Welcome, everyone, to Far EasTone's 2025 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent background noise. After the presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Please follow the instructions given at that time if you would like to ask a question. For your information, a webcast replay will be available within an hour after the conference is finished. Please visit www.farestone.com.tw under the Investor Relations section. I would like to introduce Mr. Gary Lai, IR Officer. Gary, you may begin.
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the 2025 First Quarter Investor Conference Call. We are pleased to have you all join us today. We have with us our President, Chee, and CFO, Sharon. Both will share valuable insights and updates on our performance for the first quarter in 2025. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone to pay attention to the Safe Harbor statement in the first page of the presentation. Thank you for all your attention, and now let's proceed with the presentation.
Okay.
Thank you, Gary. Yeah, good afternoon, everyone. Far EasTone, we finished the first quarter of the year pretty well. We have exceeded all of our financial KPIs, exceeded our guidance, and also we were seeing an improved margin. As you can see, we have a NT$26.0 billion for the first quarter revenue, and the EBITDA, which is also a record high for a quarter, quarterly EBITDA, is our history record high for NT$9.48 billion. The net income, you look at YoY, it is a double-digit, and it is also better than our original forecast. All in all, we had a very good first quarter. In terms of trending, you can see some financial highlights.
From the total revenue perspective, the first quarter revenue is NT$26 billion, it is a growth of 1.2% YOY, but it is a record high already for the same period for Far EasTone. It is driven by very steady mobile business growth, and of course, the continuous 5G upgrade and the APT migration uplift all helped. On our ICT side, we also have very impressive first quarter deliveries and all that. Also, the quarterly revenue, we have seen positive YOY growth for 18 consecutive quarters already, starting in 2021 second quarter. When it comes to EBITDA, the first quarter EBITDA, as I just mentioned, is NT$9.48 billion, it is a new record in Far EasTone history. Our 6.6% YOY EBITDA growth is attributed to merger synergies and better margins across the board.
Now, all of our services continue to improve our margin. Okay. As far as net income is concerned, we have come to a NT$3.24 billion net income for this first quarter, and the EPS is NT$0.90. It is also a record high for the same period. The first quarter net income, we grew 10.3% YOY. It's a double-digit growth for four consecutive quarters now. Okay. For some more financial metrics for your information, our net debt and the net debt to EBITDA ratios improved significantly post-merger, as you can see from the chart here. Our free cash flow remains very strong. The CapEx in line with our 2025 guidance, which is a total of NT$8.3 billion, and so far it's about NT$1.54 billion spent. All right. In terms of some more details on the service, the revenue breakdown for your information.
As I mentioned already, for the mobile service, because of the time on the hands-on replacement, it certainly drove some replacement and some more 4G to 5G upgrades with bundles. We are seeing 40% uplift in the monthly fees for the 4G to 5G upgrades, and also continued APT migration with uplift, and it also attributes to the overall renewed 12% uplift for our monthly fees. Okay. For the digital essential services, because some of our services are coming to the offline, for example, we have some events scheduled or we sponsored or we invested, it's all in the entertainment area, so I included them here already. We are seeing a revenue growth of 3%, and margin improved YOY 5%.
The insurance agency business continues to grow very well, and we also are finding new type of products that we can resell in this area. We are definitely seeing some very good momentum for growth. In terms of fraud prevention service, that is our strength for assuring our customers with a very safe and reliable network, and we are seeing a 38% YoY growth. In terms of the Friday Video, that already is three years in a row, we are the number one local OTT in terms of paid number of subscribers and also the number of viewership. We are also seeing revenue-wise, there is a 5% revenue year-over-year growth. For ICT and the fixed business, revenue grew 13%, and the margin grew 5%. For our ICT revenue alone, it grew 24%.
We have a four-focused area that there is one slide on. In terms of the SI project, we showed the strongest growth in the first quarter, that is the 63%. Also, in the security and the cloud area, we have NextLink that is continued throughout the cloud growth. We have ISDU, that is a security company. We are also seeing a very good strong growth. Now, merchandise, we do see minus 6% in terms of revenue loss, but our margin improved by 14%. We have moved more allocation of the handsets to our bundled services within our own channels. The number of devices we sold to the external e-commerce channels has been reduced. Here you see the decrease of the total number sold, but in terms of margin, definitely it is much better.
