimum net savings. In 2024, this probably corresponds again to roughly CHF 100 million gross savings, because we will have, again, a hit on salary expense of roughly CHF 20 million. We will unfortunately have, again, a hit on energy expense in Switzerland because regulated energy prices went up again. So the picture in 2024 will be quite similar in terms of gross and net savings to what we had in 2023.
Long term, however, long term, however, I think what and, you know, I repeated this many times. Long term, CHF 100 million is, is, is not feasible because simply mathematically, at some point, you don't have any costs left. So this is why we think it makes more sense to to articulate a cost ambition of CHF 50 million plus net and to talk about a net ambition, because we also don't want to confuse ourselves and you guys with gross and net numbers over the next coming years. So CHF 50 million net minimum, with the ambition to compensate service revenue decline, is the midterm guidance we would like to give today. Thank you, Eugen.
That's very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you, Nawar. Next question comes from Andrew.
Hey, everyone. Good afternoon. I had two questions, just both relating to digital infrastructure and your ability to monetize fiber. So just first off, just the, do you think the regulatory set up in Switzerland and your wholesale agreement with Salt allows you to develop pricing power and fiber within a network market landscape that looks more like an oligopoly than a duopoly? That question goes for wholesale and retail. And then secondly, just question around your OpEx savings targeted by the end of rollout of fiber to the home are CHF 100 million. That's not much more than a percentage point of EBITDA margin improvement and looks quite light, given all the areas of efficiency you highlight.
Versus maybe if we look at a peer, like BT, that's targeting GBP 500 million of savings or 2.5 percentage points of margin expansion by 2028. Just so, the question really on that is: How should we think about the risk or upside opportunity to your CHF 100 million savings guide? Thank you.
Thank you, Andrew. Both questions go to Christoph.
Okay, so on your the first question, in terms of pricing development with the fiber rollout. So I think on the wholesale side, we offer non-discriminatory pricing with the same price for all the market participants. And the pricing logic in the wholesale market is more sort of a cost-plus-oriented structure. So I think the room for increasing prices or extracting more value from the build on wholesale is quite limited by the regulatory framework, and needs to ensure that everybody's treated in the same way. What we obviously need to make sure is that on the B2C side and the B2B side, we are able to monetize the fiber footprint by increasing penetration, by increasing ARPU levels, and convincing customers that the fiber connection has more value.
But then, at the same time, you have competition with, let's say, the likes of Salt, which operate at much lower price points. So we will see over time how this plays out on the service revenue impact. And maybe, you know, like, we have some positive effects on ARPU and penetration, and maybe some negative effects, with, let's say, in a price-aggressive, competitor in the footprint, which is, and we will see how this evolves over the coming years, and it's too early and difficult to tell over time. Now, the cost savings of CHF 100 million, it's a first estimate of what we think is achievable, that it might be possible to extract more cost savings over time.
But we will build in these cost savings in our yearly guidance over the next years. What is important to understand also on these cost savings, most of them accrue only at the latter end of the copper phase-out, when we can really turn off the exchange, the local exchanges, and dismantle the equipment completely. Making sure that, for example, energy consumption, which is an important driver in the cost savings, really occurs because we turned off the full equipment in a local municipality. Because as long as you have still one home running on copper in a municipality, I need to operate my local exchange at full capacity in terms of equipment.
But on maybe some other cost-saving elements, such as less field force, less tickets, because today we have four times less customer incidents on fiber connections than on copper connections. Those will obviously accrue year on year as soon as we start migrating copper connections to fiber. So you will see sort of this CHF 50 million net ambition over the coming years will be in partly generated by the copper phase-out. And then we will see if in the, let's say, thirties, we can accrue more savings and might be able to exceed the CHF 100 million ambition that we set ourselves today, yeah.
Thank you, Christoph.
Thank you. That was really helpful.
The next question
Thank you.
Comes from Usman via Andrew.
