Hellenic Telecommunications Organization SA

DUS:OTE

Thank you, Gailey. So warm welcome to everyone, and thank you for joining us here today to review our third quarter results. Our performance over the first 9 months of the year reinforces our confidence in delivering our 2026 growth ambition. In the third quarter, EBITDA growth accelerated further, reflecting the sustained momentum across our business and continued progress in our transformation agenda. At the same time, underlying revenue growth remained strong, supported by the resilience of our operations and the contribution of our key growth areas.

Looking at our quarterly performance in more detail, I will start with the fixed business. While navigating a demanding competitive landscape, we maintain a broadly stable broadband base compared to a year ago, while sustaining positive momentum across fiber-to-the-home, fixed wireless access and Pay-TV services. Our B2B data communication services also recorded solid growth, driven by advanced connectivity solutions, supporting the overall fixed business development. In FTTH, infrastructure utilization increased further, driven by solid customer net additions in both retail and wholesale.

Our network footprint continues to expand, reaffirming our position as the leading network provider in the country across both urban and rural areas. At the same time, adoption of our advanced in-home connectivity solutions continue to progress well, further enhancing the customer experience and strengthening the distinctiveness of our offering over competitors. At the same time, the strong momentum of our fixed wireless access offering has strengthened our ability to compete effectively with satellite-based alternatives.

By fully leveraging the capabilities of our 5G stand-alone network, we are enhancing our fixed broadband proposition, extending high-speed connectivity across the country and further reinforcing our competitive position in the market. Within our fixed segment, Pay-TV continued to perform strongly. In a dynamic environment, we once again delivered robust revenue and customer growth, surpassing the 800,000 customer milestone. This achievement underscores the sustained appeal of our offering and its growing contribution to the overall strength of our fixed services portfolio.

Turning now to our mobile business. We are pleased to see continued solid momentum. Customers continue to migrate from prepaid to postpaid plans, while demand for higher-value data services is growing. As a result, we delivered another quarter of strong postpaid customer growth and another quarter of overall mobile base ARPU growth. And with prepaid customers still representing a relatively high share of the market compared to the rest of Europe, we see substantial room for further growth in the future.

The consistent quality and reach of our mobile network remain our key competitive advantages and important drivers of customer value. With the widest population coverage in the country, our 5G and 5G+ networks continue to set us apart, while their performance is recognized by leading independent industry benchmarks. This consistent performance underscores our long-term investment in the network and our commitment to delivering superior customer experience.

In our System Solutions business, we are now looking ahead with the Recovery and Resilience Facility deployment cycle mostly is complete. We delivered another solid performance in the quarter, and our robust results to date reinforce our commitment to delivering solid double-digit growth for the full year. We are strengthening our collaboration with several EU organizations and continuing to advance the digitization of both the public and private sectors, focusing on high-growth areas like cloud, security and AI.

The strong portfolio of national and international opportunities we are building gives us confidence and provides a solid foundation for the year ahead. We are combining strong performance across our business with the continued transformation of OTE Group, embedding data and AI to improve the customer experience, unlock greater efficiencies, strengthen our value proposition and further differentiate us in the market. Our focus here spans across several areas. First of all, enhancing sales and customer interactions, advancing intelligent network management, improving IT productivity, while at the same time, developing AI native products and new revenue opportunities.

This includes AI-enabled solutions already visible to our B2B customers and our planned AI calling service designed to offer a next-generation experience to our customers. We are also introducing AI-driven customer interfaces, conversational tools and intelligent agents to empower customer support. We already see tangible benefits in our customer care services, where AI capabilities have been deployed extensively. Across our networks, we are pursuing greater automation while leveraging AI to enhance software development productivity and accelerate execution.

Before closing, allow me to share a few words about the recent evolution of our brand to Telekom. By combining our strong foundations with the scale, technology and innovation of a global leader, we are opening up new possibilities to innovate faster, harness the potential of AI, create a better digital experiences and deliver even greater value to our customers, our shareholders and the country overall. We are setting our sights higher with a clear ambition to lead in Europe and bring Greece to the forefront of digitization in Europe.

