United Internet Stock

Ladies and gentlemen, dear guests, welcome to the Analyst and Investor Conference of United Internet. I'm very happy to be able to welcome you personally here in Frankfurt again. I would like to welcome the webcast participants as well. I'm happy to take you through the agenda. First Mr. Ralph Dommermuth, we'll hear the company development of the first half of the year, and he'll also give us an outlook. And then Carsten Theurer will explain us the financials in detail. After this, you will have the option of asking questions in a Q&A session. That's all I have to say.

So I can give the floor to Mr. Dommermuth.

Well, thank you very much, Mr. Grossman. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. As far as we haven't seen earlier, I will give you the company development of the first half of 2026 of United Internet and give you an outlook to the second half of the year as well.

Since the 1st of January, we have been distinguishing 3 different segments of the company in our reports. One segment is called 1&1. That's about Internet access, main brand 1&1, then Versatel for business -- for B2B and then the discount brands. Then we have the IONOS segment. The main brand is IONOS. The other brands are subsidiaries of IONOS from purchases that we've made in Germany and Europe. And then the third segment, Mail & Media, with our brands, GMX, WEB.DE and United Internet Media for our advertising areas.

Let me start with the 1&1 segment. This is where we address consumers and small businesses, but also institutional customers and authorities. Let me start with the consumers and small businesses. We have 12.33 million mobile contracts. We have broadband market approach. Then we have the fixed line business, just under 4 million broadband connections, mostly VDSL and FTTH packages that we generate with our fiber optic network with last mile provided by Deutsche Telekom and regional carriers. And our largest FTTH footprint we have the largest FTTH footprint in Germany, 77% of households are connected. Then we have the segments enterprises and networks within 1&1, we reached 34% of households. It was 27% at the end of last year.

Then we have the fixed line business with more than 70,000 kilometers of fiber optic network available in over 350 cities, 30,000 directly connected sites, for instance, of major companies, institutions and authorities. Customer contracts in this segment have decreased by 140,000. I mentioned it earlier, 150,000 fewer contracts for mobile Internet contracts and another -- an added 10,000 broadband connections. The loss of customers is due largely to discontinuation of particularly low-cost tariffs and reducing the data allowances included in the high-performance tariffs and then 10,000 new broadband customers.

Revenue has increased by 1.6%. Service revenues decreased by 1.1%. That's now at EUR 1.805 billion. and other revenues have increased by 13.5%, now to EUR 464.8 million. The EBITDA has increased by 5.1% to EUR 382.7 million, 16.9% EBITDA margin.

The second segment is IONOS, just like 1&1, it is stock listed. It is Europe's leading digitalization partner for freelancers, small- and medium-sized businesses as well as a reliable cloud enabler. We're active in 14 European countries as well as in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. We have a really broad product portfolio, domains, websites, e-shops, online marketing tools, office packages, business e-mail, online storage, AI assistance target to the needs for small and medium-sized companies and a secure cloud infrastructure.

IONOS created an additional 500,000 customer contracts in the first half of the year, 5.57 million abroad and 4.98 million domestic. Overall, revenues increased to EUR 701.1 million, increasing by 6.9%. It would have been 8.2% if adjusted for foreign exchange. The EBITDA increased by 2.6% to EUR 232.6 million. Foreign exchange adjusted would have been 4.2% at significantly higher marketing expenses compared to first half of 2025. And the EBITDA margin is 33.2%, a little bit lower than last year, but we're on the right track, as IONOS has confirmed.

Then Mail & Media, we cover data protection and everything is according to European legislation. We have now 50,000 accounts less than last year. Overall, we have 240,000 fewer free accounts, but the positive thing is 190,000 additional pay accounts. We're converting free accounts into pay accounts, which is working ever better. We now have 3.54 million pay accounts. And if you look at revenue, you can see that the revenue of the pay accounts is already slightly higher than -- just nearly as high, sorry, as free accounts. In the past, we only had free accounts, but we are managing to shift this.

And we are also improving in terms of cloud storage. For instance, if you store your photos, that's a good thing. That is an ongoing trend that we pay more and more -- sell more and more of these pay accounts. You can see it also with the revenue. We have EUR 161.4 million revenue, plus 8.4% due to increased monetization of free accounts and strong growth in pay accounts. Then EBITDA has increased by 16.7% to EUR 62.9 million, 39% EBITDA margin, more than last year. That is going very well.

Of course, you could always imagine things going better than that, but we can't really complain. Business is developing quite nicely. Now what's the outlook? We confirm the guidance for 2026. The revenue is approximately to reach EUR 6.25 billion. The EBITDA is to reach approximately EUR 1.45 billion, and the cash-CapEx is to reach EUR 600 million to EUR 650 million. So we're doing fairly well. The first half of the year has panned out very positively, and we're looking ahead quite positively into the second half of the year. And I would like to ask Mr. Theurer now to give you details on the financials.

Thank you very much, and welcome on my behalf as well. I would like to take you through the figures as of 30th of June compared to the first half of last year. And we see what Mr. Dommermuth said. If we look at the customer contracts, we see just 1 million plus, 960,000. And in the [ad-funded] media, we only have lost 30,000. We didn't lose them, but we see a conversion rate there that 360,000 new pay customers joined. So the converting business with the pay accounts is developing very positively despite we were able to have the ad funding media, Mail & Media responsible for this has developed very well in the first half of the year.

Looking at the revenue, we are going towards a EUR 3 million plus compared to the year before through all segments, and that is positive as well. Each segment provides its contribution. And EBITDA on group level, we get to 5.1% EBITDA growth, which continues in the EBIT growth. We have a 20% growth here. One special effect here, which is increased depreciation from the investments and in this year by the phaseout of the PPA depreciation from the Drillisch Corporation, we see a drop in the depreciation, and that gives a positive development in the EBIT. In the EPS, in the total, we have an increase of about 60%, ending at EUR 0.775 per share in earnings. Cash flow-wise, we see a positive development as well. Before the changing of the asset, we have an increase of 3%. The net pay of the operating activities, we see an increase of 22.7%, giving us to -- CapEx is stable to the year before. The investment is stable.

The net payout is a little less than the year before, but on a similar level. And the net in and out pay for the funding is EUR 207 million to the level as of the year before. That means in total, bottom line free cash flow after leasing, we end up EUR 129.7 million, which is about EUR 100 million increase to the year before. And I'd like to illustrate this with the cash flow bridge here. We start with the EBITDA, EUR 676 million. And we see the EBITDA, which is from AdTech, although reporting why it is an IFRS 5 nonconsolidated. As we reported, the cash flow still includes it with minus EUR 6 million as a negative. CapEx net, EUR 5 million and this is the gross CapEx here with EUR 280 million taxes, a lot less than the year before. That is what we had announced. The exact effect from selling Versatel to 1&1 and the connection to the entities within 1&1 leads us to pay less taxes. We will see that in the balance sheet again in a minute.

Working capital lower than the year before, leaving a free cash flow of EUR 230 million. The leasing expenses with EUR 83.5 million, and that ends us to the free cash flow after lease of EUR 129.7 million.

Look at the balance sheet. We see a little increase in the total. We are a bit over EUR 12 million, EUR 93 million plus. What are the changes, long- and short-term assets, we have an increase of about EUR 100 million. That is material assets from the investments that we have been carrying on to the optical fiber and mobile networks. In the assets, we see an increase of EUR 104 million by selling and buying hardware. And we also see a tax increase -- decrease. Why? In '25, we had upfront payments, which after sale of Versatel have been turned back. So we asked the tax office to pay back. This is why we see the better cash flow, less payments and of course, the profit tax, which drops.

The liabilities. If we look at this, EUR 90 million increase, liabilities of performance and second half year, the bank liabilities have increased by EUR 200 million to EUR 3.5 billion. So with the dividend payments, shares buyback from IONOS package in '26 as well with EUR 84 million and the CapEx, which we funded a net debt of EUR 3.4 billion, leverage of 2.57. And these are some of the things that you see here would appear in the second half, so that the leverage there will be expected to go down south as we have forecast at the end of the year.

Equity, EUR 6.3 million plus total, the ratio is slightly dropping 0.2 point to a stable level of 43.4%, driven by the result on one hand, and this is opposed by the dividend and the purchase of buyback of shares.

This is why it doesn't change. And that already takes me to the end, and I would like to open the floor for questions.

Okay. Thank you for the presentation. We will start with the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions], [indiscernible] from Deutsche Bank to start.

I have a couple of questions, if I may. The first is on IONOS. And again, you still hold a 64% stake in the company. You previously said you still see a lot of value in IONOS. Just happy to hear your thoughts on how you feel about your shareholding there. And also, IONOS has announced a lot of high ARPU AI initiatives at the moment. How do you view those initiatives and IONOS' position as a German player within Europe with data centers at their disposal?

So maybe some color on the prospects there would be great. My second question is on Mail & Media. Some of the questions we're getting is, is there an advantage for having it within the United Internet portfolio? In other words, does it help you with your other businesses to own these sort of portals? Would you consider spinning out the business, listing it, looking at options going forward? And despite the loss of the free accounts that you described, are you still seeing good engagement on the website? Or is traffic also taking a hit, which in turn affects the ad revenue on these portals? Some color there would be great.

Thank you. Let me start with the IONOS shares. We are proud and happy investor in IONOS. The company has developed greatly and the business is going on since '89, '98 in our business. That's because we started with a small company in Karlsruhe, Schlund+Partner at the time, EUR 6 million turnover. That is a dimension that we do in a day today. So over the years, that has seen great development and the company has huge opportunities.