Hello, gentlemen. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I've got two questions, please. One on Italy, specifically the, j ust coming back to the agreement with Wind Tre, and one on AI. On Italy, I just want to get it right. So you had an existing FWA network, and now you're saying that this 5G kind of sharing agreement with Wind Tre, now it's developing into these more rural areas where I guess you had your existing network. So you don't, you feel like you can decommission that network and allow this partnership with Wind Tre to develop into these other areas.
My question was: why did you not just contribute this network on FWA that you had into the Wind Tre JV, rather than kind of, you know, decommission it and end it, so to speak? Just trying to understand that, please. And then, the question on AI was, in your CapEx envelope, I didn't see much in the way of, you know, additional investment going into the compute infrastructure that is needed. And I wanted to ask, in AI, are you positioning for model training or are you positioning for fine-tuning of models? Because obviously the CapEx is quite different in these two areas.
And, you know, the fact that, you know, I saw with the agreement with NVIDIA in Italy, for example, you've got, you've got 30 GPUs from NVIDIA. Is that enough to take advantage of this revenue opportunity that you mentioned, which would be CHF 1.5 billion in five years? Thank you.
Thank you, Usman. The first question will be answered by Walter, and the second part or the second question by you, Christoph.
Yeah. So again, on FWA, so you got it right. So the idea is to exploit the 5G network that we are building through Italy. Now we cover 70%. Next year, this year, we reach 80%, so we are covering rural areas. And FWA technology, based on 5G, 3.5 GHz, is perfect to deliver above 100 Mbps fixed wireless services, which is great in these areas, where you can only offer broadband services, copper-based, max 10-20 Mbps speed. So this is a great opportunity in our opinion, and we will, as said, use the agreement with slice. Why we are not contributing the existing network on the gray areas, the reason is that FTTH in such areas is more performing, more sustainable, and therefore, we as Fastweb will use such network.
Also, Wind is our wholesale customer, is exploiting FTTH in the same areas.
Great. Thank you, Walter. Christoph?
So, in other words, we believe that the old network is not competitive toward against FTTH. Sounds like, yeah.
Yeah.
On the AI side, so the CapEx required to build out the AI compute infrastructure is included in our overall CHF 2.3 billion CapEx envelope. And the way we think about this is that we started with a, let's say, reasonable investment in both countries, which allows us to build up a first AI compute service or a compute-as-a-service offering in those markets, to be able to train, fine-tune, and run models for inference. Obviously, our target is not to be able to train LLMs on a huge scale. For this, you need a much larger infrastructure, which is very costly. So I think the focus is more on smaller models for training, and then also on the fine-tuning and the inference side, you can also run larger models on the same infrastructure.
As we manage to sell this infrastructure to B2B customers, and we sort of fill up the compute infrastructure, we will go on and continuously order more and more hardware on as a, let's say, pay-as-you-go basis. So there is no need to order thousands of GPUs before we have sold them. And I think once we also contract revenue, we will increase the CapEx levels in those areas.
Thank you, Christoph.
Thank you.
Okay for you, Usman?
Yeah, great.
Okay, thank you. Bye-bye. Next question comes from Steve Malcolm .
Hi there, can you hear me?
Yes.
Yes.
Hello, Steve.
Hi, guys.
Hi.
Good afternoon. Thanks, thanks, thanks for taking the call, for taking the question, even thanks for the call. Three questions or the standard three, if that's okay. First of all, just on Swiss competition, you had a nice slide on page 18 that sort of shows your NPS scores against your two major competitors. And I guess one could kind of, you know, overlay that against your improvement in service revenue trends, which has been, you know, very impressive in the last couple of years. I guess, you know, are you seeing any change in the NPS profile of your rivals? I mean, one in particular has obviously gone through a major rebranding, it hasn't been a huge success.
