Good morning. Thank you for standing by. Let me welcome you to Orange Polska conference call, in which we will summarize our results in the second quarter and the first half of 2026. My name is Leszek Iwaszko, and I am in charge of investor relations. The format of the call will be a presentation made by management team, followed by a Q&A session. Speakers for today will be CEO of Orange Polska, Liudmila Climoc, and Jacek Kunicki, CFO. Let me now pass the floor to Liudmila to begin the presentation.
Thank you, Leszek. Good morning and welcome to our conference summarizing second quarter of 2026. Let's start on slide four. I am very pleased to share with you on our progress for first six months of the year. Within this time, we were focused on our priorities set in Lead the Future strategy, pursuing brave commercial agenda, investing in our network, and implementing transformation initiatives for our operations.
It all starts with profitable growth, which was excellent across all our business lines. Firstly, in core telecom services, we successfully combined healthy pace of growth of customer bases and improving ARPO dynamics. I am very happy that Orange Polska was the leader in mobile number portability for the second consecutive quarter, with net gain for Q2 of 20,000 customers. Secondly, it was a particularly good quarter for B2B.
Revenues in IT and IS increased by as much as 50% in second quarter, thanks to an accumulation of contracts won. In addition, we signed the first major contract for the defense area, which we see as a significant milestone for future development. Finally, wholesale sustained very strong momentum, growing revenues by double digit despite lack of national roaming contract, which expired last year.
These strong commercial achievements were combined with progress in our transformation program as we strive towards high efficiency, and it is visible through indirect costs, which were flat if we compare year-over-year. All that is translated into strong financial results. In H1, revenue growth exceeded 7% and the EBITDA growth exceeded 6%. As a consequence of strong first half of the year, we are confident in right execution of our strategy, and we are more optimistic regarding our future prospects.
Let's review these achievements in more details, I will start with commercial activity on next slide. Our commercial performance in Q2 was successful both in volume and value. These trends are key to today's value creation, but also give us confidence for quarters to come. Starting with mobile, where results were particularly excellent, net customer additions exceeded 80,000. As I have mentioned already, we were again the winner of number portability with a big advantage.
This demonstrates that the strength of our multi-brand strategy and also confirms that customers continue to value the quality and our Always On connectivity. For the mobile ARPO, growth improved, exceeding 2% as we monetize our value strategy. It was driven by acceleration in the main brand on consumer market and an improvement in B2B.
As a result, we have reached a well-balanced volume-value growth in mobile, which was not that evident in the previous quarters. Moving on to fiber, customer base increased 10% year-on-year. Net customer additions were similar to a year ago, and we see it as a very strong achievement despite fierce competition, which we see in this area. In second quarter, we increased our footprint for high-speed broadband by 900,000 households in hybrid fiber coax, HFC technology of getting access to one of the wholesalers' networks.
Over the time, this footprint will be further increasing and will be gradually upgraded to FTTH standard. This new infrastructure creates a new fishing pool for us for growth in our very high broadband services. Strong mobile and fiber were accompanied by further growth in convergence, with the pace of growth in line with Lead the Future strategy. Convergence remains key to value creation on consumer market. It already penetrates our customer base in a very high proportion, that's why we are focusing on reaching new households, not yet using our services with fiber or mobile services.
We are quite successful with that. In the first half of 2026, the number of households where Orange is present with our services was growing, offering promising prospects for the future. Strong results of core telecom services were accompanied by strong performance in B2B and wholesale, I would like to zoom in on it on next slide six. Common feature of these two business lines is that their revenues include both recurrent streams and boosts from particular big deals. If we want to achieve strong growth, we need both of these streams. We see it well reflected in results of the second quarter.
Starting with business market, if you remember our priorities for 2026 that we were presenting in February, one of them was to achieve profitable growth in B2B. I am pleased to confirm that this is clearly happening. It is driven by a constantly improving trend in telco services and accumulation of contracts, one in IT and IS. Additionally, we have signed a first major contract in the defense sector, I hope that this will open new market opportunities for value creation. Switching to wholesale. It sustained great momentum in H1 with a particularly high 17% revenue growth in Q2. This is despite the absence of revenue from national roaming contract.
