BT Group plc

Good morning and welcome everyone to BT Group's results presentation for the full year ended 31st of March 2024. Presenting today is Alison Kirkby, BT Group Chief Executive and Simon Louth, BT Group CFO. A Q&A session will follow the presentation. I'd like to make everyone aware that this event is being recorded for replay purposes. Before we start, I'd like to draw your attention to the usual forward-looking statements in our press release and our latest annual report for examples of the factors that could cause actual results to differ from any forward-looking statements we may make. Both the press release and the annual report can be found on our website. With that, I'll now hand over to Alison.

And just to be clear, that was not a deepfake. That was Mark. He's obviously very shy about speaking in public. So good morning, everyone, and welcome to our full year results presentation. And thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. It's honestly a real honour to present BT Group Results for the first time here as CEO. And by way of an agenda, we'll begin by looking back at some of the progress we've made this financial year before looking forward, outlining our sharpened focus and outlook, and then moving on to Q&A, myself and Simon. So let's start with the full year highlights on slide four. First and foremost, I believe our strategy is the right strategy. It's about building and connecting our customers to next generation networks at pace, creating standout customer experiences and leading the way to a brighter and more sustainable future for BT and all its stakeholders. This strategy has continued to prove itself and has delivered another solid set of results. Our focus to improve customer experience has meant that group NPS trends were positive throughout the year, up one point to 24 overall. and a solid operating and financial performance led to growth in both adjusted revenue and EBITDA. CapEx reduced to £4.9 billion despite record build, driving normalised free cash flow ahead of our guidance to £1.3 billion. And as a result of structural efficiencies, especially in open reach, I'm today announcing that we have now passed peak CapEx. Yes, you read it right earlier and you're hearing it right again. We have now passed peak capex. This, together with ongoing operating efficiencies, means we expect normalised free cash flow to increase from this point on. We also achieved our £3 billion of gross annualised cost savings 12 months early and at a cost of £1.5 billion, which is around £100 million lower than we had forecast. This is a great achievement and I see a huge opportunity for further savings, which I will outline later. Enabled by this performance and demonstrating our confidence in our plans and in line with our progressive dividend policy, we're also increasing our total dividend to eight pence per share. Personally, as you can imagine, I am pleased with these results as they give me confidence in the strategy that has delivered them. However, I do believe that with greater focus, improved operational discipline, and an acceleration of pace of modernization, we can deliver an even brighter future for BT Group faster and more consistently. But more on that in a moment. I first want to reflect on how we've actually performed in each of our CFUs in the recent period. Slide five, Openreach delivered another strong performance with growth in both revenue and EBITDA. Our full fibre footprint today stands at more than 14 million premises and in the fourth quarter, our annualised build rate accelerated to 4 million. Customer demand for full fibre has remained high with just under 5 million premises now connected, which means we have market-leading take-up of 34%, and an excellent Trustpilot rating. Our Ethernet business, often overlooked, is actually more than a £1 billion business in its own right, and it's also growing, with revenue up 11% and ARPU up 6%. And with respect to broadband lines, which I know is a very popular topic of conversation, I'd like to start with my context. We have a significant 74% share of the UK's fixed wholesale broadband lines. And as outlined in the open reach business briefing back in November 21, we always assumed that we would lose some lines, roughly 2% per year. And we have. We did, however, expect market growth to offset some of those losses. But in fact, the market has declined on the back of a downturn in house building and the cost of living crisis hitting broadband adoption. But just to be clear, we are not seeing any meaningful acceleration in competitor losses as they've been broadly flat in recent quarters. In areas where we have built full fibre, our broadband line base has and is growing. And ARPU, given recent inflation, is ahead of expectations, up 10% and rises with the mix improvement to full fibre, which far outweighs the drag from the losses of lower value and higher fault rate copper lines. So we remain very comfortable with the expected returns on our investment. And considering our significant market share, our best defence has been to build full fibre faster and more efficiently than anyone else, which is exactly what we have been and are and will be doing. Finally, I'm really pleased to announce today that the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has notified Openreach of its preferred bidder status for the Type C project gigabit cross-regional supplier contract, which in the early phases covers over 100,000 hard-to-reach rural premises. The government have currently stated that Type C contracts are up to half a million premises, including £800 million of grant funding. This allows us to build momentum even further in the coming years. So moving to the next slide and consumer, where we delivered another solid performance with growth in both revenue and EBITDA. We continue to connect customers at pace with our full fibre base up 39% and 5G connections up 22%. ARPU for both fixed and mobile has been strong with broadband up 5% to £41 and postpaid mobile up 9% to £19. As anticipated, the gross to net drop through from ARPU to EBITDA reduced to around 30%. And this fiscal year that we're now entering, we expect that drop through to be even lower following the compounding of the high price rises that we've seen over the last two years, and as we rebalance the front and back book before recovering in the second half of the year and again in fiscal year 26. However, despite these significant price rises and the competitive markets that we operate in, we held monthly churn for the year at 1.1% for both our broadband and our mobile bases. This reflects our strength in customer service with both BT and EE off-com complaints equal to or lower than industry average for mobile, broadband and landline. In October, we launched our new integrated EE digital platform to drive performance. This included new connectivity propositions, building on our fibre and 5G leadership, and better tech products and services delivered via a simpler set of digital customer journeys. Overall, it's early days, but it is improving customer experience with those that have migrated showing a higher rate of convergence and a higher NPS, and sets us up for a return to growth in our base, our ARPUs and in the number of services our customers buy from us going forward. Moving to slide seven. In spite of a 2% drop in revenue, business is actually showing the early signs of operational improvement. The trends are clear. They've been there for a while. The market is shifting to next generation products and solutions and we now need to migrate our customers to them at pace. All of them. Full fibre, 5G, voice over IP and secure cloud-based services. Progress, albeit from a low base, has been good this year with our 5G base up 80% and our full fibre connections up almost 60%. We also have over 50% of our customers on voice over IP, so halfway through the PSTN transition. And high NPS scores speak to the relatively seamless way in which we've managed those migrations. In certain revenue streams, business is actually performing even more positively. Such as security, we're up 11%, and the SMB segment, we're up 4%, and we're also seeing improvements in NPS. The biggest challenges for business have been the speed at which we've been able to move off legacy services and the effectiveness of offsetting the rising costs with pricing. Clearly, these legacy pricing and cost pressures combined with the FX headwinds led to a weak EBITDA outcome for the year. But Baz and the team have been working to address these since ripping off the plaster, in his words, late last year. And that effort continues. Now, let me hand you over to Simon, who is going to take you through the numbers.

