Ladies and gentlemen, dear guests, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Analysts and Investors Conference of United Internet for the half-year figures 2025. My name is Dominic Grossman. I'm very happy to be able to welcome you here personally at Sofitel Frankfurt. I also like to welcome everybody who is participating online. Allow me to take you through the agenda today. We'll start with Ralph Dommermuth presenting the development of the first half of the year, giving a focus on the second half of the year. Following that, Carsten Theurer is going to explain the figures in detail. You will, after our presentation, have the opportunity to place your questions in our Q&A session. That's it from my behalf, and I pass on the stage to Mr. Dommermuth. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Grossman. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. As announced, I will present the development of the company in the first half of the year and a focus on the rest of the year. My colleague, Mr. Theurer, will give you the details on the figures of the first half of the year. You know our business. We work in a team with about 10,800 employees, 4,000 of them in product management, development, and data centers. We run a powerful internet structure with fiber optic networks, a mobile network, and computer centers with over 100,000 servers worldwide. We have the access business and applications. These, again, split up in offers for consumers and business customers. Our products are offered in a number of brands. In the consumer business, the main brand is 1&1. We have discount brands from the merger in 2017. In the business access, we are active with 1&1 Versatel. Applications for consumers are GMX, WEB.DE mainly, and internet media. Applications for business customers are provided by IONOS with different subsidiaries and acquired like Arsys and STRATO in Poland, Austria, England, and so on, and a number of minority partners. Let me start with the consumer access in the first half of 2025. You know our business. Our consumer access business is organized in 1&1. Again, there are stocklisters, 3.89 million broadband customers and 12.44 million customers. Contracts, we are operating the first Open RAN business, and we are migrating the existing customers from the wholesale contracts to this Open RAN. At the end of the year, we had 16.33 million customer contracts. Mobile chain broadband hasn't changed, and the broadband has reduced by 60,000. Our service revenue could increase slightly to EUR 1.647 billion. The general development - 13.12, EUR 130.6 million included in this is the buildup of the mobile network. [1&1] reports two segments. One segment is access, a - 3.5% due to the change of the roaming partner with higher roaming costs as expected before. The mobile network with EUR 130.6 million coming from EUR 111 million. Business access, 1&1 Versatel operates one of the largest German fiber optic networks. We operate the access network, transport networks on the 67,000 km. We are available in over 350 cities in Germany, including the 25 largest. Over 28,000 buildings are directly connected. We have increased 287.3. This is the accumulated figures. Our own optic fiber is growing much more. We have a decline in the voice business where earlier customers paid per minute for voice, and they don't accept this anymore. This is why we are losing non-recurring revenue, but the recurring revenue is growing. That is the lines, for example. We will see this development over a couple of years still. The [ABTR] has startup costs. Without the startup costs, the [ABTR] would have been at EUR 92 million. The margin is a bit higher than last year with 28%. Looking at the applications, I have said so. The consumer area is GMX, WEB.DE, mail.com, online office, cloud servers, cloud storage. Our differentiation here is German data protection and data security. We had 41.75 million active consumer accounts at the end of the year. That is free accounts, which are funded by advertising, 38.7 million minus 360,000. We have 3.8 million pay accounts, which are much better for us than the advertising accounts. There are some seasonal figures. That is why we have a difference here between the end of the year and the middle of the year. This is a bit misleading, but if we look at the year-to-date, we see a plus of 90,000 coming from 41.66 million. We see this in revenue as well, a plus of 3.1%, EUR 248 million. The result is not brilliant. We expect that to rise with the revenue as well, but we expect a change. We have a high business region, 36.2 EBITDA, and we don't need many servers to have that business running. Business applications, IONOS, they published figures today as well as the leading digitization market for small and medium-sized companies. They're a cloud enabler, active in Europe and in the U.S. Broad product portfolio ranging from digital solutions, websites, e-shops, marketing tools, right to virtual servers, dedicated servers, cloud infrastructure as a service. All of these are the active figures. Very good growth in the first half of the year, 210,000 new contracts, 9.8 million as a total. Also from abroad, but our main market in Germany, 80,000 + contracts, reaching 4.71 million. The revenue has grown strongly, 19% to nearly EUR 900 million. That is due to customer growth and better up