Telia Company AB

Telia Company AB

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EUR
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0.13EPS
37.52P/E
16.73BMarket Cap
Jan 28Next Earn

Q2 FY2026 · Earnings Call TranscriptJuly 17, 2026

Operator

Welcome, everyone, to Telia Company's Q2 results presentation. With that, I will now hand over to Telia Company Head of Investor Relations, Erik Strandin Pers.

Please go ahead, the floor is yours.

Erik Strandin Pers

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to the call.

We have, as usual, CEO Patrik Hofbauer and CFO Eric Hageman here, and I hand the word over to you, Patrik.

Patrik Hofbauer

Thank you, Erik, and good morning, everyone. We continue to see good commercial momentum in the business, with a strong performance in our core operations.

I will take you through the key areas. Starting with customer, the customer satisfaction is improving and our net promoter score continues to increase.

This helps to drive growth in the customer base, and we had positive mobile net adds across our three biggest markets this quarter. We delivered high-quality experience to fans during the FIFA World Cup, and our network supported record data traffic and streaming volumes.

Protecting our customers is equally important, and we blocked tens of millions of scam calls in the quarter. Our management of asset portfolio remains very active, and we are driving targeting consolidation in our markets.

After closing the Bredband2 deal last quarter, we have agreed to two smaller bolt-on acquisitions in Sweden, adding a city network and a niche B2B MVNO. Work on the mobile RAN sharing agreement with Ice in Norway is progressing well, although taking slightly longer than initially estimated.

In July, we also completed the stake increase and new partnership in our Finnish fiber JV, Valokuitunen. Simplification is fundamental to our strategy.

We recently closed the Halebop mobile brand in Sweden, and we have agreed to transfer part of our ICT business in Finland to a partner, including around 250 employees. This will help us to focus even more on our core business.

We are using AI and other technologies to improve customer journeys, which saves time both for us and our customers. Turning to innovation, we have agreed to form a partnership with KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Brookfield, where we will work together to develop sovereign AI capabilities.

We launched a service called Telia Critical IoT Connectivity, which is the first commercial available service in Sweden to use 5G standalone. We demonstrated a modular solution that enables mobile coverage in emergency situations.

Let's now look at the financial highlights for the quarter. Service revenue growth accelerated to 2.8%, the highest in 4 years, supported by continued strength in Sweden Consumer and high demand for business and mission-critical services.

Lithuania was again strong, and Norway's growth accelerated to 4.1% as the wholesale headwind faded in the quarter and is now behind us. EBITDA grew by 3.4%, with solid contributions from Sweden and the Baltics, while Norway was slightly negative due to a tough cost comparison on the TV content side.

CAPEX remained disciplined at around 12.5 billion SEK on a rolling 12-month basis, remaining below our outlook for less than 13 billion. Free cash flow once again stronger than we expected, driven mostly by phasing, and came in at 2.2 billion for the quarter and 4.1 billion year-to-date.

Leverage ended at 2.06x, more or less unchanged from the last quarter. Let's now move into Sweden, where we had solid customer trends supported by convergence.

This is a clear strength for us since we have more than 1 million converged households. Customers buying multiple services improve both loyalty and economics, which can be seen in our financial performance.

Double-digit TV growth is the most obvious example. Growth in Consumer continued to be strong, and demand for mission and business-critical services remained solid.

As I mentioned, the Halebop mobile brand was discontinued in the quarter. This is part of our simplification agenda and can improve both channel mix and operational efficiency over time.

The integration and synergies from Bredband2 are developing according to plan. The broadband ARPU decline of 9% is to around half driven by the addition of Bredband2 customers, which had a lower ARPU, and partly because we are in a phase with more volume growth, having grown the base for four consecutive quarters, but less pricing.

The balance between volume and pricing will shift from time to time, and working is going on to strengthen the ARPU. As we have a full household approach, currently doing more pricing on TV.

Financially, Sweden continued to deliver healthy results, with service revenue growth remaining strong at 2.6% and EBITDA growth of above 5%, supported by lower OPEX. EBITDA less CAPEX continued to improve and is now on comfortable levels of 10 billion.

In Finland, we saw an increase in mobile customer base driven by growth in Enterprise and stable development in Consumer. The Consumer mobile segment remains challenging, but intake ARPU is slowly moving in the right direction, and we continue to focus on retention and loyalty.

The share of our Consumer mobile customers in binding contracts has steadily increased from very low numbers 2 years ago and now represent a majority. As I mentioned, we signed an agreement to transfer part of our ICT business to a partner.

This is part of our strategy to sharpen focus on our core business. For the same reason, we left the e-invoicing, web hosting, and alarm business in recent years, because it makes Telia Finland less complex and more agile.

Around 250 people will be part of this transfer, which will result in approximately €40 million lower revenue for us per year, but hardly no change to EBITDA. We also finalized our new partnership and increased our ownership in Valokuitunen, the infra joint venture, from 40% to 49%.

Service revenue growth was slightly positive overall. The revenue mix this quarter included some low-margin components, but this was offset by strong FX from cost savings, especially on resource costs, so that EBITDA growth overall was flat.

Norway delivered a visible improvement in revenue growth, supported by pricing, improving customer trends, and to some extent an easy comp on TV since we had higher discounts last year during the black screen situation with TV 2. ARPUs increased across all products, and the mobile subscriber development improved, with the quarter ending strongly.