Looking ahead, we remain confident in our ability to compete effectively, supported by the strength of our business. Our leading network infrastructure and the momentum across our key growth areas. With our ongoing investments and disciplined execution, we are focused on delivering our 2026 targets, sustaining growth and creating long-term value. And with that, I will hand over to Babis.

Thank you, Kostas, and welcome to everyone from me as well. Before reviewing our performance, let me briefly clarify our FTTH rollout figures. Starting out of this quarter, alongside our existing metrics, which refers to homes passed by fiber and have an active fixed line connection, we will also report all homes passed irrespective of whether there is an active connection and antenna technology or these are simply empty. This definition aligns well with prevailing market practice and improves comparability. We will disclose both metrics through the fourth quarter 2026 reporting period.

Let's move now to the performance of the quarter. Total revenues adjusted for the anticipated phaseout of certain international wholesale activities with near 0-margin impact increased by 5% year-on-year, while the respective growth for the 9-month period stood at over 8%, namely 8.4%. The increase is mainly driven by positive performances across System Solutions and Data Communications alongside the ongoing momentum in FTTH, TV and particularly the mobile. In the fixed business, the retail market remained intensively competitive with fixed retail service revenues slightly lower year-on-year and broadly stable in the first 9 months.

Including data communications, fixed retail service revenues increased by 2.9% year-on-year, supported by continued FTTH customer take-up and solid contributions from our TV and fixed wireless access businesses. Data Communications delivered solid growth, driven primarily by rising B2B demand for advanced connectivity solutions, notably our SD-WAN offering. In FTTH, strong net additions of 52,000 brought our customer base to 739,000, representing 31% of our broadband base compared with 21% a year ago.

Continued customer migrations, footprint expansion and solid wholesale demand further increased the utilization of our network to 44% based on the commercially available active lines approach or 32% based on the broader home passed definition that I referred earlier. We remain on track with our rollout and continue to lead the market, having reached 3 million home passed with a target of more than 3.1 million by year-end and an ambition of more than 4.6 million by 2030.

These figures are based on home passed approach in line with the prevailing market practices. FWA maintained strong momentum, recording 15,000 net additions, bringing the total subscriber base to 134,000 more than double the 62,000 recorded a year ago. A key driver remains our advanced 5G Wi-Fi proposition, supported by the continued expansion of our 5G+ network. By extending high-speed broadband to underserved areas, FWA complements our overall broadband proposition and reinforces our competitive position.

In TV, positive trajectory continued with revenues growing at a high single-digit rate, namely 9%. We added 9,000 subscribers during the quarter. And as Kostas mentioned, we crossed the 800,000 mark, increasing our customer base by 6% year-on-year. We have now secured most of our key content for this season and though at a more moderate pace, we expect positive momentum to continue, supported by the strength and value of our proposition.

Moving to mobile. Our business remains strong and resilient, delivering consistent growth and solid KPIs across the board. Service revenues increased by 2% year-on-year, supported by strong postpaid growth and sustained demand for high-value proposition. As expected, growth has moderated as we moved beyond the benefits of last year's prepaid adjustments, while the fourth quarter will also reflect the normalization of the CPI changes, which were implemented last year.

Postpaid performance remained strong with 49,000 net additions, while year-on-year subscriber growth remained elevated at 7.5%. This performance is supported by continuous migration from prepaid to postpaid, a trend that is also driving growth in the overall mobile ARPU. Mobile data usage increased by 18% year-on-year to 24 gigabytes per user per month, while unlimited plans reached 37% of the total B2C base, up from 33% a year before. These trends reflect growing demand for higher-value mobile data services.