We -- you have mentioned AI as a topic. I think there is a large market for specific AI application for small and medium-sized companies. IONOS is doing initial offers with a phone assistant, which answers the phone for you, answers questions, makes appointments, for example, a chat assistant, which is 24/7 available on your website for questions and so on. And AI-supported marketing tools or a website, an app website app builder, which you can just enter your wishes by the microphone or the keyboard and then the website, if you want to build it or if you want to build an app, it is built.

These are tools that fit well into the times we're living in and IONOS from my point of view, has a lot of competitive advantages. One is our own data centers with our own cloud infrastructure and also for this business, very important, the sales force because especially addressing these small companies with German products is not possible by Google alone because if you look at this, the demand for keywords and the request of customers is very low for these keywords.

So we have to educate the customers and explain to them what AI is able to do and how simple plug and play can be used. And IONOS, if you want to use a phone assistant, you just select if you want to have a male or a female voice and you say the address of your website, the system scans the website and that trains it and it's done and it goes, off it goes.

So only very few small companies will know that this is actually available. So I see an opportunity here for IONOS because we have millions of customers in so many countries, and we are able to drive campaigns and we have the money to do the campaigns. And well, we are in the beginning. Now it's about rolling out the product throughout the brands, adjusting it. Of course, products won't fulfill all customer demand in the first rollout and learn what the channels work and fine-tune things, but I'm very optimistic.

Yesterday, we had a Supervisory Board meeting in IONOS, and we can simply calculate if IONOS keeps its figures today, if I had normal EBITDA factor 5 by next year, the share should be at 60, not 30. So what do I like? What I don't like, I like the shares. What I like is the operative business. We've seen the guidance of the revenue was increased from 7% to 8%. I think more is possible. Profitability is good. There is a lot of invest in new products. I'm very happy. And it is a fixed part of our group, and I wouldn't like to miss it.

Lately, I had a job interview with some of our senior management. They ask me, where do you see the company in 5 years? The standard question. If I start here, what do you think? Where do you want to go? Obvious. And I said, I see this company at EUR 1 billion. Why shouldn't business double? If we keep the growth rates and put AI on top. We are very good in the cloud. That is no dream. Maybe it will take a year more. Maybe it will be a bit quicker. But I think it's absolutely a realistic to double the figures next -- over the next year. The market is there. It's just up to us to do it. The market is there, the conditions are there, great company, great future, not only for that. I can just be happy.

You asked how does Mail & Media fit into the group and how is it connected? We've just heard Mail & Media is developing very nicely as well, generating a lot of cash. We are capital light. We generate EBIT, lots of cash. We help 1&1 in the mobile customers. By GMX, WEB.DE, we sell mobile contracts, and this is a topic we're looking into in more detail if we could do more, especially with respect to eSIM.

Today, 1&1 is mainly for contracts with cell phones, bundled. If you look at the campaigns, it's always cell phones, hardware with additional things like a watch or some kind of bundle. It's always hardware. 85% of the contracts in 1&1 is on hardware. We have very few SIM only. And our discount brands nearly always only sell SIM only, but discount brands are in a segment, as we've seen today, which is discount. And we are considering whether we could do more with the portals. The portal should have more range. And as they have so many apps, is it 25 million, 28 million? I don't know. Does anybody know the figure? 25 million active apps, and we can do an eSIM within 3 minutes.

So 25 million people, if you want, pressing a button, giving them a new SIM card without having to send it by mail or anything. And this is where I see great opportunity over the next years. eSIM is getting more and more. People are learning it. And -- we can do this out of the app, producing and commissioning the eSIM. And that is something we want to drive down into. And it is an additional reason why the portals besides their independence, their profitability they have already, could grow in importance as an additional and even more important channel. They are already a channel, but more important in the mobile business because we have this benefit of these millions of installed apps.

And from there, I think, yes, there is a pivot. Yes, we do have business, but that business could grow, definitely. And on the other side, we're looking at doing -- combining apps of the portals with mobile phones. You get cloud storage. I think young people have 25 gigabyte free, 100 gigabyte, 200 gigabyte terabyte. And we have synchronization in the background, as you know, from your iPhone and your phone, we have that up and running. And we are moving in that.

If you look at our pay accounts, lots of pay accounts are not mail traffic, but cloud-induced because people have to pay, Apple or Google, 15 gigabytes are free and then they have to pay. And now I see a big issue for the portals in the next years and also for the bundles with 1&1 products because in the group, we have this function. And we are now coming up with an even better function to manage -- to administer pictures with the best moments and so on, AI induced. That is a topic that is coming up. So on one side, we can sell more mobile phones, but we can combine it with the development of the portals as well. And this is why I'm rather in getting this geared up more rather than separating it. And if I got your last question right, it's about the engagement on the website, the traffic on our website, that is still growing. We have a good situation.

Over the past years, we had the mobile traffic increasing a lot, smartphone-induced traffic and the big screen traffic dropped. And now we do see that this is -- the drop in big screen is flattening out. And big screen is well monetizable for us. small screen as well by the box ads in the inbox.

But we have leveled the drop in big screen by the growth in small screen. If this decline levels off now, we're going to see better view. And we are not dependent on Google like many other websites are, which have Google traffic on them. And now Google answers more and more with AI. They are not linking to the websites. We don't have this problem. We generate our own traffic. We have log-in traffic. And this is why our traffic is still growing. And I don't see any reason why this should change.

So in total, I'm very happy with that area of the business. It squares in nicely. Of course, there's lots of things that you could do better as in any business. AI is something that we integrate more and more. We're going to start with an independent AI assistant for our customers. We have lots of AI functions in the mail system, translation function, auto completion. I see opportunities there as well. So I think it is a good match in the group, and it's developing nicely.

Another question by [indiscernible].

I have 2 questions, please. Firstly, just a follow-up on that GMX eSIM opportunity. That feels like it could be a big opportunity. So what would the time line be for implementing that? And why has it not been done already? And then second question, just on the EBITDA phasing. Based on the guidance, the EBITDA is going to be very H2 weighted. That's partly implied by the guidance that IONOS and 1&1, but it would be great if you could just talk through the steps of what is driving that step-up in EBITDA in H2. That would be really helpful.

Well, I'll start with the eSIM topic. will start in quarter 4, i.e., next quarter. With this, why didn't we do it earlier? Well, we now have an increasing number of eSIM-enabled devices. It is something that we -- the legacy devices weren't able to support us that way, we couldn't do it in the past. And now we're at the point where we can actually do this within 3 minutes, including identification procedure or the customer, et cetera. So this can be done within 3 minutes. We weren't able to do that in the past in this at this speed, and we wanted to get to this point before we actually communicate this and spend money on it.

And we combine this eSIM then with cloud storage to create an overall package. The target group are younger people because at the 1&1 brand, we are mostly in a middle-aged or older target group with relatively -- with hardware. And here, we try to build a business without hardware, target group, younger companies. That's the basic idea. And we'd like to trial that -- try it out in the fourth quarter.

Concerning the second question, monetization for the first and second half of the year, we've seen a large customer growth with IONOS, where we have some offerings that will monetize in the second half. That's why the EBITDA growth will accelerate in the second half of the year also with additional customers with 1&1, we have the monetization of the network, which is being expanded. So that will give us some tailwinds with the increase of EBITDA in the second half of the year as well.

Are there any other questions? On the left-hand side, Karsten Oblinger of DZ Bank first row. Yes, Karsten Oblinger, DZ Bank.

I have 2 questions. First, cost reduction potential due to AI. What can I see there for the group as a whole? Are there any work groups in the 3 segments, right? Is there a central control of this? Maybe you can give me some indication. Then I have a question, Mr. Theurer. You mentioned AdTech, which is a IONOS issue, of course, but it affects the group as a whole. My understanding was that if you hadn't sold it within a year, you'd have to put it back on your balance sheet. Can you comment on that?

Will I start with that? Yes, that's true. It's a 12-month period, and that is what our colleagues have said that over the next few months, we will have clarity concerning AdTech in IONOS, how things will continue there. AI cost reduction potentials, you're right. They are huge for us, for the group from development to marketing to the call centers, written processing of customer requests, customer inquiries. We do a lot in this context already. And we can see overall that we have fewer staff members today than we had a couple of years ago. I think we had 11,000 staff members, now we have 10,400. And if you ask me how many people will we have when we reconvene a year from now, we will probably have fewer than 10,400 because we have incredible efficiency improvements. This will pan out over several years, roll out all of that. So there are areas where we've made huge progress.

Other areas we're still experimenting. Let me give you an example. What we can do pretty well already is written communication with customers. That's going very well. With oral communication, we can handle simple topics, for instance, we have a concierge function. If somebody calls us, we can recognize a customer through the number, the phone number that's calling us, and we can see what phase they're in. Are they waiting for a DSL connection? Did they just receive an invoice? Are they in an area that just suffered a technical fault, so we can already assume what's coming down the line. With many, we can't anticipate that, and that's where we have the concierge function where customers tell us what it's all about. That's done entirely by AI with us. In the past, we used to have staff there. But once we go into the actual topic, we can't rely fully on the AI to answer all complex cases. So the quality isn't where we'd like to be. But over time, this will change.

But what we're doing, the AI monitors the phone call and suggests solutions to the agent in real time so that if the agent doesn't know the answer, the solution immediately doesn't have to look into a knowledge database, the AI suggests a solution. And of course, every phone call has to be logged so that if the customer calls again, they usually wind up with a different agent. That agent needs to know what it's all about and the AI can process this, and that also reduces the period that we spend with every single phone call.

