Earnings call transcript: Deutsche Telekom Q2 2025 raises guidance amid AI push

Deutsche Telekom reported its second-quarter 2025 earnings, showcasing solid growth in key financial metrics and raising its full-year guidance. The company achieved an earnings per share (EPS) of 0.51, surpassing the forecast of 0.4863, representing a 4.87% surprise. However, revenue slightly missed expectations, coming in at 28.67 billion USD against a forecast of 28.76 billion USD. According to InvestingPro data, the company maintains strong financial health with an overall score of 2.43, particularly excelling in profit metrics and price momentum. The market reacted negatively, with the stock price dropping by 4.88% in pre-market trading to 29.64 USD from 31.16 USD.

Key Takeaways

• Deutsche Telekom raised its full-year EBITDA guidance to over €45 billion.
• The company launched T Fiber and T Satellite in the U.S., expanding its technological footprint.
• AI initiatives have significantly contributed to operational efficiency.
• The German broadband market remains saturated, presenting challenges.
• Strong postpaid customer growth was observed in the U.S. market.

Company Performance

Deutsche Telekom demonstrated robust performance, with a 3.7% organic service revenue growth and a 5.2% increase in organic EBITDA. The company also reported a 17.8% rise in free cash flow and a 6.4% increase in adjusted EPS. Despite the competitive landscape, especially in the German broadband market, Deutsche Telekom maintained its position as a top-ranked mobile network in both Germany and the U.S.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: 28.67 billion USD, slightly below expectations.
• Earnings per share: 0.51, exceeding forecasts by 4.87%.
• EBITDA: Raised guidance to more than €45 billion.
• Free cash flow: Increased guidance to over €20 billion.

Earnings vs. Forecast

Deutsche Telekom’s EPS of 0.51 beat the forecast of 0.4863, resulting in a 4.87% surprise. The revenue fell short by 0.31%, reaching 28.67 billion USD against the anticipated 28.76 billion USD. This mixed performance reflects the company’s ability to manage costs effectively while facing revenue pressures.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings announcement, Deutsche Telekom’s stock experienced a 4.88% decline in pre-market trading, dropping to 29.64 USD. This movement reflects investor concerns about the slight revenue miss and the competitive pressures in the German market. Despite the recent decline, InvestingPro analysis indicates the stock has delivered an impressive 18.25% YTD return, with current trading levels suggesting the stock is slightly overvalued based on their Fair Value calculations. The company maintains a strong dividend track record, having paid dividends consistently for 21 consecutive years with a current yield of 3.1%.

Outlook & Guidance

Deutsche Telekom raised its full-year EBITDA and free cash flow guidance, signaling confidence in its financial trajectory. The company is focusing on expanding its fiber infrastructure and leveraging AI-driven efficiencies. With a strong emphasis on U.S. operations and an EBITDA of $3.4 billion in the last twelve months, Deutsche Telekom is well-positioned for continued growth. InvestingPro subscribers can access 8 additional key insights about Deutsche Telekom’s financial health and growth prospects, along with comprehensive valuation metrics in the Pro Research Report, available exclusively on the platform.

Executive Commentary

CEO Tim Urtges highlighted the transformative potential of AI, stating, "AI is going to be the game changer for the whole company." He acknowledged challenges in the German broadband market, expressing dissatisfaction with customer losses but reaffirming a long-term strategic vision.

Risks and Challenges

• Saturation in the German broadband market could hinder growth.
• Increasing competition from alternative networks poses a threat.
• Macroeconomic pressures might impact consumer spending.
• Regulatory changes could affect operational strategies.
• Technological disruptions require continuous innovation.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about Deutsche Telekom’s AI investment strategy and its potential impact on operations. The company addressed concerns about market consolidation and explained its infrastructure expansion plans, which are crucial for maintaining competitive advantage.

Full transcript - Deutsche Telekom (DTE) Q2 2025:

Hannes, Moderator/Host, Deutsche Telekom: Good afternoon, and welcome to Deutsche Telekom’s second quarter twenty twenty five conference call. As you can see, with me today is our CEO, Tim Urtges and our CFO, Christian Ellich. As usual, Tim will first go through his midyear highlights, followed by Christian, who will talk about the quarterly performance and our group financials. After this, we have time for Q and A. Before I hand over to Tim, please pay attention to our usual disclaimer, which you will find in the presentation.

And please also note that this conference will be recorded and uploaded to the Internet. And now it’s my pleasure to hand over to Tim.

Tim Urtges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom: Yes. Thank you, Hannes, and welcome to our first half twenty twenty five results call. We continue to deliver consistent, reliable growth. Amidst the competition and the global tariff turmoil, we remain on course, and we even slightly raised our guidance for 2025. As usual, I will start with the year to date view for the group before Christian will dive into the details of our second quarter results.

Our growth momentum has remained strong and steady. Our flywheel strategy keeps working. In the first six months of twenty twenty five, we delivered 3.7% organic service revenue growth, 5.2% organic EBITDA growth, 17.8% growth in free cash flow and 6.4% growth in adjusted earnings per share. With these results, we are on track for the midterm targets of the last Capital Markets Day. And while there are some incremental headwinds, there are many incremental positives, including upside from M and A, T Mobile spectrum disposals and from fiscal relief on both sides of The Atlantic.

I’m especially happy with our progress on the M and A front. In Europe, we got clearance for the sale of our Romanian mobile business. This win win transaction brings much needed in market consolidation while improving the growth profile for our European segment. In The U. S, we closed the Matronet and the U.

S. Cellular transaction. This comes after the Lumos Fiber joint venture and the two out of home advertising companies, Vista and Bliss. We are now looking forward to the incremental growth that these transactions will bring. T Mobile also sold part of their 3.45 gigahertz spectrum for €2,000,000,000 and agreed to sell our 800 megahertz spectrum in exchange for cash and some valuable 600 megahertz spectrum.

As you can see on the next page, all our segments are contributing to our EBITDA growth. DT ex U. S. Grew by 3.6% year over year. Moving to our Networks, where we continue to extend our leadership.

In the last twelve months, we passed 3,400,000 additional European homes with FTTH. We now reach nearly 22,000,000 homes, of which 11,000,000 here in Germany. In The U. S, we launched T Fiber, enabled by our two new fiber joint ventures. Our mobile network remains leading across the footprint.

Our German network has ranked top European large country network. And UCLAR confirmed T Mobile’s network as the best network in The U. S. Two weeks ago, T Mobile also launched t satellite after a successful beta test. As last year’s Capital Markets Day, we talked a lot about how AI is accelerating our digital transformation.

And last quarter, I showed you various ongoing initiatives. On Page seven, you can see the additional progress we have made as this remains a top priority. Let me pick out a few highlights. Our AI based employee knowledge tool, Ask T, is already used by 30% of all German employees. The tool has now been rolled out in Greece and in other markets.

In the network, our AI based remote monitoring agent is now moving towards implementation. AI created lines of code increased to 10% of the total, And Frag Magenta, our chat and voice bot, is now reflecting 1,600,000 calls already in the first half year. To make this tangible, 1,600,000 deflected calls corresponds to about 133,000 call agent hours. At the Capital Markets Day for DT Ex U. S, we estimated the financial benefits at around €800,000,000 in cost savings by 2027, and we see ourselves well on track for that.

