Sunrise Communications - Earnings Call - Q1 2025

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Sunrise First Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am Sandra, the course co-operator. I would like to remind you that all participants have been listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. Page two of the presentation details the company's safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking statements. Today's presentation may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including Sunrise expectations with respect to their respective outlooks and future growth prospects on the information and statements that are not historical facts.

These forward-looking statements involve certain risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the statements. These risks include those detailed in Sunrise filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recently filed 20F. Sunrise disclaims any obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements to reflect any change in the expectations or in the conditions on which any such statement is based. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Alex Herrmann, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Alex Herrmann (VP of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us today. I'd like to welcome you to our Q1 2025 results call. As this is our first pure quarterly update call since our listing, let me briefly summarize which documents were published today and which will also be made available on a quarterly basis going forward. Next to the press release we published earlier, you'll find on our Investor Relations website the interim financial statements, the fact sheet, as well as the presentation that we will discuss in this call. Now, turning to the presentation itself, as per usual, with me today are André Krause, our CEO, as well as Jany Fruytier, our CFO. We'll start the call with a presentation, which will be followed by a Q&A session. With that, let me hand over to André. Please go ahead.

André Krause (CEO)

Yeah, thanks, Alex, and good morning, everyone, for our Q1 results. Let me start the presentation by talking you through an overview of the key takeaways of today's presentation. Firstly, we have seen Q1 as being a quarter with continued customer growth and with a number of new technical and product launches that we'll talk through in a minute. The quarter as such was somewhat softer in terms of trading, which was intentionally also driven by the fact that we had some price rises coming up, and hence had reduced our activities a bit and had also a few spillover effects from the Black Friday activities in Q4, which had impacted the quarter. As I said, we launched a new product portfolio in April that is focusing on more for more for our customers and also on loyalty.

There is a number of new innovative products on the basis on the back of that launch coming throughout the year. We also launched our 5G Standalone technology and our network, and we will talk about that later on as well. Secondly, the Q1 financials were in line with our expectations. On the back of that, we are also confirming our full guidance for this year. Revenues were down by 3.3%, also impacted by lower hardware sales on the back of increasing replacement cycles on hardware and, of course, also impacted by the right pricing activities from last year on the fixed side in particular. Down to EBITDA, we are +0.4% year on year. The revenue decline was only partially impacting gross profit. With a number of OPEX optimizations and some phasing, we see the EBITDA number growing year on year.

We are fully confirming our guidance, as said, that includes also our dividend per share guidance that we expect to grow by 2.7% for the year 2025 to be paid in 2026. Certainly, we also held our first AGM just last week. You probably all saw the outcome of that. Shareholders approved our 2024 dividend, and the payment has been executed in the meanwhile. Today, we are also announcing that we will go ahead with the ADS delisting for mid-August 2025. Already, 82% of our ADS have been converted. Of our Class A shares have been converted, and 98% of the Class B shares have been converted. We are progressing, as announced, as part of the IPO towards the delisting. Now, with that, let me move to a bit more detail and granularity on our commercial performance.

I would really like to start off with our new portfolio, which is called Swiss Connect. The name is actually the program of that new portfolio. It is, like I said, a more for more portfolio, so customers do get more roaming included. All tariff components now have certain roaming services included, and that comes then with a slightly higher price across all of the tariffs that we have. We also added a new Travel East plan, which covers the Balkan region, as we do have also quite some frequent travelers to that region. That seems to be an important product and a need that we are covering with that tariff in particular. Important on top of that is also this portfolio is not only looking at more for more and the inclusion of roaming, but it is also adding loyalty rewards.

These loyalty rewards are not only for new, but also for existing customers. That is closing an important gap that we had in the past, where existing customers were often complaining about the fact that our promotions were mainly focused on new customers and existing customers were not benefiting. With the structure and the mechanic of the new portfolio, this is now past history. We believe that this portfolio will drive more value also to our existing customers. Lastly, we added also Perplexity to our product lineup. Customers do get an exclusive loyalty offer, which is a one-year Perplexity Pro subscription that everybody can use.