and cross-selling of additional products and a strong growth in the ad tech segment. As a total, [EBITDA] even better growth, 24.6% + to EUR 258 in the first half. The margin now at 28.9%. A very strong margin business here. Their figures, again, in the overview. A total of 290,000 new customer contracts and pay services reaching 29.31 million contracts. A plus of 4.3% in revenues. EBIT plus [EBITDA] plus 2%. EBIT is dropping due to the investments and the antennas, the computer centers, and so on, which are being added and activated. A drop here and a result of - 3.3%. Included in this, as I've said, is the EUR 130 million ramp-up costs, as I've said. If you take these 18.4 on the EBIT, you will get a growth of, I'd say, around 5%, a little bit less. What is the forecast? How are we going to carry on? We confirm our forecast. We are expecting the forecast to fulfill EUR 6.545 billion. The EBITDA is about EUR 1.35 billion. We've just explained this: EUR 20 million less EBITDA due to the change of the national roaming partner to Vodafone. We had deactivated components before that increased the EBITDA. Vodafone doesn't do this, and EBIT, there's no impact, however. If we add this difference to the EUR 1.535 billion, we would end up at EUR 1.7 billion, which would be 5.5% of growth, something in that range, which is quite reasonable. CapEx will end up at about EUR 800 million this year, a bit higher than last year. We are still investing into the fiber optic network, in the mobile network, and also in the cloud infrastructure. Thank you for your attention so far. I would like to ask Mr. Theurer to present the figures. Welcome again from by me. I'll have the honor of taking you through the figures in detail, giving you a summary from the overall view and into the balance sheet. First of all, why do we have different figures here? Mr. Dommermuth mentioned it. We have the comparison like for like, i.e., the key figures as of June 30, 2025 compared to June 30, 2024. You can see that the fee-based customer contracts actually grew by more than half a million in this period of time. If we take a look at the ad finance free accounts, we have a decrease with 180,000. At the same time, we were able to get paying customers, which are in the first figure indicated. We have actually + 270,000 customers. Revenue growth, 4.3%, as I mentioned. EBITDA, as we can see here again with the 2%, despite the EUR 19.6 million higher costs for the rollout of the 1&1 mobile network. The EBIT, a larger impact of the effect we mentioned already shown in the EBIT, but not in the EBITDA. In the EBIT, we see the EUR 39 million higher depreciation in connection with the network expansion, EUR 12 million for Versatel. We have an overall decrease of 8.5% of the EBIT. Let's speak about the cash flow. In the first half of the year, we have an increase from EUR 557.9 million to EUR 578.9 million. Cash flow from operating activities, we see strong growth here. Why? Last year, the contingent payment, the last contingent payment of EUR 260 million was paid to Deutsche Telekom for the last time, and we benefit from this now. We don't have this payment anymore, and that has this positive effect here, the increase in operating activities. In investments, we can see the impact of the CapEx, which is more or less at the last year's level, EUR 13 million higher than last year. For financing, we have two effects. A EUR 15.4 million positive last year, and we're EUR -211 million this year. There's two effects. There's dividend payments of EUR 426 million that have an impact, but also the catch-up dividends for last year, just under EUR 240 million. We have an effect of the 1&1 shares. That's EUR 160 million that we bought in April. We have a repurchasing program of EUR 36 million that is reflected here. We have this overall change of EUR 426.3 million. It's not quite true. It's EUR 326 million. Sorry, the figure is wrong here. Let's speak about the EBITDA bridge, the cash flow, starting with EBITDA, EUR 675.6 million. We can see the CapEx, which is a little bit different from what we saw before because there's a EUR 2 million investment removal, then a phasing effect. Payments made in the first quarter that actually were for quarter 2024, but that led to a decrease of money, then the tax, EUR 51.2 million. Then working capital and others, reduction of our payments due to our liabilities. Free cash flow arrives at EUR 105.8 million, and then EUR 80.7 million worth of leasing costs. The free cash flow after leasing for the first half of the year 2025 is EUR 25.1 million. Look at the balance sheet. What can we see? Let's start at the bottom line. We have a slight decrease of the balance sheet total from EUR 11,935 million down to EUR 11,863 million. Where is it coming? Not from assets, from property assets. That's pretty much the same. Goodwill financial assets are pretty much at the same level. Accounts receivable is a little bit higher. Contract assets are a bit lower with the decrease of contract assets due to lower customer growth and lower hardware sales. The inventories are at the same level, slight increase due to rental and pre-service provider payments. The income tax claims are a little bit lower than as per the end of the year. Same goes for cash and cash equivalents. That leads to a slight decrease in the balance sheet. Now let's look at the