EBITDA growth was, however, held back by a tough year-on-year cost comparison on content costs, which resulted in a decline of 2%. We had a strong roadmap to strengthen our infrastructure.

What we have sold to MDU and SDU customers followed our plan, and next thing is to get the RAN sharing with Ice started, since this will create both better network for our customers and stronger economics. We did not quite get it up and running in Q2 as originally planned, but we are making good progress on this complex transaction and are working towards finalizing it soon.

Lithuania again delivered a strong quarter. Service revenue growth remained solid across both mobile and fixed, and EBITDA growth accelerated to almost 9% due to good top-line momentum and cost control.

The new data center announced last quarter is progressing well, and we secured important spectrum at an attractive price in a multiband auction, adding as much as 40 MHz in the 1500 MHz band. This was important auction, and it will help us to retain our 5G leadership.

We also renewed our spectrum in the 2100 MHz band. In summary, we continue to deliver a great financial performance while strengthening our network position and expanding our capabilities in secure and robust infrastructure services.

In Estonia, growth also accelerated, driven mainly by mobile ARPU, which helped by reduced discount levels overall. Enterprise ICT deliveries also returned to growth as some of the supply chain constraints that we saw last quarter have been easing.

Our fiber buildout continues, and we are reducing legacy infrastructure at the same time and are well in line with our plan. Overall, Estonia continues to show solid execution and healthy development in the core business.

With that, I hand over to Eric, who will go through the financial development in more detail.

Eric Hageman

Thank you, Patrik. Let me now take you through the financial development in the quarter, starting as usual with service revenue and EBITDA.

Service revenue growth accelerated in Q2 to 2.8%, which is comfortably above a full-year ambition of around 2%. Across the group, consumer revenue had the fastest growth, and as you just saw, the country units with the strongest momentum were Sweden and Lithuania, with also a clear improvement in Norway.

Finland managed to stay flat in terms of service revenue growth despite pressure on mobile, helped in part by relatively low-margin project and licensing revenue in the quarter. From a product perspective, growth was driven by strong TV performance in Sweden and Norway, good mobile growth in the Baltics, and continued demand for business and mission-critical services in Sweden.

Overall, this more than compensated for continued pressure on legacy revenue in Sweden and the mobile development in Finland. Turning to EBITDA, growth came in at 3.4%, which is broadly in line with our ambition for the full year of around 3%.

The main drivers were again Sweden and the Baltics. Finland also contributed through strong cost control in the quarter, while EBITDA in Norway was held back by a tough year-on-content-cost comparison.

Overall, we had a quarter where profitable growth and cost discipline resulted in earnings growth and margin expansion, with EBITDA margin expanding to 40.5%. Looking forward to the second half of the year in terms of EBITDA growth, you can see on the far right of this page that we currently expect EBITDA growth in Q3 to be below 2%, driven mainly by limited growth in Sweden due to phasing and the margin profile of some customer projects.

In Q4, we then expect a re-acceleration again in Sweden and also in Finland, which has a relatively easy Q4 EBITDA comparison. Overall, we expect our EBITDA growth for the second half to be in line with consensus and to deliver on a full-year guidance of around 3%.

Looking at operating expenses, we continue to maintain good cost control in the quarter. Resource costs were again down, largely driven by Finland, and we also saw reduction in IT costs and bad debt for the group, which more than compensated for increased marketing spend, mainly in Norway, to drive mobile growth.

Together, this resulted in OPEX declining by around 1%. OPEX as a percentage of service revenue continued to trend down, ending at 29.1% compared to 30.2% in the same quarter last year.

Moving on to the middle graph, you can see from the green-blueish line that we also remained disciplined with our capital expenditures. On a rolling 12-month basis, CAPEX was stable at 12.5 billion SEK, comfortably below a full-year outlook of less than 13 billion.

This reflects our continued capital allocation discipline and supports our ambition to improve cash flow generation over time. As a result, EBITDA less CAPEX continued to expand this quarter, reaching 20 billion SEK, a healthy 5% increase over last year.

On the right-hand side of this page, you can see that ROCE has been steadily trending upwards, ending the quarter at 10.6%, up from 9.3% a year ago, a direct consequence from both increased profitability and improved capital allocation. Let's now have a look at our free cash flow statement.

Free cash flow in the second quarter was 2.2 billion SEK, and year-to-date, we are just above 4 billion. This is ahead of our earlier expectations that about one-third of the full-year free cash flow was to be generated in H1.

In addition to better-than-expected profitability and lower interest paid, we also saw some phasing of cash CAPEX and working capital. As you can see from the table, cash CAPEX is significantly lower than last year and lower than our budget for the year, driven by some rephasing into the second half.

As for working capital, we did expect a reversal this quarter following the strong positive contribution in previous quarters, but the reversal was smaller than anticipated as we benefited from mission-critical payments. In the second half of this year, we also expect to make a circa 400 million SEK tax payment in Norway following a recent court verdict in the long-running case regarding historical VAT rates on news services, which impacts everyone in the industry.

In summary, Q2 free cash flow was above plan, mainly because of phasing, and hence we keep the full-year ambition of around 9 billion SEK. This implies a stronger second half, but is now less back-end loaded than previously expected.

Our 9 billion SEK ambition for the full year now also includes the 400 million Norwegian tax payment I just mentioned. Let's now have a brief look at how leverage has developed on the next page.