We are quite happy about that inclusion because for us, it looks like the Perplexity is a great AI tool that helps our customers to use AI on a, I would say, basis that includes all of the current news in the web, has great referencing tools, and while we are speaking, has already 10,000 customers who have taken this option. Now, let me also talk about the price rises that we have executed in the first quarter. You see on the slide that we have done price rises across all our brands, our Sunrise main brand, also our Sunrise B2B customers to the largest part of the portfolio, and also for our yallo customers. For the Sunrise brands, those price rises have become effective in March, while yallo only became April.

You see from that that the price rise has only marginally impacted the quarter, and we are expecting more price rise positive impacts in the quarters to come. We have increased on the main brand side by 1.8% and on the flanker brand by 1.5%. The main brand scope included fixed and mobile, while on the flanker brand, we have focused on mobile only. Hence, we are expecting also the benefits down to revenue and APU in the coming quarters. We have also added new Moments rewards to our Moments program. As you remember, Moments is out there for three years now, and it is actually growing in usage, and it is trying to drive loyalty with our customers. We have focused in the past very much on entertainment experiences.

We have now also added more features and more experiences for families, like, for example, Circus Knie and Europa-Park, and the Pathé Cinemas are also new additions that are broadening the scope of the rewards that we are providing. With that, we think we are going to reach more of our customers going forward with those exclusive benefits that we are providing. As you know, B2B is a very important part of our story. Also in Q1, we had quite a number of movements. I'd like to talk you through our new Swiss Post testimonial campaign. Swiss Post is now a customer of Sunrise of more than 10 years, and hence are now participating in this campaign. They are demonstrating how our fixed and mobile offerings that we are driving to the Swiss Post are supporting their business.

As you can see from the numbers, Swiss Post obviously is a very large enterprise in Switzerland, very much operating in the entirety of the country and driving vast volumes of logistics throughout the country. We are very excited that we have been with Swiss Post and alongside Swiss Post now for 10 years. I think this Swiss testimonial campaign is well demonstrating the strengths and delivery that we have done for this customer. We also added new customers in the quarter. We added, for example, the Aquagroup, Pathé Cinemas, the Volare Group, to name a few. We also had important prolongations. Customers that have been with us and have prolonged their contracts, like Zurich Airport, University Hospital Zurich, Der Tour, which is a touristic company, and also the Zürcher Kantonalbank.

We are excited about the momentum that we have in B2B. I think we are in a good position to further accelerate our growth in the B2B areas in the quarters to come. Also, as I said already at the beginning, we are very excited about the launch of 5GSA. We are the first operator in Switzerland that has launched 5G Standalone. Furthermore, given the fact that we have rolled out this technology now to 99.5%, we have rolled out to our entire network, and our entire 5G network has 99.5% pop coverage. This is not just a trial, but it is widely available in Switzerland, and we are rolling it out now also to our customers. We have started with a soft launch now in the second quarter, the beginning of the second quarter.

On the back of that, we are also going to switch off our 3G network during the second and third quarter. As a result of that, we will also be in a position to reallocate spectrum to our 5G network, which will then further widen and expand our 5G coverage. We are expecting that 5GSA will not only improve the coverage, but will also reduce battery consumption, will provide higher security and encryption standards. We will also be able to provide unique services based on the slicing technology that is only fully usable with the implementation of 5GSA. We will also provide ultra-reliable and low-latency communication tools. This is, of course, an enabler technology, and we are on the back of that expecting further commercial launches during the course of this year and also in the next year.

Very excited of our technology leadership in this mobile area. As I said, I think we are pushing the bar higher again in the Swiss market and are positioning ourselves as a driver for this technology innovation. Now, with that, let me talk about the trading results in a bit more detail for the first quarter. As I said, trading came in a bit softer on the back of the reduced, intentionally reduced commercial trading activity on the back of the price rises coming. As a result, we have seen 12,000 net additions on the mobile postpaid side and 5,000 net additions on the internet side. I think that is pretty decent momentum despite the fact that we had significantly reduced our promotional activities in the first quarter. Our FMC quota has further increased to 58.3%. That's 1.5 percentage points over the course of the last year.