liabilities. We have a little bit more movement in equity here, and I'll tell you a little bit more about why. Maybe we'll speak about this effect. First of all, we had the purchase offer for 1&1 shares. This goes beyond the 30th of June. The total of the increased offer needs to be reflected here, even though only EUR 140.1 million were spent on shares. We have a deviation here, which is, however, required by us by IFRS. I find it a bit strange because it also has a serious impact on the equity ratio, which is 4.6% lowered at 41.9%. The right figure would be if we only accounted for the EUR 140 million, then we'd be at 3.3 percentage points and 43.3% equity ratio. What else do we have? We have the acquisition of the 1&1 shares with the EUR 60.8 million and the dividend payment accordingly of EUR 328.4 million. Liabilities have increased. We can see our CapEx measures, acquisition of 1&1 shares, but also the dividend. Trade accounts payable, we've seen it already, the effect decrease of liabilities to EUR 603 million. With contract liabilities, we're nearly at the same level. Of course, the EUR 300 million that we had to reflect here from the offer to increase our number of shares. This takes us through the figures, and now we have the possibility of taking your questions. Please get ready. Thank you very much. That is our presentation. We'll start with a question and answer session now. Please use the headsets, the microphones that our colleagues make available for you, and please start by indicating your name and company. We'll start on the left-hand side. Hi, there. It's Ben from New Street Research. I had two questions, please. The first question was on the DT contingent payments. You mentioned that you made the last payment last year and that you're now seeing a benefit from that. Should we now expect, are you now receiving working capital inflows from that asset? Can you comment on the scale and the timing of the inflows you expect to see from that prepayment asset? The second question is on the consumer applications business. You're seeing declining free subscriber numbers, but you're growing the number of premium subscribers. I just wondered if you could talk a bit about the relative value of those subscribers. For example, what is a typical ARPU for a free subscriber and what is a typical ARPU for a premium subscriber? Thank you. Yeah, let me start with the consumer contracts. The typical ARPU of a free subscriber is about EUR 0.25, a bit more. Let me say EUR 0.25- EUR 0.30. And the pay customers is about EUR 3, EUR 3 about. That means the pay customer is 10 x as valuable as the free customers, quote unquote. This is why we try to convert the customers wherever we can. If we look at the business, the turnover composes of advertising fees and the fees of the pay customers. We do more with them. This is the goal to carry on with this. The contingent payments, I can answer that. The time was 10 years. The first four years were the high upfront payments, ranging about EUR 216 million per year, which were accrued and are being used over the years now. A clear cash flow effect, which is probably not going to reflect in the result because we have accrued it. We have taken it over the years and the cash effect that we have taken up in the first four years by the payments. Maybe I can add a note for everybody who's not so involved with this. In telecom, you can select when you want to use the fiber optic infrastructure for the last mile. You can select whether you want to pay upfront in the contingent model. That will go over four years, and that will give you a better price, or whether you will not have the upfront payment and pay a higher price every year. Now, as in [1&1], we fund and have a good funding. It was a good opportunity to do this upfront payment. That means we paid about EUR 1 billion over the four years, and now we have the benefit that we don't have to pay them for the next six years. That won't help us in the result, but it'll help us in the cash. Another question on the right-hand side. Morning, you've had. I have a couple of questions, please. Firstly, in terms of your longer-term strategy for the group, in terms of maybe the consumer applications business, for example, do you still see it as a core part of the group? Would you consider monetizing it? The same question for IONOS. How do you think about your stake in the business? Would you consider increasing it? What are your thoughts on maybe disposing of parts of it to fund the build-up for [1&1]? Just wondering how you're thinking about the structure of the group and your strategy into the midterm. Thank you. We do assume that the business, as we have it, will stay with us in the long run. We don't plan to sell any of the business or sell shares of IONOS or [1&1]. We think we have a good portfolio. It's balanced. I understand that a shareholder doesn't want a conglomerate saying, "I could set up my own portfolio." However, if you are a medium-sized company, you will get more business models quite attractive because some things may not work out in the market as well as others. We can compensate that. I think we have a good and stable portfolio basing on a number of business models. Of course, that means the growth would be a bit smaller. If we had IONOS only, we would grow faster now. I can recall years where we didn't have