Solutions 30 SE (S30) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody. [Foreign Language]. Thank you being with us this morning for this webinar. It's going to be in English. Let me do a short introduction first, and then we are going to the core presentation. Let's begin with the first slide, please. Okay. I just want to say couple of words about who we are today. And first of all, remember that it's a very special year, 2023, because it is our 20th anniversary. We created our company from scratch 20 years ago. And there is a couple of things that are really peculiar about our sales. One is that we grew from EUR 0 billion to EUR 1 billion of revenues. We are going to reach this threshold this year for our 20th anniversary. And over 20 years, we had revenue growth every single year without exception for 20 years. And the second thing is that we grew the company to this size, raising only EUR 1.5 million back in 2005 and managing our cash carefully. So basically, we developed the company with our own cash flow, and we believe we can continue to do so without needing a capital increase. Other few things about ourselves. We operate a network of 15,000 technicians across Europe that install digital equipment and provide assistance to people that use digital equipment. We are visiting 80,000 houses per day, and we have visited over 60 million houses since our creation. It's a large number. And the company today is well diversified in terms of geographies. We have 3 main geographical pillars. France, which is our mother country, represents today about 1/3 of our revenues, and then another 1/3 is represented today by Benelux. And then the last third is represented by the other geographies that are growing fast. I spoke about our growth at the very beginning. And speaking with our investors, I have the feeling that everybody understands that there is very good growth continuing in coming years, especially because of the digital transition and the energy transition. So, 2 sectors where we clearly see a very strong demand and where we are very well positioned across Europe. But this webinar is not going to be about growth. It's going to be about other questions that our investors ask regularly and that we intend to address. One last point on this slide. Let me remember that we are part of the United Nations Global Compact, because we have done quite a lot of things in the last years about governance and also ESG policies, and we will see that later in the presentation. Next slide, please. So as I said, the main focus of the webinar is going to be on margins. We are going to show you what are the variables that are behind our margins? What are the key factors that drive our margins? And what are our main programs to improve margins. This is really our current focus. We are then going to go through the geographies and show you which geographies have our priority and our main focus, and what are the challenges that we face in each of them. And then we mix the 2 first point, and we are going to talk about specific actions that we are going to do specifically for each of the countries. The third point is going to be about the tools that we use to improve our efficiency and also what we do to be sure that our clients need us and we can stay with them in the long run. And the last point is going to be about our financial strategy and the fact that we will not need any capital increase to continue to grow, as we told you, we are going to do. And then we believe a Q&A at the very end for the sake of efficiency. You will have the possibility to ask all your questions at the end of the presentation. Next slide, please. Together with me this morning, there is Wojciech, our Chief Operation Officer; Amaury, who is Group Secretary; Luc, Chief Revenue Officer; and Jonathan, our new CFO. Wojciech is going to talk about -- no, stay there, please. Wojciech is going to talk about how we select projects to make sure that our operations can deliver them efficiently in a profitable way, how we are organized from the operational standpoint, how we recruit technicians, how we find technicians, how we train technicians, what are the IT tools that we use to run our operations, what are the KPIs we follow? And then we are going to give us -- to give you 3 real life examples of important operational problems that Wojciech is currently working on. Amaury is going to talk more about margins, specifically, and what we do to improve them, specifically for a geography and is also going to touch upon compliance to show you what we do when we start something new, a new activity, a new geography, make sure that it's under control. Luc then is going to talk about the innovation part, what are our innovative ideas, the ideas we bring to clients to make sure that we can follow them and make sure that we fulfill what they need and we bring value. And therefore, we stay there in the long run. And Jonathan, in the end is going to talk about how we finance our activity, what are the main challenges we are facing now from the financial standpoint and how we deal with large projects, when we start. And then in particular, with 3 examples, what happened to margins in 2022, in 2023 in France and Benelux, where we had several questions from investors. Okay. Let's begin. Next slide, please. Wojciech, it's you?

Okay. Thank you, Gianbeppi. So, I will take you through key factors driving margins. Can you see the presentation? Okay. Thank you very much. That's right. So Solutions30, taking into consideration the last years of the history, especially the size of the compound number of markets and the size of the revenue, current market developments and as well the status and maturity of the development, the particular country identified and developed some key factors, which are driving our margins today. So we identified the number of margins. And some of them, we reinvented. Some of them we modified and some were completely newly developed. And I will explain new details on the next slide. Each of these factor, and I will give you the examples of how we implement these factors to the real projects. Next slide, please. What is the best way to speed up developments and grow the revenue in the particular country? What is the best way to avoid inventing the wheel again and again? Our answer is market programs. So, this is the joint effort of sales marketing operations and joint effort of central and local teams. And we developed the model to speed up learning curve. We took the different models, different processes from the different countries. We selected the best approach, and we build, based on the best approaches, the best model to increase the speed of the development to faster achieve breakeven and faster achieve expected profitability. And our approach today is FTTH, EV chargers, solar and power grid. And this is not on the theoretical model. This is the model which is, of course, partially connected with the theoretical approach, something in the presentation, but as well a