It demonstrates that convergence remains a key trend, supporting also our bundle product policy that we are driving. APUs, as you see on mobile, have been reducing to CHF 28.6. We have seen a reduction of CHF 1.1 over the last year. This is mainly driven by roaming reductions that we have been seeing in the first quarter in particular. On the back of that, the new product portfolio is intended to actually help with more-for-more to drive back volume that we have lost from the variable consumption of roaming and drive higher prices by including more roaming in this new portfolio. Secondly, on the fixed side, also our APU has declined to CHF 58. That is clearly on the back of the annualization of the right pricing efforts that we are driving.

We are now at around 12,000 remaining customers that still have to be migrated. As we said earlier, we are intending to finalize the migrations of those customers by the middle of the year. On top of that, there is also the fact that our flanker brand product is still growing on the internet side quite well. Given the APU differential between the first and the second brand, there is also some balancing happening on the fixed APU that is impacting the total APU of the customer base that we are showing here. Now, I think both on mobile and fixed, we are expecting a sequential stabilization on the back of the price rises. On the mobile side, also on the back of the introduction and the migration of customers onto the new more-for-more portfolio.

On the fixed side as well, we are expecting stabilization, price rises helping, but also the tailing off of the right pricing activities should help us throughout the year. We are expecting actually that the volume of trading may be lower, at least in the first half, on the back of all of the introductions that we did and on the introductions of the new portfolio. We are also expecting that APUs on the back of this will stabilize and will help our revenue then to achieve the guidance on the revenue end. Now, with that, I am handing over for Jany for the more detailed financials.

Jany Fruytier (CFO)

Thank you, André. Also, welcome from my side. Before we start diving into the financials, let me remind everyone that the numbers that you are seeing on the pages are on a rebase basis.

In Q1, there were two rebasings that we have laid out in a slide in the appendix. It does not change the revenue overall, but there was a shift from B2C customers to B2B as part of the legacy switch-off of the UPC stack. Secondly, there was a product hierarchy reclassification that shifted some revenue from non-subscription to subscription. As said, all of the numbers and the year-over-year movements that you are seeing in the subsequent pages are net of that. If we zoom into the revenue, the 3.3% that André already referred to is mostly driven by the lower non-subscription revenue in both fixed and mobile across B2C and B2B, as well as the impact of the right pricing in the residential as part of the UPC-based migrations.

That is partially offset by continued customer growth in the flanker brand, especially in the fixed part, and that is tempering the revenue tailwinds. When we go to EBITDA, that is driven in part by a 1.3% decline in gross profit, as some of the revenue decline is tempered because of the lower margin, especially of the handset sales, with a slight improvement year-over-year in OPEX, which was in part driven by efficiencies and in part by phasing. When we go to adjusted EBITDA less P&E, you can see a slight decline. Although revenue was more or less flat, CAPEX was higher, and that is in part because of the front-loading of the network and the CPE-related investments. Purely phasing throughout the year rather than a sustained increase.

When we get to adjusted free cash flow, minus CHF 117 million and lower than prior year, which is then again driven by CAPEX and two more things. One is the supplier payment phasings and some other typical phasings in our seasonality. Of course, the interest payments that we typically do in Q1. When we go to the revenue slide then, minus 3.3% or CHF 25 million down year over year. What you can see here is that both the residential and the B2B other revenue, or mostly non-subscription revenue, constitute to CHF 12 million decline, which is as part of the softer takeoff of new product launches, both in mobile, but also in TV, where we had less TV gifting than what we typically do as part of our fixed subscription additions.

When we then zoom into residential subscription, you can still see the CHF 15 million decline in the fixed subscription, which is driven by the right pricing on the one hand and by the brand mix between flanker and the main brand. Mobile, CHF 3 million decline is in majority driven by the lower variable roaming usage. We expect the residential movement to further improve from here, and this was already an improvement versus what we had seen in H2 2024, in part because of the new mobile portfolio that André already spoke about. Also the tailwind from the price increases, just to reiterate, the B2C main brand price increases set in these numbers for one month, whereas the flanker brand not at all yet.