Well, thank you, Alison, and good morning to everybody. So starting with our individual unit results on slide nine, consumer revenue was up 4% for the year. Service revenue grew by 5%, and that was driven by annual contractual price rise, the higher FTT pace, and higher roaming, partially offset by a decline in voice revenues and the continued handset to SIMO migration. EBITDA grew by 5%, driven by the increased service revenue, partially offset by some high input costs and some prior year one-off items. In our business division, revenue was down 2%. This was driven by declines in high margin legacy products and managed contracts, some foreign exchange impacts, and a 41 million pound revenue adjustment in Q4 that reflects a risk of billing inaccuracy on a small number of products with bespoke pricing. These headwinds were only partially offset by continued growth in our small and medium business segment and in security. EBITDA declined by 16% for the year, and that reflected the low revenue, but also higher input costs, only partly offset by the benefits of our cost transformation. The one-off revenue adjustment also impacted Q4 EBITDA, but it was partially offset by some lower costs. Openreach grew revenue 7% in the year, That was driven by CPI-linked price increases and growing sales of fiber-enabled products and ethernet. This was partially offset by declines in the base of broadband and voice-only lines. The fiber-enabled base grew, offset by declines in the copper base. OpenReach's EBITDA grew by 9%. That was driven by the revenue flow through, but also by improved cost transformation, including 3,500 lower FTE, partly offset by some pay inflation and the higher FTTP provision volumes. OpenReach's Q4 EBITDA was impacted by one-off costs relating to an historical commercial dispute. Absent the one-off, Q4 EBITDA margin would have been consistent with Q1 to 3. Other EBITDA for FY24 was 29 million adverse, driven by exit costs from terminating leases as we continue to rationalize our office estate through our Better Workplace program. Going forward, we expect other EBITDA to outturn closer to zero. Now, moving to our group results on slide 10. Overall, we saw a solid performance, delivering another year of top and bottom line growth. We've achieved our FY24 guidance for revenue in EBITDA, delivering growth on a performer basis. We outperformed on normalized free cash flow. That was driven by CapEx efficiencies across the business. Adjusted revenue for the year was 20.8 billion pounds. That's up 2% on a pro forma basis. Growth in open reach and consumer was offset by a decline in business. Adjusted operating costs before depreciation were up 2% on a pro forma basis. In FY24, the gross benefits from our cost transformation were more than offset by the impacts of inflation, notably two pay rises and some increased business rates and non-commodity charges in energy. We also had some increased sales commissions and network running costs. Adjusted EBITDA for the year was 8.1 billion pounds. That's up 1% on a pro forma basis. Revenue growth combined with cost transformation together more than offset those inflationary pressures. We've recognized a non-cash impairment of goodwill allocated to business of 488 million pounds as a specific item, reflecting the significant decline in profitability in recent years. CapEx, excluding spectrum costs, came in at 4.9 billion pounds for the year. That's down 3% and below our guidance range. This was achieved through a combination of lower FTTP billed unit costs, increased efficiency in our systems and IT delivery, and some more targeted customer contract investments. Cash CapEx for the full year was 5 billion pounds. This was higher than reported capex due to 160 million pounds of grant funding, including for BDUK, partially offset by the timing of capital creditor payments. For FY25, we expect cash capex to be around 200 million higher than reported capex due to the net impact of grant funding and capital creditors. Normalized free cash flow decreased 4% year on year. Now the benefit of EBITDA growth and the lower cash capex is more than offset by working capital timing and of course the 200 million pound tax rebate in the prior year. At a high level, the increased working capital outflow in FY24 was driven by about 100 million pounds of receivables timing, and then a net outflow of £100 million from repayment of supplier financing, handset monetization, and forward copper sales, which net to that £100 million. We paid no UK cash tax in FY24, and we welcome the government's announcement in last year's autumn statement to make full expensing permanent. we will continue to pay no UK cash tax in FY25 through to FY27. From FY28 onwards, we will start to pay UK cash tax as our capex reduces, although we will continue to benefit from the cumulative losses early into the next decade. The IS-19 pension deficit increased by £1.7 billion to £4.8 billion, and that was mainly due to the increase in real interest rates and the narrowing of credit spreads, partially offset by pension contributions. As a reminder, the BT pension scheme hedges on a funding basis, which mechanically means we're over-hedged on an IS-19 basis. Our cash contributions are unaffected by the IS-19 deficit. And as Alison just announced, we're proposing a final dividend of 5.69 pence per share. That's an increase of 3.9%, bringing the full year FY24 dividend to 8 pence per share. And on that note, I'm going to hand back to Alison.