calculation template, training processes. So it provides smoothly from the beginning of the project to the successful launch. Next slide, please. And of course, to develop the business effectively, we need to focus on resources. This is not the easy task today. So having in mind the [ average staff ] level on unemployment from May. Just take the example. We have 2.7% to 2.9% in Poland and Germany, respectively, in Belgium 5.7%, in France 7%. So it is not so easy to recruit the new people. So, we developed internally the model to recruit and look for candidates internally. So, this is the cheapest, the most flexible way and the most successful way today. So, we are looking not only for skilled technicians, where there's a very high competitive market, but as well, we are looking for the unskilled technician. So what is important that the unskilled technicians are easier to find, usually have lower financial expectations, and there is the wider market we can look for. There is a lot of different professions like postman, butchers, shop assistance, a lot of them. The next part, the subcontractors. Of course, we have as well the internal recruiters who are looking every time for the new subcontractors, and we are verifying all the time, competencies and capabilities. And of course, we are able to deliver the international subcontractors, and we already did it in Belgium, Germany, France or Poland. Additionally, we developed a proprietary solution. It is called mySupplace. This is a unique tool, which helps subcontractors to register, to receive proposal, but as well allow Solutions30 to check compliance. So, we are sure that the subcontractor is working for us. This is the suitable partners to deliver the projects. Next slide, please. And of course, if we are looking for unskilled technicians or even the partially skilled technicians, we need to transform them into full-time productive employees. The answer, of course, is training. We can do training, training and one more time training. We have the number of training centers in Europe, the biggest one in Belgium, France, Poland, Spain and Germany. And this is the connection, combination of theoretical training and technical training. So always it starts from the -- from theoretical part, when we try to inform new employees, how, what is the technology about. And then this is the training in the training center. You can see some pictures how such training centers looks like. This is the real work, real training on the systems. And then with this employee after passing some tests, this is going to the field working supervisor with some code. And eventually, when we decided that the employee is ready, this employee can work alone. There is a different time of such training. The biggest, the most complicated one is smart metering, connection of energy and gas meter exchange. Then that training is something like 17 days in the field, in the training center than some similar number of days in the field, just to be sure that we are able to prepare the employee well enough. And you have some numbers of the training power. So we -- in 2023, we plan to have more than 180,000 training hours in the entire company. In the group, this is something 25.5 hours per person. And this is a combination of online and on-site training. Next slide, please. Having in mind the similar approach in different countries, we implemented as well the similar tools. So, we identified the 2 different tools for the different projects. So, one is for serving the customers directly. So about tickets, planning, dispatch, the tool for call center, this is Smartfix. This is our own tool, our proprietary tool. We do develop it ourselves. And then this tool is used in a number of countries. In the last -- this year, we implemented this tool for Lenovo for the IT business and for Belgium for the new customer as well. We as well define the new tool for project management. This tool to lead teams, to allow to manage the B2B projects for FTTH deployment for B2B EV charging installation or the solar farms. So every project, which needs a very heavy involvement of the project managers, this is the tool which can be managed by [ IS ] tools. We implemented such tool in the 2 countries this year, Belgium and U.K. for the different customers. Of course, we have the centralized tools for managing the rest of the -- not operation, but the back office activities like Netsuite and use. This project is ongoing, should be finished at the beginning of 2024. Of course, we have the centralization of other tools, together with the IT security. And all of that is built based on the standardized IT processes. We have the road map. We have the definition of which project we should focus on first. And this is done as a combination of onsite and offshore development team. Next slide, please. And of course, to manage the business well enough effectively, we need to have the good back office. And of course, this back office should work effectively. We should be as cheap as possible, should be scalable, KPI oriented. And we implemented such back office functionalities functions in the different locations. And this is mainly due to the language skill availability. So, this is a combination of internal, external. So, we are quite flexible about it. It is implementing the lower-cost countries in Europe, like Portugal, Poland, Greece. And this is the -- in some of the locations we have only call center, dispatching function. And in some of the places we have as well the shared service centers. Certainly, the business center providing services about HR, about IT, about marketing, so different functions too. And what is important? We do have as well our own designed shared service center. This is located in Portugal, partially in Spain for mobile contracts. And we use this shared service center to provide design for FTTH deployment services. The biggest one, the biggest shared service in Portugal. This is our main one, providing services like -- you can notice for France, for Luxembourg, for Spain and for U.K. Next slide, please. And of course, what is important to drive the margin? The most important is to have the right knowledge. So, we developed at the beginning of this year a very sophisticated model of collecting the data, built on centralized business intelligence platform. So, we are able to understand what happened in the past, what is going on today and as well what is going to happen in the future. And of course, this is not on the country or business unit level. We can deep dive and see the data per segment for connectivity segment, for technology and for energy, but we can see the data even deeper. So, we can see, for energy, as an example, we can see data for EVC, for smart meter, for solar. So very different activity. And we see the data in the different level, different variations. So first of all, KPI tracking. So you have the -- starting from the left side of the slide, we can see per activity. What are the KPIs? And the KPIs can be different, but