I won’t use the reduced capex guidance to signal limited progress in the network buildout. Remember last year a large part of the capex (around 200 million euros) went to data centers. Now that the data centers are complete, the capex for this year will go to the antenna sites. 360 million on antenna sites doesn’t sound a small feat in my opinion.
United Internet says the EBITDA headwind from changing the roaming provider is around €20 million. That will bring the 2025 guidance to €591 million, unchanged from last year. According to 1&1 investor relations, the 2025 guidance does not include the expected compensation from the partner responsible for the network outage last year. I will point out that the network outage last year is also expected to impact the 2025 results, hence there will be compensation for the 2025 headwind as well. That means with the compensation, the EBITDA will be higher. According to reports, the compensation could be in the high double digit millions. But you are right on the performance of the access segment, this is the first time that they are not growing EBITDA in the access segment. In 2024, EBITDA access was up 9%, in 2023, it was up 5%. This probably has to do with intensifying competition, which impacts pricing.