Thank you, Simon. Right, so for those of you that are interested, today is actually my 106th day as CEO of BT. So I thought it would actually be a good opportunity to set out my first impressions, where I see our greatest strengths, where we need to be better, and how we're going to drive significant value for all of our stakeholders in the years ahead. After five years on the board, it has still been important for me to meet our customers and our colleagues and really get under the bonnet of our operations. I have travelled the breadth and width of the UK. There were three key things I was looking to get a broader perspective on. Where do we have the means to win? What do we want to be? And how are we going to get there faster? As you all know, BT Group has a fantastic set of unique assets. We are the digital backbone of the UK with the leading next generation networks. Our fixed network covers around 98% of the country, with full fiber already reaching nearly half of that, providing us a significant competitive advantage. In mobile, we provide 88% geographic coverage with either 4G or 5G, and our converged core is designed to manage peak network growth and provide the best possible connectivity experience. We have deep relationships with our customers, whether that's our strong partnerships with CPs and Openreach or the 25 million customers and 1.2 million UK businesses that we work with every day. Fun fact, we keep up to around 200 million devices connected across our fixed and mobile networks every single day. Our brand equities, our loyal customers and low churn are evidence of the power and stability of these connections and these relationships. In Openreach, we're our customers' first choice, delivering fixed access at scale throughout the country providing excellent customer service with a fair and predictable long-term pricing model. In consumer, we are the best position to win in the retail market. We have three strong brands, one of the UK's largest subscription businesses. We now have an integrated digital platform and a growing suite of tech products and services. And in business, we enjoy a relationship with more companies than anyone else in the country, from the smallest startup to the largest public and private sector organizations. And we've seen a really positive response to Global Fabric, our network as a service proposition for multinational customers. These assets, combined with our personal and brilliant customer service, give us a unique opportunity to fully embed ourselves in the digital fabric of our customers' daily lives. and they're underpinned by a highly experienced workforce, our unrivalled scale in digital and technical capabilities, and of course, our strong balance sheet. Taken together, I believe these assets represent a distinct and unique competitive advantage in the UK and for the UK. But what does success look like as we go forward? Well, Many of you know that I've spent almost 15 years in this industry with experience in both challenger and incumbent telcos across multiple markets. And what I've seen is that the most consistently successful telcos are national champions with a proud history, clear purpose and geographic scale, and who have modernized, simplified and leveraged new technologies to stay ahead of the competition and become even more relevant for their customers in an increasingly complex digital world. But what do they have that BT doesn't yet have? Well, it starts with culture. The best telcos have that clear purpose and are single-mindedly focused on customer experience, and they excel at execution. And they're constantly challenging themselves to be better. As a result, they have a highly engaged, a highly empowered, and a highly productive workforce. Customer experience has been built as a key differentiator relative to their peers. They use data and insights to drive deeper customer understanding, resulting in higher rates of brand awareness, engagement, consideration, share of wallet, and customer loyalty through iconic brands excelling at service in both assisted and digital channels. and they're recognised as being vital to solving their customers' everyday digital needs. The best telcos are of critical national importance, with the best network coverage, the best services, and are always the most reliable and trusted provider to all parts of society. And they're generally providing most of the emergency and critical services that governments and the public sector rely upon, and they're thought leaders in their country's tech, digital, and cyber defense roadmaps. Finally, and of course, the best telcos demonstrate disciplined capital allocation, have a focus on constant cost transformation, drive consistent revenue and EBITDA growth, and have a ROSI mindset. BT has some of these characteristics already, but not enough of them. And as you've seen from me elsewhere, you can expect that I will be highly focused on all of these pivotal enablers to drive value for all our stakeholders, colleagues, customers, the country, and most importantly now, our shareholders, and ultimately to achieve these best-in-class levels of performance. So what are we actually going to do now? Well, this slide will be familiar to many. It sets out our current strategic framework, including the three pillars, the five priorities, and our one unifying ambition, which was to be the world's most trusted connector of people, devices, and machines. I do believe that this is the right strategy, but we now need to sharpen our focus and double down on a few key areas recognizing that the transition from fiber bill to fiber monetization is happening now that we're going to concentrate on the uk and that will focus the next phase of our transformation efforts to accelerate end-to-end pan bt product process platform and more importantly service simplification Whilst we've clarified our ambition is to now be the UK's most trusted connector, our sharpened focus remains centred around our existing priorities. In open reach, it's more of the same. We're going to continue to build out the highest quality fibre backbone for the country faster and now more efficiently than anyone else without the need to increase group capex levels further. We will build four million homes this year at the same total cost as it took us to build three and a half million homes last year, keeping us on track to deliver the 25 million homes by the end of 26 and the returns we committed to when we first started out. In consumer, we've made significant investments into our networks and our new digital platform. We now need to bring the benefits of both to our customers by accelerating migrations to these next generation platforms and delivering the best converged customer experience in the country. In business, we need to deliver on the Better on BT strategy that we launched last year, with now a focus on the UK as we explore options to optimise our global business. And in terms of transformation, this next phase will generate a further £3 billion of gross annualised cost savings to be delivered by the end of fiscal year 29. And we will continue to optimise our portfolio through efficient capital allocation to drive value for all our stakeholders and an increased return for our shareholders. My confidence in delivering these promises is reflected in our new mid-term normalised free cash flow guidance that Simon will outline later. So to answer my three earlier questions, one, we will capitalise on our unique assets. Two, we'll become the UK's most trusted connector of people, devices and machines. And three, we will get there by taking action on our culture, customer experience and operational rigour to improve consistency of delivery. Let's now look briefly at how we'll execute this through each of our CFUs and how we'll measure progress along the way, starting with open reach on slide 16. As I said, we're firmly on track to reach the 25 million premises passed by December 26. We're building faster than anyone else whilst maintaining a premium quality at a lower cost than our major competitors below £300 per premise. Our scale efficiencies and our constant engineering innovation is driving increased EBITDA and normalised free cash flow, which will, as said before, significantly increase post the peak build. On connections, we excel with market leading take up of 34%. And this is even higher where we built two or more years ago, where we're seeing a take up of over 50%. With best-in-class provisioning, full integration with our CPs, and excellent customer service, we're confident we can accelerate connections, which combined with indexation will drive further ARPU growth. And in our operations, our full-fibre fault rate remains about 60% lower than copper. As we migrate customers to fibre, therefore fault volumes continue to fall, benefiting both our customers and our OPEX. On broadband lines, we forecast that competitor losses will continue at a similar rate to what we've been seeing, as we always expect to lose a bit of market share. Of course, if current market headwinds continue, we expect moderately higher losses in this fiscal year, but this will be naturally addressed when the market returns to growth. So in summary for Openreach, we'll continue to build and connect our customers to full fibre, better, faster, further, and more efficiently than our competitors, driving a better product for our customers and a fair return for our shareholders. Moving to slide 17, in consumer, our primary focus is in winning the household and driving convergence of our core services to improve customer lifetime value. As I said, we're already on this journey with both our full fibre base and 5G connections continuing to grow, And looking forward, it's now time to leverage our brand strength, our best networks, our new digital ID platform and services, and one of the largest subscription bases in the country. And as a result, we're confident that we can grow our customer numbers again and our ARPUs as we enable all of our customers to live, work, game, and learn on the UK's best converged network. Moving on to business, slide 18, it's a clear example of where our sharpened focus is really needed. By doubling down on the UK alongside radical modernization, we will accelerate the migration of our customers to next generation secure cloud-based products and services. We'll streamline, standardize, and scale our portfolio, and as a result, dramatically improve customer relevance and experience while reducing our cost base. This combined with the trust we have in the BT brand, our best networks and our critical national infrastructure means there is real potential for business to return to growth and become the most trusted one-stop digital shop for businesses large and small as we help move them into an increasingly digital age. And then finally, just moving to the group as a whole, we have had considerable success in reducing our costs. However, as you're well aware, we're still far behind our European peers when it comes to productivity, and moving forward, this must become a priority. Today, I'm announcing a further £3 billion of gross annualised cost savings over the next five years, with one-time costs of approximately £1 billion. 80% of the savings comes from a small number of big programs focused on shutting down legacy as we build and migrate our customers to the next generation platforms and networks, simplifying our products, platforms, and customer journeys by moving them to new, more efficient, common platforms such as the new EE, scaling the use of fewer shared platforms and deepening our data and AI capabilities to drive growth alongside productivity, efficiency, whilst creating much better and brilliant customer experiences. We still expect headcount to reduce from 120,000 employees and contractors today to between 75% and 90,000 by the end of the decade. But more importantly, this next phase of transformation is also set up to improve customer experience and enable the growth agendas in our CFUs. Without doubt, the future BTE group will be a simpler, leaner, and a better company for all its stakeholders. But let me now hand you over to Simon to take you through our final priority and outline the new guidance that we set out this morning.

