2/23/2023

speaker
Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Liberties Global fourth quarter 2022 investor call. This call and the associated webcasts are the property of Liberty Global, and any redistribution, retransmission, or rebroadcast of this call or webcast in any form without the express written consent, Liberty Global is strictly prohibited. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Today's formal presentation materials can be found under the Investor Relations Session of Liberty Global's website at libertyglobal.com. After today's formal presentation, instructions will be given for a question and answer session. Page two of the slides details the company's safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking statements. Today's presentation may include forward-looking statements within the meeting of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including the company's expectations with respect to its outlook and future growth, prospects and other information, and statements that are not historical facts. These forward-looking statements involve certain risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. The risks include those detailed in Liberty Global's filing with Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent file form, 10-K and 10-Q, as amended. Liberty Global disclaims any obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements to reflect any change in its expectations or in the conditions of which any such statement is based. I would now like to turn the call over to Mike Freeze. You may now proceed.

speaker
Liberty Global

Okay, welcome everyone and thanks for joining our year-end results call. I hope you're all doing well. As usual, we have some prepared remarks that Charlie and I will manage and then we'll get right to your questions. And for that, I'll bring in my key leaders who will be ready to respond as needed. We're working off slides as we usually do and they contain quite a bit of good information this time, so we'll assume you've got those in front of you or you'll access them at some point. Just a warning, this is our year-end call, so there's a bit more information than usual, but bear with us. We'll try to keep it crisp. I'll begin on slide three with some highlights for the quarter and the full year. And I have to start by saying that I'm extremely proud of my team and each of our operating businesses for how they executed through a challenging year. Just when we thought things were getting better, Europe was hit with a war in Ukraine, rising energy costs, record inflation, and a cost of living crisis that impacted customers really across the region. But despite these headwinds, we hit or exceeded all 16 guidance metrics for our big FMC operating companies that we established a year ago. And we beat our forecast for distributable cash flow at the Liberty Global level by $100 million, and that's using GuidanceFX. So this is the third year in a row that we were faced with external uncertainty but still managed to deliver on our public targets. Second, and perhaps not surprisingly, Q4 was a very strong quarter for us across the board. We delivered positive broadband and post-paid additions in every market, fueled by convergence offerings and Black Friday campaigns. And our largest operation, Virgin Media 02, delivered their best financial result yet with a double-digit EBITDA growth figure supported by price adjustments, synergies, and net ads. We continue to benefit from consistent and steady revenue growth in our three most important segments, which are B2B, broadband, and mobile. And just as importantly, we're actively addressing headwinds in our B2C fixed businesses more broadly with smart network and product innovation, and I'll dig into both of these topics in a moment. And then fourth, we've maintained a clear and consistent approach to capital allocation. In 2022, we bought back 40% more stock than we guided to, a total of $1.7 billion, or 14% of the shares outstanding. And we're on track for at least another 10% this year. And in a few slides, I'll expand a bit on how we see our capital allocation framework going forward. And finally, I'll let Charlie cover the details of our guidance, but I'll just highlight up front that despite continued investment in fiber, 5G, and digital, this year we expect to generate another $1.6 billion in distributable cash flow in 2023. So a strong year for us operationally and financially, and as we'll discuss in a moment, we're well positioned to drive value for shareholders moving forward. Slide four is our standard schedule showing connectivity trends for our four large FMC telcos over the last five quarters. One quick observation is that for the first time in over five years, every market experienced positive broadband and post-paid mobile ads in the fourth quarter. The top left shows VM02, which has delivered three straight quarters of sequential growth in both broadband and post-paid net ads, despite intense competition and a cost of living pressures in the UK. Broadband speed upgrades, together with strong momentum from our Volt bundle, drove our best broadband quarter of the year. By the way, we outperformed BT again, and we garnered an even higher share of national gross ads than we did a year ago. Q4 also saw strong pickup in post-paid net ads in what is always an important trading period for mobile companies. And the O2 brand continues to perform very well, especially at the top end of the market with sector-leading churn well below 1%. Now, Sunrise in Switzerland also had a strong fourth quarter with 53,000 broadband and post-paid ads. Importantly, after two quarters of losses in Switzerland, we delivered positive broadband growth helped by a strong Black Friday period. focused on one gigabit offers and a new Netflix bundle we put into the market. This was particularly good performance given the continued higher churn we've experienced related to the UPC brand migration that we flagged really mid-year last year. Now, in post-paid, Sunrise delivered another strong quarter with 34,000 ads supported by the Sunrise brand refresh and, interestingly, our Swiss ski sponsorship, which is off to a great start now that the ski season is fully underway. After nine quarters of broadband losses, Vodafone Zygo delivered 7,000 net ads in Q4, in part supported by its Zygo Sprinter and Black Friday campaigns. Look at the Dutch market remains highly competitive with price and quality of service now becoming