As we are finally through the customer migrations, we will still have about the three subsequent quarters impacted financially from the right pricing, but the actual commercial activities are behind us. That is then all partially offset by continued growth in the flanker brand. When we focus on B2B, on the one hand, we see continued growth in the large enterprise segment. However, that was slightly softer than what we saw in the prior quarters, and that had to do with the big one-off deal that we did in 2024, which of course has now been annualized. Secondly, we did see mobile lower liquidity in the market. When we then zoom to EBITDA, revenue decline significantly tempered down to gross profit, in part because of the lower margin of the handsets that I already referred to.

In B2B, you can see that the revenue growth was further accelerated by a number of reductions in direct cost and a solid MVNO performance. The growth that you see in infra is in part due to the phasing of direct cost in relation to the network build that we are doing and then monetizing with our infrastructure partner, Cellnex. OPEX, you can see a CHF 7 million decline year over year, and I would classify half of those savings approximately as hard savings and the other half as phasing mostly into Q2. That has to do with some of the marketing activities that we are driving. Leasing, you can see a net increase, albeit that is again different phasing of the excess costs, whereas the underlying leases are increasing due to shifts into the excess line or the yallo deal that we have with Swisscom.

When we get to slide number 14 and focusing on adjusted EBITDA less P&E and adjusted FCF, what you see on the left side is the adjusted EBITDA less P&E additions. We have now given you more granularity on the buckets of CAPEX, how we look at it. With CPE, coverage, capacity, product and enablers, and baseline, we will continue to report these categories going forward, and this is the way how we look at the spend of our CAPEX. I think here again, I referenced to it already before, you see that the decrease on an adjusted EBITDA less P&E additions comes solely from the higher CAPEX, which, as I referred to already, is due to the phasing. Full year, we expect a slight reduction of CAPEX as we have guided for versus prior year.

When we get to adjusted FCF on the right, we spoke about CAPEX already. The interest growth that you're seeing here is still in relation to the debt reduction that we did in Q4. In Q4, we actually paid down the debt. As everybody, I guess, is aware, we have both the FX and the interest rates fully hedged. What you see here, the higher costs were in relation to the retirement of the derivative instruments in relation to the debt reduction of Q4. Basically, we retired some of the instruments, and some of those instruments were in the money, and therefore there was a cash outflow. However, if you look at the underlying reduction and therefore the third-party debt obligations, they have actually gone down.

Therefore, the CHF 7 million is a one-off, if you will, that is not expected to recur. Tax largely unchanged. I think important to note here that on an adjusted FCF basis, we exclude the tax settlement that is in relation to the past because that was pre-funded by Liberty Global when we did the spinoff. Secondly, it is a non-recurrent event. I give you some more detail later in the presentation on the actual tax settlement. Lastly, networking capital significantly down. CHF 18 million of that is in relation to leases, which, as I spoke to earlier already, is phasing. The other part is higher supplier payments that we typically have there and vendor financing repayments. All in all, as we have guided for, we expect this to normalize throughout the year.

If we go then to the next page, André referred to it already, but in general, we are confirming all of our financial metrics with revenue broadly stable, adjusted EBITDA stable to low single-digit growth, CAPEX at 15%-16%, and then leading to a free cash flow of CHF 370 million-CHF 390 million. Lastly, upon achieving those guidance, we expect to propose a dividend of CHF 3.42 for the Class A shares or CHF 0.34 for the Class B shares that are there. Lastly, I'd like to reiterate the fact that the growth metrics that you're seeing here for revenue, and especially EBITDA, are in relation to the rebased 2024 numbers, which include then approximately CHF 30 million higher cost for 2024, which is in relation to all of the standalone items which we have spoken about before. All right.

If we then go to my last slide, two things to update you on. On the one hand, we paid the dividend actually today after it was approved during the AGM last week. I spoke already about the growth, so 2.7% expected. Lastly, which is now also fully confirmed after the completion of the AGM, the dividends were paid out from foreign capital reserves, which means that they are not subject to Swiss withholding tax or in general for Swiss personal residents are fully tax excluded. Lastly then, and we have not disclosed this amount before, the remaining amount after the 2024 dividend payout is approximately CHF 2.58 billion in reserves that then can be used to pay dividends on a tax rebate on a Swiss withholding tax basis.