If they were to start improving, you know, might that make you think about, you know, your, your kind of reticence around promotional activities? So just, just a question on what you're seeing from your competitors in terms of NPS scores. Secondly, just on Fastweb growth overall, I mean, in Q3, you talked about, you know, getting hardware and one-off revenues from the, I think, the European Recovery Fund. You've kind of suggested that was the same in Q4. And when I sort of look at the pre-Q3 run rate, it looks like you've booked about EUR 60 million of extra revenue in the second half from those sort of low-margin sales. Now, if I back that out for 2024 as the starting point, your 2%-3% growth actually looks like an acceleration.
You know, underlying, it looks like kind of 3.5% ex that, that one-off sale in 2023. Take that out, it's like 4.5%, you know, in 2024. Or are you expecting more of those revenues in 2024? Is that the kind of missing piece? So just, just sort of clarity on, you know, what you're expecting in 2024 and those sales would be great. And then, and then finally, just on software spending, you know, some interesting points there, but I'm still struggling to understand what the sort of message is on overall spending.
You know, if I think about your software spending in 2023 as being 100, and I look forward 4 or 5 years, you know, are you sort of suggesting that, you know, once you've done all the simplification, you know, moved off-prem and all that kind of stuff, that you're looking at kind of 95, or does nominal spending kind of stay the same on a 5-year view? So any color you can give on what your overall software spending is would be great. Thanks a lot.
Thank you very much, Steve. First question goes in the direction of Dirk, NPS. Second question, financials in Italy, Eugen. And then last question, software spendings, Christoph.
Okay, well, with respect to NPS, I mean, you referred to the chart on that page 18, where you see, let's say, our scores relative to the competitor scores in the last couple of years. Now, you know, to put some whatever more light, you know, into our results, you know, clearly, there's those pillars around product, which is fixed with broadband and then mobile. And there we are really like on a different league. I mean, I know that sounds like arrogant, but, you know, it's really like the appreciation of our connectivity product is super high.
Actually much higher than sometimes the test results also suggest, where you would say, "Okay, the competition is just slightly behind us or so." The differences in customer perception as we measure them with our customers, but then also with a bunch of the competitors' customers, is much, much bigger, yeah. Second dimension is everything that relates around service, be it customer cares or hotline, be it the shop and the retail network, but even also possibilities that we offer in the digital space, and so on and so forth, are super high appreciated. Then lastly, there's a bit of like intangible thing that is like sympathy towards the brand, yeah? And I know it's a big word, but you know, people just love us.
I mean, they really like us, you know. It's, which is probably, let's say, the entirety of what we actually deliver and how we are perceived and what Swisscom as an entity, you know, as a company, does beyond product, you know, for the country, for the public, for participation of young and old, for delivering connectivity, not only where it is easy, but also where it's difficult in the mountains, and so on and so forth. I think there's a whole brand recognition that plays a really, really big role here. And if you ask me, you know, what are the others differently? Well, they're just not doing it as good as we do. I mean, and that's probably my comment to that.
Maybe another comment also is, you know, I think we are a company that is truly, And again, it's another big word, we are customer obsessed. We are freaking out when things are not working as they should, when customers, you know, whatever, you know, have an issue or so, or our products and experiences are not simple enough, and so on and so forth. We are really freaking out about it, and we make every effort to provide great customer service. And maybe the others, you know, just think they have a kind of a cheap trick or whatever, but, you know, that really is something you need to ask the other and discuss with them, yeah.
If there's another indication, I really, you know, which is obviously yours, following that, we see the churn rates of our competitors, and they are almost double of those that we have. Yeah. And that is another underpinning of our theory. And not theory, I think it is really our belief. The Swiss market and consumer are still quality-centric and service-centric, and so on and so forth, yeah? The promotional pricing that, like, lures in customers into, you know, competitors' offers, you know, eventually they figure out that it's just not as good as it was with Swisscom. And I stop here because
Okay, Steve.
I think, can I just
Sure.