more important than fiber. When you look at customer return, incidentally, KPN lost broadband subs in the quarter. Vodafone Zygo's 26,000 postpaid ads were negatively impacted by the loss of some corporate accounts, but were still higher than KPN in the quarter. It's also interesting that T-Mobile took some pricing in January up 9%. And then finally, Telanet added 13,000 broadband and postpaid ads, which was largely consistent with prior periods. And postpaid mobile ads were steady, supported by their bundles, and really strong performance from the base brand. So solid execution across all of our markets in broadband and mobile. Now, slide five is also becoming a standard chart for us, showing revenue growth across the four main FMC opcos and then broken down by revenue segment. So there's Five key takeaways here. First, if you look at the total revenue growth for each FMC Opco, you'll see that revenue remained resilient, with broadly stable to positive trends across the group. As you move down the chart, however, you'll see that consumer fixed revenue as a whole is consistently negative, from negative 1 to negative 4%. And that's impacted by losses in video and voice RGU, something you're well aware of, as well as pressure on ARPUs and MIX during this cost-of-living crisis. But interestingly, while we continue to lose video subs at a rate a third of what's happening in the U.S., video is now only about 15% of our revenue. I'll spend a moment on how we're addressing the headwinds in Fixed on the next slide. Now embedded in this fixed B2C result are broadband revenues, which continue to grow, albeit modestly, and will increasingly become a larger and larger part of the fixed consumer story in every market. And then third, revenue growth in consumer mobile is all green across the board, driven largely by service revenue, which is growing 2% to 4% across the group. This is a function of strong post-paid additions, of course, and price adjustments through the year. And then fourth, B2B remains a growth engine across all assets, with revenue growing increasing 1.5% to 4% and significant upside as we expand our reach and market share. And then finally, as the pie charts at the bottom make clear, we have a highly diverse and arguably defensive revenue mix with mobile, both B2C and B2B, now representing almost half our turnover, and B2B itself comprising 20% to 25% of revenue. Now, slide six dives a bit deeper into our fixed consumer business and how we're addressing some of the headwinds today. I'll start by showing fixed ARPU trends on the top left. which, as you can see, have been relatively stable in Belgium and Holland, even slightly up, with both markets betting down price rise as well and dealing with limited front book, back book dynamics. In the UK, in Switzerland, however, we've seen around a 3% decline in fixed ARPU related partly to the fact that we start with fairly higher ARPUs in each market, and then that's compounded in the UK by declining video, voice, and cost of living pressures. And in Switzerland, as we discussed, we're managing through a migration from UPC to Sunrise, which has impacted our booth. So what are we doing here? First of all, we're taking price increases on fixed. You know that. Around 14% in the UK and mid-single digit in Belgium and Holland. And those are outlined on the bottom left. You can see what we've done. Secondly, we're implementing a number of commercial initiatives that are critical here. By far, the most important is our broad convergence strategy, which, as we've demonstrated, helps improve churn, MPS, and cross-sell opportunities. We've talked about it before in Holland. FMC households have on average 20 points higher MPS and 50% less churn. These are real, not theoretical benefits to the fixed base as we converge. We've also invested significant effort into integrating streaming apps into our video platforms. Netflix, for example, is bundled in just about every market, and we're increasingly able to add these subscriptions to our bill. We're also focused on rolling out all IP and app-first video devices across our markets. In the UK, for example, we're now adding video subscribers, not losing video subscribers, actually adding video subscribers in January as a result of our Stream TV launch. And then our investments in digital are reducing friction and cost in the fixed consumer business. The tools we're rolling out are driving more online sales, reducing call center interactions, improving self-install rates, and driving cross-sell opportunities. And then finally, we're making good progress on new revenue streams. And these include things like home security or telehealth and energy. We've rolled out products just like this in most markets, and we intend to continue to take advantage of our customer relationships and digital platforms to widen our revenue lens and find new areas of growth. Now, certainly a significant part of our plans to keep growing broadband and improving our fixed consumer business relates to our fixed network investment strategies in every market, which we provide an update on in slide seven. It's also important to remind folks that we are the broadband leader today in Europe with over 31 million gigabit homes ready for service. And just as importantly, we have a clear path to 10 gigabit speeds in every market with mostly creative structures, really creative structures that will ensure we're optimizing CapEx intensity. So the chart on the bottom left shows you that by 2028, we'll be 70% fiber to the home across what will then be a 36 million home footprint. Now, that excludes whole-buy arrangements in markets like Switzerland and Ireland that add another 4 million fiber homes, takes us to 40 million, and brings that fiber percentage to 75%. So we could be as many as 40 million homes by 2028. That's good organic greenfield growth. Now, our plans to get there are summarized on the right. familiar with our approach in the UK. We added or upgraded 1 million fiber homes in 2022, and that will accelerate by at least 50% in 2023. Again, most of that CapEx, especially the new-build CapEx, is being invested through our JV with Telefonica and Improvia, so off-balance sheet. In Belgium, we've announced a deal with Fluvius, you're aware of that, to build fiber across Flanders in a net-coast-serve-coast structure. That should close this summer. And in the meantime, we've agreed a reciprocal wholesale access deal with Orange That ensures that Telenet is the undisputed