any growth at IONOS. I think it's good that we have the different business models and that they do compensate each other's, and we have no plans to change this. Okay, I don't see any more questions. Maybe here on the backside, Mr. Glaser. Yes, Volker Glaser from MPPM. The honest question has just been answered. The other perspectives, we got some news as far as AI is concerned. We had this last year, gigafactory. How do you assess this in the term of two, three, four, five years? What may be the perspective there? That will be the first part concerning IONOS. I'm not on the board there. I'm in the Supervisory Board. I can't talk for the company. I can only give the main shareholder's view. We are satisfied with the development IONOS has taken. We took them over in 1989 with 38 staff members and 25 million German marks turnover, which wasn't accrued so the prepayments weren't accrued. That has developed greatly for us. We see many opportunities for the future as well. Where do they arise from? First of all, from the AI issue, because we do think that we think we have a good access to our customers and the investment in homepages and websites can be sold to small businesses and assistance agent functions that will facilitate business. That's where we see business fields in the next years, but we'll have to get into that. We see opportunities in platform consolidation. I've shown that we have different companies founded by ourselves in different countries, Spain, U.S., and so on. Where we had opportunities, we bought the competitions. These platforms have been integrated to a certain extent, but not completely yet. We want to tap into synergy effects here, which, as we did in the past years as well, accompany our business development, increasing productivities. That is going to be a driver for the IONOS profit as well. In addition to the business today with the websites and so on, it is growing about 8% per year. Growth in the core business, consolidating platforms, and opportunities here by new products and artificial intelligence. These are growth opportunities for IONOS. We have the cloud business. We have our own cloud infrastructure developed over many years. It is completely sovereign. No UAV in there, no Huawei, as in telecom or open source stack, self-built. We do see that we can sell this well to public administrations, and some big federal authorities are using it. We have to see how far companies are willing to take this up to have an independent cloud. I think that discussion has just started. What is an independent cloud? Is it a cloud which I buy from Amazon or Google or Microsoft, or will it be independent if they have a subsidiary in Germany or in Switzerland? Is that independent enough, or is it independent only if it was done by a European company who developed it and understands it themselves and can change it? That discussion is ongoing. Of course, we do hope that there is going to be an increasing awareness and our positioning can be strengthened in the market here, and we can grow on that base. That is the big field that IONOS sees opportunities in, and that means we should stay invested. We also have to see we have a good development of the shares. If you look at the normal development, let me explain. Over all the years that we bought smaller hosting companies in Europe, we had 13 - 14 [base] EBITDA. If we look at the IONOS listing today, you see, although it was listed so well, it just got there. The European market leadership, i.e., ideas, cloud ideas, these small hosters did not have that. That is not depicted in the share. This is why I am positive. We have to do the business, of course, but I am optimistic that we will be able to show that this has more to gain, that we can carry on, and the market understands the business opportunities involved. This is why I think we will stick to our position as we have it. If IONOS needs more capital for AI factory, would that be possible without having to increase your capital? No problem. We're only talking of EUR 3 billion-EUR 5 billion there. Let me break it down. What you could read in the press was that a gigabit factory costs EUR 3 billion-EUR 5 billion. That may be true, but you don't build it in a day. You build it in individual stages, and you fill it in stages as you increase your business. It doesn't make sense to set up a huge number of computers and just keep them there if you don't use them. Growth accompanies business. How will we finance this? You need some equity, of course. I'll get back to that. The envelope of the data center, the passive infrastructure, you can do that with credit. You don't need to use your own money for it. The software we develop ourselves, the hardware has to be bought. That costs some money. We buy it gradually, but we can also use the subsidies made available by the EU now that will cover something like 35% of the cost. That means that we have less of a financing need. We do it together with a partner that decreases the financing needs. If you see that IONOS has a net debt of less than EUR 800 million now, of EUR 530 million EBITDA, you can see that we really could take up a credit line of EUR 1 billion without any increase in equity. If you take these aspects together, creditworthiness, the partner, also the availability of passive infrastructure credits plus the subsidies available by