different activities in different countries. But very often, this is the customer satisfaction number, first time right, the efficiency timing and the different KPIs, which are expected by customers. We track them ever more. We see the trends. We compare that. And because sooner or later, the negative trend will influence our productivity, profitability or volume. The middle part represent what we are looking in the area of technicians and subcontractors. So, we look what is the productivity per technicians, monthly revenue per technicians or daily revenue per technician. What is the average revenue per day for 20 best technicians? This is as a reference. But we look as well what is the revenue per technician for the lower part of 20% technician. This is the group we are focusing on, because this group is decreasing our margin. So, we know what to do when we identify this group. From the subcontractor part, we are looking for a number of subcontractors. And we are not checking on the number of subcontractors and the margin subcontractors, but we will look as well to the type of subcontractors. Especially, we're interested in the number of small subcontractors because bigger subcontractors can eventually sign our customers directly. So small subcontractors, this is some way to protect our business model. And additionally, very easy to manage, easy to replace, more flexible and, of course, cheaper. And this data led us to benchmark countries, to compare countries between each other and to give us the full knowledge about what we can do more, having the experience from the other countries. The right part of the picture presents the model we continuously improve, monitor and improve our EBITDA. We look for the field margin, direct margin and SG&A and EBITDA. And this let's us know what is the real profitability of the business. So having in mind the model of the sector benchmark and expectation to have double-digit EBITDA and the standard for our business, something like the 5% to 6% SG&A, 8%, 9% direct overheads, field margin need to be 24%, 25%, and then the business is profitable. So, we address it, monitor and improve all the time. Next slide, please. Moreover, what is the way to attractively develop the business? This is the standardized approach to the organization. So, we defined the 5 pillars, which we are going for. First of all, we limit the risk. This organization let us to limit the risk of the volume fluctuation, limit the cost of internal organization, allowed to scale easily and fast enough, keep all business intelligence or key competencies internally and generate the highest possible margin. So, you can see the model of our organization for FTTH deployment. This is the most complicated because we have the additional roles like designer, local authority operations. But these are the roles which are kept in the line. And we have asked, of course, our own teams, but these teams are limited. We keep them as many as needed, as many to be secured, as many to deliver right on time and as less to limit their internal costs. And we scan much more subcontractor part, but we subcontract only the simple work like civil works, pulling fiber, self-construction or doing facade. And of course, every time we control the quality, we control the compliance, the safety regulations, and payment, of course, is done always on the -- based on the work done. Next slide, please. And just three examples, just to present to you how these rules were implemented in practice. And this are the very good examples. The first example FTTH deployment in Belgium. You can notice. Let's start from the top left diagram. This is the number of household passed, projects started at the end of 2020 -- at the end of 2021. And at the beginning of 2022, we haven't passed any homes yet. You can see that after 6 months, there was the first home passed and somewhere after 9 months, you have significant number of home passed, which could deliver already the expected EBITDA level. So the growth from the 2022 is significant, and we are delivering something like the 100,000 home passed now. And the diagram below, bottom left, present how this organization, what I said on the previous slide. You can notice that we scale on the field teams and field technicians -- number of field technicians, but the rest is more or less the same. So, this is something, which proves that our organizational model works. On the right part, you can see the turnover and you can see the EBITDA. So, EBITDA was negative during the first 6 months. And starting from the 9 months, we already achieved double-digit EBITDA, a expected level by the group. Next slide, please. The next example is coming from Poland. The other business, customer connections. This is a special one. You can notice how our rules implemented in practice deliver the growth. So, we took over the business from Orange from the Orange subsidiary. And at the beginning at the day of the takeover, it was beginning of November last year, number of installation was quite low, 1,200 only. And last month, we received already 3,000. And at the same time, we addressed the changes in the organization. There was a lot of the employees, almost 70 employees to deliver this amount. And together, of course, with some big offices, some managers, we decreased it from 70 to 51 last month. Just we implemented, bonus system reduced the back office, reduced number of supervisors. And at the same time, we increased number of subcontractors from 5 to 13. What was the result of that? If you go to the right part of the slide, the right diagram, you can see that we -- our revenue grew more than 2x during that time. And our EBITDA is improving all the time. We started from negative EBITDA at the day of takeover. And today, the last month, the EBITDA was above expected amount by group level. The last example. Can you switch the slide, please? The last example, this is the M&A. So it was the case that Orange Poland decided to externalize part of the business. And we took the biggest part of that. The business is quite risk limited. First of all, the contract is for the long term. We took over of more than 350 employees and more than 340 were from temporary agency. What we did in the -- as soon as possible, we take over, insourced this 340 employees. And you can notice that the EBITDA already in June significantly increased with a very similar level of revenue. And we were able to purchase the equipment under very good conditions. And we implemented all the changes in this business, which I was talking about previously. So, you can notice that the revenue were growing all the time. You can compare the business which influenced the most is the fluctuation of revenue, but you can compare the November last year to October this year. And you see that the growth was significant, and we have the trend as well. It was the same with EBITDA. EBITDA is growing. We could achieve the group expected level in the coming months. So, thank you very much for this part.

