Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining our Q4 and Full Year Results 2023 Call. I am here with our management, our CEO, Alejandro Plater, our Deputy CEO, Thomas Arnoldner, and our Group CFO, Sonja Wallner. As usual, they will need you for the presentation now, and we're happy to take your questions afterwards. Thank you, Elfriede Wilfinger.
Thank you, good morning to everyone, and thank you very much for joining us today. I hope you can hear as well. It's flus and colds all over Austria, so sorry for the quality of our voice. I hope we will get through fast. A summary if we move to a slide, first slide, please. As a summary of the quarter, you see that our revenues went up 2.3%, 5% if you adjust by currency effects, especially Belarus. We saw in Q4 basically the same trends as during the full year, with good service revenue development in mobile, very good traction in ICT or B2B solutions. EBITDA went up before restructuring one-offs and effects 7.3%. What we reported was 11.4%. We had some special effects. Sonja will talk about it a little bit later in detail. We bought a spectrum in Bulgaria.
It was a renewal of the 700 and 800 spectrum for a 15-year period for EUR 22 million. Finally, in December, we got upgraded as well by Moody's from Baa1 to A3. Now all major rating agencies are rating A1 in the A category that we are very proud of. We are also very proud of having reached the sixth best-performing telco worldwide in the CDP list, which has been a focus area last couple of years. And as you well know, we have managed to spin off our tower company, EuroTeleSites, basically with some impacts in A1 revenues, almost no impact, -0.1%, but we managed to spin off EUR 1 billion of financial debt. And, of course, there is impact on per capita due to higher leases moving forward.
For 2024, we expect revenues to grow between 3%-4%, CapEx around EUR 800 million. So we are backloading CapEx, basically, based on what we presented in the last Capital Markets Day. We are putting some projects under review in 2024, especially these special projects that we have all the time that we don't know exactly how much value they are bringing to the company, so we are having an extra look at that. The Management Board is recommending the board and the AGM afterwards a dividend increase to EUR 0.36 per share. Having said that, I will move to Sonja, who will dive us into the details on the financials in the quarter and the full year results.
We have right now next page, in the mobile business, our subscriber base increased by 5%-6% in the year-over-year comparison. This was driven by the growth of M2M modules . Excluding M2M subscriber, the customer base remained stable or almost stable. We saw growth in postpaid subscribers, especially in Croatia and Belarus, and Net Cubes, especially in Bulgaria. Less net losses in prepaid subscribers in Belarus. The increase in RGUs was above all driven by growth in Belarus and Bulgaria. Good demand for TV and broadband in the international market offset the legacy reversals in Austria. Reported ARPU in Q4 increased in the whole market except Belarus. Also operative ARPU excluding M2M business subscribers and negative foreign exchange effects ARPU increased by 4.1% in the fourth quarter. In the full year, it exhibited growth of 4.9 percentage points or 4.9%.
Operative ARPU is constant currency increased by 2.1% in Q4 2023 and slightly above full year increase of ARPU of 1.5%. Moving to the next page, please. Service revenues were the main driver for the revenue increase both in Q4 and the full year of 2023. Looking at the chart on the bottom left, we posted growth in all areas except for fixed voice and the regulation-driven declining interconnection. The main growth drivers were retail mobile, so mobile core and Cube. We also saw an encouraging inflection in the solution business. On the retail fixed line side, broadband and TV, especially in CEE, supported the growth. As mentioned before, service revenues also profited to a large extent from indexation measures, a strong mobile core business, successful upselling to higher speeds, and cross-selling measures, at the latter especially in the CEE countries.
Equipment revenues declined slightly driven by Austria and Serbia. Overall, we were able to overcompensate EUR 77 million negative foreign exchange effects resulting from only Belarus. The currency depreciated by 15% on a period average in the full year 2023 and by 26% in Q4. So the last quarter was especially heavily hit by the currency with a negative impact of EUR 33 million in total revenues. Excluding foreign exchange effects, all markets posted revenue and service revenue growth. 80% of the group revenue growth was stemming from international markets. There were more than 50% from Bulgarian operations. Next page. In Austria, most of the previous trends remained unchanged amidst the rather rational Christmas seasons on the mobile market while the fixed line market stayed very competitive. Service revenues were the growth driver on the top line and benefited from the indexation measures that we implemented already in May 2023.
A strong mobile core business and good traction in the solution business that overcompensated the loss of interconnection as well as the regular fixed voice revenue decline as we always showed in the previous years. Mobile service revenues increased by 3.3% in Q4 2023 with growth both in mobile and core in the Cubes business. Retail fixed line service revenues increased slightly on the back of indexation measures. At the same time, on the subscriber side, we saw the general trend of losing voice and basic broadband RGUs while advanced broadband RGUs numbers increased and mitigated some of the former losses. Equipment revenues were lower after larger ICT customer projects in the previous. Also, we are seeing a general calm hardware tariff market. A certain shift was SIM- only to offerings.