As you can see on the right-hand side, leverage decreased marginally compared to the first quarter to just over 2x, driven by expanding EBITDA that more than compensated for the net debt increase of around 700 million. The main reason for the net debt increase this quarter is the negative impact we had from FX movements, mainly NOK versus SEK, which impacted both debt and derivatives values.

Overall, we can say in the first half that despite paying for the BB2 acquisition and reducing the level of hybrids, we are comfortably in the lower end of the leverage target range. Looking back at the value creation agenda we laid out at the investor update, we continue to make good progress.

We are delivering profitable growth and margin expansion, and we are staying disciplined on CAPEX. The first half of 2026 has been particularly active on the M&A front, where we have signed several MOUs and also closed some deals that simplified the business, strengthen our infrastructure portfolio, and drive in-market consolidation through smaller bolt-on acquisitions, particularly in Sweden.

As said, our balance sheet is healthy, with limited refinancing needs in the year, and in April, we paid the first tranche of our now increased dividend per share. With that, I hand back to Patrik for our closing remarks.

Patrik Hofbauer

Thank you, Eric. To summarize, Q2 showed continued solid momentum, with good service revenue and EBITDA growth, with disciplined capital allocation.

Sweden and Lithuania remained strong, Norway and Estonia improved, and Finland showed stabilization supported by solid cost control. We remain focused on customer satisfaction, profitable growth, and becoming even simpler, faster, and more efficient.

This all supports our outlook for the full year as well as our mid-term ambitions. Thank you.

Erik Strandin Pers

Yes, and with that, I think we're ready to take questions.

Operator

To join the queue and ask a question, please press star five on your telephone. Again, that's star five on your telephone to ask a question.

Our first question comes from Andrew Lee with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Please go ahead and ask your question.

Sofija Rakicevic

Hi, good morning, everyone. You actually have Sofija from the team.

Two quick questions from us. The first one, there have been weaker results across the Nordics this quarter, with operators citing competition as one of the reasons, which has made investors question structural growth outlook of all Nordic markets.

Do you think that outlook has deteriorated in any of the markets, or do you see any changes when it comes to structural growth? That's the first question.

The second one is you had slightly weaker mobile and broadband trends in Sweden this quarter. Could you just go a little bit more into detail as to what is driving that?

Thank you.

Patrik Hofbauer

Thank you, Sofija. I can start, it's Patrik here.

Let's look at the competitive situation. We don't feel a change in the competitive landscape in the Nordics.

We see a slightly stabilization in Finland, which we have had quite a tough situation now the last two, three quarters. We see a more stabilization there, and we hope that that will continue, of course, going forward, that the market is a bit more rational.

In Sweden, we see a similar situation what we've seen before. Consumer is for us strong, it's a good market for Consumer.

We see B2B still some, but no change from previous quarters, some competition in large and public accounts, but no change. Mission-critical is strong for us.

If Norway, we see actually an improvement. If you look at the market situation, I don't see a big different shift compared to the previous quarters, we foresee it will be continued rational and stable throughout the rest of the year.

Eric Hageman

Mobile Sweden?

Patrik Hofbauer

Yes, mobile Sweden was the first question?

Eric Hageman

Mobile service revenue growth. Mobile service revenue growth,

Patrik Hofbauer

yeah. If you look at the mobile service revenue growth in Sweden, this is a similar trend that we have seen the last quarter, nothing has changed from our side.

We have a household focus. If you look at Consumer mobile in Sweden, we have much more focus on the household.

We see that we have now more than 1 million converged households that have at least two services from us. This is an important play for us, and it has been that for the last years.

We see clearly benefits with that. We see lower churn and we see higher financial performance.

If you look at the revenue per household, that's actually increasing, we don't see a major trend shift from our perspective in that one. Thank you for your question.

Operator

Our next question comes from Derek Laliberté with ABG Sundal Collier. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Derek Laliberté

Yes, good morning, and thank you. I have two questions.

You highlighted first the lower EBITDA growth in Q3 here coming up and then a stronger growth in Q4 due to project phasing. I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit on what's driving that phasing and how much confidence you have in the pretty significant Q4 acceleration.

Then I was wondering if you could update us on the Halebop migration here, whether you've seen any increase in churn or competitive activity following this closure, and is the simplification delivering the commercial benefits you expected so far? Thank you.

Patrik Hofbauer

Should I start with the second one? Good morning, by the way.

Regarding Halebop, well, this migration has been planned for almost a year or a bit more than a year. It's the right decision to simplify the portfolio, as I said in Sweden, and make it much clearer also on the customer proposition in the market.

The Halebop migration went very well according to plan, no surprises, no increased churn, and we migrated these customers over to the Telia brand, and it was very successfully done. Executed by the Swedish team.

Eric Hageman

On the first question with regards to the profile in the second half of this year. We currently expect EBITDA growth in Q3 to be below 2%, and then above our sort of trend rate in Q4 to accelerate.

It's driven by the expected limited growth in Sweden. We mentioned two things in the analyst presentation: one is the phasing, and the other one is the margin profile of what we're selling.

What is the phasing? We had higher mission-critical Q3 last year than we expect this year in the same quarter, but then we expect that to accelerate again in Q4, more mission-critical in Q4 than the same period last year.