A critical enabler of our mobile growth is our network leadership, which remains a key differentiator. Our 5G population coverage now exceeds 99% and 5G+ has reached approximately 85%. Other revenues, which also -- which also exclude data communications, increased by 15.7% year-on-year, supported by another positive performance in System Solutions, where revenues increased by 9%, albeit at a more moderate pace following the completion of the RRF investment cycle. As Kostas outlined, we have many reasons to be confident about the year ahead, supported by a rich and diversified portfolio. Handset revenues were also up in the quarter, recording a 9% year-on-year increase, mainly as a result of higher prices in the market.

Turning to wholesale now. The drop in revenues primarily reflects the planned phaseout of 0 margin international transit activities as already communicated in our previous calls. We are anticipating a total of approximately EUR 160 million of revenues to roll off during this year, completing the rundown that began in 2025. Importantly, you should keep in mind, given the very low margin nature of this revenue stream, we anticipate only a very minimal impact on profitability.

On the domestic side, wholesale revenues continue to follow trends similar to previous periods, mainly reflecting the rollout of completing FTTH networks in the market. So our full year expectation remains at approximately EUR 15 million drop. At the same time, demand for our wholesale FTTH remains strong with 43,000 net additions in the quarter, bringing the total for the 9 months to 138,000, already exceeding the full year 2025 level. This continued take-up further supported the increase in the utilization of our fiber infrastructure.

Adjusted EBITDA after leases increased by 3.1% year-on-year with a margin expanding by 90 basis points to 42.1%. This performance was driven by sustained service revenue growth and continued cost discipline. Lower personnel expenses and efficiencies in other direct costs helped offset higher energy costs during the quarter. The increase relates to the portion of our energy consumption that remains exposed to floating prices. Our transformation initiatives continue to drive sustainable cost efficiencies with indirect costs declining to 28% of service revenues compared to 30% a year ago.

Digital adoptions also continued to progress with e-sales, digital payments and e-top-ups accounting for 37%, 44% and 53% in total, respectively. These improvements, together with our solid operating performance, reinforce our confidence in achieving our full year EBITDA growth guidance of 3%. Finally, let me say a few things on CapEx and free cash flow. CapEx reached EUR 176.4 million, up 17.8% year-on-year, primarily reflecting TV payments during the quarter. For the first 9 months of the year, CapEx was broadly stable versus last year, increasing by just 1% compared with the same period of last year. And as we published today, we maintain our CapEx guidance at a bit over EUR 600 million.

Investments are focused on expanding our FTTH footprint and accelerating the rollout of our 5G stand-alone network, supporting our fiber, mobile and fixed wireless access offerings. Free cash flow after leases increased by 27.7% year-on-year, reaching EUR 137.4 million in the quarter due to lower income tax payments, higher EBITDA and improved working capital. For the full year, we reiterate our reported free cash flow guidance of approximately EUR 750 million as well as underlying free cash flow of EUR 570 million to EUR 580 million, adjusting only for the one-off tax items.

That said, this implies an extraordinary strong free cash flow generation in the last quarter of the year, which will be positively impacted by lower working capital needs as we anticipate a reduction in sales outstanding given the completion of RRF funded projects and lower tax payments. Finally, a few words on our debt position as we issued a EUR 350 million bond to partially refinance our EUR 500 million bond that matured in September.

With -- while the pricing reflects the current environment, our credit rating and our strong balance sheet limited our spread. With that operator, we are now available to provide any further clarifications. Operator?

Thank you, Sofija. Thank you for your questions. Let me start with the first one as far as the fixed market developments are concerned. First of all, it is true that the competitive intensity of the market has increased since the beginning of the year. But it is also true that we are managing to defend our broadband retail base, more or less stable at 50%, if you would compare also year-over-year. Our key levers are for sure, our FTTH network and the ongoing expansion as well as the fixed wireless access, which is helping us defend our base, especially against satellite pressures. And at the same time, differentiate our propositions in the market.

Having said that, in addition to defending our base, we are also trying to increase even marginally our ARPUs through a number of different levers. One is by moving customers from copper to either FTTH or fixed wireless access by doubling down on Wi-Fi in-home connectivity by providing our customers with Mesh and FTTR upgrades, fiber-to-the-home upgrades, offsetting to a certain extent, some of the pressure that we see coming out of a heated overall pricing-wise competitive environment. And of course, the reducing contribution that we have in this year coming out of the coupon-based subsidized connection in our FTTH base mix.