Finally, on the product side, the active base in Magenta Moments has grown to €4,800,000 So our rewards program is highly accepted. We are launching an AI phone across our European footprint. We have partnered with NVIDIA to build Europe’s first industrial AI factory, by the way, starting in the first quarter next year already. Over in The U. S, T Mobile is making very impressive progress with their ambitious digitization plans, too.

As T Mobile highlighted during their results call, the share of upgrades done digitally has increased to about twothree from about half last quarter and virtually zero one year ago. T Mobile’s market leading T Mobile app has more than 75,000,000 installed already. Our customer growth continues on both sides of The Atlantic. In The U. S, we had the strongest second quarter and first half for postpaid customers net additions ever, and we substantially raised the full year guidance.

The second quarter was also a record quarter for postpaid phone customer net additions. And outside of The U. S, our intake remained strong, but we had fewer mobile net adds in Germany caused by a low margin enterprise contract loss. Growth in the German consumer market remained strong also this quarter. Mobile in Germany is good.

Moving on to fixed KPI. Our DTx U. S. Broadband customer growth was positive but slowed due to Germany. Our TV customer growth was also slower, mainly due to the rollover of the tailwind from the Euro24 championships in the prior year.

This is not a headache. Let me put these trends in perspective. As you all know, the German broadband market has slowed and competitive intensity has stepped up in recent quarters. But as before, we remain committed to our strategy, to our successful flywheel of differentiation. We have built the best networks and create a superior customer experience.

In Germany, our mobile network is leading, and we are leading the fiber buildout as well. We are not happy with our German broadband customer losses this quarter, but ALPA growth developed positively, and we do understand fiber monetization is a long game, and we will continue to play the long game here. As you know, we deployed 2,500,000 additional fiber homes passed per annum, and we are committed, increased to do the same number again this year. We are connecting increasing numbers of customers with fiber. As stated at the Capital Markets Day, we intend to double our annual run rate to €1,000,000 by 2027.

In this context, we welcome the recent proposal of the new digital ministry to accelerate fiber deployments, to remove bureaucratic hurdles and to facilitate in house connections in the multidwelling units. To stabilize our performance nearer term, we are stepping up as well. What are we doing? Regional and commercial segmentation. We are doing an MDU push.

We are doing target retention activity, especially in overbuilt areas. And last week, we also announced a hybrid broadband access product that can deliver up to 500 megabits per second. Moving on to ESG. We continue our efforts to contain our energy consumption and emissions in line with our stated targets. Despite rising data consumption, we were able to slightly lower our DTX U.

S. Energy consumption in the first half. In Germany, we conducted various campaigns, including campaigns against hate speech and loneliness and to empower Gen Z in data protection. Let’s now move on to our guidance update on the next page. Our guidance remains based on the last year’s average forecast for the foreign exchange of 1.08.

And as always, it’s the sum of the guidance for DTx U. S. And for T Mobile U. S, adjusted by The U. S.

GAAP IFRS bridge. T Mobile raised its guidance for customers and financial growth on July 23. T Mobile raised both its twenty twenty five EBITDA and free cash flow guidance by €50,000,000 at the midpoint. The new guidance includes the contribution from the recently completed acquisition of Matronet, but not that of U. S.

Cellular yet. We are passing this on in the group guidance today. As the result, we now project group EBITDA of more than €45,000,000,000 and free cash flow of more than €20,000,000,000 for the whole of 2025. All other guidance remains unchanged. Our DT ex U.

S. EBITDA guidance remains €15,000,000,000 but this is now after an unexpected around €50,000,000 one off headwind in Germany that Christian will talk about in a moment. So let me now hand it over to Christian for a deeper dive into the second quarter.

Christian Ellich, CFO, Deutsche Telekom: Yes. Thanks, Tim, and welcome from my side. As you know, let me start with the quarterly segment review and then discuss selected group financials. And as usual, let’s start with The U. S, who have reported excellent results on the July 23.

If we’re taking a look at the T Mobile U. S. Performance in local currency according to U. S. GAAP, you see that the service revenue has increased and accelerated to 6.1% growth, and that was largely driven by a very strong performance in postpaid service revenues, which accelerated to 9.1% on a year on year basis.

That was driven obviously by the strong customer intake, but also due to increases both in ARPA and ARPU. The core EBITDA has grown by 6.4%. And as Tim already mentioned, that was one of the drivers why T Mobile U. S. Has raised its guidance both on EBITDA as well as on free cash flow.

Moving to Page 13, you see the customer intake of T Mobile in the second quarter. You see it was, as Tim already said, record breaking. The postpaid net additions were about €1,700,000,000 This is an increase of €400,000 relative to last year and the best ever quarter in Q2 they faced in their history. Same holds true for the postpaid phone net adds. They increased by 53 ks relative to the last year’s performance to eight thirty ks, again, the best ever quarter for T Mobile U.

S. T Mobile has added 318,000 new postpaid accounts. This is an increase of 6%, and they’ve added five four fifty four new broadband five gs broadband customers, an increase of 12%. So the churn was up by 10 basis points, as you can see, relative to the previous year, and that reflects the rate plan optimizations, but that was clearly overcompensated by the strong customer intake on gross additions. Following these results, T Mobile raised its customer growth guidance.

So for 2025, they expect now in between 6,100,000 to 6,400,000 net additions relative to the old guidance of 5,500,000 to 6,000,000. The guidance for phone net adds were close to €3,000,000 to €3,100,000 And they also predict a customer intake of roughly €100,000 on fiber net adds. Let’s move over to Germany. As you can see, the headline revenues declined in the quarter, and there are two major drivers. The first one, the biggest one is one off revenue, which we got from the sublicensing of the European Championship TV rights.

And the second one is we have to according to a court ruling, we have to change the way how we account for handset revenues if we early prolong contracts, and that is a headwind, which impacts both revenues and EBITDA. The total amount of the impact is around €50,000,000 in the first half. It’s noncash, and it will reverse over the course of the next twenty four months. The total service revenue grew at 1.1% and EBITDA grew at 2%. So let me dwell a little bit on the EBITDA performance.

So on the positive side in the second quarter, you see that we obviously last year, we had to face the one off wage payment on the, what we called, energy support. This obviously is a headwind in the 2025. On the flip side, we have to absorb the 6% wage increase, which we agreed upon last year starting in October 2024. And also, we have to absorb the negative impact on the IFRS customer accounting. So if I’m taking a look to the outlook of the EBITDA due to various phasing effects, but especially due to the wage increase, which we have to embrace in the third quarter, which we didn’t have in the third quarter of last year, and an additional increase of EUR 190 salary increase starting from August 1 onwards, we expect that the EBITDA performance in the third quarter is below the current run rate.

On the flip side, we expect that the fourth quarter is actually above the current run rate. And the reason is the wage impact will largely roll over the 6% wage increase. On top, and we said, I think, in the first quarter as well, we’re facing some meaningful energy cost headwinds due to some increased grid fees but also hedging effects from the year 2022. This will also roll over in the in next year’s financials. Moving over to service revenue.

The total service revenue is has slowed down to 1.1, as I said earlier on. The slowdown in mobile service revenues comes after a stronger than usual quarter in Q1, and we mentioned this in the last call. It should be not surprising to anybody. This quarter’s growth is very similar to the 2024, but we remain absolutely comfortable with our guidance of 2% to 2.5% in the time frame of 2023 to 2027. The growth in fixed service revenues improved slightly sequentially, but is still subdued.