So we're making good progress in this spoken communication. Written communication, we can show context-sensitive solutions, suggest them, log the call, use the concierge function for a number of different issues. But we're not at the point where all the support can be handled by the AI without any staff. They're not there yet, but this will develop over the years. And this is mirrored in other areas. In marketing, for instance, if we have a support video or presenter, then it can be AI generated or if it's about adjusting images to certain channels to different formats, small screen, big screen or for social media or in the past, if we had a copy, somebody had to write copy in the past, that was done by a copy editor. Nowadays, this is generated by the AI and then monitored or proofread by a copy editor, so they can handle 5 or 6 text a day rather than 1 like in the past. So this means that we can save costs here.

And of course, we can. It doesn't necessarily mean we can handle more calls. We don't want to have more calls. We want to reduce the time that we spend on the calls. And this is also something can happen with all the other companies as well. That's a core competence, and this has to be covered by the subsidiaries.

And network control for mobile phone system, AI. Well, I can't say because I'm not sure. We're working on it, but I'm not sure we -- how far we've progressed. You can always read the press statements by Telekom, et cetera. Oh, it's so great. It does everything itself. We can see with predictive maintenance, whether something is going to break. the technology partner is Mavenir, and they provide our core software. But whether we use all the tools that are being offered, whether we've rolled them all out or whether we only do it in parts, I can't tell you. We have it in some areas, but I can't tell you that the entire network control is handled by AI.

Are there any other further questions? I can't see anyone indicating right now. So I would like to thank you for your participation and your questions. And I conclude this conference. I would like to invite you to a coffee out in the foyer. Safe home. See you next time. Thank you very much.

[Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the United Internet Quarterly Statement Q1 2026 Webcast and Conference Call.

[Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Dominic Grossman. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Hello, and good morning, everyone. I would like to welcome you to our Q1 2026 Analyst and Investor Call. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Dominic Grossman. I'm responsible for Investor Relations at United Internet. And here with me today, I have our CFO, Carsten Theurer.

Briefly about today's call. Carsten will first take you through our presentation with the business development in the first quarter and will also give an outlook for the remainder of the year. Afterwards, we will be happy to answer your questions.

So far to our agenda, I would now like to hand over to Carsten. Carsten, please go ahead. The floor is yours.

Thank you, Dominic, and also a warm welcome from my side to our webcast on our 3 months figures 2026. Before diving into our figures, I would like to present the new reporting structure that we have adopted since the beginning of the new fiscal year 2026. Going forward, United Internet will only have the following 3 segments based on the names of the respective subgroups, 1&1, IONOS and Mail & Media. This streamlined reporting structure further reflects the changes due to the sale of 1&1 Versatel to 1&1 as the former segments, Consumer Access and Business Access will be only reported on a consolidated basis, the 1&1 AG. In addition, the former segments, Business Applications and Consumer Applications are renamed to IONOS and Mail & Media, respectively, which allows for streamlined reporting with reduced complexity.

Moving on to the financial performance on the quarter. Let us take a glance at our major KPIs for the group. Starting with the customer figures, we are happy to show that our customer contracts increased by 380,000 to over 30 million to 30.1 million in the first months of 2026. The strong momentum is especially driven by Mail & Media and IONOS with more details to come once we go through our respective segment performance.

Our revenue subsequently improved by 2.5% to more than EUR 1.55 billion. Group EBITDA grew by 2.4% to EUR 331.9 million. Our EBIT increased by more than 15%, which is driven by a significant decrease in PPA depreciation. Nevertheless, our amortization of intangible assets and depreciation of property, plant and equipment continued to increase as we continue to make investments in the rollout of the fiber optic network and the rollout of the 1&1 mobile network. As a result of the improved EBIT and lower taxes, we managed to increase EPS to EUR 0.36 per share, an increase of 44%.

Over the following slides, we will do a deep dive into our segment development, starting with 1&1. Overall, the number of customer contracts remained stable at 16.32 million customer contracts in the first quarter of 2026. Both the number of mobile contracts and broadband connections remained unchanged at 12.48 million and 3.84 million, respectively. On the broadband side, that is a positive development against the backdrop of the slight decrease over the last quarters. We are happy to see that our latest campaign that promotes the easy switch to 1&1 has been paying off, and we were able to put a stop to the churn.

While the competition in the mobile market remained intense in the first quarter, and we expect this environment to continue in the second quarter of this year, the performance is in line with our expectation. That means, in terms of revenue, 1&1 generated around EUR 1.1 billion, which is an increase of 1.1% compared to the first 3 months of the prior year. Service revenues have slightly decreased year-over-year and, in line with the business plan to almost EUR 900 million. Hardware sales grew almost 11% to EUR 246.3 million.

If we turn our attention to EBITDA on the next slide, we can observe that the segment EBITDA is stable at EUR 192.4 million. EBITDA in Q1 was impacted by an increase in wholesale costs. Due to the capacity-based model underlying the national roaming agreement, the slower-than-planned growth of Vodafone's own network usage resulted in higher costs for 1&1. In addition, as a consequence of the switch of the national roaming provider from Telefonica to Vodafone in 2025, the cost of certain network components are directly recognized in EBITDA, whereas previously under the Telefonica national roaming agreement, they were activated and depreciated. While both effects were fully reflected in Q1 2026, they were only partially effective in Q1 2025.

In contrast, savings on external mobile network wholesale services had an offsetting effect in Q1 2026 [indiscernible] as an wholesale services is being produced within the company's own mobile network. The EBITDA margin is thus largely unchanged and in line with our expectations.

Next up, let's proceed with the performance of IONOS. IONOS increased their contract portfolio by 300,000 contracts to 10.35 million. This surge is driven both by winning customers domestically as well as abroad with our operations abroad performing even stronger. Revenues in this segment increased by 5.7% to almost EUR 350 million as a result of aforementioned strong customer growth and up- and cross-selling. Excluding foreign exchange impacts, the revenues growth is even higher with 7.6%. We have invested in higher marketing expenses compared to previous year. Despite that, EBITDA increased by 5.5% to EUR 112.2 million, and the operating EBITDA margin remained strong above 32%.

To conclude the segment deep dive, this brings us to the performance of the Mail & Media segment. The number of pay accounts rose by 80,000 to 3.43 million in the first quarter of 2026. By contrast, due to seasonal effects as well as the successful ongoing conversion to pay accounts, ad-financeed free accounts were down by 220,000 or 0.6% compared to year-end 2025. The Mail & Media achieved a revenue growth of 7.6% to EUR 79.3 million, driven primarily by growth in pay contracts as well as a positive development on the advertising side of the business. There was also further growth in EBITDA with operating EBITDA increasing by 70.3% to almost EUR 30 million and corresponding improvement in our operating EBITDA margin by more than 3 percentage points year-over-year to 37.6%.

Besides the underlying operative business performance contributing to the growth in EBITDA, the increase results from the acquisition of the server infrastructure used in IONOS Group's data centers, which was previously leased from IONOS. Following the acquisition effective January 1, 2026, the prior incurred lease costs fully expensed through EBITDA as OpEx, have been shifted. The acquired infrastructure is now recognized as capital expenditure on the balance sheet and depreciated on a scheduled basis, impacting EBIT.

So much for the segments. Here, we have summarized additional KPIs for the group. At around EUR 118 million, our CapEx was down year-over-year from EUR 122 million. This confirms that we are on track to finish the year below the elevated levels in the past 2 years. Our free cash flow improved significantly year-over-year, turning positive to the first 3 months of the year with more details on the next slide. The net bank liabilities increased by 4.3% to around EUR 3.3 billion as our net bank liabilities reached their peak ahead of planned repayment, while our equity ratio rose slightly by 0.4 points to 44%.

And this slide shows you the bridge of our EBITDA to free cash flow. One of the main contributors to our outflows this period is CapEx totaling EUR 115.2 million. This reflects ongoing investments in our infrastructure across fiber optics mobile networks and data centers, which highly contribute to the digital sovereignty of Germany and Europe. After accounting for taxes and changes in working capital, our free cash flow before leasing stands at EUR 47.5 million, a significant improvement year-over-year. And therefore, our free cash flow after leasing amounts to EUR 3.7 million.

And finally, a brief word on the outlook. So far, we are right on track. And looking ahead, we fully confirm our guidance for fiscal year 2026. As broadly discussed, we are planning with a back-end loaded CapEx development like in the previous year. So it's a bit too early to specify the range we've indicated.

So much from our side, and we are now available for any questions you may have.

Carsten, many thanks for your explanation. Now I'd like to start with our Q&A session. The first question, please.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from the line of Polo Tang from UBS.

So apologies, I missed the 1&1 call because it clashed with Vodafone. But really, it's just a question in terms of the evolution and the development in terms of the mobile network build. So you have an 18-year NRA with Vodafone with costs being relatively fixed. It seems less likely that you will get low-band spectrum. So my question is, does it really make sense to continue and progress with a mobile network build? And can you remind us where you are in terms of the number of active cell sites and where you expect to be at the end of the year?

Polo, thanks for your questions. Concerning the spectrum discussion, discussion is still ongoing. There is still the draft from the BNetzA on the table since February. We are still waiting how this will end. But we will continue building out our network as the next spectrum auction will be in 2030, then. And therefore, we try to reach then the low-band spectrum. For the time being, we have a bridge -- we have a solution to bridge the situation with our national roaming agreement.