Thanks Alison. So slide 21 sets out our performance objectives and capital allocation framework for the group. Execution of the strategy with sharpened focus will deliver enhanced cash flow and returns. As I will set out in our guidance shortly, we will see a significant expansion in normalized cash flow over the next few years, starting this financial year, supported by revenue and EBITDA growth, cost transformation, and lower capex. We expect to deliver normalized free cash flow of around 1.5 billion pounds in FY25, around two billion pounds in FY27, and around three billion pounds by the end of the decade. The cash flow generated will be deployed in line with our capital allocation policy. Our first priority is to invest in value-enhancing growth. Our second priority is to support our commitments to the pension fund. We agreed the 2023 tranny evaluation in October last year, in which we reconfirmed that we're firmly on track with our existing funding plan. We'll maintain a strong balance sheet. We're committed to a BBB floor and a BBB plus through the cycle credit rating target. And residual cash flow is then available to fund returns to our shareholders underpinned by our progressive dividend policy. So we've got a clear set of performance objectives and a disciplined capital allocation framework that will drive value for our shareholders. Moving to slide 22, this sets out our guidance for FY25 and beyond. Starting with FY25, we continue to expect both adjusted revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth, with revenue flat to 1% and EBITDA of around 8.2 billion pounds. This is despite challenging macroeconomic conditions, the cost of living challenges, and a highly competitive market for connectivity services. In consumer, we expect revenue in EBITDA growth to be weighted more towards the second half of FY25. Lower equipment sales, a reduced benefit from annual price rises, and the base decline will impact performance in the first half. Beyond FY25, we expect consistent and predictable growth in revenue in EBITDA, underpinned by pricing and adoption of next-generation converged products and solutions, with EBITDA growth ahead of revenue enhanced by our cost transformation. Our further three billion pounds of gross annualized cost savings comprises the completion of the existing programs in FY25 that will deliver an additional 600 million pounds of cost efficiency, followed by transformation programs leveraging digitization and AI in consumer, business, and open reach. Approximately 40% of the £1 billion cost to achieve will be incurred in FY25 and the remaining costs will be spread over the following years and will clearly be running at a much lower annual rate than over the past five years. On CapEx, we are reducing our outlook to less than 4.8 billion pounds for FY25 and 26. That's down from our prior guidance of 5 to 5.1 billion pounds. And this is underpinned by prioritizing investment to our UK connectivity business and above all, by CapEx efficiencies across the group. For example, Openreach will build to 4 million premises in 25 at the same total cost as last year's build to 3.5 million premises. And digital have improved software development productivity by about 10% just over the past year. Once we've built FTTP to 25 million premises by December 26, we will reduce CAPEX by at least a billion pounds a year. CAPEX will start to decrease in FY27 with the full one billion pound impact visible from FY28 onwards. And as just discussed, normalized free cash flow will increase significantly by the end of the decade, driven by the EBITDA growth, by the CAPEX reduction, and by broadly neutral working capital. They'll be partially offset by increased tax charges towards the end of the decade. Specifically, we will deliver normalized cash flow, as I said, of 1.5 billion in FY25, rising to 2 billion pounds in FY27, and then to 3 by FY30. The confidence in our outlook has allowed us to increase the full-year dividend and reconfirm our progressive dividend policy into the future. Overall, our outlook shows our confidence in the business and our conviction that we'll continue to deliver consistent and predictable growth in value, not only in the long term, but the short term too. We'll use any surplus cash generated to reduce leverage and provide increased returns to our shareholders. And on that note, I'll hand back to Alison to conclude.

Thank you, Simon. So in summary, we've delivered another solid year of financial and operational progress, proof that our strategy is the right strategy. We have a unique position in the world, but we're especially strong in the UK with the potential to become a true national champion, the digital backbone empowering our customers and the country. Our investment into next generation infrastructure has now peaked and we're inflicting to significant cash flow growth in the coming years. Consequently, our returns are rising and moving forward, we will demonstrate a disciplined approach to capital allocation and a focus on shareholder returns. a commitment reflected in our increase to our dividend. In summary, I actually could not be more excited about what the future holds for BT Group and all our stakeholders. I see significant growth potential for all colleagues, customers, the country, and of course our investors, as we realise our ambition to become the UK's most trusted connector of people, devices and machines. Thank you for listening. I know it's been a bit longer than normal, but we'll now move to Q&A. And given the time available, we would appreciate, and the number of people in the room and online would appreciate, one question per person, although I know you're always very good at squeezing in three into one question. So please, first question, and somebody's going to have to help me. Yes, Hayley, you're going to do that.

james ratzer from new street research and allison welcome congratulations on the first set of results thank you james so it's very nice to see a uk telecoms company putting up its dividend um so i was wondering if i could just focus on that a bit you the message there is progressive are you able to give us any more details around the kind of phasing of that going forward could that growth accelerate towards the end of the decade as we go into a free cash flow ramping up or can we see maybe in the near term the kind of four percent growth you've just announced actually start to ramp a little bit sooner thank you

So not giving any further guidance now, but the board remains very committed to our progressive dividend policy and the confidence we have in the outlook going forward. We're expecting top line growth. We're expecting EBITDA growth to go ahead of top line because of the efficiencies that we're pursuing. And if you assume that our capex has now peaked, And once we're through the once in a generational investment of capex in the next couple of years, there will be a significant acceleration of free cash flow. Our capital allocation policy is very clear assignment is laid out. And so clearly, as we get into, you know, the final part of the decade, there'll be some significant cash flow for us to allocate against our priorities.

Hello, it's David Wright from Bank of America. Thank you for taking my question. I wanted more than one, but I'll stick. You've got Nick next to me. So just on the CapEx outlook, Clearly the capex number has come down versus previous expectations, but the build volume is the same. So just sort of confirming that dynamic and perhaps digging a little bit into what are the efficiencies that have supported that would be useful. And it is part of the same question, but... We'll be the judge of that. Tangential, so to speak. But you've targeted the 25 million homes. But could there be more than that? What are the opportunities to consider rural build? You've obviously talked about this new opportunity today, and it almost pivots a little bit into James's question on allocation of capital. Are you maybe holding back a little? Should there be any opportunity to move beyond the 25 million? So I think that's sort of one question.

Okay, one question, but lots in it. So in terms of efficiencies, we are seeing efficiencies across the board. I mentioned particularly open reach first. Open reach, we're seeing efficiencies in network supplies. Having now laid out a much clearer path of how we're billed going forward, we've been able to negotiate good rates on equipment. good rates on contractors. We've actually reduced the number of contractors that we're working with and leveraged that. We're also paying them based on outcomes now, not just based on headcount. And as I touched on in my presentation earlier, we're actually seeing real engineering innovation actually happening in our build as well. And if you've spent time with Clive recently, he'll excite you about subtended head ends which is a very exciting topic for clive but but that and overblowing and how we're managing efficiency in the spine is bringing us real innovation and efficiency so productivity is improving in the build and we've got lower equipment costs and lower contractor costs so real efficiencies that's allowing us to keep the pace of build. Outside of open reach, we're starting to reap the benefits of some of the work that Harmeen has been doing in digital. As you know, we restructured our partners in the IT area last year. We're seeing real productivity gains there. And she's using AI. In fact, we've been recognised by AWS recently as being quite far ahead in in productivity on coding so we're seeing our development costs the productivity of coding is now up by 12 in the last year and then finally um i have stopped some capex investment into innovation areas that i did not see as getting a good return on investment in the foreseeable future And so that whole sharpened focus is really about focusing around core connectivity in the UK, where we can win, where we can succeed. So a good range of efficiency and stopping stuff that won't give us the right returns. And then moving on, do you want to take the second question?