Fixed service revenue trends remain impacted by lower especially telco services. In addition, while positive, broadband and wholesale revenues were sequentially weaker. Looking at the outlook for the remainder of the year, what you see on the chart is we had a very strong Q3 in last year’s performance. And that was followed by weak performance in the fourth quarter, and that was the first quarter where we faced this IT revenue drag, which we’re having over the course of the full year. So if you compare those comp effects, we expect that the fixed service revenues will be, from a growth perspective, been sequentially lower in Q3, but again, higher in Q4, same way as we described the EBITDA.

As you can see on Page 16, while overall service revenues remain subdued, broadband and wholesale access revenues remain in solid growth territory. We said that the main driver for the broadband growth, revenue growth will be value growth. And you see that the ARPU of our retail customer base has increased on a year on year basis by 3.5%, and that’s mainly driven by upselling into higher speeds. And that continues to be the key driver of broadband revenue growth. Moving over to the fixed line KPIs.

So while our monetization remains positively, our customer growth remained in negative territory. In the second quarter, we didn’t perceive any changes in the competitive environment compared to the first quarter. We’re still facing very slow overall market growth. We have ongoing pressure from the altnets or the overbuilders. And we saw a very promotional cable competitor in the second quarter.

We, on our side, had to reduce the promotional value beginning of the second quarter by cutting the discount period from six to three months, and we believe that explains the sequential slowdown in the broadband net adds. As you heard from Tim earlier, we’re playing the long game here and we remain focused on upselling and on fiber. So we’re on track with our homes passed strategy to add another 2,500,000 of fiber homes passed onto the network this year. And we are increasingly connecting more and more fiber customers. Last quarter was 137,000, which is an increase of more than 20%.

As you recall, we intend to double our run rate to 1,000,000 by the ’27. Finally, on TV, what you see is still growth but relatively smaller given some tailwinds last year. We added 23,000 IPTV customers and 40,000 over the top customers. Moving over to mobile. And we’re seeing some elevated competition for quite some time, but still our commercials remain strong.

Our B2C customer intake has actually increased Q over Q between Q1 and Q2, but we lost a sizable, and Tim mentioned it, low margin B2B contract. And that basically explains the sequential slowdown in the second quarter. You see that the data growth is still strong, and we are seeing an unchanged churn rate of 0.8% per month. Moving over to the European segment. The European segment delivered an excellent result in the second quarter.

They’re contributing now 30 consistent organic EBITDA growth. The organic revenue growth was 2.1%. The service revenue growth was actually higher at 2.6%, very comparable between mobile and broadband. The EBITDA growth was strong at 6.3% and the slowdown is actually due to the rollover of inflation driven price increases in some markets. Moving over to the customer growth in the European operations, you see that strong performance.

The mobile customer base has grown by 209,000 in the second quarter. We see a very strong performance across the footprint, but especially in Poland and in Croatia. We also saw strong commercials in all the other categories, being at broadband, FMC or TV. We made also further progress on the digitalization in the European segment. So the air penetration is now at 72%.

And Magenta Moments members have reached 4,700,000, so we’re well on track to meet our 27 targets of the CMD. Moving over to T Systems. T Systems continues to be on a positive track. You see that the order book has increased by almost 12% on the last twelve months. This is driven by the same drivers as you have seen in the last quarters.

It’s cloud, it’s digital solutions and road charging. We’re also seeing increasing interest on digitalization projects and digital sovereignty offerings in the German market. And that led and that leads to strong organic revenue growth of almost 4% in the second quarter. And the organic EBITDA growth is slightly above 8% in the second quarter. So T Systems absolutely on track with its full year guidance, but also with the CMD targets.

So that’s basically it for the operational review. Now let’s have a look at some selected financials. So overall, what you see is, obviously, we had a negative impact relative to the last year when it comes to the dollar, and we’ve seen some phasing impacts, which affect both free cash flow and earnings. So if you take a look at the Page 23, you see that the free cash flow bridge, the free cash flow has decreased by 6.7. This is largely explainable due to two factors: one is the weaker dollar and the other one is negative working capital effects.

We also see an increase relative to Q2 twenty four on CapEx. This is not surprising because it was especially low in the first quarter. And if you combine the two quarters, we’re still on 18% growth on free cash flow. Taking a look at the net profit, it was impacted by a weaker dollar. That accounts roughly for €400,000,000 coming from The U.

S. And we had some positive impacts in the last year’s second quarter results. There was a release of an accrual of the health insurance for public servants. And also, we had a derivative impact, which both accounted for zero four. So if you take a look at the reported figures on EPS, they grew at 6.4 on a year on year basis.

If you basically exclude what we call the nonrecurring effects, the growth is close to 10%, it’s at 9.8%. So finally, net debt. You see that the net debt has decreased relative to the previous quarter in Q1 by €2,700,000,000 This is basically driven by three factors. One is the €4,900,000 effect on free cash flow generation. Then we have ForEx and derivatives effects, which account for more than €5,000,000,000 And we have a net reduction on net debt because of the three, four, five sale of €2,000,000,000 which was offset partially by 600 megahertz and the one off extension for the usage of spectrum fees in Germany.

Obviously, that increasing are the dividend payments both for DT and T Mobile U. S. And the ongoing share buybacks on both sides of The Atlantic. Gets me to my final statement here when it comes to the leverage ratio. The leverage ratio is extraordinarily good in the second quarter with 2.51% including leases and 2.11% excluding leases.

But bear in mind, that will change in the third quarter given that we have closed two deals, which we’re happy with, MetroNet and U. S. Cellular. And obviously, we see an increase in net debt happening in the third quarter. That completes my half year review, and I hand it over to Tim.

Tim Urtges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom: Thank you, Christian. On the final page, a quick reminder of our key messages this quarter and our Capital Markets Day targets of around €2.5 adjusted earnings per share in 2027. Now in this quarter, not everybody might be satisfied about the net adds in broadband Germany and the intense price competition in this market. Most of our competitors are showing shrinking revenues and EBITDA. We show growth, but I’m not happy that these companies are shrinking.

This is not good. But despite this observation, we are delivering as a group a very consistent, reliable growth despite some headwinds here in Germany. We are on track for the full year guidance 2025 and confirm that, including our confirmation for the midterm Capital Markets Day targets. We are extending our network leadership on both sides of The Atlantic. And we have announced, for instance, the gigabit mobile network for Germany, which is now up and running.

We delivered a record customer growth and a guidance upgrade for our U. S. Operations. We have created exciting new growth opportunities throughout our successful M and A transactions, which we have completed. We are making strong progress with AI powered digitization, and we are on track for the resulting efficiency targets.

Our leverage is well within the comfort zone, and we are not directly affected by the tariff changes, and we are a beneficiary of fiscal measures to stimulate investments on both sides of the Atlantic. So overall, good outlook for the future. And with this, I hand it over to Hannes.

Hannes, Moderator/Host, Deutsche Telekom: Okay. Thank you, Tim, and thank you, Christian. Next, we have the Q and A part. I think you know the routines, but if you like to ask a question via Webex, please press the raise hand function. If you’re required to cancel your question, please press the raise hand again.

You. And as usual, we would be grateful if you could restrict yourself to two questions. And keep in mind, you must mute and unmute yourself. So let’s start. The first question, I think, is from is it James Ratzer?