About the speed of our network rollout, it's still the same. It's up to 200 to 300 each quarter, and we are almost in line with that in the first quarter. So we will end at the end of the year in 4x of that, so we can think about that we will end up at about 3,000 at the end of the year.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question today comes from the line of Nizla Naizer from Deutsche Bank.

I have 2 questions from my end as well. And one is something that we tend to ask you every quarter, Carsten. But when you look at the portfolio of the company now and your 64% stake in IONOS, how do you view that stake? Are you happy to remain long-term shareholders? Could there a be scenario where you feel like you'd want to lower the stake to sort of fund projects elsewhere? Could you give us some color on how you think about your IONOS investment?

And second, on United's own sort of leverage and capital allocation, anything there that you can comment on whether -- how you're happy with the leverage target levels at the moment? What's the target leverage you'd want to be within? And is there anything else you could consider if you think there's some balance sheet flexibility? Or is 1&1 the priority now in terms of getting that network rollout done? Some color there would be great.

Thank you, Nizla, for asking the questions. So let me start with IONOS. As mentioned before, we are still happy with our stake in IONOS, and it's very, very well growing business. And therefore, we are happy to have those investments. Considering the ongoing AI trend and momentum in the sector for digitalization, we continue to see additional potential. In our view, it is therefore too early to leave the party. It means we will be still the anchor investor for the IONOS for time being.

On the leverage side or the capital allocation side on the UI level, we -- as mentioned on the year-end meeting, we still aim to reduce our leverage to a target of 2.0 multiple in meaning of net debt divided by EBITDA. And at the same time, we are basically open to do more share buybacks again as in the past, but nothing is decided right now.

[Operator Instructions] And the next question comes from the line of Karsten Oblinger from DZ Bank.

It's Karsten from DZ Bank. I would like to come back to the low-band topic. So did I get you right that the low band is off the table now and then that you have to rely on the Vodafone solution? Or is there a chance that you will get low band later on this year?

Thank you for the question. It's not off the table. We are still waiting for the final decision. As mentioned in the 1&1 call before, there is a solution with 6 million each year over the 5 years for all competitors, but there is no final decision. We are still fighting for a final decision, which will go in our direction. But it's too early for us to give you the right outlook if we will be successful or not. We're still believing in doing that. But what I mentioned before was even if we not will get access to the low band in this process, then the next option will be 2030, and then we will get low-band access for sure. And in the meanwhile, if we don't be successful, then we will bridge that with the solution with national roaming with our Vodafone agreement.

We will now take the next question. And the question comes from the line of Gustav Froberg from Berenberg.

Just a follow-up question again on the low-band topic. And maybe this is a pointed way of asking it. But from your perspective, is there any reason why you should not receive low-band spectrum this time around before 2030? Or is this only a matter of time? I'd be very curious to hear how you're thinking about the topic.

Thank you, Gustav, for your question and also for asking us the low-band spectrum. In our opinion, and that is what we are fighting for, there is no reason why we should don't get any access to low band because we apply for building up a network and to be a full network provider, there is necessary to have access to low band, and that is still our meaning, and that is still the way we are fighting for. And all other words I mentioned are only the options if that will be not successful but we will still fighting for it. But it's been, it's kind of a lawsuit route. So it's not that easy to see what the final outcome will be for us.

[Operator Instructions] There are currently no further questions. I will hand the call back to Dominic for closing remarks.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for attending our call today. Please feel free to contact us for any follow-up questions. We wish you a nice day. Stay safe, and goodbye.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear guests, welcome to the Analysts and Investors Conference of the United Internet Company. My name is Dominic Grossman, and I'm very happy to welcome you in-person here to Sofitel in Frankfurt. I would also like to welcome all participants in the webcast.

I'll be happy to take you through our agenda of the day. First, Mr. Dommermuth will speak about the developments of the fiscal year 2025 and give you an outlook on the current business fiscal year of 2026. After that, Carsten Theurer will give you the details of the financials.

Ladies and gentlemen, after our presentation, as usual, you will have the opportunity of asking your questions in the Q&A session. So much by way of introduction, I'll give the floor to Mr. Dommermuth.

Thank you, Mr. Grossman. I think we've all met before. Those of you who haven't been there, welcome on my behalf as well. Mr. Grossman has taken us through the agenda. I will start with the company development. Many of you know this. We work in the Internet access and applications. We offer that for consumers and business customers. In the middle, you see our assets, our team and our infrastructure. We have over 10,000 employees. Our optic fiber network is 86,000 kilometers long. We have a 5G mobile network, and we operate about 100,000 service. We offer our products in different brands in the consumers, mainly the 1&1 brand, other brands which we have taken over from Drillisch and in the business customers, 1&1 Versatel and applications for the consumers, we offer in GMX and WEB.DE, mail.com.

Applications for small, medium-sized companies, mainly driven by IONOS or the IONOS subsidiaries. You see them here on the chart, companies that we have acquired over the years, Strato in Germany, for example, Fasthosts in England, Arsys in Spain and so on. And we have some minority shares companies that we cooperate with.

Let me start with the Access business. We have just heard in the 1&1 conference, 3.8 million broadband connections, 12.5 million mobile contracts, our own Open RAN, fully virtual networks, reaching 27% of the households as per end of the year '25, over fulfilling the requirements of the authorities, high customer satisfactions in Internet Access and also in the mobile range. First place in both competitions on the connect customer range.

Customer contracts, minus 70,000 in the access, minus 110,000 broadband accesses. I've just said that we get a hold on this. And the mobile contracts are -- is a bit dampened by the migrations of our customers in the last year. Our turnover revenue, 0.8% growth. Service revenue stayed about the same. Others, especially selling smartphones, tablets and so on, 3.7% plus.

EBITDA in the Consumer Access as a total, a minus of 11.7%, I'll reason this. If we look at the individual segments, we have the segments [Foreign Language] 1&1 mobile network with EUR 265.3 million. The cost for the same figure as in '24. And in the segment EBITDA excess, which is our end customer business, 8.1% less EBITDA with the change of the national roaming partner. And this is reasoned by Telefonica activating a part of the costs. Now we don't have this activation anymore. And it's the Vodafone network is growing slower in '25 than we had expected.

Looking at the business access range. Here, we work with 1&1 Versatel 68,450 kilometers of network, 350 biggest cities in Germany and 29,000 directly connected customers, 2 handover points, 2 antennas or handover points, 2 telecom or regional carriers. The turnover increased by 2.1%. Also the EBITDA, 2.1% better, EUR 177 million (sic) [ EUR 167 million ] higher than before despite the starting costs.

Application business in the fiscal year starting with consumer, GMX, WEB.DE, mail consumer, we offer a broad consumer portfolio for information management, e-mails, calendars, online office, cloud storage as well for the photos on your cell phone, for example, we fund this by -- we differentiate by the German data protection, German service last year, we won over more than 60,000 new accounts, 360,000 pay customers. Usually, we start with a free account and step-by-step, migrate the customer to a pay account. We did very well in that last year.

We have 310,000 additional pay accounts. Free accounts also from the conversion is dropping due to the conversion, and we have increased the revenue by 8.1%. That's good, EUR 322.6 million driven by the better monetization and the pay accounts also due to advertising. Parallel to the revenue, the EBITDA grew a little bit more even, 8.7% to EUR 123.1 million. This is a business that we've been doing long years, developing well, and we are optimistic for the year to carry on with good opportunities in the future.

Looking at AI, which we implement or in our services or offer as add-on to extend the business. Business applications, the last range I'd like to present here, driven by IONOS, IONOS subsidiaries. IONOS is the leading digitization partner for small- and medium-sized companies in Europe, a cloud enabler, 14 European countries and in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, a large product range, presence in the Internet. We need domains for that, website for that, e-shops, online marketing tools and so on and also products concerning office organization, business e-mail with opportunities to administer different accounts, office suits, online storage, for example, to store your e-mails legally correctly or bigger data management, AI assistance, cloud infrastructure, a broad range, all at higher security standards developed in Germany and the EU, all conform with the data protection laws.

Customer contracts have increased here, driven mainly from growth abroad with 5.25 million. The domestic contracts, 4.8 million. Germany, good and still ahead, but the international business growing stronger. We could compensate in the business applications, the drop of the dollar. So the growth here, good EBITDA, 19.8%, well scaled EUR 464.1 million, 35.2% EBITDA, major margin. An overview to what I said, 700,000 new customer contracts up to 29.72 contracts. Revenues grew by 1.9%, EBITDA, 2.4% EBITDA due to the invest. EBIT is a little less, 11.5% less due to the EUR 42 million of depreciation.

EPS, EUR 1.23, a plus of 43% due to the difference in the taxation. What are we going to see in the future? This year, we want to increase our turnover to EUR 6.25 billion. The EBITDA should end up at EUR 1.45 billion, EUR 170 million more compared to the year before. Cash CapEx, we see at EUR 600 million, EUR 650 million. We've just said this at EUR 1&1 before. We've invested a lot into decentral and regional data centers. That's going to slow down a bit. We have EUR 350 million already up and running. So the cash CapEx is a little lower here.

What's going to change in '26? Besides the figures, we are going to report by segments. We are going to use the Access business after selling the 1&1 Versatel, a new segment consumer access since January '26. So when we meet next time on the quarter figures, it will be set up a new and it is then called [Foreign Language ] 1&1 Mobile network will be taken out and consumer access will then be called consumer and small business, showing that we address small businesses as well.