leader in the north with 70% plus utilization and also capable of entering the south. Now, we completed our 1 gig upgrade in Holland last year, and in Switzerland, as you know, we're going to use a hybrid approach with DOCSIS, Fiber, and Holby. And then finally, in Ireland, we'll be our first market to launch wholesale services on our own Fiber network in 2023, and that's after announcing a wholesale agreement with Vodafone. So we have a sound and, we think, efficient set of plans in every market, remain the speed and quality leader in fixed connectivity. And you should expect that we'll keep you posted on progress here every quarter. Now, moving to slide eight, we decided to hit the valuation question head on this quarter. So if you back off and squint your eyes a little bit, this might look like a complicated slide, but it's really quite simple. The purpose here is to help decipher the valuation gap in our stock a bit and focusing on our FMC opco. So One way to look at our current market valuation is to break it down into three parts, as we've done on the left side of the chart. So assuming full value for our cash balance and our ventures portfolio, the implied valuation of our FMC opcos at the $21 price level is roughly five and a half times EBITDA and around 13 times operating free cash flow using our actual and reported figures for 2022. By the way, cash is cash, and our venture investments are conservatively marked They're held in very tax-efficient structures, and we've already returned over $500 million to the parent. Now, interestingly, the free cash flow yield at $21 once you reduce the market cap by ventures and cash is well over 30%. Now, moving to the middle of the slide, the analyst community has an average price target on our stock of $30. That implies a 40% premium to our current market price of $21. So running the same math, and attributing all of that premium to the FMC telcos result in an EBITDA multiple of around 6.5 and an operating free cash flow multiple of about 14.5. By the way, our peer group trades between 6.5 and 7.5 and some as high as 8.5 times EBITDA. The free cash flow yield of $30, by the way, is still compelling at around 15%. So while our peers would be really mid to high single digits, the analysts correctly cite, in our view, a handful of narratives support their price targets right and this includes things like telco sector tailwinds in europe uh where we can now have pricing power market rationalization and mobile revenue growth and regulatory relief and we agree with that but their arguments also typically include three other drivers like the benefits we're realizing from a sub base that is now 50 converged or the expectation of continued and on-target synergy realization in the uk and switzerland and the inherent free cash flow profile of our businesses, especially given that we believe we're in a peak CapEx period right now. So I guess the message is that $30 doesn't seem like a big stretch to us. One of the reasons is that we don't believe analysts have captured all of the drivers that, in our view, support a premium market valuation. We don't specifically quantify what a premium market price looks like. Our lawyers wouldn't let us do that. But we do identify the key elements that should support values well above our stock price, and perhaps even twice the analyst price target. And those are summarized on the right-hand side of the slide. To begin with, we have been on the receiving end, as most of you know, of six private market transactions in the last six years where EBITDA multiples were as high as 12 and OFCF multiples exceeded 20. Now, admittedly, synergies did factor into some of those valuations, but these were subscale cable TV operations, not fully converged FMC champions. You can run your own numbers, but in today's environment, we believe 8 to 10 times EBITDA and 18 to 20 times operating free cash flow are not unrealistic multiples and are based – if you look at historical transactions for high-quality FMC businesses in Europe. In addition, there are a handful of other value drivers that we believe would support a premium valuation that analysts don't cover. First, we've gone to great lengths to build true national champions that are shaping the market structure in every country we operate in. We have embedded infrastructure upside in the form of towers as well as our fiber networks that's not recognized. Third, we're only beginning to realize now the benefits from new revenue streams like security, gaming, and telehealth, all of which we've launched. And finally, we are arguably at peak capex levels this year, which will result, obviously, in even greater long-term cash conversion. And we add to this equation our unique approach to value creation that relies on agile capital allocation, a leveraged but de-risked balance sheet, And a commitment to buybacks, you've got a winning combination. So building on that last point about our levered equity model, slide nine digs a bit deeper into our capital allocation framework. And we know this differentiates us from our peers. It all begins with shareholder remuneration, which we show graphically on the left-hand side of the slide. As you know, we've now retired over 50% of the shares in the last six years, averaging 11% per year. And in 2022, we exceeded our initial buyback authorization, as I mentioned, by 40%, buying 14% of the shares and returning all distributable cash flow, $1.7 billion, to shareholders. Now, for 2023, we remain committed to the 10% buyback floor again, and we are well underway there. On the right-hand side, we try to put the buyback into context. If you look at our overall capital allocation framework, We have three principal sources of cash, right? Of course, we start with our existing cash balance at the corporate level of $3.4 billion and the modest interest we earn on that before investments. Then you add the $1.6 billion of distributable cash flow that we receive from our operating companies that we're just guided to, which includes recaps. And then finally, we expect cash proceeds. That's the bottom line from the sale of venture investments and non-core assets over time. Now, we're clearly a cash generative business. So where do we invest that capital? First, as you would expect, we do prioritize our networks. So our fiber and 5G investments are important to us at the company level. None of that PP&E is funded out of our cash balance since we generate free cash flow at the Opco level, but we mention