Thank you, Wojciech, and good morning, everyone. In order to explain how we improve our margins, let me first elaborate on our business development strategy. On the next slide, as you can see, we are already positioned on well-established business lines with a significant growth potential in the future. On top of that, on most of the new business lines that we want to develop in the coming years in different countries, we do have a solid experience in the group already. So, we have very good knowledge of the businesses that we want to develop and that will drive our growth in revenue. We will focus on currently well-established business lines. And in addition, we will address highly growing markets on which we will apply our well-known operating models. In conclusion, we know precisely where we are going and how we need to do it. Next slide. Having said that, in terms of margins, our objective is to reach double-digit EBITDA margin in all the countries. To achieve this goal, which is represented by the circle on the graph, both our direct costs and our SG&A must be optimized. The starting point is actually different from one country to another. First, we have countries which are already close to the sweet spot. This is the case of France and Benelux. And we have growing countries heading for the sweet spot. In order to reach this target, we do know the leverage that we need to activate. We need to improve our operational efficiency in order to achieve a high margin and direct costs, and we need to keep our structure costs, our SG&A under control. Next, if we now go into more details for each category of countries, we do have a clear operating strategy. In the Tier 1 countries where we find France and Benelux, which have reached the critical size, we already have implemented an efficient business model. One, we do have a large network of technicians in all the country, which allows to optimize the travel time between 2 interventions. Two, we have implemented our IT systems in order to automatize most of the admin tasks, such as planning optimization or reporting. And three, we have centralized all the admin and support functions. And when possible, as said by Wojciech, we locate these functions in countries where the labor cost is cheaper In these countries, our objective is to accelerate our business diversification and especially in the energy market, while continuously improving our cost structure through greater process industrialization and cost optimization. On the next slide, in our second bucket of countries, we find Germany, Poland and U.K. In these countries, the organization is still not fully optimized because these countries have not reached the appropriate scale at this stage. However, in these countries, the market conditions are extremely booming. The fiber rollout, in particular, has just started, and this will support our strong growth in the coming years. With this growth, we will be able to increase our national coverage and the density of our network of technicians. This is a very powerful lever in order to increase our margins. The more dense we are, the better we can optimize the planning of our technicians and increase the daily revenue. We will also ensure that we deploy our IT systems, and we work on the automatization of the processes in order to free technicians from non-productive tasks and to limit our number of back-office people. In the context of growth, we will also ensure that we generate economies of scale at central level in the countries. Actually, as we do already have support functions in place in these countries, when we develop our teams on the field, we do not need to develop the HR department, the finance department or the legal department at the same pace. That's how we will generate economies of scale. As a result of these optimizations, we will be able to generate operational efficiency and optimize our central cost structure. And therefore, the EBITDA margins will reach a double-digit level. Next slide. In the last category of countries, the market conditions are less favorable. So, we will focus on the most profitable businesses and ensure that our cost structure is flexible enough in order to respond quickly to new business opportunities without taking risks. In some cases, we will try to negotiate better contractual conditions. And if we do not reach an agreement, we will adapt our organization to the more profitable businesses. This is notably the case in Spain, where we are developing our energy activities, which offer good margins. Next slide. So as you have understood in the coming years, Solutions30 will face a significant growth in several countries at the same time, with specific operating strategies in order to improve the margins and to make sure that each country delivers according to the plan, improves its margins and complies with the group risk management procedures. The group has a consistent methodology deployed in all the countries. This framework embraces commercial control, operational control, financial control and ESG strategy. This implies making sure that we use a consistent set of governance rules across the countries, and that we deploy the tools developed by the group and the most efficient operating models. By doing this, we will be able to accelerate our learning curve in the different countries and reach our double-digit target faster in all the countries. I will now hand over to Luc for an update on our activities in Germany. You are on mute, Luc.

Good catch, Amaury. Good morning, everybody. I hope I don't need too many handkerchiefs. I stood up with a -- I woke up with an allergy this morning. What I would like to do is give you a view of Germany before I go into innovation. And Germany has been a focus country for us all over 2023. We've recently seen some announcements on contracts with big telecom companies. We will produce a couple of more announcements in the next few weeks. This presentation focuses on the connectivity market. We do have an energy plan as well for Germany, but the presentation today focuses on the connectivity market. The view that I'm presenting on this slide comes from Dialog Consult and VATM. They are a group of alternative telecom suppliers that produces report and has produced very recently, 29th of November. The top graph in this slide shows you the penetration of IP-enabled customers in Germany. Every bar represents a year, and the dark blue represents DSL customers. The light blue represents coax customers or HFC, hybrid fiber coax customers. This is where we traditionally operate in the German market. And the green element of the bar shows the fiber connections. And this is fiber-to-the-home as well as fiber to the business. So in total, of the 46 million active lines in Germany, only 37 million are full IP. And you notice from the slide that fiber is still the minority of those connections. On the bottom part of the slide, you see a different view. This is just the fiber customer. And you see that fiber is growing fast from homes passed perspective in Germany. By the way, the blue bars represent non-Deutsche Telekom and the Magenta bar is Deutsche Telekom penetration. So, you see that the market went in '23 from 13 million to an expected 16 million homes passed. But the dark blue part and the dark Magenta part shows the number of home connected. And you see that in Germany, the penetration rate of when we pass with fiber is around 26% for non-Telekom, but only 13% for the Telekom customers. So, that is still a very, very large opportunity, even where fiber is deployed on connecting customers to the fiber. And that is where we specialize on in Germany. Next slide. This gives you a view of Solutions30's current position in the German market. The table on the left side of the screen