Can I just probe a little bit? Because I think that's been true for a long time, but it seems like the gap's got bigger in the last couple of years. That, you know, clearly you have a great brand, you know, but you've also, you know, had some benefits from their poor execution on top of your great execution. So the question, you know, more aimed at, like, if they were to improve, you know, you've had a couple of years where those service revenues have improved, but you're not,what you're saying is you haven't seen any change, you know, in their perception in the marketplace. Yours is still clearly very, very good, and they have problems that you don't have.
Well, I think that-
Well
you know, maybe I can answer the... I mean, looking forward, you know, I mean, if they were to improve, that's obviously a risk that could put additional pressure on service revenue or might require, you know, a different approach in promotional activities. And that is why it is so important that we continue to invest and focus on the best quality, the best network, the best experience in the shop, online, digital or in the call center, to be able to ideally increase the NPS lead, or while the others increase, we increase as well or improve as well. So that's sort of the delta we have. We can maintain at least the difference, and that's why we continue to focus on this, let's say, super high quality strategy.
All right. Thank you, Christoph.
Okay, Steve, on your second question, I always like your questions. They're always a challenge. In particular, since we don't have your Excel spreadsheet in front of us, but I think I got the main thrust of the question, which is Fastweb grew by CHF 151 million in 2023. You're kind of backing out the, let's say, one-off extraordinarily high revenues in Q3 and Q4, which you put at about CHF 60 million. So that would give a growth of Fastweb in 2023 of about CHF 90 million, which would be maybe 3%-6% that we were seeing. I hope I got that roughly right.
And the 3%-4% are actually in line with the original guidance we had at the beginning of the year for Fastweb. So that's all consistent. Now, in the light of these numbers, the guidance for the revenue for 2024 is 2%-3%. So it's in the same ballpark say, but slightly lower than 3%-4% that come out of that hypothetical calculation. Obviously, the composition of revenue growth as we see it right now in the next year will be a bit different. It was very much biased towards enterprise business this year. Next year, we do expect an acceleration in growth in the wholesale business, because the wholesale business this year still had a drag of a IRU business, which is not related to the UBB access line business.
So higher growth in wholesale, and certainly lower growth in the enterprise business compared to this year, as much as we can see for the moment. So I hope I put, you know, I could shed some light on that question, but feel free to-
Yeah.
You know.
I think the point I was making, you back out the 60 from the starting point, 2%-3% is actually more like 4% or 5%. So it's actually an acceleration if you assume that you don't get the, you know, recurrence in those one-off revenues. So I was kind of wondering, you know, how you get the acceleration, and I think you're saying it's, it's
Fair enough, and wholesale is one of the answers.
All right?
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. Then the last point.
Okay, so on software spending, CapEx. So, I think if we go a couple of years back, our software spending was actually lower than it is today. So we accelerated software spending over the past 2 to 3 years to accelerate our digital transformation, and especially what Urs talked about before, building the new products, building the new online experience, the My Swisscom Business . And obviously, these investments at one point will also come to an end, and we will be able to decrease again our investments on the IT side. But even with all the simplification renovation, you know, we still have multiple hundreds of IT applications remaining. So there will still be a lot of need for renovation and digitization in the future. There will be new technologies like AI that we need to continue to invest.
But I do expect IT spend to decrease slightly in the future, once the majority of this renovation is over. But you have also seen that, fiber CapEx was only CHF 466 this year, and it will move up to CHF 500-CHF 550 this year. The part of this increase will be compensated by IT or a reduction in the transport and backbone bucket. So we will shift a bit the CapEx allocation this year to keep the overall CapEx envelope stable, despite the fact that we will spend more on the FTTH rollout.
Thank you, Christoph. Thank you, Steve.
Thank you.
Bye-bye. Next question comes from Titus.
Good afternoon, all. Can you hear me well?
Yes.
Yes. Hi, Titus.