it since it does impact the amount of distributable cash flow we receive, and therefore it is a capital allocation decision. And as I mentioned on the previous slide, we see ourselves right now at peak levels of capital intensities. By far, the largest use of cash is directed towards our buyback programs, where we've allocated over $12 billion since January 17, and we are committed to this strategy again this year. From time to time, we will allocate capital to our FMC opcos for strategic transactions that create value. A good example of this is an X-Fiber JV in the UK, or even the acquisition of Sunrise. And then finally, we have been building a sizable portfolio of strategically aligned assets in tech, media, and infrastructure. Now, building on this last point of investing capital into strategically aligned assets, we thought it would make sense to provide a bit more background on our current portfolio of investments and how we intend to manage this part of our business growing forward. If you look at the top of slide 10 on the left-hand side of my last slide, you'll see a familiar chart that breaks down the $3.1 billion Ventures portfolio into principally tech, content, and infrastructure, and then a few notes beneath that on how that value moved modestly in the fourth quarter. As a reminder, we're not coming up with these values on our own. We use a big four accounting firm to provide an independent assessment of value on an annual basis. Then in the three boxes in the top right, we highlight some really important updates that we thought you should be aware of. First, we have 60-plus investments in our tech portfolio. Five of those investments, five companies today, represent about 75% of the value, and we've listed them here for your references. Three of these are companies that provide innovative cloud-based solutions. Plume, you know well, and BitSight is a cybersecurity business. Our net investment in these five companies is about $100 million, and they are conservatively valued today at $700 million. Importantly, each of these companies is currently doing or planning to do business with our FMC Opcos, and that's part of the flywheel we provide in Vesky Companies, and quite frankly, why our pipeline of deals is so robust. The bottom line is that our tech ventures team has an eight-year track record of making money in strategically aligned product, service, and technology companies, and has already returned $500 million to the parent. Next, you'll also see our three largest infrastructure investments, Atlas Edge, our 50-50 JV with DigitalBridge, the Edge Connect data center business, where we are 5% shareholder with EQT, and NextFiber, the JV I've discussed already with Telefonica and Infravia. That's going to build 5 to 7 million fiber homes in the UK. In each case here, we are using either existing opco assets or our strategic position in a market to create and benefit from these infrastructure platforms. It's also important to point out that these figures do not include our tower assets in markets like the UK, NNL, which we own through joint ventures. Now, on the far right, we've provided just a few bullets on the announced Vodafone investment. I'm not sure there's much to add to what we've said publicly. We do think the stock is undervalued, and there are a handful of near-term catalysts that should be beneficial. We've also put in place a very clever structure which minimized the amount of equity we had to put up while protecting our downside. By the way, there is no scenario where we would have to invest further capital beyond the relatively low cost of borrowing, which is partially offset by dividends. We also intend to replenish that equity investment, as we said in the press release, with asset sales, and there are more than a handful that we're focused on presently. I suppose it's good to see that the Vodafone stock is up since our announcement. We don't take credit for that, but obviously that's a positive. And then finally, on the bottom right, we've provided a few points in how we see this part of our business evolving. And you'll see that the three main verticals, tech, content, and infrastructure, are targeting technology, services, or platforms that are right up our alley, as they say. We have expertise, history, or unique synergies in each of these areas. We've added a fourth pillar that we simply call financial, for lack of a better word, which captures existing and potential investments in the debt or equity of situations that we feel are strategic, distressed, or provide a unique opportunity to put capital to work. Now, across the first three pillars, our investing principles are straightforward. We're looking for businesses that provide significant growth opportunities. This typically means businesses with scale, sector tailwinds and strategic benefits to both our opcos or perhaps other portfolio investments. We're also interested in companies built around new or disruptive innovation that either diversify or amplify our core businesses. And then lastly, we intend to be extremely disciplined here with exits and what we refer to as capital rotation. We've already begun to evaluate every position and believe there are more than a handful of assets that could be monetized both in the Ventures Group and outside the portfolio, like Towers, for example. So those are the core building blocks of value creation. You know, first we're going to continue to drive growth and free cashflow in our FMC champions and optimize our ownership positions in these businesses over time. This may include capital investment in M and a or strategic growth. And some of those markets also will be very flexible and agile about, as we've said in the past listings or spins and things like that. Secondly, we're going to continue to put our capital to work in an efficient buyback program as we've consistently done. And then third, We're going to remain opportunistic about investments that we feel are strategically aligned with our core mission and within our capability set. Now, this last one is not easy, right? But we've surely earned the credibility to work here given our history of building, buying, and exiting assets in our sector over time. I don't want to be on this call in three years' time sitting on $3.5 billion of corporate cash and $6 billion of liquidity. I don't think you want that either. So we're focused on value creation first and foremost, and I think we're in a great position to do that. Charlie, over to you.