Then with regards to the margin profile, because that obviously is what impacts EBITDA, is that we're doing proportionally more ICT in that third quarter and less mission-critical, which has a higher margin. With regards to the confidence of that, we have full confidence in it, and I think it's also important that we have a slightly different profile for EBITDA than for service revenue, because basically we don't see that impact on service revenue and because the compensation of the less mission-critical is there by more ICT revenues in the quarter in Sweden.

Derek Laliberté

Very good. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Andreas Joelsson with DNB Carnegie. The line is open.

Please go ahead.

Andreas Joelsson

Good morning, everyone. One question from my side, but it's a bit long.

I know it's difficult to compare products and talk about households, but it would still be interesting to hear your thoughts on the Swedish ARPU development on TV and the corresponding service revenue growth that you see in TV versus the lack of ARPU growth in mobile and corresponding lack of mobile service revenue growth. Yes, I know I'm living in an Excel world and you live in the real world, and there are differences, but can you take some learnings from what you have done on the pricing on TV into mobile in order to accelerate mobile services as well?

Thanks.

Patrik Hofbauer

Good morning, Andreas. I can try to start what's going on on the market.

Now, just joking. I will try to explain our situation.

We have a very strong TV product, the best, absolutely the best in the market. This has been a situation for a number of quarters, and we continue to have good development there.

Look, our play in Sweden, as I tried to say before as well, we are trying to focus on household perspective. Getting more broadband customers was strategically important for us.

That's the reason why we acquired the 500,000 broadband Bredband2 customers as well, because that gives us a good base to sell more services on top, like mobile and TV. The reason why the pricing power has been so good in TV is because we have the absolutely best product.

No one can compare our product with anyone else in the market. That is the reason.

Then when we look in our KPIs, we look into, okay, how is the revenue per household developing, and that is important for us because, A, we have a significantly lower churn of those customers, and we want to sell more to existing customers and building that base. That we have done successfully, and we have now more than 1 million households that are converged that have at least two services from us.

That is 20% roughly from the Swedish households. That's the total households in Sweden, so that's building a solid position for us.

Then, of course, looking forward, we're looking into always how we can continue to grow ARPU in mobile, both postpaid and on broadband. We think that there is still opportunity to increase prices going forward, but let's see whether timing is right.

Andreas Joelsson

Thank you very much.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Ondrej Cabejsek with UBS. The line is open.

Please go ahead.

Ondrej Cabejsek

Hi, yes. Good morning, everyone.

Thanks for the presentation. I have two questions, maybe more follow-ups.

On the Halebop migration or the impact rather of the discontinuation of the brand, we've heard from one of your competitors that this has created a lot of, I guess, attempts at stealing, I guess, market share during this migration period, but at the same time, you guys also had a very good result in terms of net adds. If you could please comment on those two or those three pieces of information, how they square up from your perspective.

Then second comment, I guess, I would appreciate if you could give us on the comments from again your biggest competitor in Norway, where the situation was painted as basically much more competition in the higher-end unlimited segment and specifically from MVNOs. Again, you don't seem to beat the concerns, if you could please comment on that from your perspective.

Thank you.

Patrik Hofbauer

Yes, thank you. Let's start with the first question, Halebop.

As I said previous on the previous questions, the Halebop migration went according to our plan, or actually a bit better than plan, with extremely low churn. Remember again, we took all these customers and moved them into the Telia brand, and that worked very well.

If you look at the market, yes, we have seen more activities on the value-based segment, i.e., the no-frills brand, and that is I would say pretty natural. It's not like we have seen historically aggressiveness.

We would not subscribe to that one. We have, of course, seen more activities.

Of course, our competitors are trying to steal customers from us, but we have not seen that in our base. People stayed with us, they are happy with the services that we are delivering to them, and the migration for Halebop was extremely successful, I'm super, super happy to see that.

Then when it comes to the Norwegian case, well, I would say the market has been somewhat tougher in Q2, but we remember we performed well in this market. There were some positive also developments in June.

We see ATL prices, for example, that we have observed in the market that several brands have increased prices. We are acting rational in the market.

We haven't seen an increased so much intense competition in Norwegian market. It's fairly similar compared to previous quarters, we are not recognizing that comment on your question.

We see the market a bit different. Fairly healthy market.

Competition is there, it will continue, of course, but it's not unusual compared to previous quarters.

Ondrej Cabejsek

Appreciate that. Thank you.

Patrik Hofbauer

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Fredrik Lithell with SHB. Your line is now open.

Please ask your question.

Fredrik Lithell

Thank you. Thank you for taking my questions as well.

Just a follow-up on the Halebop, if you could describe a little bit if you have some cost benefits now when you close down platforms or FTEs or something, and if that was part of Q2 already, if that is the case. Secondly, if we could get a little bit more details on how to view networking CAPEX changes in the coming quarters, how we should sort of trim that in our models.

Thank you.

Patrik Hofbauer

I can answer the first question on Halebop. We don't see a big impact in the numbers.

This is a part of our simplification work that is ongoing to support the outlook and the target up until 2027 that we have already communicated, so that there is nothing on top. This has been planned for more than a year and very sensitive and very successfully executed, I would say.

It will, of course, be beneficial for us because it will be easier for the customer to understand the difference between the Telia brand and the Fello brand. Now Halebop was a bit stuck in the middle.