Perfect. Yes, it's Titus from Bank of America. Just wanted to first of all, thank you for a very detailed presentation, also on the guidance side. That's really helpful for us to model. But my question I wanted to dig in a little bit deeper was just on the copper decommissioning you were talking about, just because I think that's such an exciting topic for probably the next 10 years or so across the entire sector. Just a couple of small questions. I think some of your peers indicated that fiber as an OpEx line could be something like a third of copper or so. Your assumption, is it roughly in line with that?
Do you have a kind of different assumption behind your CHF 100 million number, which, as you said, might go up? Then also, in terms of timing, how long does it take from kind of making a decision that you want to shut down copper in a specific region, until it's actually fully done, and can you do that partially? And, as a third question also, you currently expand your fiber network, and you elaborated on the fact that it's kind of currently a parallel network. You start shutting down copper, but you already see some efficiencies from moving to fiber, from copper. When do we see actual fixed network OpEx coming down? Do we already see that within the net savings we have in 2024, or is that something only to happen, in the future?
Then just a very, very different topic. Sorry for that. Just a last one on Fastweb, maybe. There's kind of the reports about the Wind Tre network sale being a little bit behind also because third parties, like you, don't really disagree with it. How is the strategic value? How is your positioning on that? Is that something which is really relevant for you? Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Titus. I think, the copper question goes,
Yep
to Christoph.
So, the way we thought about the copper savings, we actually made a bottom-up estimation of what we can save on energy, on maintenance, on call center expenses. And I think to my knowledge, we actually didn't calculate it in percentage of our current copper spend, so I can't answer that question, unfortunately. But I think it's an interesting angle to look at it. So I will. I think we will have a look at this in the coming weeks or months to be able to comment more on this. In terms of timing, you are clearly looking at multiple years.
So we are still in the process of discussing the precise process of shutting down with the regulator, how much notification period needs to be set up, but you can expect something like, you know, probably a two-year notice period before shutting off a connection, and then you really need to do it. So, I mean, we're looking at sort of a two- to three-year period once we get started, but we will obviously also already start migrating our own customer base already this year. So we will already see the number of copper connections going down, but at the, and which will generate some cost savings. But on the other side, while we are expanding the fiber footprint, we are increasing our cost base.
On a temporary basis, I have, let's say, a double, I have the copper cost base and the fiber cost base, which will eliminate, on a net basis, most of the fiber, most of the copper savings that accrue in the coming 2-3 years. There is maybe an exception, for example, on the, let's say, the call center side, B2C. You can clearly already see this year or last year a certain amount of savings. So, Dirk talked about
the decrease of number of calls at the customer center, and part of this decrease is because the customers on fiber tend to call us less than customers on copper. So these are areas where already today we accrue, so some savings, but really on the, let's say, the fixed network side, I think we are still a couple of years out before we see the net, effect between copper and fiber turning into a negative number.
Thank you, Christoph. And then to you, Walter.
Yeah. Thank you. So on Wind Tre NetCo sale, of course, I, I can't comment on their situation. I can only say that we are an happy partner of Wind Tre. We have a long-term commitment to roll out 5G network together with clear milestone and clear SLA. So we are delivering on that. The quality of the network is very good, as you can see from the award that we are winning on 5G. In principle, we are not against any network separation of Wind Tre, as long as we can keep these long-term commitments in terms of rollout and quality of the network.
Thank you, Walter. All good, Titus? Perfect. Thank you very much. Perfect. Thank you very much. Next question comes from Luigi.
Hello. Good afternoon, everybody. Can you hear me?
Yes. Hi, Luigi.
Yep. Yep. Hello, yeah. Thanks for the presentation. Very, very useful, as always. I have three questions. You know, the first one is on Switzerland, then your approach in B2C to price increases. Now, if we do a step back, last year, you changed your clauses in the contract to introduce a link to inflation. But if I remember well, the key reason for not applying that inflation link was the fact that you were already at a 70% premium compared to Sunrise secondary brand, so you felt it was not appropriate to go ahead with an inflation-like price increase. Now, if you think about 2024, do you think the market conditions have changed? Do you see scope for linking your price to an inflation escalator?