The third lever, which is equally important when it comes to our fixed service revenue development is our constant effort to upsell our B2B customers from traditional to advanced connectivity software-defined solutions. And all in all, keeping our overall fixed retail revenues on the positive territory as already reported and consistent with what we have been seeing in the last quarters, and we have guided for the full year. This is on the fixed side.

Now when it comes to the mobile spectrum, unfortunately, I don't have a lot of news on this particular front. As you very well know, the consultation period has been concluded -- completed at least. Now we are waiting for news from the regulator. We also are without a regulator chair since August after the sudden loss of the previous one. So nothing has been formally decided yet including the timing or the structure of the future auction. So we are not in a position today to provide any kind of estimates or speculate on the spectrum structure and outcome. We follow -- we will follow the process closely and engage constructively once the regulator provides further clarity.

I cannot comment on PPC's pricing strategy as far as the fixed service revenue, yes, including data communications, which is an important lever for us growing our customers from traditional, especially in the B2B segment from traditional connectivity services to enhanced software-defined connectivity services.

Okay. So since you brought up -- thank you, Stamatios, for the question. Since you brought up the Pay-TV topic. Allow me also to shed some more light or to provide some more details for things which I believe are important. First of all, what we have managed to do is to secure the vast majority of our key sports and content before the beginning of the season, which was important for us. On top of that, we have expanded our international partnerships. Next to Netflix, we also introduced Disney in our lineup. These are important elements which are helping us further strengthen our value proposition and are all into the Pay-TV ecosystem.

And these are all translating into the continuous growth that we see in the Pay TV, both in terms of base, but also in terms of service revenue. And just to indicate once again that we are still at relatively low Pay TV penetration levels, at least legitimate Pay TV penetration levels in the Greek market, around 35% when the rest of Europe is hovering around 50% to 60%. So we still believe that there is further room to grow.

Now regarding the upcoming auction for the rights of UEFA, first of all, we recognize that this is an important content lineup for our audience. And for sure, I mean, given the strong interest that they generate. Having said that -- I mean, as you can imagine, this is an active and commercially sensitive auction process. So we do not want to comment a lot of details at this point in time. And before the process has been formally concluded.

Having said that, as already indicated, this is high level content has always been a strategic priority for us. And based on this principle, our approach will remain consistent irrespective of the structure through which rights may ultimately be secured, including potential strategic partnerships. And as far as your question about the Nova cooperation, it is still running for 1 more year.

Thanks for this question as well. So we have already indicated a number of times in these calls that we know that RRF will come to an end at a certain point in time. Hence, we have started preparing ourselves for life without RRF. And this implies a number of different areas that we are focusing. First of all, just to set the record straight, the fact that RRF is complete does not mean that the public sector has been fully digitized. So for sure, there will be more projects coming out of the public sector. On top of that, we have doubled down on the private sector, focusing on areas like cloud, security, a lot of AI across a number of different fronts.

And the third lever that we have also progressively started scaling up. It is also evident in the numbers is our presence in Europe in cooperation with a number of different institutions, I call it the European Investment Bank or the European Parliament or even NATO. So we are trying to strengthen our position there and to be in a position to run more or less along the same levels of this year moving into 2027, both in terms of top line, but also in terms of margin.

Yes. Let me start with the second question. The intention is to stay within this kind of growth levels moving into 2027. There are challenges, there are opportunities. But at this point in time, we feel confident that we have what it takes in order to keep on growing at this level as we managed to do in 2026. Now when it comes to your question around fixed, I'm not sure I fully understood, to be honest with you. I have already commented based on Sofija's question with regards to what we see on the competitive intensity.