That we now take away, and we continue to build our premium position with the Telia brand, and the customers are obviously very happy with that situation, and we are growing in the Telia brand, which is very positive for us. I think we are in a good commercial momentum there, and that will continue.

That is again supported by the convergence, that is a very attractive play and it's very appreciated by the customers as well.

Eric Hageman

With regards to your second question on CAPEX, Fredrik. We highlighted today the rolling 12-month, which is at around 12.5 billion coming from 16 or so billion 2 years ago.

That trend continues. Today we reiterate the guidance that we are going to be below that 13 billion for 2026, and we don't see any reason why that would change.

If you think about it as a percentage of sales with the strong performance in top-line that you've seen this quarter, we'll see that continuing to trend down. Relatively flat in absolute terms, trending down as a percentage.

Fredrik Lithell

All right. Perfect.

Thank you.

Patrik Hofbauer

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Max Fowinkel with Rothschild & Co. The line is now open.

Please ask your question.

Max Findlay

Good morning, Patrik and Eric. You mentioned that the majority of Finnish customers are now on fixed-term contracts.

A couple of questions on this. Was there a sudden ramp-up during the second half of last year, and if so, how significant was this?

Should we expect the trend of fixed contracts to continue, or should this temper from here? Then secondly, both your competitors have explained how they expect pricing over time to recover in the Finnish market, but it seems to me there's a risk to pricing as a lot of these fixed contracts will come to an end during Q4 and operators will be wanting to defend their volumes, which you mentioned remains your focus in Finland.

Given these subs will no doubt have liked their cheaper tariffs, MVNOs are launching new tariffs, and there's been commentary on softer consumer sentiment, the backdrop for significant pricing improvement in Q4 is tough. It'd be really useful to get your view on how you see the pricing environment developing in Finland.

Thank you.

Erik Strandin Pers

Thank you, Max. This is Erik, the other Erik at IR here.

I will take the question on fixed-term contracts. We've actually had over quite a long time, a couple of years, a gradual buildup of the share of fixed-term contracts in the base from very, very low levels of low single digits almost to a majority now.

That's one of the things we do to build engagement and loyalty in the base. There isn't a big bump in that curve in Q4 of the year, it's been a longer-term effort.

Yes, there's a lot of turnover in Q4 seasonally, and is there an opportunity to raise prices when those contracts expire in Q4 this year? Probably is, but let's see, and we can't really forecast what the other players and the MVNOs will do, I think.

Anything to add, Patrik or Eric? No,

Patrik Hofbauer

and I think the buildup of fixed-term contracts is also good for the market. It stabilizes the market, and we had just an imbalance in our base two more than 2 years ago, where we have everything outside the contracts.

This is the right play for telecom operators to run, yeah.

Max Findlay

Brilliant. Thank you.

Patrik Hofbauer

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Nick Lyall with Berenberg. Your line is not open.

Please go ahead.

Nick Lyall

Morning, guys. I hope you can hear me this time.

It was a quick question on cost trends on the Finnish market and the Norwegian market. I think, Patrik, in your presentation you mentioned that cost control in Finland was solid, and it looks as if OPEX is about flat.

Is that where you want to be, and how quickly can you ramp up savings that you talked about in raised margins in the Finnish market via savings? Is that more of a revenue effect with prices start to rise again, or are the more savings you can take out and when?

In the Norwegian market, maybe cost grew around 3% underlying in terms of growth, and you mentioned some marketing spend in the quarter. Is there a big initiative you can start, is that dependent on the RAN sharing, and when do you expect the savings in this market to kick in, if possible?

Thanks. Yeah.

Eric Hageman

As always, Nick, we caught about 75% of that, but we won't make that comment again.

Nick Lyall

I think

Eric Hageman

we got the gist. It's on margin expansion in those markets.

No, actually in Finland, OPEX is down quite a lot. From memory, it's about 90 million, but, Erik or Anders, can confirm that outside the call.

It is because of what we flagged earlier. It was a business which had less than 30% EBITDA margin, and it should get to, let's call it 40% or so, as we said in many interactions with you guys and investors.

We are all on that path. Part of that is taking out the cost.

You saw the FTE reductions that we've done. The second one is by divesting non-core businesses is also helping with that, hence the acquisition or the sale to CGI that we highlighted in the report is super important in that context.

Good progress made, quite a bit yet to go in that market. To your second question is, obviously, improved pricing will help with that.

We already see a better market in Q2 than in Q1, and Q1 was a lot better than Q4, I think we're going in the right direction there in terms of Finland. In terms of Norway, what we've done there is that increased commercial momentum that we called out in the presentation today is partly driven by the increased focus on mobile.

For the first time, you see us actually winning customers there again. In combination with very strong ARPU increases following the price adjustments that we have, you see that mobile momentum growing.

That's partly also because we invested in sales and marketing. Is there more opportunity for cost there?

Absolutely, not just in Norway and Finland, but across the board for the organization. We're very happy with what we've seen in the OPEX development, 1% down compared to last year, and as a percentage of revenue, our OPEX continues to go down.

It is a fundamental part of our profitable growth story is margin expansion, and we see that coming through certainly also in Finland now.

Nick Lyall

That's great. Thanks, Eric.

Operator

Our next question comes from Felix Henriksson with Nordea. Your line is now open.

Please go ahead.

Felix Henriksson

Hi guys. Thanks for taking my question.