There's going to be a new segment, which is then 1&1 Mobilfunknetz network together with Business Access, and it's going to be called Enterprise & Networks. With Versatel, we address large customers. And besides the Versatel network, we have the Mobile Network in this segment as well because we think that is a clearer structure for you having the pure let me call it, resale business, consumer ask us, consumers buy at enterprises and networks.

Enterprises & Networks is the wholesale business due to the networks that we have. So this is the idea of the new segmentation.

Okay. And now I'd like to ask Mr. Theurer to explain the financial figures to us.

Welcome again. Basically, everything has been said again. I can tell and explain it to you in a different -- from a different perspective from a cash flow view. So let's start with an overview of the key figures for the group. Mr. Dommermuth already said that we were able to increase our customer base. We have added 0.7 million users, mostly from consumer business, i.e. IONOS, IONOS with business applications with 460,000 and consumer applications. You can see that the pay accounts on the next line with 310,000 customers who we could convert from ad finance free accounts to pay accounts. That's why the ad finance free accounts are slightly decreasing because we converted them to pay accounts, which works very well and gives us a nice recurring revenue in this business model.

Revenue overall increased by 1.9%. We had an EBITDA growth of 19.8%. That's a main driver on the group level -- sorry, EBITDA was 19.8%. That was a mistake. That refers to the next line. EBITDA growth. We see a growth here of 19.8% of Business Applications, where we have an increase of 2.4%. What's different here, as we heard with IONOS earlier, due to the IFRS 5, we have a discontinued business unit Sedo within the P&L that was disregarded. But in the balance sheet, it's included and in the cash flow as well.

So we see it in the cash bridge later on that those are the rules of the IFRS 5. So the EBITDA, all figures without this segment EBIT, we can see the effect of the higher depreciations here. So we have a slight decrease of 1.9% compared to 2024.

Cash flow, we have a positive trend and significantly increased cash flow by EUR 70 million. This comes from cash flow from change in business activities. We have a positive cash flow. This is due to our payment of convergency payments. That is a volume that we paid, EUR 200 million that we paid in advance and it will be used up over time over the next few years. So that means that it's no longer a cash payment was made over the last 5 years already.

The net cash inflows from operating activities, we see a net inflow through investments. We have a dividend, the catch-up dividend that we paid last year. We have the acquisition of the 1&1 shares with over EUR 200 million that we managed in 2025, and we have a buyback program for our shares that started in the last business year and extended into this year with IONOS. That takes us to a free cash flow after lease, which has significantly increased by EUR 18 million from EUR 47 million in 2024 to EUR 320.6 million in 2025.

Cash flow bridge from EBITDA to free cash flow. You can see we have a slightly increased EBITDA compared to 2024, and I'll focus on 2025.

Now then we had AdTech added because it is necessary for cash flow considerations. We had a similar CapEx, a little bit less than last year. You can see EUR 730 million right now. Investments into the extension of our network mostly. And you can see the biggest difference here in taxes. What is that to? Well, you can see last year, 2024, we had a normal tax as it were by the end of -- or at the beginning of 2025, backdating to beginning of 2024, we had Versatel integrated into the Tech Group. So we had an advanced payment for these taxes that we didn't pay back in 2024, but in 2025, the advanced payments have a positive effect on the taxes in 2025.

So we have a positive effect. And therefore, we have this big discrepancy because these 2 figures, and we have the working capital pretty constant in 2025 compared to 2024 of EUR 508 million and leasing -- minus leasing that takes us to a free cash flow of EUR 320 million of just EUR 270 million more than 2024.

Now let's take a look at the balance sheet. I won't read out every detail here. Maybe the most important topics you can see that the fixed assets grow fast. We have EUR 350 million added here, particularly through our investments in our fiber optic network. Then we had the contingent payments from telecom where using those up over the year. So we're activating those now. So nearly identical balance sheet, some despite increased intangible assets.

Let's take a look at the liabilities and equity, and we can see that we've increased those by EUR 350 million. Trade accounts are decreased. Liabilities due to banks have increased, particularly in order to finance the CapEx, but also due to the share buyback and our dividend had a negative impact on our cash flow. So we have a net debt of EUR 3.2 billion at the end of 2025 with a leverage of 2.48x at the end of 2025.

The other financial liabilities have slightly increased the leasing additions that we've seen, then lower frequency liabilities on the other hand. And equity has slightly decreased, but the ratio is still at 43.6%. So that's still a pretty solid equity rate -- equity ratio. So that takes us to the end of the financials here, and we're happy to take your questions if you wish to ask any.

Okay. So much concerning the presentation. Let's start with the questions and answers. [Operator Instructions]

First of all, on the left side, [indiscernible] bank. I have 2 questions concerning IONOS. First of all, concerning the data center that was planned since the beginning of last year or the summer of last year, is there any news? We never heard anything about it.

And the second question is concerning the revenue development. For Cloud Solutions, that's a bit behind schedule. Could you give us some reasons for this and maybe give an outlook for the next couple of years. What are the current plans?

Well, we're not the IONOS Board. I'm on the Supervisory Board, but I'll try to give you the best answer I can. If you speak of the plant data center, you're probably referring to the potential EU gigafactory. We're still waiting for the tender, which is being delayed again and again. The last thing I heard was end of March. And once we get the tender documents, then we or the IONOS management can determine whether it suits or not.

Concerning Cloud Solutions, I can tell you very little about this as far as I can tell, the business is going very well so far, but I really can't say too much. Well, I might be able to give you some information there. We had some headwinds in the last couple of years, but this leads to tailwinds right now. So we've had a quite good start in the first quarter, and we're quite optimistic that we can grow by double digits, particularly in the public space. And so we're quite optimistic looking forward there.

Next question, Polo Tang upfront here.

Polo Tang from UBS. Just a clarification question in terms of tax because your tax stepped down quite notably to less than EUR 100 million in 2025. I think it was EUR 250 million in terms of 2024. So how should we think about the tax charge going forward?

Yes, we have to make a distinction here between cash flow. We have to make a distinction between the cash flow. I showed that in the cash flow bridge and what is declared in the P&L. We have 2 different effects with the cash flow, we had the impact of the United Internet.

And in the second step, the sale to 1&1 of Versatel. We have the tax group Versatel including 1&1. So in 2024, it was for UI because the tax effects were similar for UI. And now we have the same thing for 1&1 Versatel. So due to the losses of Versatel included into 1&1.

So in 2027, we'll go back into a normal level. But in 2026, it will have an impact on the P&L concerning the taxes. So the main special effect was cash back from the advanced payments from the year 2024.

Next question on the right-hand side.

Yes, Mr. Dommermuth, my question also refers to IONOS, basically from investor to investor again. Since August, there have been opportunities for AI. We discussed them and everybody understands them. But since August, the opposite has occurred because everybody believes you probably is that there is a threat to the IONOS business model. And I would like to know what your current view of this is?

It won't surprise you that I'm quite relaxed in this context. I hope it's not a misjudgment. You've seen that last year, we increased our EBITDA at IONOS by 20%. The management gave a guidance of increasing it by another 10% this year. So I'd say business is going well there. But it doesn't necessarily mean that it will continue to do so. You mentioned quite rightly that the question remains whether we are setting the right track. And the big issue is what about AI.

And if you look at IONOS figures, we have a share price of up to EUR 43, which rose very fast, but then dropped very fast as well. But we have to see that our peers had more severe losses, have a 1/3 peak value and another competitor is down to a 6 of their peak value. So the entire segment has come under pressure.

Question is will AI be a benefit or detrimental to us. I think it will be beneficial. Why? Because we see the opportunity for a new business field, AI for small and medium-sized enterprises. I think we're excellently positioned there with the number of our customers, the type of our customers, our sales capacity, and we can see that it's going very well. It started very well. We're at the very beginning still. We are increasing the number of AI agents. We try to increase our sales efforts, and I see a lot of opportunity for additional business. At the same time, we're including ever more AI into our products. And in making our products in programming, we gain a lot of efficiency.

Now that's my personal view of things. It doesn't have to be right. Now where does this skepticism come from? It comes from new possibilities of building a website with so-called vibe coding and there are small new companies that are excellent in doing this, Lovable and keep's popping up here. And I don't see why that should affect us much because we ourselves well the value creation involves in making a website, building a website is not our main value creator. We makes the infrastructure available so we will also offer a vibe coding in a few months from now.

So I don't see any reason of why this [indiscernible] bypass us. I think the ooze are in the field of creating website is a core business there more effected. But even if you build a website via Lovable you still need that the main for that if you build the website with Lovable you still register the website with us because through a cooperation with an American supplier called [ Entry ], you wind up with [ entry ] again. So we cannot only sell the domain. We have a customer relation then and we can sell more products.

So the website has to be hosted some place. And with Lovable, there's a premium model. You can use a lot of products free of charge, then the next level is $25 and the final premium level is $50. And that's much more expensive than with IONOS, I told you about the share price development of [indiscernible], which crashed by 5% to 6%, and they have this premium pricing model as well, and that's not our model or IONOS, the IONOS model.

I think we still will continue to have this business model. We have a good customer growth. We expect even better growth this year. But maybe we just don't see the problem or the risk. We see opportunities more than risks.

Would it be an option? IONOS has its own share buyback program that you increase your share with United Internet? Or don't you see that as an option?

Well, if you ask me what I would like to do, I might go ahead with this, yes. If you ask me what I could do that, I would delist IONOS but if you ask Mr. Theurer, he'll tell me immediately about the high debt rate and all the things that we need money for the auction, et cetera. And we have to see. I hope that I have the right view of things, but if I have a wrong view, it might be a mistake that cost us -- might cost us billions.