Or perhaps, you know, you just prefer the flexibility of ad hoc, more for more, price changes. The second question is on Fastweb, and I guess, you know, it's obviously been a very important asset for you over the years. But what strikes me, you know, for an asset that is still, you know, facing, you know, great growth potential, is the lack of operational leverage. So there was no operational leverage last year. Your guidance for 2024 implies, once more, no operational leverage in 2024, and I guess the reason is because growth comes from lower margins, revenue growth. So I guess if you look at the organic and the inorganic opportunities available for you in the Italian markets, what's your thoughts?
You know, what can you take advantage of in order to finally deliver operational leverage at Fastweb? And thirdly, a big picture question for Christoph. You know, I've written down one of your sentences from the opening remark, "We have to invent new products to grow." That's too good of a sentence to let you go, and I was wondering if you can elaborate, 'cause it will be exciting if it happens. Thank you.
All right. Thank you very much, Luigi. First question goes to Dirk.
Okay. Yes, indeed, we put in, you know, this, inflationary price increase possibility into our terms and condition last year. As a matter of fact, with us, and maybe also others, it was quite an omission. You know, we should have probably done it right away, but who have ever thought in the last 10 years or so around the inflation, and it then happened. Yeah, so the inflation then occurred, and we looked at it, and, you know, not knowing how things develop, we thought it was, let's say, a good idea to provide for that possibility in the T's and C's. Yeah. And then later on, we obviously had a discussion, would we actually activate it, you know, or not? And we made a choice here clearly, you know, for
Customers and satisfied customers, it did not activate that clause. By the way, you know, the earlier question from the other gentleman, why has NPS been deteriorated? You know, maybe there's a correlation, you know. Both of the competitors actually did utilize the clause and did price increases just like that, and I don't think it's a theory. You know, we see it in very practical terms, that did not go down very well with the customer base. Yeah. So we decided against that. That said, you know, we take a bit more of a difficult approach because, you know, it's more work than obviously to identify, you know, the growth areas within the base. You know, which customers can you develop from, like, older tariffs into the front book tariff?
You know, what else can you do? You know, that is something that we want to address, beginning, you know, this year in Q2 already. So we see targeted or selected price movements. But in any case, you know, whenever we move price, I don't think it's appropriate just to increase the price like that. You know, we're always looking at, you know, providing more value with that. Yeah. So there's always an element: you pay a bit more, but you get actually much more in return for that. That is our strategy, you know, for this year.
Thank you, Dirk. Okay, Christoph?
Maybe on the second and third question, lack of operational leverage. So you're right, that in the past years, some of the, or much of the growth has come from rather lower margin side. And that, that's one point. And I think on the other side, there have also been or has been inflation in Italy, or there is still some inflation, that, despite, you know, also cost-saving measures, part of the new gains due to new revenues have been eaten up by increased cost base, making it look like you cannot leverage or create operational leverage. So as I pointed out before, I will not comment on inorganic moves that potentially exist.
But I think what is really important from my point of view in Italy is that we continue to focus on increasing the operational leverage also in a standalone mode. So we need to generate growth also from products which are higher margin. So we need to move into higher value services, like providing AI compute-type services, where typically in a private cloud infrastructure environment, you enjoy good margins when you sell those type of products. A certain type of cybersecurity services, which are rather high margin. Or, as Walter mentioned, we are focused on creating sort of an ecosystem in B2C around energy, around insurance, to try to move into managed services with a better margin profile. And I think that's the approach we have in Italy to increase the operational leverage of Fastweb.
Now, the opening remark, we have to invest in new products to grow. That, I think that's quite an obvious one, because we see that service revenue continues to erode in Switzerland. So on the one side, we are very, very focused on reducing this service erosion in the future, which I think is an important element of the strategy. But even this erosion sometimes requires new products, and then probably we need to move into entirely new space. And I think one area where you know can see this quite well is on the B2B side, where we have launched this completely new workplace for SMEs, which is quite innovative. It actually merges fixed line or telephony services with broadband for multiple locations, with a cloud infrastructure, and cybersecurity and workplace infrastructure.