In this context, we also keep our subsidies low because, as mentioned in the previous calls, we see subsidies as fr actional as a tactical measures and clearly, decrease them wherever possible. Looking at the OpEx side, we want to flag several non-operational effects in Q4 2023. In total, OpEx included positive one-offs in the amount of EUR 41 million. There were EUR 35.5 million related to the activation of the stamp duty, which was booked in the OpEx in Q3 2023. So a positive effect in Q4, while it has no effect in full year results. The remainder was related to EUR 10 million related to a release of provisions for workforce costs and EUR 5 million were related to a provision in other OpEx related to a legal case. So excluding these effects, core OpEx was mainly due to higher electricity and workforce costs.
Operationally, workforce costs rose, related to increased inflation while the number of FTEs decreased. Overall, this result is a stable performance of the underlying EBITDA, so excluding restructuring one-offs. Please, move to the next page. In international markets, exhibited another strong fourth quarter with 4% service revenue growth and double-digit EBITDA growth in all markets except Belarus. For constant currency basis, service revenues and EBITDA grew by 10% and 16% respectively. The clear growth drivers were Croatia and Bulgaria, the two markets besides Austria where we implemented indexation measures in June, July, and March respectively. In Bulgaria, A1 continued to perform very convincingly in all business areas besides a very strong retail mobile performance, on the back of upsetting indexation results. Results profited from the strong demand for security services and IT solutions in Q4, particularly from two big ICT projects.
Besides this, growth was fueled by strong demand for high-speed services and TV products, also lifting RGUs up by 5.2%. Croatia exhibited an extraordinarily high growth of 40 or 44% in EBITDA, also supported by some small non-recurring effects. Operationally, the result was already strong in the back of 11% service revenue increase. OpEx was lower despite rising workforce and electricity costs. Despite macro regulatory headwinds, Belarus delivered a solid operational performance in Q4 on the back of successful up-selling and tariff migration. Besides this, the higher RGU subscriber base benefited service revenue growth. Thomas will present more details on Belarus afterwards in the focus points. Also, the smaller markets exhibited strong results. Let's move on to the next page on P&L. To sum it up, at the end, in the full year, we delivered a 5% revenue increase, thereby exactly meeting our guidance.
75% of the growth was driven by service revenues. We managed offset the OpEx increase, mainly stemming from high electricity, workforce, and product-related costs, and translated 5% revenue growth into 5% EBITDA growth. Operationally, EBITDA also increased by 5% as positive one-off effects and negative foreign exchange effects offset each of the full year 2023. The margin remained stable. The operational improvement also led to the increase of EBIT of 4.5% despite the higher depreciation amortization. The latter increased now in Q4 related to the rights-of-use asset after the spin-off of the tower business in Q3 2023. The financial result of -EUR 90 million versus EUR 55 million last year was mainly due to higher interest expenses on leases and financial debt. The increase in interest expense on leased liabilities is mainly due to interest rate levels as well as the spin-off of EuroTeleSites.
The increase related to the financial liabilities and interest income from the financial asset relates mainly to the issued bond and the long-term debt and bank debt as well as the investment of these funds in the previous subsidiary, A1 Towers Holding, and was generated in the period between the issuance, respectively the investment in July, until the spin-off of EuroTeleSites at the end of September 2023. Altogether, with a stable income tax, we resulted in a slight increase of net results to EUR 646 million. Moving to the next page to the free cash flow, in the full year of 2023, we delivered free cash flow of EUR 355 million compared to EUR 603 million last year. Despite the solid operational performance and the EBITDA increase of EUR 86 million, the difference to last year's amount to EUR 250 million.
The biggest part of the difference, EUR 120 million, was attributed to spectrum payments of EUR 103 million in 2023. Lease payments were higher by EUR 74 million, mainly as a result of the tower spin-off last year. Income taxes paid increased by EUR 43 million due to better operational results. The remainder can be explained by the change in working capital from a positive EUR 90 million last year to a negative EUR 14 million this year. We saw positive timing effects in accounts receivables and received some part, roughly EUR 40 million, of the subsidy related to the broadband subsidy program in Austria as a prepayment.
This only partly compensated the lower increase of the accounts payable and the increase in installment sales in the accounts sales. The lower increase in accounts payable was mainly reflected in the timing effect, especially on the CapEx side, where the negative effect from installment sales was reflected to almost Belarus. In 2022, we temporarily reduced the period of installment for installment sales in Belarus to six months, positively affecting the free cash flow in 2022 after we increased the contract periods again in the second half of 2022. We have a more normal development now again in the year 2023. Now, handing over to Thomas with the focus points of the presentation.
Thank you, Sonja. As always, we will give some more details on some areas of focus. First of all, as a reminder because we cannot talk about the year 2023 without talking about the spin-off of our tower business, a reminder on this transaction for your convenience. As you know, end of September, we spun off our tower businesses. We listed it as EuroTeleSites AG on the Vienna Stock Exchange on a pro-rata basis. And with an unchanged shareholder structure at the time of the spin-off, the rationale for us was very clear, allowing us to focus more on our core telecoms business, more efficient budget allocation. We could substantially reduce our financial debt by around EUR 1 billion. And, of course, we could unlock value for our shareholders through the higher trading multiples of those tower assets.