It was driven by a consistent growth in wholesale fiber access and big deals in infrastructure rental. This should remind us that wholesale is our strategic line of business, complementing our retail operations and balancing our risk profile. Now we have discussed all three business lines, which build growth of our revenues and margin. The missing element for EBITDA is cost transformation. I invite you to look on next slide, on slide seven. Under the Lead the Future, we have launched a new wave of transformation focused on improving efficiency, expanding margins, and strengthening our cash generation.
It covers all areas of our business, you can see the pie chart on the slide illustrating it. Its key levers are automation for processes, re-engineering, and opportunities from integrating AI in our operations. The key measure of its overall progress is the evolution of indirect cost. Indirect, so it is not directly linked to revenues. Our aim to keep this cost flat despite growing business and despite growing investments in our networks.
This enables high operating leverage, as a result, allows us to floor our revenues in EBITDA and consequently into the cash. We are very pleased that this transformation is progressing well, and that underlying indirect costs were flat year-over-year, if we look on first six months of this year. You have seen that strong H1 results were a combination of strong commercial execution and also a solid progress in our cost transformation. It allows us to be more optimistic regarding the future. Just to illustrate it on the next slide.
As a consequence, we are raising our full-year guidance in most areas, so for revenues, for EBITDA, and for organic cash flow. Following the exceptional revenue growth to date, we now expect full-year revenues to grow by low to mid single-digit in percentage. This will translate into EBITDA that we expect to grow at above 6%. An important improvement versus our initial estimates. We have decided to guide above 6% as perfect execution in second part of the year could see us landing above this level.
Finally, we are raising operating OCF cash guidance to at least PLN 1.2 billion. This means that we plan it to grow by more than 20% in 2026. This guidance is underlining our determination to grow our financial outputs and to create values for our shareholders. This is all for me as for now, and I hand over the floor to Jacek to walk you through the details of our financial results.
Thank you, Liudmila. Good morning, everyone. Let's start the financial review on slide 10 with the highlights of our performance this quarter. I am very pleased with our financial results in Q2. We have increased our revenues, profits, and cash generation. Revenues were up by 12% year-on-year. A solid, consistent development of core telecom services was coupled with exceptional growth of revenues from IT and IS. High top line was coupled with cost savings, in turn, this drove the 3% EBITDA growth in the second quarter. This is a strong achievement, especially as we note that the second quarter of 2025 included a PLN 75 million positive one-off from the rollout agreement.
The comparable base was very high. Solid revenue and EBITDA in Q2 enabled us to achieve excellent results for the first semester, with 7.5% revenue uplift and a 6% growth of the EBITDA. High operating results were coupled with CapEx discipline, as a result, we have significantly increased our net income by 24% year-on-year and our organic cash flow by 43% year-over-year. Both viewed for the first semester. These are very strong results based on solid underlying trends.
They give us an increased level of confidence for the future, as evidenced by the guidance uplift described by Liudmila. Let's now look into the sources of these achievements, starting with top line on the next slide. Q2 revenues grew by 12% year-on-year, an exceptionally steep dynamic. This combines a solid, consistent performance of core telecom services and a very strong growth of the less recurrent areas such as IT and IS and wholesale. Revenues from core telecom services increased by 5% year-on-year.
Similarly to the first quarter, this reflected a strong above 6% growth of all post-paid service revenues and a natural slowdown in prepaid following its steep growth in 2025. Consistent development of core telecom service revenues is fueled by the rock-solid growth of their customer bases and ARPUs. Good growth of core telecom revenues was coupled with an exceptional 50% increase of revenues from IT and IS. This quarter, we benefited from a big accumulation of contracts for digital transformation and IT infrastructure upgrades.