So 50% of the honest shares are with us due to the buyback, and we're happy with that. If management were to desire more buybacks tomorrow, I'd always agree with it. So we could -- if we are to increase our stake, I'll go -- I'm on Board. But to say, okay, let's buy back everything. My heart says, yes, I want to do that. But I think it's a good thing that I can see that we don't have these opportunities and that we have other investment opportunities as well. And that is why we have to keep our powder dry. So that's not on the agenda right now.

Next question, just beside [indiscernible].

Mr. Dommermuth, you are active in 14 European countries, but U.S. and Mexico, Canada as well. And now the last 3, U.S., Canada and so on, there are the hyperscaler, Amazons, Microsoft and Google Cloud. I think they take care of small businesses as well, don't they? How are you moving forward in that segment? And can you say anything about the margins or the investments that you intend to place there? Possibly, you have a critical size already. Where are you at?

Well, in the U.S. U.S., our second most important country adding IONOS, but it's not a country where we would offer our cloud infrastructure. Our cloud infrastructure is mainly done in Germany, France, Spain, England, European range. And the focus really is Germany because here, we have a sovereign cloud addressing a part of the market very well. We can't compete with Google, Microsoft or Amazon in the full range. That's our target.

So we offer our web presence products, the productivity tools, IONOS. The business is growing well. We've had a nice growth in America last year. This year started well. Also, it's a good country, good money. We grow good. So I think we have more opportunities, but I don't see them in the cloud and structural range. Our USP, the European sovereignty is not worth anything in the U.S. And so we just cooperate by size. We just compete by size, and we won't have an opportunity against the big giants. But if one of the hyperscalers uses it, isn't it difficult to win over the products that you want to sell in the U.S.?

No, I think our products mainly address small and medium-sized companies, and these are not the Amazon customers or Microsoft either. And we sell everything concerning the website, the domain. This is not the focus of the hyperscalers. So we never know. Of course, maybe Google says to, I have to sell to small and medium-sized companies, okay? But they are -- Google had domains. They sold their domain business. Google has tools to make homepages. There's nothing really new, but it's not a part of Google Cloud. Google Cloud has different contexts.

Next question maybe on the left side.

Mr. Dommermuth, I have a question concerning the AI question we just raised. I do share your relaxation as far as IONOS is concerned, but I'm not quite sure what the consumer applications are concerned. What we do see is more and more AI-based inquiries, less search engine-based inquiries. Maybe you could illustrate a bit how consumer applications could be concerned if this trend continues.

Well, I'm even more relaxed concerning consumer applications. What do I see? Well, let me break it down. If you say there's less research, it's traffic that you have on a website that offers content where Google where you participate from Google Search. And now media tell us that many pages are losing traffic because AI has fewer content websites presented in the search results. However, that has no effect on us because we just look at the incoming traffic. If we sell advertising, the customer logged on.

So it's not the Google traffic that we live on. We do have a little, of course, but it's just behind the decimal. And it's an opportunity for us actually because if you do an advertising campaign in Germany to get range, the more the others lose, the less you can get around us, and we see this. We see that media planners start to look at us and the loss of the traffic is rather a benefit for us without me being happy about it.

But we have the lock-in traffic. People want to check their mails or address the web page, but they don't take Google, give me a hint on what I do if I have an infection. That's when you visited a website before, which is called your health. Now Google tells you what pill to take. And the website has no traffic. And we don't have this problem. So search, marketing, no problem.

Concerning AI itself, I see big opportunities, and we do this step by step. Putting this in the applications that you can have your mails translated in different languages, you have a smart search, giving you context, allowing you to give context so that they can look at your e-mails or with a couple of keywords, you get a proposal for your mail text. We have this as beta partly even rolled out. We have that, and we are doing more of that this year. And I see the opportunity to take AI agents, offering them to private people.

So as we've talked about IONOS before, saying they have a high range reach, they can use it to distribute their AI agents. I'm not talking about ones that you have to build yourself 1&1, we have an assistant for phone assistance. We've got a partner in America, one partner in Germany. And we integrate these products. And I think that's good because that makes us fast. And we can react better to the different market requirements apart from and we don't have to build up the know-how ourselves for every little detail. And that applies to the consumer range as well.

I've talked with the colleagues on the Board lately. And as an example, just to give you to illustrate this, we talked about an AI agent for travel planning, saying I want to go somewhere 3 weeks, Mallorca e-visa whatever, somewhere warm to children, need a rental car, hotel should be this and that along seaside, create a proposal for a travel.

And this is available already today. There are people often. I look at ChatGPT, they showed me a company, 24 people in Berlin, focusing on exactly this. So how do they get range? How do they get us tomorrow, book their journey with their tool. And this is where we get into the game. We could integrate them into our service and generate AI range for this AI application. So you learn about the customer. That means we can extend our data range. We know that we're going to go to a summer holiday in Mallorca, okay, that could help us in marketing, advertising and you sell it tomorrow for -- as a premium service, but I don't know that today.

So if somebody has a platform to distribute the products to consumers in the German range, it's us. We can do this better than WEB.DE, you name it, we are better. We are the best in that section. So this is why I do see opportunities.

And last but least, if you say Mr. Dommermuth is a dreamer, he's always optimistic. So he just puts the AI and sells agents on top, if it doesn't work, if he doesn't have range tomorrow because people ChatGPT, write the mail, whatever, he has no traffic anymore on his pages. He won't need a tool to write English mails or Spanish mails, and he won't need AI agents for travel planning because he's got no traffic. I got an idea for that. I'll just close the service and do it as a free service, I close it as a free service and charge for it. And there are services, a lot of examples for e-mail service who used to be free and then cost something.

And the e-mail address sticks because it's used everywhere. And there's about 20% of the customers who are ready to pay if we do this. And this is where we have the participation in open exchange. They do that. They buy e-mails where telco says, look, I did this. It's not a business model for me anymore. They buy the e-mails, switch off the free service and say, customer, you can keep your e-mail. It will be much better in the future, won't be any advertising, a great hotline. You have more storage, but you have to pay.

And then the revenue would rocket -- would skyrocket. Just take our customers and let's say, they pay EUR 5, EUR 60 per year, minus VAT, EUR 50 by 20% of our customers. I can't even calculate it, EUR 300 million. And with advertising, I think we do EUR 120 million. So EUR 180 plus and we could reduce complexity all the advertising, targeting, bidding, data and so on. We got 1,000 people working for that. Simply a cost -- an e-mail that costs the customer much simpler.

So it's not the plan. We want to go forward. We're not planning to do that. So no misunderstanding here, but we want to get into the products, to the agents and all of that, what I said. But if it all didn't work, I would say, whatever how the customer writes their e-mails, they will need the e-mail address. That's the thing with the owners. Whatever they do with their website, it has to be hosted. They needed a more domain. They need marketing. It has to be compatible upwards and so on.

So I'd say -- and that was when I started my monologue here saying I'm even less concerned here than with IONOS. I think we'll do it well, and I have a plan B in case it doesn't work.

Next question on the right-hand side [indiscernible].

The last aspect was very interesting, basically added value, which is your plan B. But my question is on 1&1. I saw your passion for IONOS just now. And you're willingness to buy back shares if Mr. Theurer wasn't sitting on the money back. But the question is whether the competition isn't just as enthusiastic about the possibility of purchasing United Internet or 1&1. I know that the money back, of course, is right now for the moment.

Well, of course, I spend more than most of my day on 1&1 and I spend maybe 1 day a month with the Supervisory Board of IONOS. But in the past, we were one company. I used to be the CEO of IONOS, and therefore, I spent many years with the hosting business. It's a beautiful business with many opportunities. And yes, there are moments where I say this telecommunications business with a slow market growth and all the problems that we had over the last few years, maybe it wouldn't have been the worst thing if I've never seen it.

If I had always stuck with hosting, but you never know. For you as a shareholder, you compile your own portfolio. A medium-sized company doesn't want to stand on one leg alone. If I focus on hosting alone and tomorrow, Google or Amazon say, well, we can do much better, and we give it all out for free, then I focus on telecommunications.

So I'm very happy with the portfolio. It's very balanced. There's always one wheel that turns more slowly than the others. But we do have 4 wheels that we drive on and not only one. And I think as a somewhat more elderly entrepreneur, I'm very happy about it. So our passion is for hosting for the Access business, for the mail business. I always have sparkling eyes. I see opportunities everywhere. And I'll give you the last anecdote now.

Years ago, I was standing on a blackboard when we were only one company back in the days of Deutsche Mark said if we do it right, we can earn EUR 100 million for Access, EUR 100 million Marks, -- Deutsche Marks for hosting and EUR 100 million for e-mail business and the others were just glaring at me. You see that was a while ago, but the ambitions were ones that we would earn EUR 100 million in each business field. We went way beyond that by now. And I think we're still not at the end of the line. There are still opportunities. We just have to accompany every transformation. We have to participate in the AI transformation. And we have to become much more efficient within internally.

We have a lot of AI projects. You can see that the number of staff is ever decreasing because we're becoming ever more efficient. And this will continue. Programmers are becoming more efficient. Customer care will be much more efficient. So we move into new fields where -- in marketing, in accounting, where we can consider ever more how can we do it faster, better and smarter.

So we're still at the beginning here. We can see that we're increasing the top line and at the same time, we're decreasing the costs. If we do it right, AI will be a positive thing for us.

Maybe explicitly on purchasing 1&1 as well, that would work in terms of your desirability. Well, if you have the opportunity, would you increase your share?