Yeah, I mean, David, you were asking if once we got to 25 million, we won't have entirely covered the UK, although obviously as the preferred bidder on lot C, that gives us some additional footprint, which is important for us. In the guidance we provided, which brings our capex down by at least a billion, that still assumes we're going to continue to build out beyond the December 26 timeframe. We will get nationwide with FTTP, and that's built into the plan going forward. Okay?

Hi, morning. It's from JP Morgan. Can I ask a question on your midterm guidance, please? I guess the first part is the decision to provide that guidance now. What motivated that? What's the specific reason around timing? And the second part of it is it's obviously a welcome move given the duration challenge of the story, given you're investing today, but the returns are further out. But I guess the question is, for investors, the tricky bit is always trying to size all the moving parts, given the unknowns around, you know, does Virgin Media wholesale on their footprint? What happens to TalkTalk? So can you sort of help us understand, given what are some pretty sizable binary items, how have you thought about the way in which you've constructed that guidance so that you can help us understand the confidence there is to make sure you deliver on that 3 billion at the end of the decade?

Yeah, I'll start and you can always build on it, Simon. You know, clearly it has been, by saying all of the upside is the end of the decade, has been difficult for both our existing and potentially new investors to understand, but what is the trajectory going to look like going forward? And having, you know, come into the business, scrutinized the plans, I got very confident, including the sharpening of the focus, that we could start to give much more guidance on the cash flow so that we can we can help our investors understand when they're going to start to see the returns and see that inflection point. And you only need to believe that you get 100 million of EBITDA roughly every year, capex is flat until the end of 26, and then it comes off by about a billion, and that working capital fairly neutral. And you can see the route to that. you know in terms of the revenue in EBITDA you know you could say they're fairly muted I think they're fairly muted and clearly we're aiming for more than that but you know we are entering a period of significant migrations and we've got a lot of new stuff coming to market. We've got the momentum in business to come back. I got very comfortable with the cash flow and hope we can even beat some of the revenue and EBITDA guidance going forward. As I look at what about the threats from the market, as I said there, we have a 74% market share. We were never going to sustain a 74% market share. That would not have been the outcome that the regulator wanted. We can afford to lose a couple of share points a year, and our focus is just building the best network in as many places as the country as we can. It will be a nationwide network that our CPs will continue to have to rely on in some areas. And the great news is that we got the first two locks of the type C that takes us into deep rural, where it is a heartland for BT, clearly, in our retail businesses. So I'm comfortable laying out We owed it to investor community to give them a little bit of a roadmap. Also helps me internally. It keeps people focused on not just the end of the decade when everything is going to be rosy, but to deliver every year consistently on the route to that.

Can I add, Alison, just to perhaps help with a few very visible, predictable numbers to get your head around. I mean, we developed about $1.3 billion of cash flow this year. There are three things entirely in our control as we move forward, which will drive a $1.5 billion improvement. One is we've said we're going to cut our capex by a billion. That's reported capex. And you know how we're going to do that, and you've seen the efficiencies we're delivering. In addition, as you stabilize a constant run rate of capex, your capital creditors go away. In addition to that, we'd have expired through the BDUK grant fund return. So that's another 200 million of basically cash capex that goes away. That's 1.2. And on top of that, in FY24, you've seen this. We were running with a negative capital, working capital. And that's to do with some events we've had over the last couple of years. This business can run with neutral working capital. So that's another 300. So you've got 1.3 this year. One and a half is entirely in our control. There's then, obviously, we've got a bit of interest rate pressure, but you know how the debt book will unfold. So the real thing is the growth in the EBITDA. And we told you about the gross annualized savings. We talked to you earlier about half a billion of net OPEX improvement. And I also mentioned earlier that we still have cumulative tax losses benefiting cash tax into the early next decade. So hopefully that gives you a bit more of an understanding of the controllable parts. Yeah?

Should we take a question from somebody online now? Yeah.

Thank you. Our first question online comes from Adam from HSBC. Adam, please go ahead. You are now unmuted.

Hi, Adam. Maybe you're not muted. Should we go back to the room? Well, yeah. Let's go to the room and we'll go back to Adam. Sorry, Adam.

Hi, it's Polu Tang from EBS. Just have one question. It's on open reach because you called out competitor line losses continuing at a similar rate with the potential for losses to be worse if the market does not recover. So does this mean that you're expecting 500,000 per annum in terms of line losses going forward? And if line losses are continuing, does it not actually make sense to accelerate the build beyond 4 million per annum Is this not the best defence rather than trying to boost your pre-cash flow near term? So if you could just maybe talk about line loss trends and do you expect it to inflect and how do you expect it to evolve?

Yeah, we, you know, as I said, we're considering house building is likely to be even lower this coming year than even last year. And, you know, life is not any better for the consumer at the moment. We don't expect the market to recover yet. And so the market is likely to decline a little bit again this coming year. So we're actually expecting competitor line losses to be moderately higher than this past year. And looking forward, though, we expect that to improve when the market improves. In terms of your challenge, why don't you build faster? To build at a rate of a million a quarter and four million a year is actually pretty full on without it starting to become inefficient. So we are choosing to go as fast as we can, as efficiently as we can, And honestly, if we threw more capex at Clive at the moment, he probably wouldn't be able to do more with it. But it's great news on the BDUK award because that helps us get into some of the rural areas faster. So we'll be moderately higher than 500,000 this year, but the market will recover. You know, house building will pick up again, broadband adoption will pick up again, and then we will be back below that level. But for the foreseeable future, we'll be moderately higher.

Just to clarify, do you expect persistent line loss? You say recover, but is that just a reduction in the rate of decline?

Until the build stops from the altnets. We always expected a couple of points a year. But where we're building, we're growing our lines. So in the areas where we have not had high speed broadband before, we're growing our market share and we're growing our lines. And we're almost halfway through the country now. We'll continue into the other half. And that will allow us to get into some of those areas where Openreach has not yet built high-speed broadband. And the BDUK investment and some of the voucher schemes that come will allow us to ramp that up. But it will all be within the 4 million per year. So we're very happy with our plans. The 2% a year will calm down at some point. And actually what we're seeing is some of the competitor build has slowed. And there's a bit more focus on connections at the moment. But we are market leading in terms of connections, a 34% take up rate.

