Foreword

Dear reader,

As one of Europe’s leading internet companies with approximately 29 million fee-based customer contracts, 39 million free accounts, and roughly 11,000 employees, we consider ourselves to be part of society and take responsibility in line with this. We want to shape the digital world to be safe and accessible for our customers. Our goal is to provide consumers and companies with broadband internet access and high-performance cloud applications, making the internet fully accessible as a universal infrastructure for information, communication, entertainment, and e business. By constantly enhancing our products and by investing in sustainable technologies as part of the digitalization process, we are helping make our society fit for the future.

In fiscal year 2024, we again set ourselves the goal of getting even better at our core business while also making sustainability an even more integral part of our business activities. Against the backdrop of the introduction of the European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), we worked intensively to meet the stricter regulatory requirements as far as possible. Among other things, we have adopted stricter sustainability targets in our divisions, strengthened our teams, and expanded and optimized our data collection processes and systems. This means we are able to present environmental, social, and governance (ESG) matters in greater detail and to make developments in our divisions more transparent. At the same time, we are continuously adapting and expanding our existing risk management activities so as to safeguard the robustness of our business model in the future as well.

We are addressing the climate impact of our business model step by step. We are taking responsibility in this area, too, so as to help protect the environment and the climate. We aim to use energy and resources – from environmentally friendly logistics solutions down to highly efficient data center operations powered by green energy – efficiently and responsibly, and to ensure our continuous improvement in this area. Our work to document and update our environmental footprint in the fiscal year has laid the foundations for being able to implement our actions even more precisely going forward.

Acting sustainably and taking responsibility for our business activities has become part of our Company’s DNA. And as with our core business, our qualified, committed staff are the bedrock for this. As an employer, our goal is to support and develop individual skills. We are convinced that living diversity makes us strong, creative, and unique. Our diversity initiatives aim to offer space for personal development and open dialog in the future, too.

As a successful company, we also want to live up to our responsibility to society. Our social commitment focuses on our cooperation with the United   Internet for UNICEF foundation. We have been working towards the goals set out by UNICEF – the United Nations Children’s Fund – since 2006 and also use the reach offered by our strong brands to do so. Thanks to the regular appeals for donations that we make to our GMX, WEB.DE, 1&1, and IONOS customers, coupled with the additional amounts donated by the United   Internet Group itself, we have raised roughly €73 million for global UNICEF programs to date. We are delighted to be able to contribute to UNICEF’s valuable work through the foundation.

Our goal in the coming years remains to offer our customers true value added. It is a pleasure for us to already be actively shaping the digital future, from 1&1’s ongoing expansion of Europe’s first vendor-neutral 5G network to be based on the new Open-RAN technology through the provision of secure, innovative cloud solutions at IONOS and additional user-friendly applications at GMX and WEB.DE, down to 1&1   Versatel’s growing fiber-optic network.

We are not resting on the laurels earned with our sustainability achievements to date, either, but are steadily continuing our progress. We created a good basis for this in the past fiscal year and will continue to build on it in fiscal year 2025 – something that I am looking forward to!