Well, last year, we did increase our share when packages became available. And you said, okay, we will make an offer. So that took us to 86.5%, and we feel happy about this. But if somebody were to offer us another package tomorrow, I'd take it as well. I'm still optimistic. I wouldn't buy every single share individually. But if somebody comes along and says, okay, I have another package. Are you interested, we'd go for it. Okay. I thought that was a strong statement to make.

Well, there's another question upfront here.

[indiscernible] I heard your enthusiasm vis-a-vis AI with great pleasure. And it might be a little bit as important as the Internet was when it was first introduced. Now your company is called United Internet, would it be possible that you make something much bigger than out of AI than AI agents with IONOS as they did with the web business?

Well, I don't think we'll find or develop any large language models. That's way too much effort. And it's not really possible in terms of the power costs in Germany and the competition is way ahead. So we will focus on the agents, and we'll have to think about where do we use them and how can we use AI to improve our products by installing or introducing them into individual products and tools. But I don't think that we'll become an AI company overnight now.

I was told that I should rename the company from United Internet into United AI, then our stock price would double, but I didn't go for that. So did I understand correctly that large language models with Alpha, you can see how you can fail with a huge investment there. But my question was that the AI agents and what you do could be so big that it might be an important business field.

Yes. Of course, if we do it right, it could be very big, yes. Are we too slow? If you ask me, we're always too slow. But here, we are behind our opportunities. You can see it over the last few months, we're rolling out a lot of things there, and I see a lot of opportunities there. The tickets are larger here than what we have in hosting. In hosting, I get a good website for EUR 10, but for 1, 2, 3 AI agents that run my office who handle my work, I'm willing to pay more for that. So I see huge opportunities there.

Meetings are always about this question. Okay, people, let's focus more on this, push the other stuff aside, fully focus on showing what we can do there. And we can see over the first few months, the figures are vast expanding -- fast expanding, but at a very low level. So we need to boost this and to learn as we go along of how to do this best, but we're well established for that. We can host the AI agents. We can integrate them into our processes. We can market and service them. So I see huge opportunities. We're excellently placed there.

May I follow up on that question? Mr. Dommermuth, now that we're talking about AI, I have another question on this topic. We've covered all various business fields. Now concerning 1&1 because I think it was Telefonica who said that they need to take more computing power to the network. My understanding is that they need to install more data centers for AI, and they have, they have the data crunching ability. But I was thinking where does the network, the mobile network require AI? Or what could AI contribute there?

Well, my understanding, but I'm not a technician, of course, I see 2 levels here. One being you will have efficiency gains in areas still handled by people today. Let me give you the example of network operating centers. That's where we have people 24/7 watching where something breaking and they alert repair crews. And that is something that you can automate. You don't need people anymore for that going forward. So that will lead to efficiency gains. But you won't see that happening in the network.

But in the core areas, the core places operating the network, if you read the press releases, then Telefonica says that we have such a great AI, they can help us identify capacity utilization levels in the network, but you don't need AI for that. I don't know what they could do better with a huge data center with AI, I can't really see that. What we would do is we say we have space for applications. And these applications could, of course, be AI applications, no question. But the benefit is we have -- we're faster near the antenna because we're only 10 kilometers away. That's a benefit.

But otherwise, I don't see any AI-specific aspect that needs to be fared because it can't run on the core. So I don't see that. Yes, well, I've had the same feeling about this. Yes, but it sounds great. If you say, oh, let's do AI everywhere. As was said, that will drive the share stock price.

I can't see any more questions. There is one more question.

Another question on consumer applications. Last year, EUR 123 million EBITDA. I'd like to know what your expectation is for this year, where are we headed? And the idea was whether you want to sell this? Is that still on the table or not because your sales expectations aren't realistic? Or what is your view there? Mr. Theurer, what's the bandwidth for the free cash flow for this year?

Maybe concerning the consumer applications, they are growing very well because we have natural growth, organic growth and because we're winding down a shared service, IONOS was handling that for us, and they want to focus on their own business and don't want to do that anymore. Multimedia has bought the service from IONOS, so they have to handle it, and that increases the EBITDA. In the past, they paid on a monthly basis. Now we have the upfront investment. That's why the EBITDA is much higher, but it only comes from our growth. Partially, it comes from the fact that we operate our own service. I think we're over EUR 140 million by now. Is that realistic? Yes, more than EUR 140 million. That's what we expect there.

And sale, I think it was in 2022 when we were asked, we want to sell the business, but we didn't get far. And it's not on the agenda. I said before, never say never. Maybe tomorrow, somebody comes along and says, "Oh, this is so great. I gold played it for you. Then of course, we have to listen in the interest of all investors. But it's not a plan. The business is going well. Last year was good year, before was good. This year will be good again. We have a lot of good ideas.

Free cash flow, around about EUR 600 million, very rough estimate. We're coming from EUR 500 million, just under, as we saw. You have the EBITDA improvement with 1&1, the forecast. So around about EUR 600 million ballpark figure.

Any other questions? I can't see anyone wishing to ask a question. I hope I didn't overlook anyone. So thank you very much for your interest, your questions. And I would like to close this conference and I invite you to have a coffee out in the foyer and thank you very much.

[Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]

Good morning, everyone. I would like to welcome you to our Q3 2025 Analyst Investor Call. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Dominic Grossman. I'm responsible for Investor Relations at United Internet. And here with me today, I have our CFO, Carsten Theurer.

Briefly about today's call. Carsten will first take you through our presentation with the business development in the first 9 months and will also give an outlook for the rest of the year. Afterwards, we will be happy to answer your questions. So far to our agenda, I would now like to hand over to Carsten. Carsten, please go ahead. The floor is yours.

Thank you, Dominic, and also a warm welcome from my side to our webcast on the presentation of our 9 months figures for 2025. First of all, I would like to point out 3 noteworthy events. Number one, 1&1 has successfully completed the migration of our customers to our own network. I will get back to this later on. Number two, in October, we were able to complete the disposal of our energy business field. And number three, as mentioned during the IONOS call this morning, our group figures have been adjusted due to a change in presentation of the AdTech business in the Business Applications segment, which is carried in accordance with IFRS 5 as discontinued operation as of September 30, 2025. The prior year was adjusted accordingly.

Having said that, let's have a look on the development of our major KPIs. We are happy to report that our customer contracts increased by 480,000 to 29.5 million in the first 9 months of 2025. Our revenue subsequently increased by 1.4% to EUR 4.5 billion. Group EBITDA increased by 1.9% to EUR 966 million despite EUR 34 million higher mobile network rollout expenses compared to the same period before.

Our EBIT declined by 11.3% to around EUR 443 million. The development in EBIT is driven by higher depreciation and amortization expenses attributable to investments in the rollout of the fiber optic network at 1&1 Versatel and the rollout of the 1&1 mobile network. As a result of improved performance from our associated companies and lower tax expenses, our EPS increased by EUR 0.03 to EUR 0.75 per share.

So now we will do a deep dive into our segment development, starting with Consumer Access. And here we go. As mentioned during this morning's 1&1 call, the migration of our customers to the 1&1 mobile network has been successfully completed. This marks a major milestone for our company. What's particularly remarkable is that despite the complexity of executing the largest customer migration in the history of German telecom market, we not only retained our customer base, but also achieved net customer growth during the transition. This clearly demonstrates the strength and appeal of our 1&1 mobile brands.

Overall, the number of fee-based contracts fell by 50,000 to 16.34 million. The decrease is driven by the loss of 90,000 broadband connections to 3.86 million. However, during the same period, we were able to increase our number of mobile Internet contracts by 40,000 to 12.48 million. Despite the biggest impression, we turned a 20,000 Q1 decline into a 20,000 gain in Q2 and doubled momentum with an increase to 40,000 net additions in Q3.

I will continue on Slide 5 with the development on the segment's revenues. Revenue in the Consumer Access segment is fairly stable and amounts to approximately EUR 3 billion. Both the development of service revenues and hardware sales have remained flat year-over-year and are in line with our expectation.

That being said, if we turn our attention to EBITDA on next slide. We can observe that in particular, due to the further year-over-year increase in expenses for the rollout of the 1&1 mobile network segment, EBITDA fell to almost EUR 410 million. The network rollout costs amounted to EUR 201 million compared to EUR 167 million in the same period last year.

As shown in the breakdown next slide. The Access subsegment EBITDA remains robust at around EUR 611 million. The decline is a result of higher advanced payment costs for national roaming due to a lower-than-expected network growth at Vodafone and the different accounting treatment of certain network components under the Vodafone national roaming agreement, which are all recognized directly in EBITDA without having an impact on EBIT in comparison to the former Telefonica contract. The EBITDA margin remains fairly stable. Our rollout costs for the 1&1 mobile network amounted to around EUR 200 million and are in line with the business plan.

Moving on to the Business Access segment. We are able to increase sales by 1.1% year-over-year to EUR 435 million. At the same time, segment EBITDA increased by 2.1% to EUR 123.1 million. There was a corresponding improvement in the EBITDA margin from 28.0% in the previous year to 28.3% this year. In the first 9 months of 2025, total start-up costs for the new business fields, 5G and expansion of commercial areas amounted to minus EUR 16.3 million for EBITDA declining by almost EUR 6 million year-over-year.

Let us now turn to the application side of the business. Starting with the Consumer Applications segment. The number of pay accounts rose by 220,000 to 3.26 million. Here, we have to point out the year-over-year development in free accounts with a decline of 210,000, which shows you, in particular, the successful migration to pay accounts where we added 280,000 over the same period. Overall, we are able to grow our consumer accounts by 70,000 in Q3 year-over-year.