Good morning. It's George from Citi. My question, and thank you for providing the broadband retail base, very useful. My question is on the retail business and the decline that we've seen in the last year, both in mobile postpaid and broadband. I appreciate you mentioned the... processes that you want to change to improve customer experience but those tend to take time so I was wondering if there is anything more structural that you are thinking I know you mentioned convergence but if I could ask is there any ideas about launching family plans a bit more decisively second brand being used more actively anything around back book price increases perhaps changing in terms of structure versus your predecessor thank you thank you yeah I'm you know

I, on purpose, brought in the base into how we'll measure the business going forward. We need to keep an eye on our customers. If we're going to be customer focused, we need to be ensuring that we're actually either maintaining or growing the base. A couple of things you should understand. The mobile postpaid base, we proactively discontinued the Plusnet mobile business during the course of last year, and we've been deprioritizing the BT mobile business as well. That Plusnet base was around 400,000 customers and some of the ARPUs were as low as four or five pounds. So we decided Plusnet has a role to play in the broadband market, but we did not want to be playing around with a four or five pound ARPU mobile business in Plusnet. So that's why you've seen it was a proactive shift on the mobile base and we're planning, once we get that out of our base period, we're planning to stabilise and grow that base again. On broadband, it's basically a reflection of the market. Less house build, broadband adoption, growth having slowed or even in decline because of the consumer squeeze. And also, we've been getting ready for the migration to the new EE. We only launched it in October. We are basically migrating, as Mark likes to say, the equivalent of Wembley Stadium a week in terms of customers. So we've already got more than 400,000 new EE broadband customers that have a higher propensity to sell other products from us, to buy other products from us. The Elevate proposition is a converged proposition that allows us to sell family plans online. on the back of a household broadband. And that, you know, we are now just really in the last few months set up to be able to take advantage of the new EE. We're also putting non-EE subscribers onto the EEID platform. We now have almost 10 million customers registered with EEID that don't necessarily buy an EE connectivity subscription from us today, but the minute they buy a tech product from us and we're the biggest seller of gaming consoles in the UK at the moment, then we're able to then cross sell and upsell to them. We're planning to do all of what you said. We're looking after a base. We're going to be driving Convergence on the back of our core connectivity. We've got Wi-Fi 7 launching just after the summer. And you'll see a lot more on Convergence. On the second brand... You know, BT will continue in the market for quite some time. You know, it's going to be around as long as we've got the PSTN, and we're still talking about EE powered by BT for now. And Plusnet plays a very important... You know, it's what we have a million subscribers on Plusnet, a very loyal set of subscribers, and it's a really important brand in this... period where the consumer is feeling a little bit squeezed. So yes, that gives you some insight on how to understand how we feel confident about the base growing, convergence growing, and how we'll play the different brands going forward.

Hi, Carl Murdoch Smith from Barenburg. Firstly, I just want to take a second to wish Mark Lyddiard a happy retirement and also to wish Mark Smith a happy birthday. I can't think of any way he'd prefer to spend his day. I wanted to ask about how you engage and incentivize your employees. So specifically, kind of the balance between LTIPs and RSPs. So BT moved away from an LTIP towards a restricted share plan in 2020. Part of the logic around that was with rising capex, was it right to incentivize and bonus people on free cash flow metrics? Obviously now we're, as you say, past peak capex. Do restricted share plans therefore still remain appropriate or should BT look to move back towards a traditional LTIP structure as free cash flow progression becomes more important over the next few years? And apologies, I know this is more a question for the REM committee than you guys, but I suppose I'm asking not for your pay but more for how do you incentivise your staff towards these targets?

Yeah, incentivization of staff, clearly very important. And actually, it's one of the biggest asks I get on employee calls is, when are you reintroducing ShareSave, Alison? And it is definitely my intention to be able to reintroduce ShareSave once Simon gives me the capital to do so. But he's very tight on his budgets. No, we want to encourage more share ownership in the population. What we agreed with the Remuneration Committee this year is, having just arrived in February, we wouldn't want to make any changes to the current structure of our remuneration, but that we would use the next six months as we really sharpen down on... the strategy, the key priorities, what does the accelerated transformation look like over the next few years? We've got the broad outline of at the moment, we know what it looks like financially, but we're thinking, how do we really incentivize our employees against delivering and actually beating what will be the real enablers to a better BT in the future? So we've got a number of things that we're discussing with Remuneration Committee. We've not really touched on whether we move away from RSP or traditional LTIP at the moment, but we are looking at how do we, in our annual bonus metrics, have something that is better linked to being on track for multi-year consistent delivery and growth, because at the moment it's very in-year, and that's something that we're in dialogue on.

Hi, good morning. It's Steve from Redbird Atlantic. Nick has kindly said that I could have 10 questions. So I'll keep going with number one. First of all, I just want to come back to the sort of market and the fact that it's declining, because I take all your points on board, but it's still quite unusual. There are other countries where housing construction has fallen. Unemployment is still pretty low in the country. So I'm just sort of curious as to why you think it's moved from growth to decline and what the triggers are for it to start regrowing. And is there any risk that doesn't happen if we get unemployment rising and things like that? So just, you know, what would happen if it didn't grow? And would you take remedial action if you didn't see a recovery in market volumes? And just a quick add-on on BDUK, great news on Type C, but you didn't seem to bid at all in the regional markets. I think you won something like £25 million of contracts. Was that just a sort of either-or decision in terms of capital allocation? Are there any reasons why you didn't take part in those tenders? It would be interesting to know. Thanks.

So on type A and B, we chose not to participate. Those were areas of 10,000 homes, very regionally focused. There was a lot of competition. and we recognised that actually we were probably better set up to be more successful in Type C. So we chose not to be in Type A and B. Can you go into Type B?

If you were in the Type C, are they completely discrete in terms of the homes allocated?

Well, those that won Type B do not actually build. So you're actually seeing that some that won have not even started to build yet. then clearly that would be something that we could probably discuss with BDUK and the regulator if we could help pick those up. And that's our intention. In terms of market growth, you know, economically, you know, the consumer is squeezed at the moment. It's not, it's tough out there. And therefore, and there was a real growth in broad, you know, broadband lines, broadband adoption during COVID. There will be a settling down whilst the economy stays where it is, but broadband growth will pick up again. You know, As everybody increasingly needs to do everything digitally and online, it will come back. Do I worry about it? We'll just need to adopt our plans if the market was continued to decline. But I don't think it's going to decline. And we've got a responsibility now to ensure that we're capturing the value of these next generation networks that are giving a much better experience to our customers and actually drive the value of the services and drive the value of the market, even if there's no volume growth in the market over the foreseeable future.