speaker
Charlie

Thanks, Mike. On the next page, we provided a summary of the revenue profile in our four key markets. 2022 saw stable revenues in three of our four markets and slight growth in Belgium, despite the challenging macroeconomic environment. Fixed consumer revenue pressures across our markets were softened by sensible price adjustments in Benelux and in the UK, and we saw strong mobile and B2B growth across our portfolio. Virgin Media O2 delivered stable revenues in Q4 and across 2022 with continued pressures on fixed consumer ARPU and challenges in B2B being offset by strong mobile subscription revenue growth. Switzerland saw Q4 revenue growth decline as continued strong mobile growth was offset by weaker B2B wholesale revenues and continued pressure on the consumer ARPU mix as the business resets the pricing of its UPC customers in the migration to the Sunrise brand. In the Netherlands, despite a strong net outperformance, we saw a slight decline in revenue growth due to weakness in the consumer fixed business, partially offset by price adjustments, which we implemented in July. We delivered mobile service revenue growth of 6.3% in Q4, which was supported by a mobile price adjustment in October. Belgium delivered Q4 revenue growth of 1.7% and 1.5% across 2022. as the mid-June price adjustment continued to support top-line fixed ARPU growth in the second half of the year. The next slide sets out our adjusted EBITDA performance in the quarter. The standout performance in Q4 was delivered by Virgin Media O2, posting full-year adjusted EBITDA growth of 6%. In Q4, Virgin Media O2 delivered accelerated EBITDA growth of 10%, driven by synergies from the merger, and the continued impact of price rises earlier in the year. This was despite $40 million of cost to capture, which hit the OPEX line this quarter. Versus the exceptional EBITDA growth in Q4, we do expect Q1 growth to be much more muted, and this is impacted by the phasing of a delayed fixed price rise and tougher synergy comparison versus the prior year. Sunrise saw an EBITDA decline of 8.1% in Q4 as tailwinds from the MVNO synergies faded, combined with a continued weaker fixed after This continues to be as a result of the rotational churn challenge associated with the UPC migration to the Sunrise brand. We expect headwinds from this migration to continue to impact EBITDA trends in 2023, and in particular impact the Q1 numbers. Vodafone's Zygo saw a slight decline in EBITDA growth in Q4, driven by cost inflation headwinds, which offset the impact of price adjustments. We expect cost inflation headwinds, in particular in energy, to impact our 2023 outlook, with an estimated EBITDA hit of over 100 million euros from energy and wages. Telenet reported EBITDA growth at around 5% for the second consecutive quarter, driven by price adjustments. The business anticipates ongoing headwinds from energy inflation, as well as mandatory wage increases of 11%, which will hit from the start of 2023. The next slide provides a more detailed update on our energy costs. Before the Ukraine invasion, energy typically accounted for a low single-digit percentage of operating costs. And historically, our policy was to hedge those costs forward on a rolling 12-month basis. This hedging policy helped soften the impact of rising energy costs in our 2022 results, and we were able to absorb the impact of the unhedged costs and still meet our EBITDA guidance in our opcos. However, in 2023, you will see a full impact of the increased energy costs resulting from the invasions. And as you can see from these slides, we have broadly hedged the energy costs in each of our markets for 2023, but this has been at significantly higher rates than 2021 and 2022. We've highlighted the impact on each of our markets, but if you were to add them all up and use today's dollar exchange rates, broadly, our 2021 energy costs are around $280 million, increased to around $410 million in 2022, and will be around $600 million in 2023. representing a hit to free cash flow across our portfolio of around $330 million as a result of the invasion. Now, like everyone else, we don't know where energy prices will settle out, but in the meantime, we continue to execute our rolling 12-month hedging program and have started on the 2024 hedges, which thanks to recent price declines are at lower prices than we've locked in for 2023. We're also investigating longer-term fixed rate deals through PPA agreements. The next slide gives an update on our progress on the UK and Swiss synergies, resulting from the O2 merger and Sunrise acquisition. We remain on track in both the UK and Switzerland with our overall synergy targets, with a very strong finish to the year in the UK. Now, just to remind you, at Virgin Media O2, we expect to deliver £6.2 billion of MPV synergies, or an annualised run rate target of £540 million from the O2 merger. In 2022, we come to be delivered over 30% of our synergies in the first 18 months of the combined business and are on track to deliver over 50% by the end of 2023. Meanwhile, cost to capture peaked in 2022 with over £300 million recorded out of the total £700 million cost to capture envelope. Cost to capture are expected to roughly halve in 2023, falling to around £150 million as investment in mobile capacity to support the MVNO migration took place in 2022. In 2023, trends are expected to benefit from the continued flow through of MVNO synergies, along with the unlocking of further synergy streams, including labour and commercial. Moving to Switzerland, we reaffirm our target to deliver 3.7 billion MPV Swiss francs of synergies and incur 400 million Swiss francs of overall cost of capture. 