Offering sort of a one-stop shop for SMEs to really digitize their own company with one supplier and making sure that from a data governance perspective, security perspective, everything is taken care of, and the SME partner can safely and securely cloudify his own business. So this is something, for example, where we have quite a lot of expectations of growing new revenues in the coming years. Or the other example Urs was talking about we are working on is this new B2B convergent offering, where we try to come up with a new product offering converging security and connectivity. Because we believe that in the future, security will be a main driver in B2B.
This should hopefully also put us in a position to either ease the service revenue erosion or ideally create more revenue in the future and getting back into a more neutral or even hopefully positive position. But this will take a number of, you know, quarters or years to execute on.
Thank you, Christoph.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Next question comes from Nuno.
Hi, good afternoon. Hopefully you can hear me okay.
Yeah. Yes. Hi, Nuno.
Sorry, can you hear me?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yep. Got three questions. So a couple of questions from my side. First is on the FTTH network expansion, So at this time, you're at 46 percentage points coverage of FTTH. You've only done a 3 percentage points increase, and now you're guiding for 57 percentage points by 2025. So just wondering what's, what's driving this sort of jump? I'm assuming a lot of this is to do with the fact that you retrofitted the point-to-multipoint lines. Is that the case? Have you finished this? So just wondering about this point. Also wondering about the co-investment, and what sort of risk do you see that. From my understanding is that these utilities that you co-invest with get the right to wholesale so one or more of the, of the FTTH lines. What risk do you see that they could possibly undercut you on, on pricing?
Then finally, since, on Fastweb, FWA has been such a top topic this call, I would ask you if you could sort of break down for us why you think the FWA offer is attractive for Fastweb. Because if I wanted to have sort of a bearish view on FWA, it's going to consume a lot of network capacity. It's a very competitive market where you have Iliad, Tiscali, three mobile operators, Open Fiber, all providing offers. Why do you think it's attractive for Fastweb also to provide FWA? Thank you.
Thank you, Nuno. The first two questions will be answered by Christoph
Yeah.
And the last one by Walter.
So on the FTTH expansion, actually, one and a half years ago, you know, we announced that we are changing the FTTH rollout. Because previously, we built in a point to multipoint architecture, and then we had the investigation by the antitrust authorities in Switzerland, which want us to build in a point-to-point architecture. And one and a half years ago, we decided to switch the construction rollout from a multipoint to a point-to-point architecture, and the switch has taken place last year and has somehow reduced our capacity to roll out fiber last year. But now this switchover is completely done, and we are building at full speed, and we also ramped up additional capacity over the past year.
That is why, last year we had a 3% increase, and now moving forward, you will see rather sort of a 5% increase year-on-year in the next two years. Now, on the co-investment and wholesale side, you're absolutely right. On the one side, co-invest reduces the cost to build, but it creates a new wholesale competitor. So every co-investment partner has the right, owns half of the infrastructure and has the right to wholesale FTTH connections. So we are now in a position on the copper side, there was only, you know, Swisscom selling or wholesaling copper, whereas in the fiber turf, typically there is Swisscom and a utility company wholesaling, and this creates also wholesale competition, which, you know, creates a price competition.
We also focus on the wholesale side, on customer quality, on service quality, and making sure that our wholesale customers are happy with how we deliver the wholesale side.
Thank you, Christoph. Walter?
Yeah. On FWA, again, just to explain to you the rationale behind this move to covering white areas with FWA. White areas are currently covered by broadband. This is easy, 20 Mbps. You can offer above 100 Mbps with FWA. But even in case you have ultra broadband in place in white areas, typically you have FTTS with very long lines, so with a performance which is between 30 and 40 Mbps. So really not satisfactory to fulfill the needs of our customers. On the other side, the mobile network in the white areas is pretty empty. So we have a lot of capacity to leverage to offer FWA solution in such areas. So we believe it's the right technology, will allows us to cover this area immediately with a very good cost structure.
