Here are the main insights from the webcast call;
- CEO Ralph Dommermuth said they expect to have 1,000 active antenna sites at the end of 2024 and 200 at the end of Q1 2023.
- CFO Markus Huhn said they expect customer contracts to grow at the same level as last year in 2024 but they will lose some customers that are hard to quantify due to migration to own network, leading to net additions of 200-300k, with the lost customers having relatively no impact on result and revenue since they are old and less valuable.
- Ralph said the migration of customers to own network is not easy but once they have data centres 3 and 4, they could do 50,000 migrations per day or a million per month.
- Moving to their own network, even with limited number of antenna sites will save them money since they will use their own data centres.
Assessment
In my opinion, the call was more optimistic than the previous one, particularly on the progress with antenna sites. A 1,000 active locations or 4% household coverage is good progress given it had only 100 at the end of 2023.
However, I see a risk with customer churn as migration continues though they experienced a small churn in the past months. There is also a risk that the migration continues to progress slowly leading to more costs than projected.