the EU, then this should be possible. As I've said, it isn't done overnight. It has to be built, filled by the buy. By then, the conditions will be better. More cash will have been generated. We don't want to take any dividend out of this. We don't see any need for an equity increase as per today. If you take a look at the demand so that you can use capacity, what year are we talking about? When will that be? Difficult to say. It depends on how product development progresses. It depends on market demand. On the one hand, I'm very optimistic. On the other hand, I can also see that a lot of companies don't appreciate this issue of independence, of sovereignty, enough big companies. Take a Microsoft product. Their subsidiary is located in Switzerland. If we ask them, like, what if they don't make any update available anymore? How will you continue? Or there's no more update for this cloud anymore. Or if it gets more expensive, how will you handle this? Many haven't thought about that yet. Also, a lot of those companies are locked into multi-year contracts. You booked so many capacities for the next five years or whatever, then you don't need additional capacities anymore. It's very difficult to implement. This is always big, major projects. This won't happen overnight. It's very difficult to say that within three months, six months, five years. It also depends on our own performance. We have to be good. We have to make enough capacity available. We're only at the beginning here because we don't have the ecosystem that Amazon or Microsoft can make available. There's an 80/20 principle here as well. 80% of workload will cover only 20% of the workload: databases, backups, LLM models, ERP software. I think we have a lot to offer here, and we'll do more going forward so that our offering will become ever more competitive. It's very difficult to predict. The complex of 1&1 is listed. IONOS is listed. What about 1&1 Versatel? Are we peaking here? It's going downhill beginning next year. You're about EUR 600 million revenue, 30% EBITDA margin. You said this is going down. Fiber optic will go up. When will this move back into a growth phase? Absolutely. In absolute terms, I think you can see increasingly how the non-recurring revenues are decreasing. We have here at the bottom now that the non-recurring is beginning to grow. We'll see that over the next few years. Investments, we will have to continue to make. That's positive because we're increasing our footprint in commercial estates. That costs money. Every commercial estate we connect costs money. We have a bigger footprint because we connect to the 1&1 network. That increases our return because the contract has to be made. We have to make an investment upfront. With a growing business, these investments will earn ever more money. I have a feeling maybe a year ago or so, Versatel used to invest EUR 400 million, have an EBITDA of EUR 160 million, and the rest was paid by United Internet. This year, we still have some subsidy, but it's less than it was. Next year, it will break even. We increasingly manage to generate cash through our own business. That will be an improvement. That has to be taken into consideration. A lot has to be invested by Versatel. We completely renovated the fiber optic network, overhauling the entire technology. We're very happy with the technology. Now we're able to win tests, best network compared to network Telefónica, Vodafone. We invested a lot of money there. We invest into expansion of the network, and we can increasingly see that the money is rolling in now. That is our view from the holdings point of view because 1&1 doesn't cost us any money because it has its own money. IONOS doesn't cost any cash because they generate it. All our further businesses generate their own cash. The only company that is costing us money, if you wish, is 1&1 Versatel. That will end over the next couple of years. We don't need to look at cash too much here. We're well underway. Last question. United Internet Group, what will it look like in the free cash flow basis that should turn around the beginning of this year after this intensive phase of investments that you've had? We have a multi-year plan, and I don't know the details of it now. It's indicating basically that our debt ratio will decrease. We're peaking in terms of debt now. If we don't buy anything else, we took out another credit line because we bought 1&1 shares. Operatively speaking, our indebtedness will decrease by the by, even though we're extending the mobile network investing into the cloud. That is still excluding the AI gigafactory, of course, I have to say that. We have to exclude that. If we exclude that, then our indebtedness keeps going down year on year despite the other ongoing investments. Next question from the left side, Carsten Obelinker. Yes, Carsten Obelinker, DZ Bank. I have a question concerning Versatel. You indicated in your presentation that there's a lot of CapEx for the mobile network included there. Can you roughly indicate when we will see that in the profit and loss statement? Will it be visible or will it be background noise, basically? There's an upfront payment for any connections between 1&1 to Versatel. Then there's a long, relatively long period where we have this background noise, recurring revenues that will keep generating cash. The margin will