This demonstrates that market conditions are improving and that we are able to grab those opportunities due to our large portfolio of competencies and relevant experience. We continue to observe a solid pipeline of projects for H2. We note that the Q2 dynamic was exceptional and we expect less spectacular growth in the second semester from IT and IS revenues. Top line also benefited from a very solid growth of wholesale, which was fueled by infrastructure contracts and IoT equipment sales in the B2B.
To sum up, Q2 revenue dynamics was exceptionally high as consistent, solid performance of core telecom service revenues was coupled with extra growth from big contracts. Revenue achievements in H1 lead us to increase the full year guidance, even if we expect a slightly slower single-digit growth in the second semester. Let's now look at how we turn these higher revenues into profitability on slide 12. Our Q2 EBITDA has increased by 3% year-over-year. We're very pleased with this result, especially as last year's EBITDA included the large one-off from the fiber rollout agreement for our fiber that I already mentioned.
This shows that the underlying growth of Q2 was indeed very strong, which was driven both by an accelerated growth of the direct margin, fueled by revenues and by solid benefits of our cost transformation. The direct margin increased by more than 6%, an outstanding dynamic that followed strong revenue growth across all business lines. It mainly reflected the growth of the high-margin areas, such as core telecom services and wholesale, but it also benefited from the exceptionally high IT and IS sales.
This last item carries much lower margins versus core telco, but still delivers a direct margin rate in the area of close to 20% and an EBITDA contribution close to the 10%-12% mark. Our indirect costs were flat year-over-year, apart from the impact of the already mentioned fiber rollout one-off last year. We benefited from the cost transformation program and made efficiency gains in network operations, employment, and property maintenance costs. As a result, we preserved a high operating leverage, and we are able to convert revenue growth into higher EBITDA. This result enabled us to reach over 6% EBITDA growth for the first semester.
As you have seen, we expect this dynamic to hold or even accelerate in H2. With this, Orange Polska will reach its highest EBITDA growth rate in many years. Let's look at net income on the next page. Our net results amounted to PLN 580 million in H1, growing by 24% year-over-year. There were two drivers of this increase. Firstly, the strong EBITDA growth discussed a moment ago. Secondly, high gain on asset disposals as we executed large real estate transactions, selling properties that we no longer need as we transform our operations.
These were partly offset by higher depreciation linked to the 5G license that we've acquired last year and a change in CapEx structure evolving into assets with shorter useful lifetimes, such as IT software. H1 results puts us on a solid path for a significant growth of net income for the full year. Now let's switch to CapEx on page 14, slide 14. Our e conomic CAPEX amounted to PLN 725 million in H1, 9% down year-over-year. The difference resulted entirely from the PLN 100 million higher proceeds from real estate disposal due to the very good result achieved this year. CapEx spending was on a comparable level to last year.
In line with our strategic priorities, we allocated almost 40% of capital expenses to access networks. In fixed, this is mainly fiber rollout in white zones, a project that will be completed before year-end. In mobile, we are deploying the 5G network, now reaching almost 90% of population and finalizing the renewal of our radio access network. Another 30% of CapEx is dedicated to core and fixed network, as we are expanding the capacity of our networks to deal with the growing traffic.
Finally, we've spent just over 30% on IT, with focus on projects to support process efficiency through digitalization, both on the front desk and in the technical and support areas. Finally, a quick look at the cash flow on page 15. We generated close to PLN 500 million of organic cash flows in H1. This was PLN 150 million or 43% more than in H1 of last year. It was driven predominantly by the strong growth of the EBITDA, coupled with higher cash from real estate disposal.
We also benefited from less cash CapEx, with lower payment for prio years investment than in H1 of 2025. However, t his was offset by a higher need for working capital as a result of the great revenue growth in IT and IS equipment, but also in the core telecom services areas in H1 of this year. As a takeaway, we're happy with cash generation in H1. We also expect a solid H2. We are eyeing the above PLN 1.2 billion of organic cash flow for the full year. This is all from me for now. I hand the floor back to Liudmila. Thank you.