I have a couple left. Just looking for a status update on a couple of these strategic projects that you have ongoing.

First being the network JV in Norway, what exactly is dragging on the process there? Then the divestment of Latvia, where are we at the moment, and what is the expected timeline for that in regards to the second half of the year?

Thanks.

Patrik Hofbauer

Yes. Hello.

Regarding JV Norway, well, we have started to build a company to do this kind of activities. It's quite complex agreement, and we are in the stage to finalize that agreement, I hope we will finalize this just after summer.

That is the ambition, and it continues. It's a bit late, but I think we were a bit overoptimistic in the start as well to fix this, but no other concerns or anything about this JV.

Then Latvia, well, there is a more tricky question. Actually going there next week to meet the Prime Minister to discuss this, because we have an agreement that we should finalize this to sign an SBA by the end of July, and we have a meeting next week.

I will come back when I know more. Still, the strategic direction is no change.

We still are in the plan to exit. There has been some political changes, as you probably know, in the country, where there is a new Prime Minister and there is an election coming up in 3rd of October, let's see where we will end this.

No change in direction, it's just maybe a timing question. We don't know yet, we'll go there next week, let's see.

Felix Henriksson

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Keval Khiroya with Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open.

Please go ahead.

Keval Khiroya

Thank you for the question on Norway, please. Can you remind us of how much of your cable network has now been upgraded to fiber?

It looks like the Norwegian booked CAPEX was down 20% in the first half despite this upgrade accelerating. Can you also talk a little bit about the underlying movements in Norwegian CAPEX as well?

Thank you. Yep.

Erik Strandin Pers

Thanks, Keval. It's Erik here, IR Erik again, and it's roughly 60% of the subscriber base on broadband is on fiber and FTTB, about 40% on HFC connections.

That I think is the short answer. There is a gradual product.

First, you set up the plan, then you sell in the upgrade to the customer, the MDU or SDU, and then you plan the buildout, and so on. It ramps out quarter-by-quarter according to plan, but it takes a little bit time to get the speed up, I would say, as expected.

Was there a second question?

Eric Hageman

On CAPEX

Keval Khiroya

and

Eric Hageman

CAPEX in Norway. Since it's taking a bit of time, it doesn't consume so much CAPEX yet, this buildout.

We have built out 5G and done a lot of CAPEX in Norway, CAPEX on a quarterly basis is always shifting a bit, I don't think we have much to add there really.

Patrik Hofbauer

No, but no surprises. Everything is actually according to plan and including in the guidance for the year, no surprises.

There is at least nothing that we have on our top of our heads at the moment, so. Yep.

Keval Khiroya

Okay. Thank you.

Patrik Hofbauer

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Abhilash Mohapatra with BNP. Your line is now open.

Please go ahead.

Abhilash Mohapatra

Morning and thank you for taking my question. Just a clarification really.

I wanted to come back to the Swedish mobile service revenue trends. You mentioned obviously you're quite pleased with the underlying commercial development and then how you're sort of doing with the households.

Just in terms of the sort of financial trends this year, this quarter, obviously MSR was sort of down year-on-year. Could you maybe give us a bit of color whether there were sort of some tough comps this quarter and how those might evolve for the rest of this year?

Then just related to that, could you maybe just sort of remind us of any back-book pricing impacts or timing of those within your Swedish business and how that might impact service revenue evolution? Thank you.

Patrik Hofbauer

Yes, I can start. It's Patrik here.

Good morning. I will start with the first question regarding the mobile service revenue development that you are asking for.

If you look at the Consumer side, it was growing 2%, around 40 million, partly due to subscriber base expansion versus last year and slightly higher ARPU as well. On the Enterprise side, we had a decline of almost 8% or 86 million.

This was driven by an ARPU decline, and this was partly due to an organic decline, but also I don't know if you remember, but we had a 50 million I would say unusual high project-based revenue in Q2 last year, comparables are a bit tough. That was related to a smart public transportation deal that we did, it's a one-time deal that we had in Q2 last year, which is impacting also the year-over-year comparisons.

Otherwise, we don't see any big trend shifts in the market versus previous quarters.

Eric Hageman

No, maybe just to briefly add, and maybe you want to say something on pricing then, Erik. I think there is a bifurcation between strong consumer mobile and softer B2B mobile.

I think that is something that we've seen for many quarters, there's no real change. On pricing, Erik, anything?

Erik Strandin Pers

On pricing, basically we have a 2-year cadence as we've said before in each brand, and we continue with that in the overall picture. We did do pricing on Halebop before we merged the customers into the Telia brand to align the brands a bit, so that's done.

We've done something on family SIMs this year, but it goes along the long-term plan, I would say, on pricing. No particular change there.

I think if you add back the IoT dealer Patrik mentioned, you will see that the trend hasn't really shifted much.

Abhilash Mohapatra

Great. Thank you so much.

Operator

Our next question comes from Ajay Soni with J.P. Morgan.

Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Ajay Soni

Hi guys. Two quick questions.

First on Finland, your net adds were positive this quarter for the first time in quite a while, is there anything you've done here? I know you've been heavily focused on not losing share here, but anything you've done commercially to move this trend positively?

Then the second one was around the Norway JV. You expect it to close, you said, end of summer, how quickly will it take for the OPEX and CAPEX benefits from this JV to feed into your numbers?

Will it be fully run-rate in Q4, or will it take much longer? Thank you.