Sonja already briefly mentioned some of the financial impacts of the transaction on our P&L. I'm not gonna go through all the details here. You see it on the slide. On the P&L, the main impact is visible in the EBIT due to a higher depreciation and on leases. The net income is additional impact by higher interest rates related to the rights-of-use asset while the interest on financing is obviously lower. CapEx is lower by EUR 40 million-EUR 50 million. At the same time, our free cash flow is expected to be lower by EUR 60 million per year on average, driven by this transaction. And as Alejandro pointed out already at the very beginning, no change on dividend policy. We again plan to increase our dividend, at least proposed to increase the dividend, on an undoubtedly very sustainable level.
On the next page, as always, in February, we want to provide you with a little bit of update on our fiber expansion and investments, in Austria, fiber and including also 5G. As you might remember, we increased our speed of the fiber rollout in 2022. Already, we have basically doubled the CapEx dedicated to the fiber deployment on a new level, which is now pretty similar every year, so also similar level in 2023. We currently have 73,000 kilometers of fiber network covering all of Austria. We were quite successful in the broadband subsidy program called BBA 2030, aiming at the fiber rollout in the more rural areas of Austria where we received EUR 234 million in subsidies last year. As a result, in 2024, our fiber rollout will, of course, focus a little bit more on those rural areas.
Following the full deregulation, which we achieved in 2022, we have established now a significant number of partnerships with alternative operators, roughly 50 partnerships, which we currently have, focusing on the new fiber network expansions, which we do, allowing us to feed the network better, to enhance the capabilities and also to reach to increase the utilization of the fiber network. Also on 5G, we keep investing. We have currently achieved around 85% of PoP coverage in Austria. And looking ahead, as I just indicated, we remain steadfast on our commitment to the fiber investments, even though, as Alejandro pointed out, we have some different phasing in the CapEx in 2024. The fiber rollout here will not be impacted. Next slide, Belarus. Here again, we want to give you a little bit of deep dive and color on the current challenges, which we have.
On the GDP side, we see an improved development in 2023 versus 2022. In 2022, we had a contraction of 3.7% in GDP. We had growth in 2023 of 1.6% again. Expectation is, or current forecast is 1.3% GDP growth for this year. Inflation was close to 6% at the end of December 2023, which is slightly higher than in the previous years, but still very much controlled by the government. We are also impacted because as to counteract inflation, a general ban on price increases is still in place in the country. Also looking ahead concerning inflation, the National Bank of Belarus projects a CPI increase in 2024 that does not exceed 6% year- over- year.
As it was mentioned previously, we have also seen a substantial depreciation of the Belarusian ruble, 15% in 2023, with the biggest hit in the last quarter was 26% decrease on period average. As a result, total revenues and EBITDA in euro terms were affected by -EUR 37 million and -EUR 15 million, respectively. While the business managed to grow revenues and EBITDA in local currency terms, it was noticeable that the absence of price indexation, basically from the beginning of last year, caused these growth rates to soften in the last year. Supply chain challenges remain, have been interrupted with some of the key vendors, but local team, I think, is doing a great job in mitigating these in line, of course, with the sanctions framework but also with the telco exception rule. In this context, we, of course, continue to follow a diligent approach regarding investments.
Last focus area, as it has been, let's say, getting lots of attention all over the place, especially in the past year, we wanted to talk a little bit of what we do with respect to artificial intelligence in A1 Group. We have been using AI or related technologies for quite some while in the company already. We started using machine learning around about 15 years ago in areas such as chat prediction, customer segmentation, shopping basket analysis, etc. But around five years ago, we started a transformational project where we moved the way we deal with data to a new level, by adding a data lake to our conventional data warehouse, allowing us to work with much larger data volumes with real-time data in order to achieve professionalization in this area.
We, giving on the left-hand side, you see some of the areas where we use it, for example, in marketing and sales, customer experience management, financial forecasting, planning of fiber deployments, etc. We've also started using ChatGPT with an internal instance in the companies so employees can use it in the daily work. We have experiments going on using generative AI, for example, in software development, in document intelligence, in customer interaction, and again, of course, in customer feedback and marketing. We are in a learning journey here. We are very excited about that. But, of course, much of that is in the experimental state at the moment. Along with that, we have also introduced a robust framework of guidelines, processes, and tools to ensure a responsible treatment of AI in the company and, of course, ensure data privacy. We have a fair AI policy in place.
And we also introduced methods to test our AI models against biases. With that, I'm handing over again to Alejandro for the outlook and for Q&A.
Thank you very much, Thomas, for the focus points. And then we would like to close the presentation with the guidance 2024. As you can see in the slide, we expect total revenues to grow between 3%-4%, CapEx around EUR 800 million. As was mentioned before, we are reviewing certain projects to see if they're strategically fit for our purpose or not. That's why it's a little bit lower than expected CapEx for 2024. The fiber CapEx in Austria is unchanged. Actually, we will accelerate a little bit investments in the fiber rollout in 2024. And Thomas and me, as Management Board, we will propose to the Supervisory Board dividend of EUR 0.36 for the full year 2023. Previously, it was 0.32. And with that, hand over to Susanne, and thank you for listening to our presentation.