James Ratzer, Analyst: Yes, thank you. Can you hear me?

Hannes, Moderator/Host, Deutsche Telekom: Yes, we can.

James Ratzer, Analyst: Great, thank you. Yes, so I’ve had two questions please. So firstly, I mean, I think we’ll see a lot of focus on the German broadband net adds trend. So it’d be keen to drill in a bit more on the comments you mentioned around an MDU push and on a retention focus in the overbuilt areas. So if I think about your H2 trends, should we read from this that you’re planning to be a bit more price competitive and that broadband net adds can recover?

Or do you still expect kind of losses to continue in the second half? And then the second question I had was I’d just love to learn a little bit more about the deal you signed with NVIDIA, and in particular, some of the kind of financial impacts around that. Is is this going to be an off balance sheet deal? I mean, how much will Deutsche Telekom be investing in this project? And can you help us to think about how to quantify the revenue upside from this deal over the longer term?

Thank you.

Christian Ellich, CFO, Deutsche Telekom: James, let me start with the broadband expectation for the second half of the year. You heard Tim saying that we are focusing on an MDU push that we have selective retention measures because churn has come up and that we’re also trying to go for regional pricing aspect. Since we are basically calibrating around the zero line from negative 7% in the first quarter and negative 20% in the third quarter, I think we’re still in the value game. And are trying to stabilize the business and doing our best to actually push for an ARPU growth. You’ve seen that we have some promising results in the retail space on ARPU growth.

Whether it’s going to be positive, whether it’s going to be slightly negative, I think it’s hard to predict. So I would say stabilization is the right word for the second half.

Tim Urtges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom: There’s another discussion which I’d like to add, Christian, which is the initiatives from the Minister of Digitization that they will ease in with a new policy, the access to the Nets Ebene four, so the in house cabling. And our strong position is on this one. The one who is building it is giving access to this network to all players. So once you build it, everybody can access it. And the one who is first is the one who is owning it than rather having overbuilt in the last mile here.

So there is a political consultation going on now with the Bundes Netsargent tour, and our position is very clear. This would definitely help that we have a kind of unprotected access for our services in every MDU as well. So this is the regulatory framework, which is helping us hopefully to get more lines into MDUs. Your second question. Look, Deutsche Telekom is already invested through our venture capital arm, DTCP, in data centers.

And by the way, we own them. It’s not that we have only minority shareholdings here. Mindcubes and Greenscales are two data center providers who have infrastructure. On top of that, Deutsche Telekommanity System is running data centers on its own. We are now thinking about how we can bundle these activities going forward.

And we see an unbelievable high pull from governmental and from industrial services for sovereign cloud architecture here. So how is the investment now looking? Our part is going to be to invest into the infrastructure, data center infrastructure, And we have opportunities to double down on them where we have allowances already in a very short time window. On top of that, we have NVIDIA with their GPU commitment, 10,000 graphic cards, which they are providing to our partnership here. This is an investment coming from their angle.

Interesting wise, the so called AI Gigafactory, which is the big European initiative, This is something where an Europe wide RFQ is in place. But we don’t want to wait until this is provided or accomplished. We’re going to start in the first quarter next year by deploying the NVIDIA ships already in data center infrastructure so that the first customers can use and test these capabilities so that we are before the wave in this regard. And this is a participation then from NVIDIA and us in existing infrastructure, which is already available and fitting to the GPU requirements. The most likely scenario, by the way, for the AI gigabit factory is an off balance sheet investment.

Hannes, Moderator/Host, Deutsche Telekom: Okay. Thanks, Tim. Thanks, Christian. And with that, we move on to Robert at Deutsche Bank. Please.

Robert, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Yes. Thank you for the questions. I wonder if you don’t mind taking yourselves back a couple of months. The whole section U. S.

Eight ninety nine tax thing, but then a major cash tax positive from bonus depreciation. M and A approvals have been received, but the expense of at least headline DEI objectives. Tim, you’ve always been a great fan of The U. S. Has your view changed at all from any of this?

And secondly, I heard Christian on leverage moving up in Q3 versus the low levels of Q2, but note The U. S. M and A and more was in the balance sheet guidance. One year almost since the CMD, are you getting closer to deploying any of that more than €15,000,000,000 of balance sheet firepower or still a bit early to be thinking about that? Thank you.

Christian Ellich, CFO, Deutsche Telekom: First of all, Robert, let me comment on both sides of The Atlantic. First of all, we highly appreciate what has happened in The U. S, especially the bonus depreciation, which gives us a lot of cash tax relief. And you heard Peter talking about the €1,500,000,000 which they’re going to expect in 2026. Internally, we have been always skeptical that the retaliation tax, as we call it, The U.

S. Eight ninety nine would actually come into effect because we don’t see a lot of support for the digital service tax here in the European environment. So we’re seeing benefits on this one. But I think we should also bear in mind that we have cash benefits in the German environment because we have the accelerated depreciation of 30% in the German environment, and we have the corporate income tax reduction starting from ’28 onwards by one percentage every year. Let me dwell on the accelerated depreciation.

There’s a second factor to this. So the total effect, which we expect in between 2026 and 2028 is roughly €500,000,000 And the reason being is that you can only deduct or depreciate 3x of the linear depreciation value. So if you have infrastructure, which is depreciated over twenty or thirty years, obviously, you cannot depreciate 30% in a given year. It’s only 15% or 10%. But still, the benefit is over the course of 26,000,000,000 to 28,000,000,000 roughly 28,000,000,000 On leverage, look, my expectation is that we will end the year very close to the target we’ve given ourselves.

Obviously, there’s a lot of wiggle room, especially the dollar, which was a great support when it comes to leverage in the second quarter. And that does include the let’s say, the two acquisitions of Metronet and UC. But how we basically will deal with the €15,000,000,000 is still too early to tell because we have to take a look what’s needed in order to support the business midterm. So if we have something which we can call out, we will do it, but I don’t want to speculate on this one.

Hannes, Moderator/Host, Deutsche Telekom: Okay. So with that, thanks, Robert. We move on to Akhil at JPMorgan, please.

Akhil, Analyst, JPMorgan: Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions as well. I’ve got two. Firstly, if I could go back to the comments around the German broadband market and maybe if I can ask this a little bit differently. If

Tim Urtges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom: we look at

Akhil, Analyst, JPMorgan: the top four operators across the market, so your sales Vodafone, Telefonica and one on one, aggregated you lost about 100,000 customers in broadband this quarter, which is quite a step change from the prior quarter. So it feels like something’s changed amongst the market. So obviously, yes, competition, but even aggregated, you’ve lost a much higher number of customers than before. So given the work you’re doing looking at segmentation, can you maybe help us understand what you think that is? Is that purely alt nets?

Or is it something else? And if it’s alt nets, is there some color you can give us on exactly what’s going in the mix so we can better understand that and better gauge how we should think about it going forward? And then the second one is a much bigger picture question on The U. S. Tim, you mentioned the Lumis and Metronet deals that have now closed, which is obviously nice to see.

Over the interim period, we’ve obviously seen your U. S. Peers also scale up their ambitions in The U. S. Fiber market.