So as I said, there is increasing competitive intensity, and we are trying to defend our customer base quite successfully, combination of FTTH and fixed wireless access, while at the same time, trying to make the most out of every single opportunity, moving customers from copper to fiber and fixed wireless access by helping a bit ARPU go up in the transitions -- in these transactions as well as focusing a lot on providing in-home Wi-Fi connectivity by this rental -- Mesh repeater rentals, which are also adding a bit of extra ARPU and to a certain extent, offset the result of the overall competitive dynamics on the pricing front. Do I answer your question or this is -- there is another topic that you would like to double down?

True, which is result of pricing.

Exactly.

Thank you, Maurice, for the question. Yes, I mean, good question. Just to give you a bit of a broader perspective on our strategy. For sure, I have to say that with the satellite introduction, particularly Starlink in the Greek market 3 years back, we started struggling a bit with some of our customers being served by poor copper infrastructure, and we lost a few of them, not only us, but also the other retailers, but us having a disproportionately higher share in these areas where Starlink became dominant, we suffered a bit more. This was up until January 2025, when we introduced the fixed wireless access service, predominantly trying to offer a better service to our customers still being served by poor copper speeds and try to, to a certain extent, slow down satellite growth at our expense.

And what we have seen, especially during the last couple of months is that despite -- I mean, so far, Starlink has been growing quite strongly in the Greek market. This has progressively slowed down starting 2026. And we saw that Starlink more or less run on the same levels as last year in the last couple of months, which is the result of us having managed to grow our fixed wireless access base by more than 100,000 customers in less than 1.5 years' time. So effectively, we use fixed wireless access to defend against standard momentum and to stop them from growing at our expense. This is step number one.

As you understand, we are still expanding our FTTH infrastructure and progressively, some of these customers that today we are serving with fixed wireless access, we will cover with fiber. In addition to our commercial networks, we have also undertaken the rollout of the semi-urban and rural parts of the country with the support of EU funds, the so-called UFBB. So once we get there with fiber optics, we will target -- we will target these customers being served through fixed wireless access to upgrade them to fiber optic speeds.

So fixed wireless access, you can call it as a temporary solution until we manage to get with fiber there with a few exceptions that does not make any economic sense for us to serve through fiber that we will keep the fixed wireless access as the [ end-state ] technology.

I mean, as already indicated, in addition to Starlink, also PPC brought up a lot of extra competitiveness into the market. It's not only the numbers that they generate. It is the fact that they are creating a far more competitive environment. It's not only PPC acting, it's also the market reacting. So this overall has heated up, I would say, the competitiveness in the market, especially visible during the last few months in 2026. I mean you can tell whether we are defending out of our numbers. So we are keeping more or less our broadband customer base intact.

Yes, this comes at the expense of some ARPU pressure, which we are trying to recoup by upselling customers to more services, call it, as I said before, copper to fiber or Mesh or Pay TV. These are strong levers. And at the same time, using the software-defined connectivity upgrade for our B2B customers in order to keep the overall fixed revenues slightly up year-over-year.

Thank you for the question. The current level of CapEx, which, as you said, is around EUR 300 million, incorporates all the investments that we are doing now and that we have alluded in previous calls, this is -- this reflects one of the peak years that we are running. So in this [ envelope ], we expect to continue also for the next year more or less. We incorporate all the -- today visible streams of investments. So there are no reasons that are visible now that could increase this amount further.

Thank you, [ Ioanne ], for the question. I mean, yes, the only thing that I can comment is that you're right, we have adjusted that terms and conditions in order to align, I would say, with the rest of the market when it comes to the application of this CPI. This for sure give us the appropriate flexibility, but also the readiness to apply it every year at the beginning of the year. Now what we are going to do, we'll see. It is a matter of different things and factors that we have to take into consideration, of course, with the market, customer value and overall commercial strategy. So nothing to comment beyond that at this point in time.

So thank you all for your attention, your interesting questions and for your interest in OTE. We will meet again in late February to discuss this time our fourth quarter and full year results and of course, to present our guidance for 2027. Until then, have a nice weekend.