Thank you, Jacek. Summarizing, just illustrating the bullet points which you see on slide 17. Our commercial and financial results in second quarter and first part of the year were strong. They not only give us confidence to upgrade full-year guidance, but also constitute a great platform for growth in the future and, in the same time, demonstrate that discipline execution of Lead the Future strategy is bringing desired results.
This gives us even stronger determination to execute on commercial actions in the upcoming peak season and to focus on new transformation initiatives, but also to take more mid-term perspective and to launch new actions that will fuel our growth in the years to come. This is all for us. Now we are ready to take your questions.
Thank you. Switching now to Q&A session. Let me read the instructions first. First, if you are dialed in via the phone and would like to ask a question, please press star two on your keypad and wait for your name to be called. You may also ask a text question using the webcast window. Again, to ask a question, press star two on the keypad or press the question button on the platform. We are as usually prioritizing voice questions. The first question is coming from the line of Dominik Niszcz from Trigon. Dominik, your line is open. You may ask your questions.
Thank you. Hi. Dominik from Trigon. Would like to ask two questions. First is on wholesale revenues. In the second quarter, it's up by PLN 34 million. I was wondering, should we view this temporary, or do you expect these infrastructure projects to be more like a recurring contributor, or it's just a fluctuation from quarter-to-quarter, this was exceptional quarter? What was the scale, maybe, if this was kind of not recurring?
Thank you for your question, Dominik. When you take a look at wholesale, obviously it is driven both by the recurrent streams of revenues, such as rentals of our infrastructure on a subscription basis or sale of BSA accesses for the wholesale customers. This is very often then fluctuating as we have additional impacts of large projects. Wholesale is, I would say, it has a base that is recurrent, it's fueled by non-recurrent projects. Yes, we did see Q2 impacted by over PLN 20 million of non-recurrent projects.
What I would really emphasize is that we, first of all, have grown year-over-year despite losing the revenues from national roaming. That was about a PLN 11 million negative impact. Is PLN 11 million in Q1, PLN 11 million in Q2, we've had to offset this. What I would mention is we are already heavily working on additional projects to come in the second semester that if we are able to execute them properly, will also give us quite nice upside and enable us to continue to grow revenues in H2. It's not that we've run out of one-off projects. It's that wholesale is a lot about non-recurrent projects, we are working and developing those projects, we're quite confident that wholesale will continue to deliver quite nice revenue growth.
Okay. That's clear and optimistic. Thank you. One more question on data centers. With this AI and data center investments accelerating globally but also across Europe, does Orange Polska see opportunities through partnerships or some connectivity-related services to gain higher scale in this area? We've heard about the cooperation with Morrison in France by your parent company just yesterday. Is this the path you are looking for as well?
Another relevant question. What I would say is that today we have a meaningful data center business already, as we are providing collocation for our business customers. Obviously on top of that, a number of services starting with connectivity, security, remote maintenance, energy guarantee, and so on. The usual package for data centers. These are not AI-driven data centers, so they are with a low energy intensity, and usually they are located next to the data centers that we have for the purposes of Orange Polska, so for our internal needs.
This represents, on an incremental level, an attractive business model, because we are using the space that has already been developed for Orange Polska purposes. We do not envisage today huge projects such of the scale as you have mentioned and targeting the AI boom, but would rather be continuing to look for ways to serve our business customers with this low-intensity data center services. Here, obviously, we are not close to needing to own data centers.
We can just as well rely on trusted partners, reliable partners, such as we do with fiber, where not only do we have Światłowód Inwestycje, which is co-owned and not entirely owned, but also please note that a significant part of our coverage relies on wholesale tactics. For pure data center connectivity, I would say we are open for all forms of gaining access to infrastructure to serve our customers, while obviously our unique advantage is to be able to provide the value-added services on top of the basic collocation services that are usually offered by the pure data centers.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks, Dominik. Next voice question will be coming from the line of Ali Naqvi from HSBC. Ali, your line is open.
Hi. Thank you for taking the question. Hope you can hear me. Can I just get your view on capitalization for any non-telco M&A, such as real estate, if there was a chance deals that would be available in the end?
