Bezeq The Israel Telecommunication Corp. Ltd ($BEZQ)

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us on Bezeq's First Quarter Earnings Call. We first apologize for the inconvenience. Due to technical difficulties, we are hosting one call in English today. [Operator Instructions] I am Yohai Benita, CFO of the Bezeq Group. Joining me today are Mr. Tomer Raved, Bezeq Executive Chairman; Mr. Nir David, CEO of Bezeq Fixed Line; and Mr. Ilan Sigal, CEO of Pelephone and yes. Before we begin, please review the safe harbor statement on Slide 2 of our presentation, which applies to any statement made during today's call. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the call for Q&A. With that said, let me now turn the call over to Tomer for his opening remarks. After his introduction, I will continue the presentation of our group's financial highlights, followed by Nir, who will discuss Bezeq's Fixed Line results; and Ilan, who will cover the results from Pelephone and yes. I will conclude the presentation with Bezeq International.

Thank you. Hi. I'm glad to see all of you joining us today and apologize again for the inconvenience. Our excellent results are further evidence of Bezeq Group's strength. The new strategy and the ambitious targets we have set for ourselves are clearly reflected in our operational and financial performance. We have already recorded a free cash flow growth of 74% in the first quarter, along with continued growth in comparable EBITDA and net profit. We have reached a significant milestone with the deployment of fiber infrastructure to 3 million households, a figure that establishes Bezeq as Israel's digital backbone. Together with our investment in national infrastructure, we are advancing with determination on several new subsea cable projects to Europe. These initiatives of mission-critical infra for the global economy will position Israel as a regional and global digital hub and generate a strategic growth engine for the coming years. To ensure the continued benefit to the Israeli consumer, it is time to remove the structural separation and complete the required regulatory reforms. Following the formal steps taken by MOC in the past few months, we are awaiting a decision on this matter soon. These steps will enable us to operate as a single more efficient and innovative group, benefiting both our customers and our shareholders. Let's now move to Slide 3, where we show Q1 highlights. Core revenue grew 2.6% to over ILS 2 billion. Comp EBITDA grew 1.2% and comp net profit grew by over 4%, driven by higher revenues. As mentioned, free cash flow grew 74%, mostly due to a tax refund received in the current quarter, changes in working capital and improved call activity. Fiber subs were up 19%, and our take-up reached 35% with 3 million homes passed. 5G continued to drive cellular market performance and subs plans were up 12% year-over-year. ARPU increased across broadband and TV. We signed an MOU to establish and operate an international cable system to create a telecom corridor between East and West via Israel. We hope to have more on this exciting opportunity later in the year. Turning to Slide 4. We see the tech and business road map on track to deliver our 2029 KPIs from increased fiber deployment and take-up, expansion of 5G and growth in the TV and fiber bundle. We are building for durable growth, superior customer experience and operating efficiency. On Slide 5, we summarize our Q1 financial achievements, including a 2.6% reduction in net debt. On Slide 6, we highlight our key KPIs in each of the businesses, Broadband retail ARPU continued to grow over year-over-year. We recorded an increase in yes ARPU due to fiber growth and revenues from Partner transaction. Pelephone grew 5G subs plan to 1.45 million and 5G Max subs plan grew to 184,000 today. We expect to reach more than 300,000 5G Max subscribers by year-end. I will now hand it back to Yohai, who will review our financials in more detail.