The growth of pay accounts, in particular, led to adjusted sales growth of 5.6% from EUR 218 million to EUR 230 million in the first 9 months of 2025. There was also further growth in key earnings figures such as EBITDA. With EBITDA increasing by 5.1% to EUR 82.9 million. The EBITDA margin remains stable at above 36%. In the Applications segment, we increased our number of customers contracts by 310,000 to almost reaching 10 million customers in our portfolio for the first time. This increase is driven both domestically and abroad with our operations abroad performing even stronger. Revenues in this segment increased by 6.2% to EUR 980 million from EUR 923 million a year ago. The increase in revenue was driven by the strong customer growth and increased up and cross-selling.

EBITDA in the Business Applications segment increased by 21.5% compared to previous year's number of EUR 290 million to EUR 345 million -- EUR 354 million, sorry. The operating EBITDA margin rose accordingly from 31.5% to above 36% as well. So much for the segments. Here, we have summarized the most important KPIs for the group once again and added a few more. Our CapEx amounted to EUR 488 million after EUR 442 million in the previous year, reflecting our continued investments in our fiber optic network at 1&1 Versatel and the rollout of the 1&1 mobile network. Please note that we are expecting a very significant proportion of our annual CapEx in Q4.

I will provide a detailed breakdown of free cash flow on the next slide. However, the significant improvement in free cash flow is already worth highlighting. Our net bank liabilities increased by 20% to over EUR 3.2 billion, which relates to a leverage of 2.4x EBITDA. In addition to our substantial investments, we paid out EUR 328 million in dividend payments and EUR 246 million as part of our voluntary public -- partial public tender offer for 1&1 shares and additional purchases to increase our stake to 86.5% overall. Our equity ratio amounted to 43.5%.

This slide shows you a bridge of our EBITDA to free cash flow. The largest items here is our next -- net CapEx of approximately EUR 485 million as a result of investments in the continued rollout of mobile network and expansion of our fiber optic infrastructure. Furthermore, we had phasing effects from Q4 2024 of around EUR 110 million. And after accounting for taxes and changes in working capital, our free cash flow before leasing stands at EUR 259 million, respectively, EUR 146 million after leasing.

And finally, a brief word on the outlook. We are confirming our revenue and EBITDA forecast and are specifying our cash CapEx forecast with accounting for AdTech as discontinued operation. We are now expecting full year revenues for fiscal year 2025 to amount to EUR 6.05 billion. Operating EBITDA is expected to amount to approx EUR 1.3 billion, which includes approx EUR 20 million in costs associated with the transition from Telefonica national roaming agreement to the Vodafone National roaming agreement. Under the Telefonica national roaming agreement, certain network components are activated and depreciated, whereas under the Vodafone National roaming agreement, these costs are recognized directly in EBITDA. This change has no impact on the EBIT.

Capital expenditures are expected to total approximately EUR 750 million, primarily driven by the continued rollout of our mobile network and the expansion of the fiber optic infrastructure. While this implies a slight spillover of investments in the following year, 2025 is still anticipated to represent the CapEx peak at United Internet. So much from our side. We are now available for any questions you may have.

Carsten, many thanks for explanation. Now we would like to start our Q&A session. The first question, please.

[Operator Instructions]

We will now take the first question. And your first question today comes from the line of Polo Tang from UBS.

I have three different ones. So first of all, apologies, I missed the 1&1 call earlier. But can you comment on where you are in terms of getting access to low-band spectrum? And then how do you think about your network build if you're not able to get access to low-band spectrum?

Second question is just really about CapEx profiles. You mentioned for United Internet as a group that you expect 2025 to be the peak. But can you clarify whether the 1&1 CapEx has been scaled back?

And my third question is really just about the perimeter of the group and corporate structure. So what are your latest thoughts on IONOS and whether you should or should not spin out IONOS? And what's your latest thoughts on owning 100% of 1&1.

Thank you for your questions. Let's start with the low-band spectrum. As explained in the months before, we are still waiting of a decision for the low-band spectrum. There are some offers on the table, but they are not negotiable on our side so that we are still waiting to become true offers, which we can deal with.

And therefore, what we are anticipating is that the BNetzA will step in the process, and then we are quite sure that we will get access to low-band spectrum. So there is not worth to talk about what will happen if we don't get any access to low-band spectrum. We are quite sure that, that will come not at the end of this year as expected before. But in Q1, Q2 next year, we are quite sure that we have access to the spectrum.

Second question, CapEx profile and the call on 1&1 gave the answer that the expected CapEx next year will be on the same level than on 2025, but we stay to our CapEx expectation on the group level, which will be the top or the peak level CapEx in this year, 2025 despite the spillover on the 1&1 side. And the discussion on IONOS spin-off, we have had it in the years before, but there is no way for any spin-off without any tax issues. So therefore, there is no plan for a spin-off on the IONOS side.

And then your thoughts on owning 100% of 1&1?

Not really because we -- as mentioned before, we stay at the moment at 86.5%, and we are fine with that. There is no need to get 100% at the moment. And therefore, there are no further plans to get 100%.

And the next question comes from the line of Mollie Witcombe from Goldman Sachs.

Just wanted to dig in a little bit more on the CapEx peak. Obviously, a large portion of that is Versatel. What -- is there any risk that at some point in the midterm, you might look to expand into new areas and we could see an uptick again in CapEx driven by that segment?

And then my second question is -- sorry if I've missed this, just on the EUR 110 million in phasing effects on the free cash flow from Q4 2024. Could you just run through quickly what that's made up of?

Thank you for your questions. So for the peak CapEx, we can't see there any risk at the moment that the CapEx will get, will increase in the next year because we have our rollout pace, as mentioned before, 200 to 300 sites each quarter, and that remains very stable. So therefore, we don't see any peaks despite what we already have told you that the peak CapEx will be this year. And the second question was about -- sorry, what was the second question?

There's a EUR 110 million phasing effect from Q4 '24. I was just wondering a little bit more color.

Okay. There are some invoices, which had a spillover from the last year, which will be paid in this year. And that means the phasing effect, which we can see in the EUR 110 million.

[Operator Instructions]

And your next question comes from the line of Ben Rickett from New Street Research.

I had two questions, please. Firstly, I might have missed this morning, that IONOS, the AdTech EBITDA seems to have collapsed as a result of the RSOC transition. Are you expecting that EBITDA to recover? Is this just a phasing issue? Or what's the outlook for that Adtech EBITDA line? And then second question, I was wondering, can you say anything about whether you've made revenue commitments to Rakuten. So specifically, I was interested if you were to stop the mobile network build, are you then liable to continue to make payments to Rakuten.

Starting with the first question because I didn't get the second one, but I will come back on that. On the first one, EBITDA drop on the AdTech segment. As expected, due to that effect that the old one, the old product from Google, the AFD is replaced with the new one, with RSOC. So we can see a slightly decrease on the AFD tool and only a small increase on the RSOC side.

So therefore, figures were getting better. That is what we can see month-over-month at the moment, but it is not a dramatic dynamic at the moment, to be honest. And therefore, we will have to see where we will end up at a year.

And the second question about Rakuten, what was the exact question?

I was just trying to understand is there any commitments that you've made to Rakuten for the 1&1 mobile network build. So if the mobile network build was to stop, is there a liability there to Rakuten?

I don't know about any obligations or any payments we have to do if we stop building out our network, but there is no reason to talk about that because we are on the way to build out our network. As mentioned before, we have migrated now all over our 12.4 million customers on our own mobile network.

And the next question comes from the line of Simon Stippig from Warburg Research.

Firstly, I would be interested in your expectation about when the Federal Cartel Office will disclose its decision about the Vantage Tower dispute? And then secondly, are there any discussions with your peers about consolidation such as merging or selling the 1&1 mobile network as is?

Starting with the Vantage question, we already expected this summer any statement from the Cartel office, but we are still waiting for it. So therefore, we can't tell you an exact date when a decision will come, but we are also waiting for that decision.

And on the consolidation, what can we say? There is not really something to tell. No one showed up here in Montabaur. If someone will come, we are open to have a conversation as always. We look more after our own activities, and we are working with very good success on our own network. And as already said, are happy to have all of our customers on our own network.

Okay. Great. Maybe a follow-up. Did anyone show up in Madrid from United Internet or 1&1 from the group?

Not as I know. There are always some calls, but not on the discussion of consolidation. We are always in touch with each other for cases like low band and things like that, but not for consolidation questions. And as I know, no one showed up here from Madrid.

And the next question comes from the line of Nizla Naizer from Deutsche Bank.

I just have one question, please. Your net debt to EBITDA being at 2.4x, is that a position you're comfortable with? And would you consider sort of streamlining your portfolio to free up some cash to lower that net debt if you're not? For example, would you consider selling a stake in IONOS or the Consumer Applications business? How are you sort of looking at your financial position and the portfolio that you've built?

Yes, leverage at 2.4x, we are feeling comfortable. As already mentioned before, we feel comfortable in the range still from 2.5 to 3, but our aim is to get more and closer to 2 in the next years. And maybe today is not the right day to talk about selling some shares of IONOS if you had a look at the stock price at the moment. So therefore, it's not the right day for this discussion.

There are currently no further questions. I will hand the call back to Dominic.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for attending our call today. Please feel free to contact us for any follow-up questions. We wish you a nice day. Stay safe.