Lastly, on the right, you can see the sort of the remaining process that we're envisaging in relation to the ADS. By now, 82% of the Class A ADSs have been canceled and 98% of the Class B. We can see that the volumes in the Swiss line have nicely and subsequently improved and are now on a daily basis accounting for more than the majority of the total traded shares. As part of the IPO, we had said that we intended to switch that listing off from the Nasdaq nine months after, which we are now confirming that the ADS listing was always only envisaged as a means to distribute the shares to our shareholders. The original hypothesis, of course, was always that this share was better traded in Switzerland locally than on the Nasdaq.

Once we delist the Class A ADS from the Nasdaq, then it's our intention to terminate the sponsorship of both ADS programs 90 days after the last trading, which then further reduces, if you will, the level of support for the ADSs. By then, you can only trade the ADSs on an over-the-counter basis in the U.S. Lastly, we intend to apply for the deregistration with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission following the delisting and the retraction of the sponsorship. By doing that, we are terminating the reporting obligations under the SEC, which then will further simplify our operating model and also reduce cost in relation to that.

We expect that termination to happen approximately 12 months after the original delisting, and that has to do with the fact of certain requirements that have to be fulfilled in terms of where the volumes of shares are trading across the world before the SEC will accept the deregistration, if you will. With that, I give it back to you, André.

André Krause (CEO)

Yeah, thanks, Jany. Before we open up for Q&A, let me just quickly summarize one more time. Firstly, I would say we have landed the price rise well and successfully. Again, we have been leading the market by going first, but by now, all of our competitors have followed. I think this is displaying the leadership role and also the pricing power that we think we have. Our new portfolio is a more-for-more portfolio, which has higher list prices than before.

Again, I think all of the movements are demonstrating our drive for value, which has come in the first quarter with somewhat softer trading. We are also expecting a somewhat softer trading to continue for the second quarter on the back of that. Nevertheless, the price increase, which has not yet left their mark really in our financials, will support an improvement on APU as we go along and will help to drive value and revenues for the rest of the year. We have also, again, demonstrated technology leadership by going first to a 5G Standalone network that now covers 99.5% of Switzerland. I guess with that, we are not only the first in Switzerland, but from a reach of that network, we are probably one of the first in Europe that is doing that.

On the back of that, there will be a variety of benefits to our customers that we will exploit going forward. As Jany showed in detail, our financials are on track, which gives us the opportunity to fully confirm our financial guidance for the year. Again, including also an increase of our dividend to CHF 3.42 for the year 2025, which I think is again also demonstrating the financial strength of the business going forward. With that, we close the presentation, and I will ask the operator to start the Q&A.

Operator (participant)

Thank you, sir. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on the telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered a queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two.

Questioners on the phone are requested to disable the loudspeaker mode and eventually turn off the volume of the webcast while asking a question. Anyone with a question may press star and one at this time. Our first question comes from Andrew Lee from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead, sir.

Andrew Lee (Managing Director)

Good morning, everyone. I had two questions. Thanks for the detail you gave on your price adjustments in Q1. Just wondered if you could talk about how you see the broader competitive environment and how you've seen that kind of response from competitors, particularly in residential, mobile, and fixed? Just to give it context, Swisscom spoke about it a couple of weeks ago and said it hadn't really seen any change in the degree of competitive intensity on residential fixed, but had seen small kind of signs of slight increase or improvement on the mobile side.

That's kind of first question. Then second question is just related to that. You talked about lower promotional spend in Q1. Can you just explain exactly why you would reduce promotional spend through the price rise process? Then should we expect promotional spend to increase again in Q2 back to normalized levels? How should we think about that? Thank you.