Patrik Hofbauer

Yes, good morning. I can start with the first question and Eric, you can take the second one.

Finland on the mobile side, well, we have been focusing quite a long time to turn the trends around, and gradually we have also increased, as we talked about earlier this call, the fixed-term contracts, we have reduced the churn. What we see here is now a bit better, more stable development.

We have also one deal in the B2B that is supporting the growth as well of the 10,000 subs in the quarter on the mobile side. Overall, I would say we are seeing a more stable situation.

The customer's experience has been high. NPS is high in the market, customers are fairly happy with the services.

It's just been too much pressure between the MNOs, and we have seen a more stable situation that is benefiting us as well in combination with more fixed-term contracts, less churn, we don't need to hunt so many new customers to stabilize the base. I think that is the reason.

It's execution, better execution in the Finnish market overall and a more stable situation if you look at the broad picture on the market in Finland, more stabilized this quarter compared to previous quarters. Better, I would say, during this year.

We see, as I said, if you look at the new sales ARPU, we are not where we were a year ago, but we are on a good way to reach the same numbers where we were a year ago. Overall, looks more stable now in Finland.

Let's hope that this will continue.

Eric Hageman

On on Norway, the network JV, I think the question your question was I think we're making good progress, sort of nothing to announce now, but, underneath the surface paddling incredibly hard, as Patrik said, setting up the company, getting people recruited to run that, offices, all the, infrastructure, etc. that you hardware and software that you need to do this.

A lot of progress sort of behind the scenes that that is happening. With regards to the impact, I think we've been very clear since day one that this, if you think about the medium term, obviously is very beneficial from us financially attractive from a from a CAPEX and an OPEX perspective.

In year one, of course, you also will have cost once we start to operate in this in this joint operation, because there's dismantling cost as well. Sort of neutral at first, and in the medium term, obviously it's it's very accretive.

Once we have finally signed the agreement, we will then give you those those financial details. Just to be very clear, we would not do these type of cooperations if they weren't financially attractive, because they clearly are, but it takes a bit of time to finalize it, as Patrik just commented.

Ajay Soni

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Ulrich Rathe with Bernstein. Your line is now open.

Please go ahead.

Ulrich Rathe

Thanks very much. I have two questions, please.

The first one is on this full household strategy in Sweden. If I go on your commercial retail website, it's interesting, right, that the bundling discounts come at the very bottom end of the page.

Compared to sort of other convergent plays in Europe that put this front and center of the retail websites, it seems that you're actually playing this down the way you're sort of presenting it to the customers. I'm just wondering, when you say it is front and center of your strategy, what are you doing there?

Is this sort of below-the-line discounting? Is it sort of the way you market it?

Is it the way you approach the customer, or what exactly is the manifestation of this strategy? In this context, could you please clarify when you give this larger than 1 million household number there, is this simply the addresses of people matching with two or more contracts, or are these actually people who are getting the bundling discounts?

Thank you.

Erik Strandin Pers

Thanks, Ulrich. This is Erik here at IR again.

It's a fair comment, good observation. We have never at Telia wanted to drive convergence by discounting heavily on one of the services.

It's more like providing value-add to customers that have more than one service. I think it comes through more clearly when you speak to customer service and when we reach out to our customers and ask them if they don't want to upgrade their packages or add on another service.

It is working. Broadband and TV has got an excellent attachment rate in particular, but also it works reasonably well with mobile.

Fair enough, it may not be as visible on the website as it is when you speak directly to us. No, but

Patrik Hofbauer

just to add, how you do this operationally is, of course, that we are contacting the customer, selling them more services, and building on the broadband base as a start. This play works very well.

Then if it's not visible, I must say that I need to go in to check the website again to see, but there is no doubt that this has been an important play for us. We have repeatedly given that message for the last at least four, five quarters, especially to build the number of households, because that is important for us to be, of course, important partner for the content providers that we have a significant number of households, which we have today.

It makes us also in a much better position when we discuss content deals with the content providers. This has been a very strategic rational in driving this for us, and very beneficial.

Eric Hageman

Maybe just to add to that. It's a slightly different angle.

It's more on the M&A side, where it also manifests itself. As part of the Bredband2 acquisition that we've done, where we acquired roughly half a million additional broadband customers, one of the business cases around this is the synergies that you obviously have, and the basic one obviously is cost, etc.

because you can integrate it in your company. The really attractive one is the revenue synergies, because if we look at the type of customer that has brought to us is they're very underrepresented in terms of being a mobile customer or even a TV customer.

The cross-sell opportunities are absolutely massive, and that is ultimately the thinking that you bring to this company. It's a company that you buy that is focused on selling one product, and we want to sell multiple products to them.

With a very strong TV offering that you have, you've seen the growth in TV Sweden this quarter, more than 200 million SEK in one quarter, it is a very easy sell to these new type of customers. Even in the acquisition cases of in-market consolidation, there is a strong synergy case where the thinking or the philosophy behind it is convergence.

Ulrich Rathe

Thanks very much.

Patrik Hofbauer

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Viktor Högberg with Danske Bank. Your line is now open.

Please go ahead.

Viktor Högberg

Morning. First on broadband market and the potential for you and also for the market potential, just your thoughts on it in Sweden given upcoming regulation access to single-family homes.