shows our current customer base. So, Vodafone traditional customers together with Deutsche Telekom. And then this morning, we announced Deutsche Glasfaser. GlasfaserPlus was announced a while ago. And Netze BW is a part of EnBW, which is the one of the 3 large energy companies in Germany. The BW stands for Baden-Wurttemberg, so basically the south part of Germany. And then Unsere Grune Glasfaser is a project that we're starting as well. In the different columns, you see what precisely we do. So for Vodafone, GlasfaserPlus, Unsere Grune Glasfaser in Netze BW, we are deploying a full turnkey solution. Whereas for Telekom, for example, we really focus on in-placing their home connect on their current network. And for Vodafone, we, of course, do in-home activities as well. What the slide says is that we're really into the fiber deployment now, but there is still a room of improvement inside our customers, and there are, of course, other customers in Germany. But the 3 big ones, Telekom, Vodafone, Unsere Grune Glasfaser, which is a joint venture between Telefonica and Allianz, are the main deployers in Germany. Our advantages to these customers, we deliver a full turnkey solution. We have access to the specialists from France, from Spain, from Belgium and the Netherlands, where we are very active in deploying fiber already. And in the German market, we are one of the few companies that have a lot of experience in connecting houses to a gigabit network. And that experience comes from our Vodafone experience, of course. The growth expectations for us in Germany is a high double-digit growth for the next 3 years to 5 years. And that will probably be at a level that we will sustain until after 2030. And certainly in the home connect part, you'll see us operate after 2035 in this fiber business for sure in Germany. It needs to be said that the prices in the German market are higher than what we see in other markets. That, of course, has got to do with carrier density in Belgium. Belgium is a much dense country, so prices are a bit lower. Same with Netherlands. But it also has to do with the topology of what we deploy in Germany. Everything is trenched, whereas in other countries, you use poles and facade. The surface in Germany, there's a lot of asphalt, whereas in other countries, we see a lot more soil. And of course, labor costs in Germany play a role in the definition of that home passed on connect price as well. So a very, very good market for us. If I can then move to the next slide and take you through some of the innovation activities that Solutions30 has been doing. And I'd like to point out on the next slide that for us, innovation is not necessarily invention. We don't invent new things. When we talk about innovation, we talk about optimizing costs for our customers or providing new ways of doing things that will decrease the cost. We talk about accelerating new things, that is revenues or customer satisfaction for our customers and innovating business models or the way we go-to-market with our services. So basically, how innovation put in 3 buckets; process innovation, service innovation and business model innovation. Next slide, please. In the next few slides, I'll give you examples of how we innovate. And this first example I'm particularly proud of in Belgium, this solution, Smartfix Visual AI, very [ pretentious ] innovation work from the supply chain masters. Supply chain master is the organization that regroups all customer procurement -- chief procurement offices from large companies in Belgium and you can look it up, what defined to win. But it was clearly seen as the most innovative project in Belgium. The project that I'll talk about here is for Fluvius. We used the program for other customers as well, but Fluvius is the network operator in Belgium. They passed by 5.1 million homes. 100% of those homes have an electricity meter. 68% have a gas meter. And Solutions30 rolls out about 42% of all meters in Belgium for this customer. What visual AI does, it takes a picture of the installation. And in those pictures, it analyzes up to 25 different control points. Has the sticker being applied. Is there a security information available? Do you have the right meter number, when you mount the meter and when you mount a new meter? But also, we can see whether a gas meter, for example, is seen correctly from the picture. So, a very innovative solution that totally changed the process in which we deliver. The advantages, I can talk a long time about this, but the advantages of the project is on the next slide, are basically -- can you move to the next slide, please, are basically around cost efficiency and quality control. As you can imagine, doing these meters is a very secure process. Security is of big importance. And with this project, we now verify 100% of all installations whereas previously we can only verify 15% of the installations. We've also been able now to roll out since we've implemented this project a lot faster than previously. And we've done that without having to expand the back-office team, which is a basic cost of service as well. So, you are 100% of conformity, with no increase of the back office. Photoconformity is important because the meter numbers are important for customers to receive their bills, of course. And then last but not least, our technicians' productivity has increased. We have no longer a repeat visit because something was installed badly. The reporting time, the time that the technicians need to use to do reporting decreased to 25%. And on top of that, the gas leak detection improved significantly, so that security improved, and we no longer need the 4-eye principle for our principle, meaning every meter that was installed by a technician was checked by a quality person. So, that has been reduced as well. So this was a significant cost saving, increase the speed of deployment significantly for our customer, and it was a game changer in the whole rollout of smart meters in Belgium. Next slide, please. We've since been using the same technology, Smartfix Visual AI on fiber projects. So, we now take pictures of all of the fiber deployments. That's bulk of the trench, as well as the distribution points. And we analyze those pictures of the AI, actually analyze those pictures, store the pictures and geotag is applied. So, we know precisely what happened on what location when we put fiber, and we put distribution points or connect customers. Every picture is validated whether the picture is clear, whether the picture hasn't been used before. So, every picture needs to be unique and we keep the picture stored for future quality control. The advantages, on the next slide of this project, are a much easier stakeholder dispute resolution process. And stakeholders here are, of course, municipalities and the people that are on the roads, but also the residents for whom we sometimes open the driveway. And the proof point is we take a picture before, we take a picture after and we can show on geotag a specific location, what happened before, during and after we've done our fiber deployment. This whole process also improves the first time right. And the picture you see there is a small picture on your screen. But in France, we've had this large issue and all of the telcos had the issue with the spaghetti of the fiber. In this process now, we're using Deepomatic in our Smartfix Visual AI, we can show the evolution of a distribution point and we can ensure and technicians know that we ensure that the distribution point is left correctly behind. So first time right has improved and, of course, proving that our work has been done with the right quality is made much easier as well. Next slide, please. So that was visual AI. This slide contains 2 examples of Smartfix Remote. The