André Krause (CEO)

Yeah, thanks, Andrew, for those questions. Let me talk to the competitive environment and how we see it evolving. I think I would clearly echo that we see on mobile that the net prices, if you deduct the promotional period, have gone up over the last couple of months. I think post-Black Friday, there's some rationalization happening. Still, I think there's also a number of smaller players out there that are still operating at low price points. I think the situation is kind of fragile.

Everybody has understood that the direction of travel should be that we can't continue to just drive prices down. Elasticity is actually declining given the fact that prices have come down substantially over the last couple of years. As a result, now we're, I think, at a turning point where we have to rationalize our pricing behavior. It's good to see that the price rises have been taken on also by our competitors. We would have not expected Swisscom to do that with the main brand, but they did with Wingo. I think that all is indicating towards the right direction. On fixed, I'm also not surprised that the promotional intensity has remained the same. In fact, prices have also not been moving for the last, I would say, three years, right?

If you look at the net prices that are resulting, then I think there's little to no movement on that, which has also to do with the wholesale nature of most of the fiber networks. There is a natural limit to what can be priced. On those levels, it has been quite stable, I would say. I would also not see that there's increasing aggression on any of that. From our point of view, a fragile moment because everybody is trying to get in the right direction, but everybody is also needing to then deal with lower volumes on the back of that. Liquidity is not necessarily growing if the only feature that was stipulating liquidity in the past, which was price promotions, is being reduced.

Now, that's exactly where we are turning towards a main brand strategy that is more looking towards innovation, service, and loyalty. Of course, price will continue to play a role, but it can't be the only argument going forward. That's how I would depict the competitive environment. Maybe, Jany, on the promotional spend, you want to take that one?

Jany Fruytier (CFO)

Yeah, sure. I think why one would reduce promotional intensity when you're doing the price increase, I think André referred to it already, it's that when you are bringing up the prices, not sure you want to use then a lot of above-the-line marketing to shout about new promotions. We typically come at a discount. I think that's the commercial reason behind it.

I think, like I said during the EBITDA slide, of the CHF 7 million, approximately CHF 3.5 million is phasing, of which more of the marketing campaigns is one. I think the way to think about it is that CHF 3.5 million hires of lower spend that we saw in Q1 is supposed to come back throughout the year and marketing campaigns is a large element of that, but not the only one, just to put that into context.

Andrew Lee (Managing Director)

Thanks. That's really helpful.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Polo Tang from UBS. Please go ahead.

Polo Tang (Managing Director and Head of European Telecoms Research)

Hi, thanks for the presentation. I've got three quick questions. The first one is, at the end of the remarks, you flagged software trading in Q2. Can I just clarify? Was this a reference to net ads? Because I'm assuming that your revenues will have the benefit of price rises and your new more for more portfolio.

Second question, just continuing on revenues. In Q1, you saw a decline in terms of handsets, hardware, or your non-subscription revenues. This is obviously lower margin, but I'm just curious in terms of how we should think about the evolution of this line in the next few quarters. My final question is just on your plans to delist the ADSs in August, just given reduced reporting requirements, just trying to work out whether this could be a mutual saving or not, and how quickly could this feed through into numbers? Thanks.

André Krause (CEO)

Yeah, Polo, thanks for your questions. On the Q2 trading remark, that clearly was related to the trading in terms of physicals, not in terms of revenue, you're absolutely right.

The revenue will have the benefit of the price rises really coming through in full for the first time only with the Q2 numbers and from there on. In terms of volume, as I said, liquidity, given that promotional activity has been reduced and prices have gone up, is slightly coming down. Hence, we are also not expecting that the Q2 net ad figure will be a very high one. We rather expect it to be on softer levels. That is absolutely fine from our perspective, given the fact that we are benefiting from the price measures that we have taken in terms of revenue generation. Hardware delisting, Jany, you are going to take this too?

Jany Fruytier (CFO)

Yeah, sure. No problem. If you look at the non-subscription decline as part of the Q1 results, they were significantly going down on a percentage basis.