Thank you, Walter. Okay for you, Nuno?
Yes. Thank you.
Thank you. All right, let's move to the last question coming from Robert. Thereafter, we are closing today's meeting. Robert?
Can you hear me? Thank you.
Yes. Hi, Robert.
Hi there, Robert Grindle from Deutsche Bank. A couple of clarifications. On Fastweb, something was said about an African and Middle Eastern opportunity. I didn't quite catch that. Is that a carrier's carrier, virtual POP for B2B or something else? Is it a decent margin opportunity? Is it something for this year, or is it something more for the future? And on Swiss B2B, something was said about stabilizing ARPU, and I thought, like Polo, it was prices, but you're clearly trying to say something else on B2B ARPU stabilization, I think. So what is it, if it is? And then finally, on Swiss CapEx, fiber up, AI up. Is it the 5G spend is coming up? Have you finished the heavy lifting on 5G now, given your high Connect scores ? Thank you.
Thank you, Robert. First question will be answered by Walter.
Yeah. So regarding the international business, Italy is the point that connect the submarine cable to Europe and then through Italy, there is a lot of traffic moving, right? Why is it an opportunity for us? The submarine cable land in Sicily and in Genova, right? Then you need to transport this traffic to Milan or Paris or Marseille. This is an opportunity for us to connect this landing station to the main exchange points, right? Since the traffic is growing very well in Southern and Middle East and Africa, we would like to play a role in transporting this traffic. And you are right, this is then is not an imminent upside, but will develop over the course of the next quarter.
Thank you, Walter. Then B2B, Urs?
B2B side, ARPU stabilization, I guess, first of all, it's clear to say that it's a more for more strategy that we are executing, so adding some additional value to our bundle products in the SME space and also managing our price erosion in the competitive negotiation environment, the corporate space. There, we definitely executed very well over the last two years, which we truly believe by adding some additional elements into our overall services and our value-added service elements, we are convinced that we are able to stabilize our ARPU way forward.
Thank you.
Urs, next question.
On maybe
On Swiss CapEx.
Yeah. So the, Sorry.
Go ahead.
The mobile rollout 5G will continue for a couple of years, and I think you can expect mobile CapEx to remain roughly unchanged, because, I mean, after 5G comes 6G. So, I don't expect mobile CapEx to significantly change in the coming years. But to compensate for the fiber increase and potential AI investments, as we said before, IT over time will go down. Also, the buildup of the new optical and IP core networks, the heavy lifting has been done in the past two years, so there is still some investment left this year, but these pockets will also go down in the next years, which allows us to keep the overall Swiss CapEx envelope stable.
Thank you very much, Christoph. Thank you, Robert.
Thank you.
Obviously, there is one very, very last question coming from AJ, J.P. Morgan. Are you on the call?
Hi there, thanks for taking my question. I just had a quick follow-up on, I think it's slide 37. You previously said that you've converted all your point to multipoint lines. But in last year, you kind of showed which were constructed lines and non-marketable. Just wanted to clear off, are all of those now converted over so that they're all marketable now? That was my only question. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Christoph?
So out of the current build, roughly 9% of the lines are still not marketable. They're still blocked due to the regulator or the investigation that is ongoing, for which we are waiting for the decision in the coming weeks. And we need to, one by one, upgrade those lines to the new point-to-point architecture, and this will take place over the coming years. So the gap between the built footprint and the marketable footprint will continuously decrease over the coming years while we upgrade the blocked connections.
Thank you, Christoph. At this point, it is from our side. In case of any follow-up questions, do not hesitate to contact us from the IR team. Thank you for your participation and attention. Have a nice evening.
Thank you!