first is a tool that we use with customers, as well as with engineers within the HP community and the services we provide in the technology space. We have the ability to send the link to our customers and the customer smartphone is then visible for our remote resolution desk. And our remote resolution -- resolution desk that can draw on the screen of our customer, say, now do this, now do that. So we've reduced the requirement of the dispatch of technician dramatically. And where we dispatch technician and the technician is to junior to solve the issue. We always have a senior technician in our consulting team remote that can help the junior technician onsite. On the bottom of the screen, you see a different example of that Smartfix Remote. Here, there is a Solutions30 technician doing a repair, and because the technician needs his two hands to do the repair, the technician is wearing, you don't see it really well a virtual reality glass. So the instructions can be given to the technician on the virtual reality glass, but also of the technician who sits remote, and you see the picture of the technician sitting remote, can see what the technician is doing and he can guide the technician to do the right thing. So that's Smartfix Remote for you. Next slide, please. So we now go into service innovation and service innovation started with our customer loyalty program this year, the program started this year. And the customer loyalty programs, basically along with the customer, for the customer, we listen to the customer and we improve where the customer believes we need to improve. The process is a classical continuous improvement process. We listen to the customer. So we send questionnaires. We try to understand on different levels of sales and innovation, service development, service operations, support administration, digital, on different aspects, we try to listen to the customer. We then define activities to improve. We propose a plan to the customer and improve the plan to the customer, we implement and we listen again. So it's a continuous improvement, continuous listening process that we've implemented this year, and we will roll it out. At the moment, we're doing this in the large therapies, but we will roll this out to all of our large customers with the customer for the customer loyalty program. Next slide, please. Another Smartfix improvement that changes the way we deliver service for our customers is Follow the Tech. Follow -- in Follow the Tech, the customer can access the technician page and see where the technician precisely is, who the technician is who called to his site and what the estimated time of arrival of the technician is. In that same tool, the customer can also provide NPS scoring for low NPS score. So one star service activities, we will provide our customers with a closed loop feedback mechanism, which we will immediately correct the customer interaction if a customer was unsatisfied with the technician activity. So Follow the Tech is a very important tool for many of our customers now. And for some of the customers, we've integrated tool in their BSS and OSS systems. Next slide, please. The next 3 slides talk a little bit about the business model innovation. In the past, we have been doing a lot of transactions, as Gianbeppi already said for customers, but we were contracted for transactions. What we are seeing is a big shift towards turnkey solutions. So customers come to us and say, yes, find the transaction, but I would like you to take much more responsibility. And rather than just doing the installation work, we've now been asked to do the service and the management afterwards, where we've to do the design work. So our portfolio on a per transaction basis increased significantly. A couple of examples on the right side of the screen, in a fiber rollout, customers give us a municipality. The abrasives within the municipality that they would like to connect, and from there, we start doing the engineering, the preparation of the project, the permitting with the municipality. We do the deployment. We provide service and maintenance afterwards. And if it is relevant, we will also do the copper decommissioning or the [ coax ] decommissioning. So a full turnkey solution for our customers. Same happens in the EV charger world, where customers say, hey, I just want to give you leads and then you convert those leads into installations for me and you do the maintenance with the customer. And actually, we provide an end-to-end process where I only take a request from the customer, give the request to you, and you do the sales on my behalf. So again, a full turnkey solution, same we're seeing in the IT market where we used to do brake fix for customers. We are now deploying a full device as a service solution. So a clear shift away from transactional services into a more managed services approach. On the next slide, that managed services approach also drives the way we interact with our customers. So where we used to be a supplier delivering transactions and transactions very well for a very good price, we now move up to the value chain with the customer and try to become a trusted adviser with our customer by looking at cost effectiveness in what we do. And you see some examples below the slide. So our service efficiency is becoming a lot more important. Service efficiency, which will increase our margin, but we will also be able to give something back to our customers, of course. We identify the next step, we are like to value waste in the process. This will increase our productivity for our technicians. If we don't deliver value, that's to deliver value to a customer, we stop the task, we improve something else or we take margin for both us and the customer, and then last but not least, we will ensure that service model innovation will deliver that competitive advantage that a customer of Solutions30 will be looking for. That competitive advantage and a way to deliver a different service model to our customers, we've practiced. And on the next slide, please, through our vested outsourcing programs. And we've announced to you in 2019, I believe the large vested outsource with Telenet, a Liberty Global Group company in Belgium. And last year or end of 2021, we announced the vested outsource with Community Fibre. Vested outsource takes that trusted adviser to the next step. It is more than just a new way of contracting, it's really a way to both work together in a joint approach on improving the services that are delivered to the end customer of our customers. But there are 5 basic rules rather than saying this is the service you need to deliver, we define the outcome that our customer wants. And we move away from this individual service items to the outcomes that the customer wants. We focus by doing that, we don't focus on how we do things, but we focus on what we want to achieve. But those desired outcomes of our customers are clearly measured. So we do have strict KPIs. We measure those KPIs because in the pricing model, which is a cost is the cost model and some customers call it a cost-plus solution, it's more than just the cost-plus, as I stated before. But that cost base is an important measure in co-vested contracts, and we can deliver our margin by delivering the desired outcomes on top of that cost, right? So the desired outcomes define the price, not the cost of delivery. And very important in these vested out contracts is -- contracts is that we provide insights in what we do, but the governance process provides oversight in how we achieve those desired outcomes. So a very important program for us is vested outsource and one that we will be practicing with all of our customers. Thank you for that. With that, I will hand over to my countryman, Jonathan Crauwels.