So in that context, I’d love to understand how you think about the opportunity for growth there. Do you think there is an opportunity to grow bigger? And if there is, can you really do that organically? Or do you still think or do you think there could be an opportunity for more M and A? Look,

Tim Urtges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom: Achir, thank you for the question. Look, the broadband market in Germany is largely saturated and the overall growth is very slow. In this environment, we are seeing the impact of overbuilders, which is no longer overcompensated from our sites by wins which we gained from Vodafone churn. Vodafone is very aggressive on pricing to keep their customers in their loop. I even don’t understand how they can afford this subsidization, which they’re doing on Check 24, for instance.

Have a look on this one. But they’re trying to do everything to keep that churn low. Now therefore, the market is so slow that we are not able to overcompensate the churn which we are seeing on the altnets. The altnets themselves are not focusing on homes passed anymore. They are very much focusing on homes connected in this environment.

So their build out rate has slowed down, but their efforts to make promotional offers for Homes Connected has gone up. In this environment, we were trying to focus on value, and we have reduced our promos at the beginning of the year. For instance, we went from six months to three months on the discounts. And this is one of the reasons why how we can explain the sequential slowdown, which we had in this quarter. So we are staying, and we said that again, we want to focus on the value of this industry because it doesn’t make sense on the one side to build very costly expensive fiber infrastructure.

And you are aware that our fiber infrastructure is in Germany is much or more expensive than it is in other markets. And we want to keep the ARPA on a level which is amortizing this infrastructure. Nevertheless, we see that some players are focused on contribution to margin in this environment. Now do I like it? No.

Do I hope that even the other players do their economics well? Yes, I hope, but I can’t speak from them. But what we want to do is we stay on our focus on building the infrastructure, euros 2,500,000.0 annually. We are focusing on, let’s say, bringing the customers into the fiber infrastructure by 1,000,000 in 2027 and zero five million last year. And that’s what we’re to do is to trying to focus as well to grow the ARPA in this environment, which is a little bit, let’s say, possible on Ritz A.

So it’s a long term value play, which we are trying to fight. But what you can see is this is not at least supporting the volume growth at that point in time. So we have to make a watch out. We see where the market is going. But you see the consequence of our value strategy, at least in this quarter, and we will observe the situation going forward.

I can do The U. S. Market, sorry, Wieber. Look, as we said before, we don’t look at fixed wireless convergence as an end in itself, but as one of our numbers of way to increase customer attachment. That said, let’s say, we like the broadband space, which is a combination of fixed wireless access, which continues to be a fellow capacity business as well as investing in fiber, where we like the economics and where we are just getting started.

And by the way, the economics of the fiber market in The U. S. Is much more attractive than in most of the European markets. And with Lumos and Matronet approvals, we have now a much stronger basis to prove the success here. We are already a scale player in broadband, looking at our more than 7,000,000 existing fixed wireless access customers and our 12,000,000 target by twenty twenty three thirty.

And we have even fellow capacity, which is helping us to extend it to more homes, about half of The U. S. Homes where we’re going to deploy fixed wireless access or high speed Internet, as we call it. Plus, we extend to get to 12,000,000 to 15,000,000 homes passed with our Loomis and MetroNet activities. So I would say we have a good hand.

We are very clean in the way how we’re doing. We are an alt net in a kind of way in The U. S. Market. And we remain open for clean incremental fiber opportunities in The U.

S. Market. But they have to be right. And they have to fit from an economic perspective. They have to fit into our footprint, and they have to come at the right price.

So we are not somewhat under super pressure here. We keep on going in this direction, and we have built the foundation.

Hannes, Moderator/Host, Deutsche Telekom: Great. With that, we move on to Josh Mills at Exane BNP Paribas, please.

Josh Mills, Analyst, Exane BNP Paribas: Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Hopefully, you can hear me. Two for me, and one of them would be on the broadband trends in Germany again. I’d just like to pick up on Tim’s comment there about the German broadband market being saturated.

And I’d be interested to know whether you’re seeing any increase in overall broadband demand penetration in the areas that you’re rolling out fiber to the home to, I. E, could this be a tool to grow the size of the overall market and perhaps offer a release valve for some of the competitive intensity in the market we’re seeing today if everybody can grow? Or do you see that in areas where you roll out fiber, there isn’t really much of an impact on overall broadband demand? And then secondly, on the AI investments that you flagged earlier in the presentation, you’re one of the few, if not the only European telcos with the scale and the free cash flow today to seriously participate in these kind of AI investments. I’d be interested to hear whether you’ll be in conversations with other European telcos and how you can partner with them, offer them your services or perhaps just sell them some of your services directly and if there’s that option in the future as well?

Tim Urtges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom: Good questions. By the way, to the first one. Look, we are differentiating between broadband and fiber to the home. And I can tell you one thing, I’m happy with the take up rates on FTTH, guys. We had one thirty hundred seven thousand net adds on the FTTH side in the German markets, And people like the product, like the service, could be better, but we see a constant higher demand for fiber.

So therefore, where we deploy it, we find ways even to sell it to our customer base. Is this already satisfying? No. We have to we want to do more, and we want to utilize our factory in a better way, but we are on a good track in this regard. The numbers not being able to overcompensate the classical line losses, and they are mainly driven by altnets.

These are areas where we haven’t built out where the altnets are building their fiber infrastructure. So answer, FTTH is the answer going forward. Second question, AI investments. And I can tell you, for me, for the company, AI is going to be the game changer for the whole company. And I’m thinking about how is this company looking in ten years driven by AI by agent and even by super intelligences at one point in time, which is an and the agent models are already being used in our companies.

I talked about one example earlier, which is in the network. The cyber and the anomaly detection in our network is handed by AI and the agent is already taking actions to fix things in a much faster than humans can do. We still have a human interface in between because we do not want to hand over these activities already to a machine. But prospectively, we’re going to, let’s say, change entirely the setup for the network architecture and the network handling going forward. One example.

I see huge benefits on the customer service and the sales organization. To be honest, it’s not about only about efficiency. It is as well about, let’s say, the personalization of services. To be honest, I’m very happy what these guys are doing. And the cost savings which we are seeing are in the 30s.

I see super big impact coming with regard to contextual marketing. Bundling the data of our company with data from the outside and the social medias and other sources, which gives us more opportunities for better tailored offers. And I can go on and on. We recently saw the first models where we are using AI agents for internal service like internal audit, where the agents are already trying to find anomalies with regard to compliance supervision and other things. So there are a lot of good examples.

It will change every process in this company. Every product, every process has to apply AI. And that is, let’s say, the discussion we’re having. Now we have to cross the river by feeling the stones. This is definitely the way going forward.

But there will be audacious targets, which we should define for our organization that they understand where we are aiming for. And that is the discussion which I have with my fellow broad colleagues here right now. And to be honest, I believe there’s much more opportunity in the organization with regard to efficiency and other targets than what we have laid out yet. But to be honest, I don’t want to commit to something I don’t know yet. But I’m and we are very excited about the opportunity here.

Christian Ellich, CFO, Deutsche Telekom: Can I chime in on the broadband? Just quickly, Josh, I would say the growth is coming onethree from volume. So if you assume there’s 200,000 to two and fifty thousand of volume growth in the German market and twothree have to come from Opera, given the size of broadband customers which we have, that is kind of the rule of thumb how I would envision the growth in the broadband market.

Hannes, Moderator/Host, Deutsche Telekom: Great. Okay. Next, we have Polo at UBS, please.