2022 represented a peak year for Costa Captcha, as approximately 140 million Swiss francs of Costa Captcha supported the business in achieving nearly 50% of our synergy run rate target, including the early benefit of MVNO synergies supporting half-won trends in 2022. The business aims to deliver around 60% of the synergy run rate target by the end of 2023, with key focus areas being the build-up of the DSL migration and headcount synergies, and delivery of these synergy projects will be supported by an expected 50 million Swiss francs of cost of capture spend in 2023. Turning to capital allocation, Q4 saw a step up in capital intensity across our key operations. This is as we expected and was consistent with our full year capital intensity guidance for the group. Moving to distributable cash flow, we achieved our distributable cash flow guidance for the year, delivering over $1.7 billion of full company distributable cash flow in 2022, based on the FX rates at the time of our 2022 guidance. On a reported basis for the full year, distributable cash flow was around $1.6 billion, including $455 million of dividends from Virgin Media O2, along with $478 million coming from our share of the recapitalization of that company, and $321 million from Vodafone Zika. Finally, our outlook for 2023. Now, I appreciate there's a lot on this slide, but to help you understand our current view on the 2023 key financial drivers and ultimately the free cash flow and cash flow distributions of our key assets, we've added our view on some of the drivers behind those assumptions. Starting with VMO2, on an IFRS basis, we expect to achieve revenue growth mid single digit adjusted EBITDA growth supported by synergy execution and inflation link price rise adjustments with headwinds from inflationary pressures impacting our cost base, including energy. Now these numbers are excluding cost of capture for the year where we expect OPEX and CAPEX cost of capture of around 150 million pounds, which is still within our multi-year expectation of 700 million pounds. We also guide to property and equipment additions of around 2 billion pounds Benefits from Project Lightning moving off balance sheets, but this is offset somewhat by the fibre upgrade accelerating and the 5G mobile investments. On cash distributions to shareholders, Virgin Media O2 is going to around £1.8 to £2 billion versus £1.6 billion distributed in 2022. Turning to Sunrise, we expect low single-digit revenue decline for the year, along with low to mid-single-digit adjusted EBITDA decline, including cost of capture, as the business continues to navigate the impact of the UPC brand migration and lower tailwinds from the synergies in 2023. We guide to property and equipment additions as a percentage of sales to be around 15% to 17%, also including cost of capture. Cost to capture spend will drop this year, falling to around 50 million Swiss francs, of which 10 million Swiss francs is expected to be attributed to OPEX. Vodafone Ziggo is guiding to an improved revenue profile, supported by pricing actions, and low to mid single-digit adjusted VDA decline as the business will be impacted by cost inflation headwinds of around 100 million euros from energy and wages. Property and equipment additions as a percentage of sales is expected to be 21% to 23%. The Dutch JV is guiding to shareholder distributions of €300 million to €400 million of cash, which is impacted by higher cash taxes and a tougher EBITDA outlook. This is versus cash distributions of €602 million in 2022. And finally, on an IFRS basis, Telenet are guiding to revenue growth of 1% to 2%, supported by price adjustments and broadly stable adjusted EBITDA, impacted by wage and energy inflation headwinds. Property and equipment additions as a proportion of sales are expected to be around 26% with an adjusted free cash flow outlook of 250 million euros for the year. This is lower versus the 409 million euros delivered in 2022 as free cash flow will be impacted by higher capex on 5G fibre build. And finally, on group distributable cash flow guidance, we're guiding to 1.6 billion of distributable cash flow in 2023 at guidance FX rates. we reiterate our commitment to buy back 10% of our shares outstanding in 2023. And with that, operator, let's turn to questions.