We have had steady mobile service, and in this chart, that should be 18 consecutive quarters, right? Okay. As you can see, we had launched our 5G service in July 2020, and that was the year the pandemic started. We do see, and then as my peers telcos, right, in the second quarter of 2021, we start seeing we kind of hit the bottom and then coming back. Far EasTone, as I remember, was the first to show the month-over-month positive year-over-year for the same month. Since then, it has been 18 consecutive quarters now. This time, we are also seeing 2.1% YOY. In terms of our post-pay R pool, we continue to improve it even after the merger. This trend continues to go up. We are now come to 713.
Our post-pay 5G penetration has come to 44%. I believe that's number one for the telco here. For our post-pay churn rate, we continue to work it down. It has come down to 0.8%. We'll continue to improve that. We have some very good first quarter in terms of the ICT contracts that we have been granted. It's almost double the contract amount, the contract value that we received at the same time last year. Like I said earlier, we focused on four areas for our ICT projects. One is the sustainable smart city. We have some big projects from the local government, such as for the smart streetlight management, and also the continued maintenance, and also the EV charging station and the management systems.
It's all kind of from our EMS, Energy Management System platform, as these are the applications came off that platform. In terms of the digital transformation, we have some big data-related and data security-related projects that are bringing us a very good contract. On the smart health side, our telemedicine platform service renewal, now these are kind of like a continuing, and we are also expanding our smart health or telemedicine platform technology into the cloud hits and also the clinics to see kind of application as well. In terms of telecom-based SI, we have quite a few projects awarded to us, as the enterprises are seeing the need for their resilience in terms of their IT infrastructure, partly because of the net zero efforts and partly because of all these so-called infrastructure sustainability.
We have seen quite a bit of projects in that area. In terms of the digital service highlights, for the two major paid subscribers, Friday Video, we have exceeded 400,000 subscribers. As I mentioned earlier, we actually are number one for three years in a row as the local OTT for the number of paid subscribers. Our Guardian Network continues to see good demand and strong demand. When we give the users a tryout period, the conversion rate has come as high as 60-some %. That led to a 42% year-over-year growth for us. Also, the paid subscribers have come close to 400,000. On the right-hand side, we are expanding our service offerings to the consumers. This is really way beyond our typical service, our telecom service, or just the device-related.
In the insurance area, as I mentioned earlier, not only we started with the device insurance, but now we have also come into the travel insurance, the life insurance, and property insurance. All that business is looking pretty good. That is why we are showing, I think, a 12% or 14% growth earlier, 12%. Yeah. We have kind of sponsored, or we have worked or co-worked with Spotify. We launched an exclusive Spotify offer with three- to four-months of free access. This is receiving very good feedback from the users. Recently, we have just invested in Pro360 as we aim to really expand the services to our users. Beyond this telephone or telecom-related, this is a platform that offers more than 700 different kinds of services, and they have 250,000 professionals on their network.
Every month, they have like 100,000 transactions that they brokered. This is a very good service. We are looking to co-work with them since we have a mobile circle platform as well. We will help them to expand more transactions and more business for them and for us too. Some honors and recognitions we have received recently in the environmental sustainability area. We have received this in the S&P Global for the 2025 Sustainability Yearbook. It was ranked in the top five for the global companies. It is number two among global telecom companies, and it is number one among Taiwan telcos. For the CDB climate change, we won the leadership level award for five years in a row now.
In terms of our corporate governance area, we have received some recognition from Finance Asia just recently for Asia's best companies poll. We were awarded best CEO, best large-cap company, and best managed company in telecom services. I thank you all for your vote if you voted for us. If not, next year, hopefully you will. Just kidding. All right. For Taiwan Stock Exchange, we are one of the seven public-listed companies in Taiwan that have been consistently ranked in top five for 11 years now. There are only, including us, only seven companies in Taiwan that have received such honor. We also earned an accredited healthy workplace by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Just recently, and actually just this past weekend, my team has received this AI award.