Polo, Analyst, UBS: Hi. Thanks for taking the questions. I have two. The first one is just about the €500,000,000,000 German infrastructure fund. So what do you think the impact will be in terms of the German market?

And could Deutsche Telekom be a beneficiary? Second question is really just a follow-up in terms of the EU Gigafactory opportunity. You mentioned how it could be an off balance sheet venture. But could you clarify what role Deutsche Telekom would have? And what is the business model for Deutsche Telekom?

Thanks.

Tim Urtges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom: Look, the €500,000,000,000 German infrastructure fund is a big opportunity for Deutsche Telekom. And by the way, you see that already. If you look to systems and their double digit growth on the digitization efforts, you see that there’s an increased demand from public spendings into this direction. Germany has to digitize, and money is going into this directions. And we have multiple opportunities, which we consider in this regard.

On top of that, infrastructure is always I don’t see that there is additional funding going into subsidization for fiber. At least the market is already hot. The construction capabilities are limited. So if you put a lot of money on top of that, you would only increase the prices, but you will not increase the output of it. So therefore, this is a tricky undertaking.

So we are not lobbying for getting significantly higher subsidization for the fiber buildout. We are looking more for infrastructure support on the data center side and on the gigabit side in this regard. Now I was with the Translar and others. There has been this huge $630,000,000,000 investment commitment from German industries into Germany for the future. Yes, a lot of that is already existing or committed CapEx, but there is additional CapEx as well on this one.

And for every infrastructure which has been built, you need connectivity, you need data centers, you need software. And therefore, we see from the political side and from the business side, we see upside on the German market on the software and the digitization perspective. And then we have these areas of health and on defense, where we see additional money going into as well. I just had a discussion with the an hour ago with the CEO of Reinmetall, who is and we discussed as well about opportunities here. So to me, without being now in the position to say, okay, there’s EUR 50,000,000 going in this one and this one, there must be something in for the German telecommunication providers for the companies who are providing software.

And on top of that, I can tell you, after all these tariff discussions, you know there is a shock in Europe with regard to sovereignty, a huge pull on the sovereignty discussion. All data centers are all fully deployed. You know that from other companies you are covering, there is no capacity in the market there. And that is what we are using these days, expanding our capacity on the data center side, which brings me to your second question. And you should always differentiate.

We have a two step approach. The first step approach is now the approach of filling data centers with GPUs that the companies can already test it and governmental services. So we are not waiting until the so called Gigafactory opportunity is decided. To be honest, I don’t like the word Gigafactory too much because it will not be that somebody is building a Gigafactory. It will come with the utilization.

It will come on demand. So it might grow into a gigabit factory, but it will not be that all the investments will be put into the countryside and then we’re waiting for customers. It will grow into this gigabit factory over time. And we have applied for that. Our concept today is that we have a partnership with the state of Northam Westphalia.

That is where we are where our headquarters is sitting. We are trying to partner as well with RWE, not final decided on sites, former coal sites or nuclear power plant sites, where we have water and power supply and access to things where approvals have been given in the past where we can implement the data center infrastructure. And on top of that, without saying too much here, we have a partnership with Brookfield, a very successful one, as you know, which is our tower company. And these guys are very, very committed and interested to build this gigabit factory with us so that we have a very strong partner on the co investment side. So we have a strong a very strong group of people together.

There is competition, no question about it. But at least we have a way forward. And we have already a nucleus with MindCubes and Greenscale and with experience in the group, which we can use now for the planning and the deployment of it.

Hannes, Moderator/Host, Deutsche Telekom: Okay, great. So now we move on to Karl at Citi, please.

Karl, Analyst, Citi: That’s great. Thanks very much, Anders. Two questions from me, please. Firstly, slightly just following up on Polo’s, but from a more short term basis, I suppose. You’re talking about the large scale kind of public sector opportunities.

But for the last few quarters, we’ve obviously seen IT business phasing kind of drag. So any forward visibility on timing of return of government spend, but more kind of in the next few quarters rather than the longer term opportunity. And secondly, just on the customer contracts IFRS 15 adjustments, I wanted to ask when was the court ruling made in relation to the customer contract accounting one off? And when did you understand the extent of the impact it would have on revenue and EBITDA? I guess I’m trying to understand why the bulk of the impact is in this quarter and whether it might have been possible to signpost the issue ahead of today.

Thank you.

Christian Ellich, CFO, Deutsche Telekom: Let me start on the IT situation. So first of all, we’re seeing stronger demand for IT project relative to telco projects. And that naturally supports T Systems more than it does support the German segment. Second one is, I think this to a large degree, the budget for this year hasn’t been signed. And therefore, the I would say, the projects were hold back.

What we’re seeing right now is the fastest demand is coming from federal and has to trickle down into the federal state budgets, and that will take some time. So this is why T Systems is, since they’re focusing on the very large customers, is more in favor of grabbing that opportunity at least sooner than the German business is doing. And this is why we see this different, let’s say, speeds between T Systems and the German business when it comes to the IT space. The second question on IFRS accounting. Do you have the number?

Hannes, Moderator/Host, Deutsche Telekom: Yes. Well, this was a ruling that was actually a court ruling in against a competitor of ours, Vodafone. It we had to evaluate this decision and also take a view on when we would adjust our contracts because that’s something that takes time. Now I would also say, while it is a headline hit to EBITDA this quarter, as we have clearly communicated, is noncash. It will come back.

So therefore, we did not feel it was, let’s say, big enough to create this, let’s say, potentially unusual levels of disclosure. Okay. With that, we go on to Otavio at Bernstein.

Otavio, Analyst, Bernstein: Hi, good afternoon and thank you for taking a couple of questions. The first one is going back on the German broadband. During the call, almost used alternates and overbuilders as synonym. But my question is, how big is the real the overbuild between you and the alternates in Germany? In The UK, it’s relatively lower than 10%.

So I was wondering what’s the rate in Germany. And and also you mentioned that expect the run rate on connection to reach 1,000,000 all around 2,027. So the question is there, it’s all due to the fact that you’re running a point to multipoint, and that’s difficult for you to build a drop into the MDUs, or there is also a issue with month. The second one is for it’s pretty straightforward. It’s for Christian and this on the guidance provided for the progression on EBITDA growth for the rest of the year.

You mentioned about the third quarter that will be impact by a number of issues, but then you guided for full quarter to go back to the run rate. So my question is, what’s the run rate? Is the one we’ve seen in H1, the ruble in around two percent? Or is the run rate is what you guided for the midterms between 2.53%?

Tim Urtges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom: Yes. Look, the first thing is you’re totally right. We have to differentiate between alt nets and overbuilders. And to give you a quick answer, the amount of overbuild is very, very small. It is a single digit number.

That is, let’s say, where we are in Germany. And by the way, it’s not my number. It’s the public stated number from the Bundes Netsagerntour, which was recently published. And the Bundes Netsagerntour stated as well that there is no problem with overbuilding in Germany so that they have to interfere or regulate something. This is now public.

And by the way, I think this is totally correct and is reflecting as well how we are looking on the markets. Now there are, due to the size of this country, areas where Deutsche is not building. We always have customers in every kind of village of this country, but there are areas where we are not building. This is a market where the altnets are mainly gaining their customer growth today. Due to the fact that they are going away from homes passed to very much homes connected, they are now very much pushing to migrate our customers onto their fiber infrastructures.