Thank you, Tomer. Turning to Slide 7 for the group's Q1 highlights. All key metrics, including core revenues, comp EBITDA, comp net profit and free cash flow showed strong growth this quarter. Although fixed line CapEx was down by 8.2%, Group's CapEx was slightly up due to timing differences in yes. Moving to the next slide, we show our operating expenses. Salary expenses decreased 3.8% due to the sale of Bezeq Online and its deconsolidation as of Q2 2025. Operating expenses were down mainly due to lower interconnection expenses. Other expenses were impacted by provisions for employee retirement in Bezeq Fixed Line and in Pelephone. On Slide 9, we show our quarterly operational metrics. We recorded growth in Pelephone subscribers and wholesale broadband subscribers, along with higher retail broadband ARPU and yes ARPU. Bezeq Group retail broadband subscribers increased by 1%, although fixed line retail broadband subscribers decreased in Q1. Slide 10 highlights our balanced capital structure. Net debt decreased by ILS 122 million to ILS 4.6 billion with a net debt to comp EBITDA ratio of 1.4x. This month, the Israeli rating agency reiterated our strong AA rating with a stable outlook. Turning to shareholder remuneration on Slide 11. Tomorrow, we will pay a cash dividend of ILS 549 million, representing 80% of the net profit in the second half of 2025. In addition, we began our share buyback plan of ILS 150 million to be completed in 2026. As of today, we completed approximately 50% of the total plan. On Slides 12 through 14, we show our 2026 outlook and 2029 targets, which are unchanged. We will continue to focus on maintaining our AA level rating and strive to increase shareholder remuneration. I will now hand the call to Nir for fixed line results.

We opened 2026 with strong results, reflecting continued and consistent growth across all core metrics. Turning to Slide 15. Fixed line core revenue increased 2.5% to approximately ILS 1 billion, driven by higher revenue from transmission and data communication, broadband cloud and digital services. Fiber deployment continued as we reached 3 million homes passed with a take-up rate of 35%. On the following slide, we show Q1 financial highlights. Comp EBITDA and comp net profit each rose 1.5%, driven by higher core revenue, partially offset by lower telephony revenue. CapEx was down by 8.2% and free cash flow grew significantly to ILS 404 million, an increase of 84%, mainly due to tax refund received in the current quarter, lower CapEx and change in the working capital. Turning to the next slide, we show continued fiber deployment reached approximately 3 million homes passed with over 1 million active subscribers on our fiber network today. They're representing 65% of total broadband subscribers and take-up rate of 35%. Retail broadband ARPU continued to grow and rose to 3.7% year-over-year to ILS 139. Moving to Slide 18. We show the take-up trend, fiber take-up reached 645,000, wholesale fiber take-up reached 395,000 today. Turning to the next slide. Broadband revenue were up 8%, driven by growth in ARPU and wholesale revenues. Transmission and data revenue grew 3.6% to ILS 330 million due to higher revenues from metro transmission services and cloud and digital revenue growth 1.6%, driven by higher revenues from virtual exchanges and cloud services. With that, I will now turn the call to Ilan to discuss Pelephone and yes.

Thank you, Nir. Turning to Slide 20. I'll start with Pelephone's performance in the first quarter. As shown, revenues, comp EBITDA and comp net profit were impacted by a decline in roaming revenues as a result of the war with Iran. When adjusting for this impact, revenues from services would have increased by approximately 2%, reflecting the underlying strength of the business. We delivered strong subscriber momentum this quarter. Postpaid subscribers increased by 34,000, marking our strongest quarterly growth since Q2 2018. 5G postpaid subscribers grew by 50,000, reaching approximately 1.45 million or 61% of postpaid subscribers. In parallel, 5G MAX subscriber plans continue to expand, reaching 184,000 today, reflecting customers' increasing demand for premium connectivity. We are now targeting 300,000 5G MAX subscribers by year-end. We saw improvement in free cash flow totaling ILS 15 million compared to negative free cash flow of ILS 5 million in the first quarter of the last year, supported by working capital improvements and disciplined cost management. As expected, given the war-related roaming impact, ARPU declined modestly year-over-year to ILS 44 or decreased 2.2% or approximately ILS 1. Excluding roaming, ARPU trends remained stable. We also continue to drive operational efficiency. During the quarter, we reached an agreement to retire 150 employees over the next 3 years, further streamlining the organization while maintaining service quality. Turning to Slide 21. You can see the detailed financial performance this quarter, which reflected this dynamic pressure from roaming revenues, offset by strong subscriber growth and improved free cash flow. On Slide 22, we highlight continued growth in 5G adoption with 61% of postpaid customers now on 5G plans. We remain well positioned to capture further data and service revenue upside. On Slide 23, we show revenues from services and ARPU. Both were down slightly in Q1 due to the impact of the war with Iran. Moving to yes, on Slide 24. Yes delivered a strong quarter with revenues growing 7.5% to ILS 343 million, the highest quarterly level since Q1 2019. ARPU reached a record of ILS 202, driven by continued growth in the TV+ fiber bundle and revenues from the partner transition -- transaction. Slide 25 highlights our key financial metrics in Q1. Comp EBITDA grew 14%, and we transitioned to comp net profit after many quarters of net losses. Moving to Slide 26. Fiber subscribers increased to 137,000 today, while migration to IP continues with 89% of yes customers now on IP platforms. With that, I'll hand the call back to Yohai for Bezeq International's results.