I'm sorry, Ali. Could you repeat your question slowly? We have quite a poor line from you. We have a hard time to get your question.
Great. First one is your policy on non-telco M&A, for example, in real estate, if you have anything to say on that. In terms of your uplift in guidance for 2026, are there any scenarios or is there any update to give a view on your medium-term guidance, whether you could raise that as well?
Thank you very much for your question. I will start with the M&A. Here, we're very consistent. We would not be open to venture far out away from the telco side. The two areas of M&As that we are open to, and historically have been open to, is on the one side, the potential increase of our competencies in the ICT area, where we've done a number of M&As historically, and where obviously we need to be relatively selective as to which exactly competencies would be potentially wish to acquire. On the other hand, the fiber infrastructure, where we are an active participant on those infrastructure projects.
The last one being the ongoing process of acquiring Nexera together with APG. Those would be pretty much the only areas that we would be looking at right now. We're not really eyeing any M&As that would be outside the core business. I think regarding the EBITDA, what I would say is First of all, we need to understand where this upward guidance revision stems from. We're happy with the growth that we've seen so far for 2026, and we're happy with the sources of growth. The way that I would put it's in three steps.
This guidance, revision, and growth stems from, one, strong sustainable growth across the recurrent business. Core telecom services, we've seen great trends in H1. We think they will be continued in H2. Plus, we see support from big deals. We've seen very nice revenue growth and converting into also EBITDA support in [B2B] with continued and will continue good growth from wholesale. Number three is another plus, a great contribution of our cost transformation, and this has visibly accelerated this year. That gets us to guiding above 6%, and as Liudmila mentioned, perfect execution could take us even 1%-2% higher.
As far as H2 expectations, obviously, we expect relatively slower revenue growth versus the one that we observed in Q2 as IT and IS was truly exceptional. At the same time, we expect rock-solid revenue margin from core telecom services. That is, in fact, translating into EBITDA growth that could even be higher in H2 than the one that we've seen in H1. What is great about this dynamic is that both core telecom services and cost optimization provide a recurring effect, we should be able to enjoy their benefits in the future.
Repeating this year's forecast would obviously also require for sizable additional big deals, and it's a bit early to be eyeing this right now, we are in mid-year. Our 2026 performance is definitely creating a good platform for further growth in the future. Our midterm EBITDA guidance is a low to mid-single-digit percentage CAGR. Today we stick to this, clearly our ambitions are at the high end of this guidance. We will be doing our annual business planning in H2 of this year, we will definitely address, next year's guidance, also give you a better outlook for 2028, together with the full year results, in February of 2027. Thank you.
Great. Thank you.
Thanks, Ali. We have no more voice questions as of now, we have text questions that came to us from Paweł Puchalski from Erste Brokerage. Three questions. First question is, in Q2 2026, we observed PLN 200 million top line consensus beat and a mere PLN 6 million EBITDA beat. Is that actual margin or on ICT or more profits would be recognized in coming quarters? That's the first question. Maybe we'll take them one by one.
Sure. Thank you, Paweł, for the very relevant question. I believe I mentioned part of the reasons when commenting the EBITDA. While we have indeed noted very steep growth of revenues from IT and IS, we need to remember that IT and IS carry much lower margins than the incremental margin by extra core telco revenue. This is where the EBITDA contribution of these extra revenues, it is about 10% this quarter. That, I hope, explains to you why the PLN 200 million top line beat, which was, I believe, mostly about IT and IS.
I do not have the details per product line of consensus, obviously, but I do believe that this was mostly about IT and IS. It's not translating into a spectacular beat of the EBITDA, congratulations to everyone that was forecasting well and had faith in our ability to deliver EBITDA growth despite this big one-off in Q2 of last year, because all of you guys have actually had faith that we will deliver a very strong underlying growth, and we're happy with this.
The next question I will read, but I believe this was already at least partly answered. It concerns OCF guidance following 2026 OCF guidance increase by PLN 0.1 billion. Should we assume it would result in your 2028 OCF guidance or maybe 2026 OCF is related to uniquely strong real estate asset, leaving midterm OCF outlook unaffected?