Yes. Thank you, Luc, and good morning to all. I wanted to kick off my presentation by giving you a view on the lifespan of the fiber-to-the-home cycle. I mentioned before during this presentation, the fiber-to-the-home network deployment is highly growing in several countries, and Solutions30 is actively participating in that market trend in several countries. The revenue from fiber-to-the-home network deployment will grow in the next years and will even stay high up to 2027, 2028. The fiber-to-the-home network deployment is usually limited to the homes passed part, as you can see in the diagram to the left. However, this is just the first step of this business cycle. Fiber-to-the-home network deployment is very often the gate opener for the homes connected and homes activated part. And these investments will follow the network construction shortly and will take on beyond 2027 beyond 2028. At the same time, the fiber-to-the-home network and customer maintenance service will be launched in S30 as a vendor of the fiber-to-the-home network deployment, homes connected and homes activated is likely to be a preferred partner to deliver this service. In many countries, we are already performing this. The fiber-to-the-home network and customer maintenance is a recurring service, which we are highly interested in. You will see in the next coming slides, why this is of an importance for us. One of the next investment cycles in the European Union will concern the upgrade of the power grids as a preparation to renewable energy sources. Solutions30, as an experienced partner of the fiber-to-the-home network deployment, we will be ready to reuse its build capacity to deliver this service in the future. Next slide. In this graph, we wanted to show you the standard project life cycle of, in this case, the deployment of fiber. In the first phase, the launch phase, which lasts between 6 months to 12 months, we see lower sales volumes and high costs related to the start-up of a project. We have to start hiring, training, equipping our workforce. We have to invest in our support functions, hire new vehicles, et cetera. This dip -- this is a dip you can see in the graph, during the launch phase, the first phase. The next 2 years, we have rising volumes and margins. Margins are still not at a normal level because we need to reach the critical size in the company or in the density of that project. Once this critical size is reached, we are able to optimize the planning and bring down the travel time. We will have trained technicians who can implement best practices to new technicians, increasing our productiveness. This we call the mature phase. Typically, in a deployment life cycle after we have reached a certain maturity level, we will see the volumes go down. Together with this, the productiveness will decrease and our margins will also go down. If you go to the next slide, how do we want to tackle this? So like mentioned Solutions30 is not only offering the deployment, but also offering maintenance and repair. What we can see is that by adding these volumes, we are able to keep the volumes high in the latter phase of the project. And secondly, we are also able to stabilize our margins throughout the project. To give you a short update on Solutions30 financing strategy, we can see that the organic growth we are financing by reinvesting our profits. So instead of paying dividends, Solutions30 chooses to use this to grow the business. Next to that, we use debt financing to finance our external growth. Due to our solid financial position, we are able to finance both our external and internal growth without having to raise or without having to increase our capital. Like mentioned, Solutions30 is able to finance its organic and inorganic growth without having to raise extra capital. So how can this be achieved? This can be achieved by putting a lot of effort in keeping the working capital under control. For instance, the use of a global implemented deconsolidating factoring program and continuous negotiations with clients and suppliers, we managed to limit those requirements. In addition, our CapEx requirements are low with 1% and 2% on our yearly revenue. Together, this makes that we have a low cash requirement for year growth. As an illustration on the balance sheet projection of H1 2023 to grow with EUR 0.5 billion in revenues, we would require EUR 34 million of cash. Next to that, we also show our leverage ratio, net debt over equity -- over EBITDA, sorry, in the right graph, which is consistently under 2x, and it's far away from the 2.5x figurative mark and estimated to decrease also in the next coming years. As mentioned in the previous slide, we have high expenses in the launch phase of a new project. Solutions30 is using several tools to fund this period. We are negotiating advanced payments -- advanced payments with our clients to cover some of the prepaid expenses. We are utilizing our past earnings to invest in new projects, which [indiscernible] our growth. We are funding our CapEx expenditures through debt financing, and we have a global deconsolidated factoring program in place to close the gap between invoice issued and cash received. In the box below, we give some examples of costs we have at that start-up -- at the startup. An important bucket in this cost -- in this bucket -- in this box below is the WIP. The WIP is all work that we have already performed before we are able to invoice it. As mentioned, we are able to factor the invoices we have sent to the client, but there is also a significant time between the work performed and the invoice itself. That's the so-called WIP. If you go to the next slide -- sorry, this is the next slide. To deep dive more on the WIP topic, we want to show the impact it has on our need of working capital. For instance, the average time between the first invoice sent at the start of a project is 130 days. During this period, we already have paid several expenses. Next to the first invoice, we have higher lead times between work performed and invoice sent in the first months of 70% compared to a year later. This is because in new projects, we need to learn about the processes. For instance, we need to set up training and the invoice approval flows. We have to take pictures. This needs to be checked. We need to send a weekly checklist to our clients of all work performed. We need to get back and forth with the clients, et cetera. To speed up these processes, we are looking to set up automated flows for all exchanges with clients. We are investing highly in our IT software so that it is able to adapt to the needs of the clients and that we can create interfaces with their platforms to reduce this lead time. Doing this and continuously focusing on these processes, we are able to reduce the WIP after the first year of a new project up to 70%. Now in the next 2 slides, I wanted to give you -- we were asked a lot of times on the evolution of the margins between -- in Benelux between 2021 and 2023 and also in France. So to elaborate on this, if we look at the evolution of the Benelux from H1 2021 to H1 2023, we see a decrease of 4.1 points. This can mainly be explained by the enormous growth this parameter has experienced. As can be seen on the graph that shows an 84% growth in H1 2022, up until H1 2023. As explained in the previous slides, the first phase of the start of a new project brings increased costs and investments as the Benelux has now reached a critical size and can start working on increasing productivity levels, we expect margins to increase, even already in H2 2023. If you look at the evolution, if you look at what happened with France during this period from 2021 to 2023, H1, we see we were actually in the perfect storm in 2022. Our margins dropped significantly due to the combination of 2 exceptional events. A reorganization had to take place due to geographical redistribution in the telecom business and a bankruptcy of a competitor. And at the same time, we had a discontinuation of the smart meter rollout. In the first half of 2023, we started to recover in terms of profitability. This was mainly driven by the integration of Scopelec that had been finished and the reorganization that had taken place to prepare France to move into new activities. Lessons learned during this extraordinary event is that the teams needed to react very fast to turn around margins when special events occur, which has been done with success in H1 2023. Thank you for your time, and I want to pass to Gianbeppi again.

Thank you, Jonathan, and thank you all. Let's open the Q&A. I see that we have some questions coming up. So the first one is how does Solutions30 integrate corporate social responsibility as does CSR principles into its overall strategy, especially in time of crisis? So that's the first question. Amaury, do you want to take it?