That is in part because also some of the new launches happened typically in Q1 from some of the providers, which I think were not as strong this year. We do not expect that sort of percentage wise decline to continue throughout the year. We expect that to normalize throughout the coming year. Of course, nobody knows how the new Apple launch is going to be later this year. Of course, we expect, let's say, a more tempered decline, if you will. On the deregistration, two things. Yes, there are absolutely cost savings that will occur as part of that, but those will only at first start to appear in 2026. What is important to note, there are effectively three steps in the deregistration process. First is the delisting of the Nasdaq.

Secondly is the retraction of the sponsorship, which then sort of makes the program not sponsored by us anymore. Thirdly, it is the deregistration from the SEC obligations, which can only happen first time 12 months after the delisting of the Nasdaq. Because basically what the SEC says is that the trading volumes in the U.S. versus the rest of the world have to significantly reduce so that there is no exposure anymore for U.S. investors, if you will, after which you can then stop to report under U.S. law and to U.S. in terms of all of the requirements that come with that. Yes, there will be savings. We'll talk to those to you as we give guidance for 2026 because they do not impact the 2025 financials, if you will.

Polo Tang (Managing Director and Head of European Telecoms Research)

Thanks.

Operator (participant)

As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star followed by one. The next question comes from Maurice Patrick from Barclays. Please go ahead.

Maurice Patrick (Managing Director)

Oh, good morning, guys. Thank you for taking the question. Just a couple from my side, please. The first one really is just a technical question. If you could provide the split of your net ads on the main brand and the sort of yallo brand would be helpful. The second question relates to just phasing of revenues and APO? So if I'm not wrong, you've guided to broadly stable revenues. You were down in the 3.3% Q1. You've talked about a soft net ad quarter. Presumably 2Q could be -2%, -3%, maybe depending on the equipment volumes you spoke to. I mean, the price increase is relatively small.

I'd love to understand the phasing of the APO and the revenues throughout the year. That'd be very helpful. Thank you.

André Krause (CEO)

All right. Thanks for your question, Maurice. We are not splitting out the net ads by brand, but I would say that there's no change either, right? I mean, you remember that as part of the IPO or the listing, we were talking a bit about how the dynamics between the different brands are. That's pretty stable, but we continue not to share detailed net ad figures by brand. For the phasing of revenues, Jany, you want to take the one?

Jany Fruytier (CFO)

Yeah, sure. I think, like I said on the revenue, half of the decline that we saw approximately in Q1 was driven to the hardware or hardware-related revenues. Like I answered on Polo, we expect that to significantly normalize over the quarters.

With that, if you will, on a normalized basis, the revenue decline was not 3.2% or the 3.3% that we saw was only half driven by subscription revenues, which then if you phase in the fact that we do not have really the price increase of 1.5% to 1.8% on a large part of those subscription revenues that have to come through. Secondly, the fact that the right pricing is going to temper in terms of year-over-year impact on the subsequent quarters in the year. I do not want to sort of speculate here around the commercial performance that we are going to have in the outer quarters. As André said, we are excited about some of the launches that we are doing. Of course, those sit in our plans as well then in terms of the expectations for the quarter.

I hope that helps you to sort of frame how the revenue is going to trend throughout the quarters.

Maurice Patrick (Managing Director)

Yes, thanks for that. Maybe as a very quick follow-up, would it be fair to assume you're expecting most of the price increase there for the drop through to the bottom line to APU?

Jany Fruytier (CFO)

Look, most is a wide range, and I'm happy to confirm that most, if you will. I think André spoke about it, that we are very happy with how the price increase has evolved. We actually saw the result of it was better than expectations. I don't think we maybe want to say anything more about percentages on that.

André Krause (CEO)

Yeah, but I think most is clearly the right term. As you've seen, I mean, 1.8% and 1.5% is also not massive increases. The counter effects have been relatively small.

Hence, yeah, we are expecting that most of the price rise impact is going to land in our revenues and then the bottom line.

Maurice Patrick (Managing Director)

Very clear. Thanks, guys.

André Krause (CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Alex Herrmann for any closing remarks. Please go ahead.

André Krause (CEO)

Thank you all very much for attending today's call. Actually, that concludes the call for today. As always, if there are any further questions, please do reach out to the investor relations team. Thank you, and all have a good day and week ahead.

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing CorosCall, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.