A couple of things, Alison. One is that, don't forget, new house build is half the rate it was just two or three years ago. And I think any government in the UK, that is going to be a major priority for them. And we do believe that will come back. The other factor is that broadband penetration in the UK at sort of 83, 84 is still well below 80%. most European benchmarks. So we think there's a lot more opportunity for overall penetration to grow. So there's a couple of other factors that give us confidence. The question to Alison's point is exactly when that starts to recover, but it will.

But when we get into areas where there hasn't been high-speed broadband or mobile connectivity, we see dramatic increase in our revenue and digital adoption. Parts of the highlands and islands of Scotland have been transformed thanks to us building out Openreach and building mobile. We're ahead of our peers on the shared rural network from a mobile point of view. We see immediate uptick in subscriptions and the type of subscriptions our customers buy from us. So we just need to keep doing that. And then we go to the table behind us.

It's Andrew Beale from Maritime Research. Just a quick question to understand what focus on the UK means financially. I mean, what is the scale of revenue EBITDA CapEx that we're talking about? What does it mean for customers as you shift away from those operations? What does it mean for management time or distraction? And how much are you going to get back from doing that?

Yeah, so I think we've been quite clear that that revenue that is now global, once we took out, because originally global included a lot of UK domiciled multinational customers and all of our securities products and services, even if they were sold even to the British government. So the global piece is about $2.5 billion in revenue. And if you take the average margin of our business portfolio, that would say it's about an EBITDA of about half a billion, but it's probably very neutral when it comes to cash flow. It probably doesn't really add a lot from a cash flow point of view. What do we mean by what it means for our customers? We're just announcing it today. We've got some small M&A activity that has been ongoing for a while, but we've only just announcing today that we're exploring all options for that business. It will take time. We don't have any answers yet, but by announcing it, I can now put a dedicated team against it that are focused on protecting that customer base, and seeking, for example, to find interesting partnerships that could allow us to really leverage the global fabric product that I mentioned earlier. Because we see that segment as ripe for consolidation, and we're ready to engage in the consolidation opportunities that can occur from that. In terms of management time, it'll allow me to have a dedicated management on that so that I can dedicate the rest of the business organisation on the UK. Because it's still too intertwined today. I want that dedication to get growth back in the UK. And that's the way we see it forward. But it will take time and I don't have all the answers today. But it's fairly neutral to overall cash flow.

Thank you. Good morning.

And after this one, we'll do a question online.

Karen Egan from Enders Analysis. Thank you for a great presentation. I've just got a question regarding BT Consumer. I think you're quite clear about the pricing pressure in the first half of the year because of the lower in contract price increases relative to last year. But I'd be interested in more detail on how you see that recovering in the second half of next year and into 2026.

Yeah, a lot of it is timing. You've got two years of very high compounding rates on those that have been in contract coming out of the contract period. And the front book has not moved at the same rate. So as our customers come out of contract, we need to recontract them. at a level that is more equivalent to what they see in the marketplace at this point in time. That fades out over time. And clearly we start to get the benefit of our latest price increasing that we just put into the market. And then we have the benefits from convergence and really the take up in new EE. As I said, it's building momentum very well. It comes with a higher NPS. It comes with a higher convergence. and therefore it's coming with a higher ARPU. And that's why we have more confidence in the second half of the year than the first half. We've also got a new Wi-Fi 7 product that we're launching after summer, and that comes with a higher ARPU as well. So we've got a number of things that gives us the confidence in the second half. It's just really about the phasing of those coming out of what was an 11.9% and a 7.9% price rise. Thank you. Shall we do online? Yes.

Thank you. For our next online question, let me introduce Robert Grindle from Deutsche Bank. Robert, please go ahead.

Hi there. Can you hear me okay?

Yes, Robert. Hi.

Super. Sorry not to be down in person. Kudos to Openreach for continuing to do more with less. My question is, is there an upgrade path to the symmetric and higher broadband speeds that your competitors are using within the lower CapEx outlook and on what timeline? And I have a point of clarification rather than a question for Simon. I heard the no cash tax until full year 28 and then just incremental after that. comment within the full year 30 guidance. Is that a comment about net taxes, including when you get some tax back on the pension top-ups, or is that an excluding pension tax refunds? I assume in full year 28 there are no tax refunds.

Thanks, Robert. Listen, we'd love to have more of Clive everywhere driving more for less, and that's certainly our plan for how we'll manage CapEx going forward. On the broadband speeds, our next opportunity to upgrade broadband speeds is with our new Wi-Fi 7 product and everything we're doing with the new routers in the home. And we have some quite new innovation coming in our Ethernet product as well to start to provide upgrades there. So we definitely have speed innovation coming to keep us competitive in the market. On the tax question, Simon?

Yeah, Robert, what I said was that we were paying no UK cash tax. I said for the next three years to FY27. We do start to pay the UK cash tax does start to click in in FY28, but we still have significant benefit of the cumulative losses. So those still run through into the beginning of the next decade. And that's at the UK cash tax level. There will be a little bit of a pension sort of tax shield, which will mean the normalised cash flow can be a bit higher, but really the growth in the cash tax starts for the UK perspective into the next decade.

Nick, next.

Yeah, morning. Nick Lyle from Bernstein. Can I ask one on open reach as well, please? Some big staff cuts in the fourth quarter, it looked like. Do those carry on through the next few quarters as well? Is that the copper base starting to get cut down? And could you also explain maybe how that offsets versus the staff salary rises? I'm assuming open reach is quite affected by the double salary rise in the first half of the year. Thanks very much.

Should I start and you continue? Sure, go ahead. Clive is basically getting ahead of himself. He is planning on what are the engineers he will need over the coming quarters and years and is just getting on with, and it's through a voluntary scheme and we're getting good take up on that. So he's slightly ahead of plan. It will probably slow down as you come to the end of fiscal year 25 for a bit. And then do you want to answer the question on?

Yes, certainly. So you are right that in FY24 versus 23, we did have quite a significant headwind from pay awards because you'll recall we gave a pay award in Jan 23 and then another in September 23. And those clearly had an impact in Openreach. We've largely offset the pay awards with productivity and through the benefits of the cost transformation. And obviously, as we move into FY25, that pay award effect is sort of annualized out.

We should try and get Adam back on the line at some point, but Andrew? Oh, sorry. Sorry, that was very rude of me. You've had your hand up.

Jacob Bluestone from BNP Exxon. I had a question just if you could maybe share some of your thoughts on some of the, I guess, long-running BT debates around the portfolio. What are your thoughts around things like open-read monetization, consolidating alt-nets? Are there other things aside from the UK, which you've mentioned, obviously, investing for growth? Are there other adjacencies you're interested in other than the UK-specific point? Are there things you're looking to exit? So just if you could maybe help us understand as a new CEO, how do you think about some of these, I guess, slightly longer running debates, which Simon's been answering questions on for many years? Give it a go.