speaker
Operator

The question and answer session will be conducted electronically. If you would like to ask a question, please do so by pressing the star or asterisk key followed by the digit 1 on your phone. In order to accommodate everyone, we request that you ask only one question. If you're using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. We'll pause for just a moment to give everyone an opportunity to join the queue. The first question comes from the line of Sam McHugh with Zane. You may now proceed.

speaker
Sam McHugh

Thanks very much for the question. I'm just trying to wrap my head around slide 21 and the central cost update. It's kind of a two-part question. The first bit is just I see that there's some changes happening with the P&E allocations. Just to confirm, that's all already captured in the OpCo guidance that you gave separately, for example, like the Switzerland OpEx charge shift. That's already in the Swiss guidance. And then secondly, how should we think about the cash burn in central in 2023 relative to what looks like maybe 200 million loss in 2022? Thanks very much. Charlie?

speaker
Charlie

Yes, I'll confirm. Just so everyone understands what goes on, we do this with our joint ventures as well as our wholly owned companies. We have what we call technical service agreements to really support the tech spend, which has been coming consistently down, actually, over the years. And so that's baked in at the Opco level. We've actually got a renegotiation with one of them pending, but broadly speaking, it's all fully baked in. And then at the center... As you know, we've been running around this 200 million euro time number. There's gives and takes on that, depending a little bit on how much money we spend on development and new areas. But I think you should assume it's going to be broadly consistent around that number for the upcoming years.

speaker
spk40

Very easy. Thanks very much. Cheers, Charlie.

speaker
Operator

Thank you, Mr. McHugh. The next question comes from the line of James Radcliffe with Evercore. You may now proceed.