It was called like the biggest AI competition ever or so far. We were awarded the silver medal for best AI award, and that is for the enterprise category. We were very pleased with that, and that also demonstrated our capability in this area. This is how we kind of continue to enhance our solutions, especially serving our partners and also in providing our professional service to them. Okay. In terms of our 2025 priorities, of course, the end of the year is the deadline that the Fair Trade Committee gave us that we can migrate all the APT customers with the contract that already expired and all that. We are aiming to complete that in time. We will continue to grow our mobile revenue.
We wanted to have some new offerings, and then we want to expand our digital essential service offers for our consumers. This is something we will continue to do. Actually, for my own focus, and then as our enterprise business is pretty much on track and mobile is also doing very well on its own, I will spend more time on growing our new business because this is the area where we see more opportunities are yet to be tapped. Okay. We will monetize our mobile circle as we have received a lot of traffic or visits, and then for the platform economy, and then for some profit-sharing kind of a model. That is kind of business that we will continue to engage.
Our smart ICT business solutions that we will, as I mentioned, this AI-enabled or our AI capabilities, we will enhance them with more AI-enabled solutions or enhancements. Internally, we continue to accelerate this AI-powered process and productivity optimization within our own team. This is very important. This is also on our priority list. Last but not least, our annual shareholders meeting will be held on May 16th. That is next Friday. With that, I concluded my presentation and am ready for your questions. Thank you.
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Okay. We have seen some questions from the web. The first is some concerns about the impact of Mr. Trump's tariffs. Of course, this seems to be a daily topic on news. To a lot of the extent, as a telco, we operate locally. In terms of the tariff impact, if anything, it is indirect. Of course, smartphones being one of our major merchandise that we do purchase in large quantity. We just need to wait and see.
For example, if it's iPhone, we do know iPhone fans are very loyal, right? This is going to be okay. In terms of a P times Q, how much P is going to increase because of tariffs and how many people left that will be more willing to replace their phone as they always do every year. We will just have to wait and see. Other than that, maybe as a secondary, when all the enterprises are feeling some pressure, that may have some impact in our ICT. We do see a lot of contracts we already have signed. We have a pretty full pipeline to deliver for the year. With changes so fast coming out of the White House, I guess this we just have to play, wait, and see.
For now, we really do not see any significant impact at all. Okay. For number two, there was some question about the lawsuit between us and Taiwan Mobile. I think they started before I joined Far EasTone. If I recall, because this is like a soap opera for so long, I know if I remember correctly, the latest verdict from the last one we received before we went on again was in favor of Far EasTone. I do not really worry about it. Okay. In terms of the trend for 5G penetration, I think it is going to be a very smooth and surely continuous growth. We actually have pushed my team to kind of hit the 50% mark this year. I think it is pretty doable. Okay. Any more questions there?
As a reminder, press Star 1 on your telephone keypad if you would like to ask a question.
Okay. There is a question about our insurance resale business, right? Yeah. Currently, we do cooperate with multiple insurance companies. I listed two in particular because of the product that I mentioned involved. I do not think we have a set rule, like a no more or whatever. We always are open and welcome kind of reciprocal and mutually beneficial cooperation. We are not limited to our partner's options. I think some folks are asking about maybe, yeah, the exchange rate impact. If anything, it is actually doing us good because we pay some U.S. dollars for some of the vendors, but not a lot. That is still not our major type of payments at all.
But then usually, we do not do this as a one-time thing. We hedge along the way as we needed more dollars. So it is insignificant. Okay. All right. I think I answered them all. Okay. All right. Okay. I guess that is all for now. But then as always, you can contact Gary and Amy afterwards if you think about some questions that you forgot to ask or did not get to ask. We always welcome it. Thank you.
Thank you all. See you next quarter.
All right.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you for your participation in Far EasTone's conference. There will be a webcast replay within an hour. Please visit www.farestone.com.tw under the investor relations section. You may now disconnect. Goodbye.