I think it's worth answering this one directly because it's about organic cash flow, and before we comment more about EBITDA. Thanks for spotting this one, Paweł. I would say, first of all, this year's OCF looks indeed to be very strong. At least 20% growth to reach more than PLN 1.2 billion. It is a remarkable achievement for a telco. We're happy with this, and we're confident in our ability to deliver. It will be an outcome of both the strong profitable revenue growth and operating costs that we have envisaged in the EBITDA guidance, but also disciplined CapEx, enabling the EBITDA growth to flow through to the organic cash flow.
As you remember, our eCAPEX guidance, it's broadly stable versus last year. It is not about a huge cut of a huge, I would say, non-recurring one-off cut to the eCAPEX, but the strong OCF growth is rather about a very good result expected on the EBITDA side. That is, I would say, really the bright side of things is the quality of the sources of the EBITDA growth. CapEx is merely there, first of all, to finance the future growth, because this is why we want to invest CapEx, and also the CapEx discipline, to enable the EBITDA growth to flow through to organic cash flow.
Looking into the future, I would say, on the one hand, we note that this year's EBITDA growth is supported by large deals and this year's organic cash flow is obviously supported by the sale of real estate. Over the course of the next years, the real estate proceeds will be diminishing as we will be progressively selling all that we have and are not using.
On the other hand, we have a good track record of developing new growth levers and of outperforming our targets, and we are very motivated to maximize shareholder value. I do believe that there is a case to be optimistic for the future. Now we're concentrating on reaching this year's goals. There is a lot of execution to be done. We will refresh the plans for the next two years in H2, and we'll address the topic in more detail in February. Thanks.
The last question of Paweł is, following 2026 OCF growing 20% year-on-year, should we expect your 2027 DPS also growing by 20% year-on-year?
Paweł is following through all the way to the dividends. Thank you. I think it's clear that for us, the dividends are an important part of, an essential part of value creation to our shareholders. We're looking and we're working hard to create the financial conditions to be able to offer sustainable growth of the dividend. Today, by increasing the guidance, we're demonstrating that our actions are bearing fruit, and we're progressively delivering those better financial outputs. Whenever we analyze dividends each year, we look into the midterm projections for our profitability, our cash generation, and the balance sheet.
These will inevitably include the PLN 400 million cash outlay for the 1,800 spectrum renewal in 2027, and some other renewals after 2028. Also they will include our updated expectations for profitability and cash generations. This will follow the financial planning process in H2 of this year that I've already mentioned. That's why we will address the question of the next dividend in February together with the full year results. I hope that you can understand the logic that we take in determining each year what is the next level of the dividend that we pay going forward. Thanks.
Thank you. We have a follow-up question, text question from Dominik Niszcz from Trigon. You mentioned a new defense contract in the shareholder letter. Can you share more details? What defense capabilities does Orange Polska aim to develop over the coming years?
Thank you, Dominik, for spotting it. Indeed, we see the contract as a significant milestone, although we are bound by confidentiality. You appreciate that we will be rather general in the comments. Our relationships with defense sector in Poland is a long-lasting one. Obviously now the sector is becoming even more important in current geopolitical landscape. We see growing demand. What I can say is that the contract is an evidence that technology and modern infrastructure play an important role to strengthen defense and security in Poland.
We see it also as an important step for long-term value building in this market segment. It is not new for us. We are working in this area for quite a long time. Now we are intensifying efforts, working on a wider scope of solutions which could serve defense and security needs not only of public, but also in private sectors. As for this particular contract, you need to expect, we plan that this contract will contribute to our results gradually, starting with 2027. It is not yet reflected in our H1 numbers.
Thank you. It appears we have no further question, neither voice or text. Thank you very much for participating. Enjoy rest of the summer, and please send us a note if you wanted to meet us on one-on-ones. We are always open.
Let's see you at the latest in October and on conferences and roadshows in between.
Thank you. Bye-bye.
Thank you.