Thank you, Ilan. Finally, turning to Bezeq International on Slide 27. Bezeq International delivered a solid performance in this quarter with business customer revenues increasing 10% year-over-year to ILS 263 million, driven primarily by higher equipment sales and continued growth in cloud activities. Comp EBITDA grew 18% and comps net profit totaled ILS 8 million compared to a net loss of ILS 2 million in the corresponding quarter last year. This improvement was driven by higher revenues alongside disciplined cost management. Bezeq International is well positioned as demand for cloud, data and enterprise connectivity solution continues to grow. With that, I will open the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions]

We have a question from Ondrej from UBS. Hi, Ondrej. Ondrej, I think maybe you are on mute. Okay. So next question, Ilanit Sherf.

I have a few questions, if I may. The first one is about the Internet ARPU. It seems that there is some slowdown in the growth of the retail Internet ARPU. And I saw in this quarter -- this is the first quarter that I saw that there is a reduction of Be routers. So my question is, should we expect that slowdown to any -- will be continue? Or do you still see room for further ARPU improvement as customers continue migrating from copper to fiber. This is the first question. And I have another one about the employee, the first -- if we're looking for the last 5 years, you can see that between 2020 to 2025, there were ILS 32 million reduction on the employee expenses. But in the same period, the number of employees is reduced by 15%. And I want to understand two things. First, how do you explain the lower reduction in the expenses. And the other one is what we need to look forward in this area.

Okay. I'll start and the team will chime in. But first, on the ARPU question, we see healthy growth in ARPU, where we reached ILS 139. We were hoping to reach ILS 140 next year, which we're going to reach ahead of time and currently targeting ILS 150. That's not as a result of increased prices. It's a result of the mix that you mentioned of transitioning from copper to fiber. This will continue in the next -- at least for the next 2, 3 years as the take-up continue to rise and the speeds also increased. So that's also a trigger for growth in ARPU. There's some seasoning around router sales and there's like a months of four as well, but there's nothing changing really on the trends as come to routers. On employee side, on one hand, we did reduce headcount by roughly 10% during the years you mentioned, but there is also the 3% increase in employee salaries in the group every year. So the salary expenses did go up by almost ILS 200 million over the period, slightly less than that. But what you're going to see going forward, given the amount of employees and that's already set within Bezeq, Pelephone and Bezeq International, more than 1,500 employees combined, 14% of the group headcount is actually retiring over the next 3 years. You're going to see not a reduction in salary expenses, but flat. But it's going to be the first time in the group -- in the past 2 decades, we're going to see a few years of flattish salary expenses, and we communicated a pretty detailed presentation around that in the previous quarter, but that's the explanation of what you've seen in the past 4 years and also in the next 4 years. I hope that answered the question.