I'll give it a go. See if I answer it in the same way, Simon. Clearly, the first portfolio decision was global. We've made that very clear. We have also, and I referenced it earlier, We're really focused on core connectivity and close to core services that we can aggregate and integrate with connectivity and anything else we have stopped or put on hold. In terms of the portfolio, we've got some towers. They're mixed up in MBNL. And maybe, maybe, maybe there'll come a time in the future for those, but it doesn't make sense for us to do anything at the moment, particularly considering the potential merger in the market. And then in terms of open reach, listen, our first priority is not to distract open reach away from building fiber faster, further, and more efficiently than anybody else. And it's our responsibility as a management team to get the value, the true value of open reach once it's through the build reflected into the share price. And so it's not my intention to distract anyone away from doing anything on open reach. Obviously, you know, I should never say never, but my first intention is to get the true value of open reach reflected in the share price. And then everything else, you know, cabinets, exchanges, towers, they're always on the list. And if it makes financial sense, we'll do it. But at this time, our priority is non-UK footprint and shutting down some of the innovation that we didn't see was close enough to core. I'll then take Maurice, Andrew, and then we need to go back to the line. Yeah? Sorry, online before we do. Yeah. Adam's no doubt back in, has he?

I will shout. So consumer convergence has got a broad guidance for the end of the decade towards 30% to 50%. Can you give some sort of further guidance as to what the kind of trajectory you're expecting, and is it linear or back-end loaded?

It's fairly linear now that we've got the EE platform that we can really push convergence. And it's a broad range because we want to ensure we drive convergence in a value enhancing, disciplined way. And, you know, convergence comes in different forms. But as you can see, it's now a key priority for us and we'll be reporting on it more regularly. Even when it's a bad quarter, we'll still report on it. because we are actually incentivizing everybody to go after it. OK, so we'll try and squeeze two more in, right? Morris and then Andrew. Yeah.

Thank you. It's Morrison Barclays. If I could ask a bit on the timing of B2B recovery. So we've been accustomed to lots of hockey stick recoveries of B2B for many years, many B2B group and divisional CEOs. So Charles, that's the same question to you, Alison. But you seem more confident, I sensed, in terms of the timing of legacy declines easing off and some of the growth areas coming through. So I guess is March 25 the bottom of enterprise EBITDA and revenues?

I think, you know, Baz and the team set out a very clear guidance at their business briefing back in November, which had revenues starting to neutralise in 25-26 and EBITDA still being a little bit soft over 25-26 before recovery. I'd love to beat that, but I think that is still our guidance at this time, Morris, and it's the right, and that's very much reflected in the guidance that we gave you earlier.

Yeah.

Andrew?

Yeah, thanks. It's Andrew Lee from Goldman Sachs. Just coming back to your statement or your comment couple of questions ago, Alison, on trying to get the value into the share price, which is key. And clearly, the market doesn't believe those mid- and long-term free cash flow guides. Otherwise, even after the 10% rally, the shares would be a lot higher than they are now. And today, you provided us with clarity on the CapEx. So now the debate moves even more to EBITDA. And I just wanted to ask a question around EBITDA. So Really, it's trying to understand your structural outlook for EBITDA growth over the next few years. But we saw in the fourth quarter, even X the one off, 4% EBITDA growth in open reach. This is all open reach specific. What was going on there? And then could you just talk us through the puts and takes or... tailwinds and headwinds on open reach EBITDA growth going forwards versus the 7% you delivered in FY24. I think you've got the positives of kind of better revenue growth mix from Equinox 2. You've got more cost efficiencies, I think. Negatives are clearly greater line losses and the Fibonet ads appear a little lighter than they were. And then maybe neutral is inflation. But I wonder if you just talk about how you see things going from here.

OK, I'm going to give you a very high level answer because we're running out of time. But I'll try and then we can maybe take it offline, Andrew. You know, there was a number of one-offs in the fourth quarter. There was the Openreach one-off. There was the business one-off. If you strip both of those out, we were broadly in line with consensus and broadly in line. We were about, you know, group EBITDA was about 2%, whereas the last two quarters have been 3% growth. As I look forward, you know, clearly we've, you know, we have about a quarter of our revenue is index linked and all of that is in open reach. As CPI comes down, you don't get quite the same flow through to EBITDA going forward. So that particularly impacts our consumer business and our open reach business going forward. but it's absolutely our ambition through migration of customers to next generation networks and the ongoing cost efficiency program that we will grow EBITDA ahead of revenue. But because of lower index linkage, that revenue development might be a little bit softer in those areas that get tailwind from that as we move into this year and the coming years. But we want, you know, I want more net benefit from this next 3 billion of cost transformation than we got in the last 3 billion because a lot of that 3 billion was eaten up by significant inflation that nobody had predicted. So it's really my ambition to get more net going forward than we had and us to do a very good job on the transformation and getting our customers onto new products and services that they want to pay for. And was there anything else?

No, I mean, the only thing I'd add, Alison, is I think the point we've made many times, but BT today is running duplicate copper and fiber networks. We're running some duplicate legacy and new IT. Going forward, we will move to the next generation. There's a chunk of fixed cost, which is essentially supporting yesterday's network and IT. And over this five-year period, we'll have broken the back of that, and that will make a significant contribution to IT. the EBITDA expansion that we see and indeed the cost transformation.

In the last year alone, our digital team already shut down half of the 2,500 legacy platforms they were running in business. There's still more than 1,000 to shut down. And that's kind of the complication that we still have. We're still running an old mobile stack that is not fully part of the new converged experience for EE as well. So this double running will go the sooner we migrate our customers, and that's where we'll get the net benefit. I think on that point, we need to close. And I think you've got a few final words, haven't you, to say?

I did, but actually Carl sort of rather jumped, but I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that.

This is your opportunity to shine, Simon, and make somebody else shine.

You've really raised the temperature.

I've raised the temperature.

So actually, listen, thanks very much indeed for coming on for our full year results. And Alison, great to have you for your first one. Well done. Mark.

That's my feedback.

Yeah. Mark, we're going to miss you. So it's Mark. Mark is retiring. If that goes out the door today, or tomorrow, is it, Mark? I'm not sure. So anyway, we're going to miss you. Thank you for an absolutely extraordinary contribution to BT over the last seven years. It's been really appreciated. I'll miss you as a colleague. I know the group will. And indeed, I think some of your friends here might as well. So we wish you well in whatever the future holds. Thank you.

Thank you, Mark. And on that, I wish you all a good rest of the day. And thank you for listening and engaging so well today. Thank you.