freenet AG (FRTAF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

2025-03-05 15:54:01 ET

freenet AG (FRTAF)

Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

March 05, 2025 04:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Christoph Vilanek - Chief Executive Officer

Ingo Arnold - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Polo Tang - UBS

Ulrich Rathe - Bernstein

Adam Fox-Rumley - HSBC

Simon Stippig - Warburg Research

Presentation

Christoph Vilanek

Good morning everybody. Thanks for joining today's conference. It's my last one on annual results, but it's a special pleasure to present the record year 2024 to you. As always, I will start to give an overview on like the main development and then Ingo will give a detailed view on the financials.

There's two numbers, which I'd like you to be aware of. The first number is, it's 196,000 Euros. This is the EBITDA that we generated per FTE. And the other one is I think also remarkable number, it's 961,500 Euros. That's the free cash flow that we generated on every opening day of our shops over the full year, so on 302 days in 2024. I think those are remarkable numbers which we do not report like that, but I did a little calculation the last couple of days and I thought they're worthwhile to mention.

Having said that, let me start with the overview on a successful year. I think as you all know, we have created the new regime concerning the network operators contracts. So the mobile communications sector is not only fit for the future, but also in Q4 and we will elaborate that in a couple of slides. We did really well. We did better than we did for the first three quarters. And the second thing is we started to see an EBITDA contribution, and also on that we will have a couple of more thoughts and statements following it up. It was the strongest postpaid net adds ever since 2018. And once again waipu netted just under 600,000 new customers on net adds, which is about the double of the equivalent of Makedonski. So the story remains valid that we are doing about 200% of what Makedonski does. On EBITDA and free cash flow, I already gave two ratios but the majority of you will have seen that the proposal for dividend is now up to 197 Euros, which is the equivalent of 80% and also we are planning a share buyback program for the full year.

That's coming from the summary, going into the four key numbers, subscribers crossed the 10 million amount or 10 million number plus 6.9%; revenues are up 4%; EBITDA 521.5 million with a special effect which we will explain; and free cash flow is up to 292, which is also up plus 5.7% to 2023. On the mobile, yeah, as I've said and as you are all well aware of, we have signed long-term contracts. These long-term contracts are not changing the margin as such, but it changes the way to plan, the way to do campaigning and safety or security that we can plan long term. Specifically with Telefonica Deutschland, we have seen in the fourth quarter an increase of net adds specifically on Telefonica. For sure more on the lower end of the market, but this is what we are aiming for because we were for years and years missing Telefonica’s SIM only portfolio, which is now available to all our customers, and for sure and finally we have 5G across the board. ...

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