I just want to add one more thing that this quarter, we had some one-time expenses related to the collective agreement that we had both on Bezeq and in Pelephone, so that's why you see slightly higher increase in salary expenses. But if you exclude that, salary expenses more or less would have been stable, although the collective agreement impact given the retirement programs that we have in the companies in the group.

One more question, please. Do you have any updates about the cancellation of the structural separation?

Yes. So we saw the announcement from the MOC around the RFI in the past few months, and we are having currently weekly meetings with the teams at the MOC and hoping them to meet and basically make a decision and announcement in the next few weeks. We're currently in very active work stream with them. So let's wait for their announcements.

We will try Ondrej again.

I had two questions, please. You spoke about the impact of the war on mobile roaming revenues as kind of one of the areas where maybe there was a bit of underperformance or the area where there was a bit of underperformance. And I wanted to understand whether this is the only area in the business where the situation has had an impact on the business and whether given the -- maybe less restrictive past couple of weeks are leading to a rebound in the revenues already in the second quarter, whether you kind of see, therefore, or not a risk from the situation to potentially your guidance for the full year, of course. That's question number one. And question number two, if I may, -- you mentioned in your presentation the potential from subsea cables in the Mediterranean. And I wanted to understand whether there is a chance to revisit this kind of similar cable opportunity across the Middle East as was discussed in the past. And also whether there is any update on kind of the data center and other opportunities, which were also discussed with big tech in Israel?

So first, I want to be clear because it's an important question. The group financials are not impacted by the war. There's positive and negative. And you're right, there is roaming impact on one hand, which is slightly negative. Without that, Pelephone was overperforming. But net, given the other positive impacts on Bezeq Fixed Line and other companies in the group, the net impact of the war, it's nothing, okay? It doesn't change our guidance for the rest of the year. Hopefully, the war doesn't continue or resumes. There are obviously going to be impact on the roaming also in Q2, given the gradual resumption of the flights, but the impact -- we're not expecting any impact on the group results and our guidance for the year. So that's on the roaming question. On subsea cable, good question. When we talk about connecting Europe to Israel to the Mediterranean, the core strategy is connecting Europe to Asia. We already have the terrestrial part in place, Bezeq Fixed Line has a very robust fiber network to allow for multiple cables to go from the Mediterranean to the Jordanian border and from there to Saudi, the Emirates, UAE and India. We already have active lines connecting the continents, basically Europe to UAE through these lines, but currently, it's relatively on small scale. We are significantly bolstering the investment in that sector and the ROI is going to be very significant and pretty fast. So the strategy is not connecting just to the Mediterranean. It's bypassing the Red Sea through Israel to Asia and the Gulf countries. I hope that answers the question.

Next question is from Sabina.

I have a question regarding the competitive dynamics in the fixed segment. I saw recently advertisement from your competitors with a quite aggressive pricing and I was wondering if -- how does it impact your operation, both in the fixed line and the TV segment? And also just trying to understand, I think that yes had a very impressive quarter despite the aggressive competition in this segment with the addition of 14,000 fiber customers and I was wondering where are they coming from? Are they coming from the fixed line segment or they're coming from the competitors? And also just if you can tell us whether the yes and Partner deal is impacting the results for the first quarter already? Do we see the impact?

One word on the competition in general because we're not going to comment on pricing, and you know the sector extremely well. Both the fixed line, cellular and TV market in Israel are extremely competitive, one of the most competitive segments in the world. However, we have seen in the past 3 years, rational market. I'm not commenting on advertising, but the trends continue to be the same across our fixed line with the migration from copper to fiber and a continued increase in ARPU. And the bottom line to your question, it does not impact our results or our strategy across the board, across the group, across the different verticals and subsectors. I'll let Ilan discuss the yes question.