On top of that, the estimation of Buglas and some other Breco and other institutes where that the growth of the whole market is slowing down as well, including the fiber buildout. I said I told you about the numbers in my speech. We are trying to partner in all the regions with all, let’s say, regional players where these ordinates are being built, being at EVITEL, being at Villehamtel, being at MNET, being at Netcolon, being at all these players to partner with these alternative networks that our customers can use the telecom services based on a dark fiber access, which we gain from this get from this local players. So this is working nicely. We have more than 43 partnerships already today.

Some of them don’t want dark fiber. But in these areas, we might then consider to overbuild. But that is only a fraction of where we are seeing. So we are trying to optimize the CapEx spend in our footprint and concentrating on the areas where nobody is building today. So this is a little bit.

The problem which we have for the broadband, and I want to reiterate that, is the migration from copper or cable, by the way, cable is copper as well, into fiber should get should increase. It has to be higher. The run rate is still too slow. We have to fill the fiber pipes. And then over time, we will grow our net adds then as well again.

Christian Ellich, CFO, Deutsche Telekom: Okay. So Otavio, to your second question, if I’m talking about run rate, I’m talking about the 2%, which you have seen in the first half. And therefore, it’s since there’s a structural benefit, since the wage share agreement is rolling over, there’s a structural benefit in Q4, and this is why we’re saying above. Don’t nail me to the table whether it’s going to be 2.5, 2.2 or 2.7 because I think this is I’m clearly not in the position to predict this, but we expect something which is above 2% for the fourth quarter. Okay.

Hannes, Moderator/Host, Deutsche Telekom: Thanks, Chris, and thanks, Tim. With that, we move on to Steve at Redburn, please.

Tim Urtges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom0: Yes. Thanks, Anders. Thanks for taking the questions. Just a couple, please. Just first on tax, and apologies, Christian, I didn’t follow all the very useful information that you gave on tax about half an hour ago.

Just Timis has obviously given a fairly clear steer what the impact of bonus depreciation will be on them. Can you just clarify back at the Capital Markets Day, think you said there’d be a half a billion euro drag on the ex Timus cash flows between ’23 and ’27 in your guidance. Is that still the case or is that improved given the changes we’ve seen with German tax legislation? And then just on your T Mobile stake, Tim,

Christian Ellich, CFO, Deutsche Telekom: I think

Tim Urtges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom0: you gave a fairly clear steer as well that CMD last year, wanted to get your stake up into kind of mid high fifties. We’ve seen SoftBank selling overnight another 3,000,000 another 3%, sorry, or so. Sorry, 30,000,000 shares, get my math right. Maybe just update us on your sort of thoughts on the the the your the trajectory of your stake in Timus and maybe why you weren’t interested in buying that stake and how we think about, you know, the moving parts of the Timus shareholding going forward, that would be very helpful. Thanks.

Christian Ellich, CFO, Deutsche Telekom: So let me repeat on the tax equation. So we have basically two tax benefits, which affect the free cash flow. The one is the accelerated depreciation, which is you can depreciate up to 30% in the first year. If it’s and it’s limited to 3x the linear depreciation in Germany. So that effect and then you have corporate income benefits, which are starting in 2028.

So you only see the first effect of corporate income tax in the at the 2028, which is a little one. If you add them all up, it’s roughly €500,000,000 close to €500,000,000 free cash flow benefit. But we haven’t discussed how we’re going to use that benefit. So that is a structural improvement relative to what we discussed at the CMD.

Hannes, Moderator/Host, Deutsche Telekom: Okay. On the T Mobile On

Tim Urtges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom: the T Mobile stake, look, from our shareholding, we are on the right trajectory. You saw the 52% where we are today. To be honest, nothing new with regards to the SoftBank sale here. We were very transparent on that one that we know that they are going to reduce their shareholding within the company because you know, Massasan and SoftBank Group is now aiming for this big investment in the Gigafactories in The U. S.

And on Stargate and the like, and their investments probably as well in OpenAI. So therefore, we were aware with it then. Most of their shares were anyhow delta hedged. So therefore, we knew that they would not have the greater use overhang. I see a positive impact from that, guys, because the free float is going up, and that is something which is Which is, sorry?

It’s DT. Yes. So therefore, we see a benefit coming from that SoftBank is selling their shares in DT and as well in their U. S. For Total Tier.

So on that one, to be honest, I was a little bit unhappy that we got this announcement on Bloomberg this morning because this has created some uncertainty around it. But for us, this was nothing new. I have to excuse for this coincidence on the announcement here. But for us, the development is nothing new. It’s nothing where we see a downside.

I even see for the DT shares an upside due to the higher free cash flow, we’re going to see on our stock here.

Hannes, Moderator/Host, Deutsche Telekom: And Steve, to your question, why did we not pick up shares from SoftBank? We are as you know, we are currently acting as a seller in the market, and therefore, being a seller and a buyer at the same time would be inappropriate, let’s say, that way. So because we have the ongoing program. So with that, we move on to Paul Sidney at Berenberg, please.

Tim Urtges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom1: Yes. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for taking the questions. I just had two on the German market. If we take a step back and look at the your your German business as a whole, that there’s so many subscriber KPIs that we obsess about every quarter.

You obviously disclosed very detailed granular revenue, service revenue growth trends, give profitability metrics and ultimately free cash flow on a quarterly basis. But I just wondered internally, how will you judge and monitor the success of the German business both in short term and the long term? And then just secondly, a very general question about the potential for consolidation in the German market. I fully appreciate that mega consolidation among the listed operators may be difficult, but there’s obviously a lot of private companies out there, infrastructure, etcetera. I just wondered if you see any prospects for any future consolidation to improve the value creation potential of the German market.

Thank you.

Christian Ellich, CFO, Deutsche Telekom: Okay. So on the on your question short and long term, I think the crucial metric on the broadband side is how many fiber net adds do you have? How many new customers are you adding to your network? Because that shows the momentum. And this is why we have given ourselves an ambitious target to have 1,000,000 by the year ’twenty seven.

And on mobile, I think it’s clearly whether we’re gaining market share, which we’re continuously doing, and we’re doing this over the volume strategy. You see that our performance has been consistently two fifty to three hundred despite the last quarter because of this large corporate account, but we expect this to work out fine. What I said earlier on, especially in the retail consumer market, we’ve seen a pickup of the net adds in the second quarter relative to the first quarter. This is due to Next Magenta four point zero. So this is a product which has picked up very nicely in the market.

So that would be my two KPIs. But I hand it over to Tim. He’s probably more creative than I am in adding some additional ones.

Tim Urtges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom: No, no. You are very creative. So therefore, the first one, by the way, for me, the most important on the German business is that our customer base is very happy and we have the highest Net Promoter Score. And that we have a stable base. And we develop our customers into the next generation with new services and the like, mobile, fixed line, convergence, TV and other services that they are staying with us forever.

It’s a relation for life. And that is something what we want. We have a great customer base, and that is where even our value sits. The second thing, as Christian said, is the fiber deployment and, let’s say, the monetization of these investments. And I can tell you one thing.

If this market is only looking on contribution to margin, nobody will be able to afford the investments which are needed to build the fiber infrastructure. And I can tell you we are not sleeping on our tree. We do our math. We have our business case. We have our net present value.