Yes. So first of all, it's a long journey. We have started to improve our governance and our risk management procedures when we prepared our move on the regulated market, so back in 2019. So since then, we have implemented procedures, controls, which are standard and applicable in all the countries. One process, which is extremely important is the due diligence that we perform on all the partners of the group. So we -- to give -- to illustrate this standardization, we use the tool that has been developed within the group that is standard and with the standard procedure in all the countries. So we have a full KYC process applicable to all our partners. And on top of that, all the initiatives related to compliance and corporate social responsibility are driven by a team at central level, which sets targets. So targets in terms of governance, targets in terms of environment and targets in terms of social responsibility. And this team makes sure that the targets are delivered by each country and that the guidelines are operationally effective in all the countries. For that, we have -- we now have a new Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, who joined more than 1 year ago, Nathalie Duchesne. And she progressively enlarged our team -- her team in the different countries.

Thank you, Amaury. Second question, I think this is for Wojciech, but maybe I can also give a comment, a short comment before handing it to Wojciech. What kind of return of information do you have when you compare your new processes with the ones of your most started competitors and by geography? And can you quantify? So my comment is as we said at the beginning, we started up from scratch 20 years ago, and now we are making EUR 1 billion, and we have done growth every single year since then. It's not so common. So when you look at competitors, there's not many companies that manage to do this. So that means that we know we have learned some tricks well and we play them well. The other thing is the high market share that we have with some important clients across Europe. Telenet is a very good example because we are the only supplier for them, but there's also other examples for very important clients. So we managed to become important -- to become, yes, important for some very large clients. And I think that's a good proof of the fact that we have good processes in place. But Wojciech, maybe you can elaborate a little bit more on that.

Okay. Thank you, Gianbeppi. So just to give you the couple of examples which I discussed about during my part. So first of all, let's take the FTTH installations, which we did in Poland. So we are in the quite good situation because our market share is the biggest, even biggest than our competitors. Of course, the market share is directly connected with the KPIs, with the timely delivery, with the first time right with the NPS. And so it looks that the process which we implemented, and we set having the couple of factors included allows us to bring the right combination of the actions, productivity and profitability. So -- and in the different location today, we have the market share on the average like 30%, 40%. In some of the locations, we are able to achieve the market share on the level of 70% or 80% even. So the -- we do not have the direct comparison with our competitors of our processes. We can compare just on the level of market share, on the wellness of our customer to give us much more business than before.

Thank you, Wojciech. We have another question for Germany, and that's going to be for Luc. The contract signed in GlasfaserPlus in November, plus set up FTTH connection to 4 million homes. It is 3x bigger than the contracts with the 3 connectivity clients signed in Benelux in '21 and '22. Then shall we expect the turnover in Germany to be at least 3x bigger than the whole Benelux turnover within 1 year? There's big expectations, Luc, make it clear.

Yes. So these 2 regions mentioned that close to my heart, Benelux and Germany. Yes, 3 contracts in Benelux. There's actually a fourth one that we started this year. In Belgium, there's a sixth one, I must say, that we started in the Netherlands. So yes, the growth in the Benelux is still continue on that. Germany, of course, will be bigger than Benelux from a fiber deployment perspective. There's 47 million homes in Germany. The -- well, homes and businesses, there's 4. -- [ 5.1, 5.2 ] in Belgium. So yes, of course, the German market is much bigger. And the German market is less progressed as the Belgium market, I believe. In Belgium, you have a very strong coax network that covers every house. In Germany, coax is still the bigger gigabit network, but it doesn't cover every house, right? So there's still a [ DSM ]. So I think that move will go quicker as well than what we're seeing in Belgium. GlasfaserPlus, which is a Deutsche Telekom joint venture, by the way, together with Glasfaser Nordwest, really important -- really important customers of ours, and we will grow fast with them. There's other customers that we will grow fast. But again, I think high double-digit growth for the next years to come in Germany. We have just started in Germany with fiber deployments, meaning we've done home connects for Telekom and Deutsche Glasfaser since somewhere beginning of this year, April, May. We're now moving into full deployment turnkey solutions. We've got -- the design teams are ready and our designing product managers -- project managers are in place, city managers are in place, construction managers are in place. We started to deploy. We are in a ramp-up phase, meaning first year, we need to make sure that all of the customer connections happen correctly. As the documentation signed up as it needs to be and on time because cash in this project is important. So we want to make sure that we fully correctly deployed in the first year, half year and then we can go full speed in Germany. You'll see that absolutely happen in the next years.

Thank you, Luc. Another question concerns France. So that's maybe for you, Amaury, even though I can maybe comment a bit. Dismantling copper networks in France, when do you expect the first contracts to be signed, small comment from me, Amaury first is we are already doing some work on copper dismantling. But in France, it's really not the focus at the moment. In France, there is only 50% of the houses that have fiber. And at the moment, Orange, that is the operator at France, the copper network has launched a program called Fiber 360, which means that the focus of Orange still deploy fiber everywhere. And it's only once the fiber is deployed, then you can extract copper massively from the ground. So while we are still working on it, we do not see that coming the priority for 2024 and 2025. Amaury, I let you comment a bit.

Exactly. We are already doing some dismantling of the copper network. But what is sure is that the maintenance cost of the copper network is increasing. So there is a strong incentive for Orange to dismantle the copper network as soon as it is possible. And so that implies to have the full fiber network effective in the city. So at this stage, I would say that the first cities in France were like acting like pilots to be fully connected to fiber. The ambition for the first ones is in 2025, which should be the start of this copper dismantling.