Hello, and welcome to the Iliad half year twenty twenty-four results. My name is Laura, and I will be your coordinator for today's event. Please note, this call is being recorded, and for the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen only mode. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the call. This can be done by pressing star one on your telephone keypad to register your question. If you require assistance at any point, please press star zero and you will be connected to an operator. I will now hand you over to your host, Thomas Reynaud, Group CEO, to begin today's conference. Thank you. Bonjour. Good afternoon, everyone, and good morning to those listening from the U.S. I'm here in Paris with Nicolas Didier, our Head of Investor Relations, and with our country managers, Nicolas Thomas in France, Benedetto Levi in Italy, and Jean-Marc Harion in Poland. I do hope that you had a wonderful summer and that you managed to enjoy the magic of the Olympic Games in Paris. I'd like to thank the Iliad employees that were on call during this summer, specifically during this two weeks, and also the one that were on duty yesterday night for the amazing opening ceremony for the Paralympic Games at the Concorde. So I'm happy to say that our H1 results are also showing some Olympic momentum, and that Iliad managed to break into the top five European operators. We now have 50 million subs across France, Poland, and Italy, and with our investment in the Swedish operator, Tele2, that number goes up to 60 million subs, and I'm confident in our capabilities to reach the symbolic target of EUR 10 billion in revenue in 2024. We keep on gaining market share in our three geographies, and we are the leader in terms of net adds. In the second quarter alone, we sign up over 600,000 new customers, and we are maintaining a unique growth profile in Europe with revenue up by 10%. My key takeaways for France, we've been the number one in recruitment for the past two years, with a strong momentum since January, thanks to the success of the launch of our new Freebox, Freebox Ultra. We are clearly leading the pack in terms of fiber optic adoption, with an 80% adoption rate, which is the highest one among the four operators. And on our B2B and cloud activities, clearly, we've seen significant growth, and I do believe that there is still a substantial potential for further expansion. In Poland, we continue to be the leader in recruitment in mobile. Our primary industry priority is the rollout of our fiber and the acceleration of our convergence strategy, and we still need to make some progress on that topic. And as you can see in our details, and Nicolas will come back to it, we had a significant improvement of the profitability of our Polish activities. In Italy, amazing commercial performance. We've been number one in terms of net add for 25 quarters in a row, which is kind of unique. We are now serving more than 11 million customers, and I can tell you that, we will keep that momentum in Q3. And our mobile activities are starting to generate cash. We generate with our mobile activity more than EUR 50 million of operating free cash flow, and we took the strategic decision to reinvest part of that cash in developing our broadband activities. Clearly, our, at the group level, our economic performance is right on track. You will get all the details in a minute. What I keep in mind is that we managed to get a realignment of our EBITDA growth with our revenue growth, plus 13% at the level of the EBITDA, thanks to lower inflation, better energy price, and all the actions taken over the last twelve months. We invested almost 20% of our revenues with the three priorities: fiber in France and in Poland, number one priority. Number two priority, 5G everywhere, and now also in Poland. We just get back in the 5G spectrum at the beginning of the year in Poland, and priority number three, B2B and cloud. So clearly there is a significant increase of the operating free cash flow, plus 61%, and these solid financial KPIs allow us to continue reducing our debt ratio, both at the level of the operational group, Iliad Group, and at the level of the holding, Iliad Holding. This performance is not coming from nowhere. This is due to our innovation policy, our investment ambition, also our capability to always rethink our organization, like the initiatives that we took in terms of revamping our customer care in France with Free Proxi, and we need to keep this kind of initiatives and clearly, the 2024 Odyssey plan has truly paid off. It was perfectly executed, and now we need to keep on being proactive, and this is exactly what we did during the first six months of 2024 in terms of innovation. I mentioned that we launched the Freebox Ultra. That was done 100% in-house. Also, stronger performance in terms of innovation, in terms of AI, in terms of improving the growth profile of Scaleway, in terms of computing power. And finally, we keep on being proactive in terms of fiber optic expansion. We are now the reference shareholder of Tele2, the operator. We closed totally the transaction two days ago. We have a 20% economic interest, 27% voting rights, and we decided to align the governance in line with that situation. And Iliad has named three board members and is having also, including the chairman position. So a really good H1. We are now the number five telecom operator in Europe, and we are on track to deliver EUR 10 billion of revenues in 2024. Nicolas, the floor is yours. Thank you, Thomas, and good afternoon. Good morning, everyone, so as Thomas said, the group has indeed maintained its leadership in Europe in terms of revenue growth, with a 10% reported growth. If we