Yes. Sabina, you asked where are they coming from. So we have 565,000 customers and yes is a very popular TV brand. And so most of the of the clients, the customer coming, of course, from the market. And also our customers that have TV want to have a bundle. So we are offering it, and we're offering it as a premium brand, yes+ fiber. And our customers, I'm glad that they are reaching out and taking our packages, and they love it, the best TV with the best Internet. So the market is -- wants to have our packages. The second, you asked about Partner. We started this partnership around October. And of course, this quarter, the first quarter is also with the collaboration with Partner, the results are good in that.

And by the way, the result of the triple bundle that you have said, you see the retail subs of the group growing every quarter for the past more than a year now. Every quarter, you see consistent growth in retail broadband subs in the group, thanks to the bundling offering of yes.

And maybe another one regarding Bezeq International, although it's a smaller operation among the group, but I was also positively surprised during the quarter with the performance of the business segment revenue. And I was wondering if it's a beginning of a trend or it's just something one-time for the quarter?

It's not one-time. Bezeq International has successfully has been going through a transformation. It's relatively small in the group. But in the past 2, 3 years and with new management, I'm focusing also on the new world of cloud and the infrastructure they have in place. This is not one-off. You will see the transition continue with a focus on growth in cloud and the data center business. So definitely something to look out for relatively small scale, but in the right direction.

A follow-up question from Ondrej.

I wanted to follow up, and thank you, Tomer for the previous answer. I wanted to understand where the upside from the situation is manifesting in the group? Is it primarily the fixed line business? If you can maybe talk about the overall [indiscernible], where are the positives? And then following up on the second answer to the subsea cable question, do we -- or should we think about it in a way where once you roll out the kind of Mediterranean subsea cable and unlock the kind of whole chain of those links, that's when it kind of clicks into place and you're able to become the kind of intermediary for the Europe to Asia traffic. Is that kind of the missing piece to like a larger revenue stream? Or how does that work exactly?

So I'll first touch on the subsea cable because it kind of relates to a general upside question. But -- on the subsea cable part, we so far indicated one number, but it gives you a sense. We're going to invest ILS 250 million for 50% of the first cable we put in, and we have an intention to put two additional cables in place. You can make 2 to 3x your money just on presale these cables. That's before maintenance fees and others. So the IRR on these cables in a 2-, 3-year [indiscernible] period is very significant. So that's kind of one answer. The current cables we have connecting Israel to Europe are relatively smaller cables, like 1 or 2 fiber pairs. We are talking about laying down multiple dozens of fiber pairs, which is 10x to 20x to 30x the current capacity Israel has because it's not about connecting Israel, it's connecting Asia and Europe. So the financial upside from that is significant. Generally speaking, the free cash flow of the group is going to grow double digit on an annual basis and which allow us a lot of flexibility and upside to your point, and coming mostly from the successful execution of the ARPU, both on mobile and TV side on one hand and the significant upside you see from the subscriber base in fiber. We see people adopting higher speeds, which will further boost even north of the 150 ARPU we're currently targeting. So overall, it's a pretty clear picture with a double-digit growth in free cash flow, in bottom line. And I think people understand that we have a lot of flexibility also to explore potential M&A and consolidation within the realm of this current market.

And maybe, one more point. Is there an -- is there an update on the kind of HOT Mobile situation?

HOT Mobile?

Yes. On the HOT Mobile side, we don't have an update. There's another party currently under exclusivity for the past 3 months. If they drop, we will definitely go back to the playing field. But I think we are generally happy to see the market starting consolidation, pretty consistent with what you are very familiar with in Europe. We start to see the small trend in Israel on that front. And mobile also in fixed line, by the way, there was a small tuck-in by IBC last month. So we hope to see the rationalization we already started seeing in the past 2, 3 years happening also in the mobile sector. And we will definitely are looking to play a part in that consolidation.

If there are no further questions in English, we will open the call for questions in Hebrew. [Foreign Language]. Okay. [Foreign Language] So thank you, everyone, for taking the time to join us today. Should you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to contact our Investor Relations department. We look forward to speaking to you on the second quarter 2026 earnings call. Thank you.