be at the level of the same level as the company is right now? Yeah, that's what we're planning. Yeah. Okay, thanks. Next question is by Simon Stippig. Simon Stippig, Warburg Research. Thank you very much for your presentation. I have a couple of questions as well. You have 10% of your own shares on the balance sheet. I would like to know what you're planning to do with them because you could take the view that the holding is undervalued. In other words, you could be very satisfied because you could then buy IONOS very cheaply via the holding if you were to buy United Internet shares. I'd like to know. You You can't buy back your own shares right now. What's your plan here? A number of short questions. You just mentioned the leverage, your balance sheet capacity. You said that you have a maximum leverage. What's the maximum range you can imagine there? The refinancing ratio, what is it right now with you? Finally, the dividend for the next year. Could you imagine that it goes up a bit? The EUR 0.50 that you have been paying out, excluding this year. Thank you. We have about 10% owned shares. We can buy more shares at any day. We have a resolution by the board. We would have to withdraw shares, but that can be done by the board. We used to have 252 million shares in United Internet, and we're now at 173 million shares floated. 60 million have been already withdrawn over the years. We could do the same again. If we wanted to buy more shares, we could withdraw them and then buy more. We feel very well with these owned shares because we can use them as a barter currency or to make them as part of a payment for our employees. They have no voting rights. If we need to withdraw them because we need shares for tomorrow, we would have to first have them registered with a stock exchange, etc. It's easier to withdraw our own shares. Now, concerning the dividend policy, we have a policy of paying out somewhere between 25% and 40% of our profits. What we've been paying out was not an obligatory dividend. It's just what we calculated. We had a catch-up effect now because we paid less over the last few years, and in one year, didn't pay anything at all. That takes us to an average of 35%. I think that is what we feel happy with. The catch-up dividend was 50%, and previously, it was 40%. That was at the upper limit of the 30% limit. Leverage now, with the increase program, the purchasing program, we have 2.5% leverage now. The threshold for us would be 3%. If we calculate without leasing and frequency liabilities, if we calculate leverage, then the limit would be 3% for us. As Mr. Dommermuth said, to reduce the leverage with an increasing cash flow over the next three years to actually pay it back. It all depends on what we spend the money for. If we buy shares in companies, then it may make sense. If we invest into fiber optic cables, into transmission towers, then we have an asset in return. We are quite optimistic in terms of the 2.5% because it's well underpinned. In the long term, we'd like to reduce it. We used to have a lower indebtedness, and we'd like to return to that in terms of the conditions that we get. They're still very favorable for us. The margins are somewhere between 0.8% and I think 1.4%. It's still, in our view, a good access that we have to the financial markets. We can finance ourselves very well. The overall interest rates have decreased again. We feel quite well in this context. Are there any other questions? Volker Glaser again. I asked the last time as well in the context of our economic environment. Can you see anything where you do very well, but you also participated in this March meeting with about 60 entrepreneurs? Do you have any optimism for things improving in this country, or what's your view? That's a good question. First of all, our business is more than resilient. We've seen all sorts of things: financial crisis, COVID, etc. We never had any problems because we're a provider. We provide email accounts, websites, internet access to our customers. Before people let go of that, a lot has to happen. Now, concerning the overall economic development, I can't say because on the one hand, I see some optimism because people say, "Okay, the government is well-intended. They want to do something." I won't comment on whether it is sufficient or correct, but the trend is that they want to do something. We have the uncertainties, however, coming from tariffs, etc. I don't know what comes out at the bottom line. A much bigger worry, whether we have 1% more or less, is the question of digital sovereignty because AI will penetrate all walks of life, all areas of the economy, all products. That determines, if you determine what the prices are, who can get what services will have enormous power. We have to say, and there's China and America today as we talk about AI. We'll have to see whether Europe can catch up here or whether we fail to do so. I think over the years, that will be the big game changer because it has ramifications everywhere. You can make the best product if you only have the third best AI. It won't work. I don't see any further questions here now at this stage. We would like to thank you for your keen interest and the many questions. I hereby close the conference. I would like to warmly invite you to a cup of coffee, and thank you very much. Safe home, and see you next time.