exclude the tailwind from the Polish zloty appreciation, we get to 8.5% organic growth. The zloty appreciated by around 7% over 12 months. Looking briefly at country performances in the first half, Italy grew 11.5% in H1, and 14% if we focus on the core business, the mobile revenues billed to subscribers, with a trend in Q2 broadly in line with Q1. These revenues are essentially driven by volume gains since the competitive intensity in the mobile market remains very high, preventing introduction of higher price points. Our fiber business is, of course, another top-line growth driver. We keep gaining market shares since the launch of our offer, as the brand continues to enjoy very high satisfaction rate and as we continue to innovate with the introduction, a first in Italy, of a Wi-Fi 7 box since mid-April. In France, top-line growth remained outstanding, with revenues growth growing 9.6% in H1. Trends in Q2 were broadly similar to Q1, with fixed services, which include most of our B2B activities, accelerating to 11% and the growth of mobile billed to subs remaining in the high single digit area. Revenues in Poland increased by 4.6% in local currency, with a slightly lower growth in Q2 than in Q1, but it is on the back of lower equipment sales. More importantly, service revenues accelerated sequentially to 5.8%, and especially mobile revenues billed to subscribers at 9.1%. If we move now to slide 18 on the EBITDA performance, the group reported EBITDA grew 13.2% for the first half and 11.2% on an organic basis. The three countries grew double-digit with margin improvement in each of them. One element helped across the board is the easing of energy prices, when in H1 2023, the drag on EBITDA was EUR 80 million compared to H1 2022. There is a tailwind of more than EUR 20 million this year. EBITDA margin for France is rebounding by 60 basis points, driven essentially by the strong operating leverage generated by mobile revenues. As expected, energy costs were down, and we had a bit more gain from the BTS program than last year. This offset the staff cost, growing 12% with nearly 500 net hiring in the first half as we expand our distribution network in B2C, commercial and technical teams in B2B, and we had around, and the higher taxes from IFER, a tax that we continue to see as counterproductive, as it is basically taxing investments in our networks. Italy, EBITDA grew 26% as we benefit from the strong growth of mobile revenues, combined with lower energy costs and despite lower gains from the BTS program than last year. EBITDA in Poland was at 15% in euros and 7% in local currency. As you remember, we implemented our FiberCop from April of 2023, implying that the basis of comparison has started to improve from Q2 this year. Excluding the impact of the FiberCop, EBITDA would be growing 14% in local currency. Moving now to slide 19 to discuss investments and operating cash flow trends. Group CapEx reached a bit less than EUR 900 million. CapEx in France was down 20%, thanks to different factors: a lower spend on Freebox as we built up inventories last year, lower contribution from the fixed component of roaming agreement, but also non-core assets disposals in Q1. Excluding this, the CapEx will still be down by roughly 5%. As expected, CapEx in Italy is slightly up. Contribution from Zefiro was low in 2023, and there is a progressive catch-up this year. We expect H2 CapEx to be at a faster rate than in H1, due to the phasing of this rollout and the introduction from mid-April of our Wi-Fi 7 box. In Poland, CapEx was down 7% in local currency, and we continue upgrading the mobile network after the C-band auction in Q4 last year. On the right part of the slide, you can see the main moving parts of our operating free cash flow. Our FCF in the first half was up 61%, or EUR 370 million, with a positive contribution from the three countries, with an overweight contribution from France. Slide 20, with a quick view on the equity free cash flow moving parts. Working capital outflow of EUR 132 million, mostly driven by the investment in the BTS program, which was in the previous years, accounted in cash outflows related to assets held for sale. Cash taxes at EUR 210 million, down EUR 145 million compared to last year. As last year, we had a delayed impact from the fiscal integration change. Bear in mind, Iliad Holding is, since 2022, the fiscal parent company of the group. So cash taxes at Iliad OpCo will always be a bit higher than at the Iliad Holding level. Spectrum of EUR 129.90, pretty stable sequentially, includes EUR 70 million from Poland, as we finish to pay the C-band spectrum obtained in 2023, and EUR 38 million in Italy. Moving now to slides 21 and 22, on the net debt. In first half of 2024, as Thomas mentioned, the Iliad Group leverage declined by 0.2 turn of EBITDA to 2.8 times, with the net debt pretty stable in absolute. The interest coverage ratio is as well stable at 7.9 times. Iliad Holding leverage declined by 0.1 turn at 3.8 times in June, and includes some financing to Freya, related to the transaction on Tele2. On slide 23, you can see the liquidity profile at the end of June 2024 for both Iliad and Iliad Holding. As you remember, we have been proactively addressing part of our maturities for 2024 and 2025 for Iliad, and 2026 for Iliad Holding, and got a great support from investors who we meet regularly, and we will be meeting investors Friday next week in London and in New York in ten days. The level of liquidity remains excellent, at EUR 3.8 billion in at Iliad Group, with an average maturity of three years, and at Iliad Holding consolidated level, the average maturity is a bit longer, at 3.6 years. And on page 24, a view on our ratings, which are unchanged. This concludes my presentation, and operator, you can open the floor to questions. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. That's star one on your telephone keypad. Thank you. We will now take our first question from Jakob Bluestone of BNP Paribas Exane. Your line is open, please go ahead. Hi, good afternoon, thanks for taking my question. I have two, please, actually. One is on the net adds in France, where, as you point out, you're still number one in terms of net adds, but we did see a fairly sharp slowdown versus what we saw in Q4 and Q2 in Q1. So I was maybe hoping you could just give us a bit of a sense, what are the drivers behind that slowdown? Is it the pickup in promotional activity? Just to sort of help us understand that, the sort of rough halving in both mobile and broadband net adds. And then just secondly, could you maybe just give us a little bit of a reminder of your capital allocation priorities now that your leverage is below four times? And specifically, you know, how do you think around consolidating any markets, as your balance sheet headroom improves? Thank you. Thank you for your question. We're very pleased with the commercial performance in France in Q2. It might not be as strong as the last two, three quarters, but one, the market in volume has cooled down, as shown by the Arcep numbers. Two, it's true that there is more promotion activity. Three, there is one player that used to lose a lot of customers. They're still losing customers, but probably less. But what I want to tell you is that we stay true to our value. We're the only operator not increasing price on our existing subscriber base. We took a strong commitment regarding the pricing strategy of our mobile offers, and we're confident that we're gonna keep on growing our revenue base significantly. And we consider that we have the right balance in terms of volume and value. Regarding capital allocation, we're quite happy with the strong leveraging of the balance sheet of the company. It's quicker than anticipated. I do expect a strong equity free cash flow in H2, because as Nicolas mentioned, there are plenty of non-recurring item that impacted H1. So you will see a strong improvement of the equity free cash flow. We're quite happy with the level of the leverage, but we will not do a transaction just for the sake of doing a transaction and just releveraging the company. We will move only if it makes sense from an industrial perspective, and only if we see a situation where, due to our DNA, due to our positioning, we can bring something to the table. Thank you. Thank you. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for just a moment while waiting for them to queue for question. Thank you, and we will now take our next question from Stéphane Beyazian of ODDO BHF. Your line is open, please go ahead. Yes, thank you. Good afternoon. Just to follow up on your answer regarding M&A. In the past, you know, you made some comments regarding the Italian market, where you would hope to be involved in M&A and... Since Telecom Italia has sold NetCo, probably there is a clearer picture in the market now. So I was just wondering whether, you know, that transaction of Telecom Italia is, let's say, opening the door to discussions or new discussions in the market for M&A. Thank you. I think that the main route, the main road, is the one of the standalone trajectory, standalone journey for Iliad Italia. We've been number one for 25 quarters in a row. It's true that consolidation can make sense. That's why twice we made an offer to Vodafone, an offer that was much higher than the one made by Fastweb. But what I can tell you is that for the time being, we're really focused on becoming of having a market share as high in broadband as high as our mobile market share. So really, the name of the game for us right now is to concentrate on organic growth. Very clear. Thank you. Thank you. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, as a final reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Thank you. Okay. All right, so, have a good day. I think it was a quick one. No, there is a question from. There's a question? Luigi. Yeah. Luigi? Operator? No, we can't hear you. Laura, can you hear us? Laura, can you hear us? Hello, can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah. Hi, Luigi. Oh, yes. Hi. Hi, Nicolas. Hello, Thomas. Thank you for taking my questions. A couple more on Italy, if I may. Firstly, I just wanted to get your views, you know, as a leading Altnet in Italy, you know, how the change in ownership at NetCo will shape your ability to keep commercial flexibility. I mean, do you expect wholesale access cost to the network to increase significantly from here? I know you obviously have, you know, a diversified strategy using Open Fiber and others. But yeah, just I'd be interested if you think that the NetCo transaction implies a big shock in terms of wholesale access prices going forward with a three years view. And the second question is on towers. You know, you did the transaction with the Phoenix, I think it's 1,900 towers. If you can provide the split there between build to suit and existing towers, and why you opted for Phoenix, given that you are already working well, I guess, with Cellnex. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Luigi, for your two questions. Regarding the first point, we used to have some contracts with FiberCop when it used to belong to Telecom Italia, and of course, our contract will prevail, so there will be no bill shock for us with our wholesale contract, and regarding the evolution of the structure of the market, I think that we are in a better position as an Altnet to have an independent wholesaler that is not integrated within the incumbent, because there is always the prisoner's dilemma when the wholesale provider is also retail operator, and sometimes it creates some conflict of interest. Now, the situation is clear. We have an independent wholesaler without any interest in terms of retail business, and I think it's a very positive evolution for us. Regarding our transaction with PTI, it's a classical transaction. The scope is not huge. It's a mix of some existing tower that were built at the beginning of the year and some BTS. It's quite classical in the telco market. I think that most of the telco operators have used towers in order to maximize the cost of financing. Thank you. Understood. Thank you very much. Thank you, and we will now take our next question from Nick Lyall of Bernstein. The line is open. Please go ahead. Thanks very much. Afternoon, everybody. Just a quick one firstly on French ARPU. There seems to be a bit of a slower growth in the second quarter. Could you just comment a bit on the pricing situation? You talked a bit about it before, but maybe expand a bit on the slower ARPU growth. And secondly, given the good gearing position, is the UK market of interest to you as part of the CMA process, please? Could you tell us if you've kept an eye on that or been involved at all? Thank you. We don't consider that we have a slow growth, in fact, on the ARPU. So Nicolas Thomas speaking, CEO of France. On broadband, we are at about EUR 36 on the ARPU, and on mobile, we still have a decent growth. So I would say that the plan is going as planned, and we see that in the growth of the revenues, which in Q2 are totally in line with the growth we had in Q1. So we are, as Thomas said, still very pleased about the performance we had in Q2. Now, regarding the aggressiveness of the competitors, it's true that they have been becoming much more aggressive end of June, beginning of July, and then keep on being aggressive, and we want to stick to the right balance between volume and value, so that's why we might see a decrease of the net add still in Q3, but totally in line with what we had in Q2. Thanks very much. On the UK point as well, any interest on the CMA process, and would the UK be an attractive market to you? You know, of course, the UK market is interesting. Now, we need to find the right angle. I'm not sure that this is the right one right now, so, I would not have any comment on it. Okay, thanks very much. Thank you. As a final reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Thank you. And we will now move on to our next question from Usman Gazi of Berenberg. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Hi, thank you for the opportunity. I just had two questions, please. Firstly, on Tele2. I mean, you mentioned in the press release that, obviously three board members have started. One of the priorities is to improve the revenue growth profile of the company. I was just wondering if you could share, you know, your perspectives on what it might take to improve the growth profile or, you know, whether you see any deficiencies in the current product or competitive positioning that you would like to see enhanced at the company. Again, I don't know if you can say much, but any perspectives would be interesting. And then the second one was just going... I believe you've launched a pilot of your AI inferencing platform in France this quarter, and I just was interested to find out if you know what kind of demand you're seeing in terms of take-up, and if you plan to broaden this platform outside France to the other geographies as well, or whether this is a French experiment. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Regarding Tele2, our mindset is the one of cooperation with Tele2. I think that Iliad also has a lot to, each market, and from the expertise of Tele2, what we can bring on the table in terms of revenue generation. I think that we have a unique expertise in terms of digital distribution on the one side, and on the implementation of convergence strategy on the other side. This is what I can tell you, at this stage. Regarding our AI initiatives, we have different initiatives. We have one on infrastructure. Clearly, we are one of the leading independent European data center platform today with OpCore and 15 data center. Our aim is to keep on growing. There is a huge demand for new data center. We already have more than 150 different customers. Yeah, some hyperscalers, some startups, some large corporation. And so clearly, the name of the game for us is to invest 2.5 billion EUR in our data center business over the next 10 years. At the same time, we see a strong increase of our cloud and AI revenues at the level of Scaleway. We more than double our revenue base over the last 12 months, providing some computing power to many players, including some AI generative startups, for example, PhotoRoom or The Edge Company. Clearly, as you can tell by the amazing results of the NVIDIA this morning, there is a huge demand also in Europe regarding AI, and I think it will have a very positive impact on our business, on OpCore, our data center subsidiary on the one side, and on Scaleway, our cloud company on the other side. Great. Thank you. Thank you. There are no further questions in queue. I will now hand it back to your host for closing remarks. Thank you so much for your attention, this morning. We're super happy to get into the top five European player, and clearly we will give you a rendezvous by the end of the year to see if we manage to reach the 10 billion EUR revenue landmark. Thank you so much. Bye. Thank you. This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.