Proximus : financial results – First quarter 2021

'We kept a strong pace in executing our #inspire2022 strategy: fastmoving on our Fiber rollout, keeping up a good commercial performance while managing the transformation in our Enterprise segment.

It's been over a year since the first lock-down measures were introduced in Belgium, and I'm very proud that Proximus has managed to contribute and play an important role in the Belgian society through each step of this difficult journey. While we are still continuing our targeted Covid-19 easing initiatives towards customers and society, during this quarter, we specifically focused on the set up of an effective vaccination campaign. At Proximus, we had the privilege to be on the front line, providing the vaccination centers with connectivity, IT support, as well as advanced IoT solutions to monitor the temperature of the vaccines. With the vaccination campaign steadily accelerating, we are now looking forward to a gradual return to a new normal.

Looking back on the first quarter, we continue to see strong commercial traction for our products and services. In a highly competitive setting, we delivered solid customer growth for our main telecom customer bases and have seen especially good traction for our higher value offers. Firstly, we continued to grow our TV customer base with +13,000 TV subscriptions over the first 3 months of the year. Secondly, our convergent customer base increased by +21,000 to a total of 1,145,000, with these customers characterized by a higher-than-average ARPC and lower churn. These results demonstrate the success of our Flex range (+160,000 subscriptions in the first quarter of 2021), compensating the Fixed Voice decline by other value-adding services. Finally, Fiber is becoming an increasingly relevant selling point, also attracting higher value customers. The number of consumer customers that signed up for one of our Fiber offers increased by +12,000 over the first 3 months of the year.

We are well underway with regards to our ambition to build the best gigabit network for Belgium. We added +73,000 Fiber homes passed (HP) during the first quarter of 2021, doubling the volume of last year, to reach 533,000 HP end-March 2021. With the creation of Fiberklaar, a new company jointly owned by EQT infrastructure and Proximus, we are fully on track to realize our ambition to pass 4.2 million homes and businesses with Fiber throughout Belgium by 2028.

As for our Enterprise segment, the Fixed and Mobile telecom business continues to be managed carefully. By balancing volume and pricing, we have moderated the structural headwinds from legacy services. The move to convergent Telecom-ICT services progressed on plan and we grew our managed and consultative services over the first quarter of 2021. Besides, we are pursuing our B2B transformation efforts aiming at becoming the preferred partner for Enterprises' digital transformation. Specifically, Proximus launched a dedicated 5G co-creation platform to support professional customers in exploring the full potential of this technology through specific use cases, in a secure, innovative and cost-efficient way.

Our domestic consumer and enterprise services revenues grew if we exclude Roaming-out revenue, which is still affected by Covid-19 related headwinds. Beyond domestic operations, TeleSign continued its explosive growth trajectory, with a +43.5% revenue growth rate on constant currency.

Overall, our Domestic revenue, Group EBITDA and Capex are on track to meet our expectations, and we are therefore comfortable in reiterating our 2021 full-year guidance.'