We have a clear understanding about, let’s say, the costs and the cost for the deployment. And I would expect that investors in the altnets or investors at Vodafone into the densification of the network, they do the same math. So it is our duty. It is our duty for all players that we are bringing up the value of this market. Otherwise, we would all end with headaches.

And that is what we are trying to do by increasing the ARPA, by increasing prices. That is by doing our homeworks on trying massively to reduce the deployment cost for the home sparse infrastructure. This is why we make the recommendation that we only build the last mile once than rather building it multifold, which is only creating cost. I’m trying to optimize the value of this infrastructure, which is heavily challenged in this environment. In And on top of that, we are lobbying intensively, and we have great support from the Minister of Digital Services here in Germany with regard to reducing bureaucracy, reducing the approval cost and the like that the whole ecosystem is coming into a fruitful development.

I’m not happy, to be very clear, I’m not happy to see the numbers of shrinking EBITDA and shrinking service revenues of Vodafone, Telefonica, Eins and Eins today. This is not healthy for no one. So therefore, we all have the duty on this one, and I see even duty on my side. And therefore, let’s focus on differentiation, let’s focus on quality, let’s focus on the service proposition and our brand. This is, let’s say, our value play, which we are trying to play here.

But I can tell you, in this environment, it’s not an easy one at that point in time. And I understand the headaches which some of the investors had today. I have the same one. But nevertheless, this is the duty which we have as investors.

Hannes, Moderator/Host, Deutsche Telekom: Okay. Yes. There was the question whether there’s scope for consolidation to improve the market. And I guess, Paul, you were not referring to mobile market consolidation here, but more referring to potential fixed line market consolidation. Now German fixed line market is very fragmented.

There’s many small players out there that, in principle, are probably unsustainable, but at the same time, that doesn’t make consolidation or relevant consolidation easy to do. And there are some, of course, early steps towards consolidation in the industry. We are also happy to explore certain forms of collaboration, mainly with focus on passive infrastructure. And we are open minded. The German antitrust regime, however, is quite restrictive.

So we would need to be creative and or have some openings there. And of course, it’s not our obligation or job to bail out failing overbuilders.

Tim Urtges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom: Again, good question. Look, I’d like to add, if there is an opportunity at reasonable prices, Christian and myself, we are willing to test the water in this regard to see whether the political environment is reflecting the situation of too many players in one pont here and whether this is helping the economics of the whole industry. So we are willing to test it, but there’s no opportunity at that point in time.

Hannes, Moderator/Host, Deutsche Telekom: Good. And I think my understanding last question for this call is from David at Bank of America. David?

Tim Urtges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom2: Thank you so much, guys. A couple of questions. Christian, I hope you don’t mind. I’m gonna push you a little bit more on, I believe it was Robert’s question, on the balance sheet. You know, you have had unexpected fiscal benefits this year from the bonus tax depreciation in The US and also some optimism, I think, in Germany.

You have now switched to full participation in The US buyback. You’ve committed €2,000,000,000 of buyback until this year end, but nothing thereafter, and we are expecting you to probably update on your dividend alongside the q threes. Why would you not why would you not extend the buyback? And I also refer to a share price at €30 right now, which I’m sure isn’t the level you guys would like to go on holiday with. And then if you don’t mind, a second question, and I’m sorry about this, German broadband.

But and and and I’m very hesitant to say this given your recent comments, Tim, about BT as an investment, but it does sound an awful lot like BT. We have a lot of alt nets. We have increasing line loss. The alt nets focusing on connectivity instead of build, and it’s starting to impact the market. Now one of the remedies that BT took was to accelerate their fiber build.

Now a lot of these pressures have manifested since you set your fiber target at the CMD of two and a half million lines. What is the potential that you guys have to raise that target, build faster, and slow the line loss? So the two questions. Thank you, gentlemen.

Christian Ellich, CFO, Deutsche Telekom: Okay. So first of all, on the balance sheet. Look, we have been very transparent around the €500,000,000 over the course of the three years, and the peak is actually in ’27. And to be honest, the answer to that is we haven’t discussed it how we’re going to use the proceeds. But as I said to James, it’s a structural benefit relative to our October communication.

In The U. S, I can only basically repeat what Peter was indicating as a potential that they were going for faster integration of EUSELLADA, which obviously brings in faster run rate synergies. So they have something at least they can discuss, but I’m not sure whether they’ve taken that final discussion. On the share buyback, on the prolongation, David, I think it’s premature to discuss it right now. You know we have kind of a rhythm, and the rhythm is Q3, where we usually talk about the dividend expectation for next year and or let me communicate it in a very vague form, a potential additional share buyback, which we haven’t decided yet.

But I think I would wait until we have the November call, and then you should expect an answer from us how we want to proceed with the DT share buyback going forward and the dividend.

Tim Urtges, CEO, Deutsche Telekom: I like comparison with BT. So that is hopefully waking up everybody here in my organization. So therefore so with this comment, I leave it. So I can only lose by commenting something on this one. But to be honest, look, we are thinking all paths.

And we have all hands on deck on the question about how can we generate the value play here on this side. Now there’s one observation. I believe that the altnets, they are in a late blossom at that point in time because it’s not about only homes connected and utilizing the infrastructure they have. They even have to grab new land, and they have to even build more. What we see and what we hear, this is not taking place because investors are willing to invest even or double down in this business model with these guys because they see that independent from the net adds, the economics of this market is not working.

So therefore, I’m not so afraid about the future and the way forward. I have to tackle now with my short term challenges here and with the Homes connected. But I do not see that the altnets or others are doubling down and suddenly making more. It is more than net adds. It’s just the economics of the whole business case, which is very challenged in this environment if the ARPUs are not going up.

The second thing is in this environment, we won’t stop. So we go for the €2,500,000 And to be honest, we do not want to increase construction costs and all of this at that point in time. It’s already very complex to build 2,500,000 households at that point in time. So we do not have now plans nor capacity to double down. So this is just the reality.

Maybe that might be relaxed over time, but at that point, it’s not possible. The third one is we are intensively discussing new partnerships in Germany. And I can promise you this quarter, you will see a big partnership coming. I cannot talk about that one today, but we have already handshaked on something here. So that we are not trying, let’s say, to build the capacity always with our own, to find new partners who are offering their capacities to us so that our telecom signal, as we always call it, that this is, let’s say, going to a bigger footprint as well.

So this is helping the market as well, the utilization of the existing infrastructure. So partnerships is another model going forward. And I can tell you, I do not want to heat up the market with my customers, so we will do everything that the audience are not eating my cake. And that is why we launched the unbreakable proposition of 500 megabit per second. It might be an interim technology, but I can tell you it will be a convincing one.

The most of the customers I’m meeting in these areas, they’re telling me one thing. I’m with telecom forever. We like telecom very much. Great service. I don’t want to go away from you guys.

If you have an alternative, we would always stay with you guys. So I have to build a bridge for these customers. And the new proposition with Unbreakable is definitely an answer on this one. And that is a much more reasonable one than now in this difficult economic environment double down on the investments.

Hannes, Moderator/Host, Deutsche Telekom: Okay. As I mentioned, David, I think your questions were the last one. Thank you very much. Ending on a high. Okay.

So and that brings our conference call to an end. And we’d like to thank you as always for participating and your good questions. And should you still have further questions, we kindly ask you to contact the Investor Relations department and look forward to talk to you again soon. Goodbye.

Christian Ellich, CFO, Deutsche Telekom: Thank you.

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