What are your thoughts on ARPU development for you in that context given that the regulator is aiming for lower end-prices for customers, I would assume? That's the first question, please.

Patrik Hofbauer

If you look at the regulation, we don't know exactly how that will play out yet, but we think it's neutral, basically neutral for us. It actually levels the playing field in the market as well, because we are partly regulated, as today.

We see a continuous potential to improve. If you look at the whole product area, we believe that there is a bigger potential to improve the ARPUs in mobile and TV in short term.

We think also in broadband, but maybe more on the collective agreements and also on the open networks that we can maybe improve a little bit more on pricing going forward, but let's see. We cannot disclose any plans, of course, what we are doing, but we still see that there is a pricing power in the market.

Eric Hageman

Maybe to that, sorry to mention M&A again, but again, we obviously have bought Bredband2, in-market consolidation, which will bring benefits. I talked about synergies, but obviously there is pricing elements as well.

Then obviously we've all taken note of one of the other competitors taken out the other sort of independent broadband player in the market. Could that help us as an industry to drive better pricing?

Let's see. Certainly it's not going to hurt us, one would say.

Viktor Högberg

Perfect. Thank you.

A last question, just to pick your brain on a current topic and I asked one of your competitors this yesterday, just satellites. What are your thoughts on satellite providers within the context of competitive landscape in the future, not today, but a couple of years ahead, both for Telia and for the Nordic landscape in general?

Do you see any shifts in the competitive landscape and could that affect you in some sense? Thank you.

Patrik Hofbauer

Let's start with satellites first of all. I've actually been running or responsible for satellites for 4, 5, 6 years when I was on another company in the Nordics.

Very positive to satellites, I must say that, and we are, of course, open-minded to look into this. This could actually improve in more mid-long-term perspective the customer experience.

For example, if you could combine mobile, fixed, and satellite to the customer, they make sure that they always have good connectivity. Then let's remember in the Nordics, we have built out 5G to the full extent.

We are on a way now to finalize the buildout on fiber as well. It's already fiberized in Sweden.

It's part left to do in Finland. Otherwise, people have really good connectivity, and price levels in the Nordics are also attractive from a customer perspective.

If you compare to the US, the price in Europe are half of what the price is in the US. I think we have already good infrastructure connectivity in place up here, and we see satellites now as a very good complement.

We also see the low-orbit satellites also as a good complement to our business. We don't see it substitution the business today, but we're really curious to look into if we could improve the customer experiences, depending if it's a B2B or B2C customer, with combining technologies.

There is a lot to be done with spectrum and technology to fix that. In the long term, it's really interesting to see how we can combine the good technologies for the customers.

Viktor Högberg

Great. Thank you.

Just a final question if that's okay.

Eric Hageman

Yep.

Viktor Högberg

Just a housekeeping one. The 400 million Norwegian tax that is now included in your 9 billion free cash flow guide, was that also included previously, so that you previously aimed for higher cash flow, or just the mechanics of the payment and the guidance, please?

Eric Hageman

No, good question, Viktor, and thank you for that. No, it was not included when we set out our guidance at the start of the year.

The reason why it wasn't, this is an old court case that dates back to the Get acquisition, before 2020. No, there was no way, and we expected that maybe a conclusion next year.

No, was not included in the guidance, and as I said, we're absorbing that this year, similar to what we did last year, if you recall, when we sold TV and media, where we lost what was it, 600, 700 million of free cash flow, and also we didn't change our guidance at the time. No, was not included.

Operator

Our last question comes from Pavan Daswani with Citi. Your line is now open.

Please go ahead.

Pavan Daswani

Hi, morning. Thanks for taking my question.

Just a quick one on free cash flow, where performance in the first half was very strong. I know you talked about some phasing impact in the prepared remarks.

Could you expand a bit on that, and what really surprised you positively in the quarter, and how we should think about these moving parts for H2?

Eric Hageman

Sure. We sort of guided for, if you think about guiding for 9, sort of felt like 3 in the beginning and 6 in the second half, and now we already have done 4.

In the analyst presentation I said earlier this morning that it's now less back-end loaded, and on top of that, we absorb this 400 million. The positive surprise was working capital.

If you recall last year, we had very strong working capital inflow, mainly in the fourth quarter, and at some stage that will reverse. I think in line with consensus, we expected around a billion reversal this quarter, and we had 600 million as you have seen in the numbers.

As I said in the presentation, a big part of that is driven by mission-critical payments. We've talked about this before in the context of how it's driving our Sweden top-line growth, how it's driving margin as well in that market, because it's very profitable business for us, and on top of that, they pay early as well.

That's exactly what we have seen. Of course, it also helps in that first half to get to 4 billion plus because we have strong EBITDA performance that you have seen.

We pay less interest because we've managed that. We have less gross debt, and we have actively made sure we pay less average interest because we've taken out some expensive bonds in the first 2 years that we took over, and all of that then adds up to, yeah, a better free cash flow.

It's partly phasing on cash CAPEX as well, but we saw that last year as well. Overall positive for us to see that, in essence we did almost a billion more than we expected at the start of the year.

Pavan Daswani

Thank you.

Operator

There are no further questions, I will now hand back to management for closing remarks.

Patrik Hofbauer

Thank you so much, everyone, for all the good questions, and that concludes the call. We wish you a very good summer and looking forward to speak to you again in 3 months' time, if not before.

Thank you, and goodbye.