speaker
McHugh

James Radcliffe Thank you. Two, if I could, one sort of big picture and one more specific. You talked about you're seeing for converged customers, you know, higher NPS scores, lower churn, et cetera. What's the comparison to that? Because I, you know, certainly imagine that, you know, if somebody isn't happy with their broadband service, they're probably not going to add the mobile service as well. Can you talk about what sort of the comparison set and for specific customers who do add on broadband, what you're seeing versus customers who don't go the converged route? And secondly, just on the Vodafone investment, you're now a meaningful holder of a core partner of yours. Can you talk about anything that that would facilitate or anything you would make more difficult or limit in terms of your relationships around the JVs in particular? Thanks.

speaker
James Radcliffe

Thank you, James.

speaker
Liberty Global

Listen, on the convergence figures, Jeroen is on the call. I can let him chime in a little bit too. But in the case of Holland, which we cite regularly, I think we're simply comparing FMC converged customers to non-converged customers. Now, fair point, if that's one you're making, there could be some sort of self-selection there. If you are happy with us, then you're likely to buy more products, which means you become happier. Whereas people who are not happy with us generally may not buy more products, in which case you might say, well, clearly they're not happy customers. At the same time, there's no other way to do it. You're either converged or you're not. And when you can drive 20 points of MPS and have your churn, that's a big enough gap, so to speak, to support the premise that convergence works. Now, We can maybe endeavor to provide a bit more color and detail around that going forward, but that is the basic set of statistics. On the Vodafone stake, we are good partners with Vodafone. We do business together, quite frankly, in three countries. We own a power network together through this beacon arrangement in the UK. We just signed a wholesale deal to provide them fiber access in Ireland, and of course, we're partners in Holland. So our touch points with Vodafone are many. This may or may not change that dialogue. We'll see. It's certainly not the reason we did it, not a direct reason we did it, but I think it doesn't hurt to have, you know, to ensure that our conversations with them going forward about all of these business arrangements are, you know, open and direct. That's really all I'd say there.

speaker
Operator

Great. Thank you.

speaker
spk09

You got it.

speaker
Operator

Thank you, Mr. Radcliffe. The next question comes from the line of Maurice Patrick with Barclays. You may now proceed.

speaker
Radcliffe

Oh, thanks, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Yeah, if I could ask a question on the UK ARPU trends. I think the UK ARPU, the fixed ARPU is down about 3% or so this quarter despite the 6.5% price increase you put through earlier in the year. Just curious to your thoughts in terms of how the next pricing increase lands. Obviously, you've communicated the increase and wondered how much of that you thought would flow through into better ARPU and therefore what's baked into your guidance would be helpful. And just link to it if I can. Be curious to know your thoughts around front book and back book pricing in the UK. Clearly a lot of back book pricing increases, but the front book's still very promotional. Where do you think that's set to narrow? Thank you.

speaker
Q4

I'll take the first one. Lutz, you take the second one.

speaker
Liberty Global

I think on the pricing, all we'll say is that we anticipate our mobile and fixed pricing to behave, the impact of that pricing to be similar to prior years. And we've said in the past, I think what we believe generally happens in fixed pricing where we get roughly half that, if not more, in mobile pricing, a larger percentage. And so for sure, we expect to either – do as good or better. It's a larger increase, that's certain, in which case you might argue, hey, it's going to be harder. On the other hand, we have a lot more tools in place to manage customers in this particular go-around. And as you would have read going forward, we have put into the T's and C's of contracts in the fixed side of our business in RPI plus 3.9% moving forward. So now you'll know next year what that price rise is based on January's RPI. It won't be a decision we're making on a discretionary basis. It'll look like BTs. Luc, you want to handle the front book, back book question?

speaker
Luke

Yeah, maybe the only thing I would add on the pricing is, Mike said it, we have much more tools in place. So we are a month into it, and we know exactly how many customers of which cohorts have reacted in whatever way or form. and we also therefore understand exactly how much of the retained revenue we got. I won't disclose any number but so far we are fully on plan. Last year you referred to that there are two things. One thing is you do a general price increase and you get a certain reaction and then second during the entire year, customers have been optimizing their bill irrespective of price rise because they don't want to keep using their landline or they want to get rid of mid-tier video content to simply optimize their bill. And therefore, you're right, last year the net of the parts have been negative. Now, we are not giving a guidance for this year, but we are guiding an overall revenue growth And so we are much more confident on this piece of it as well. Front book, back book. So in general, you're right. This is the strategic challenge, right? So you see price increases now across most of the operators. but you still see high competition in the acquisition market. Now, the way we are dealing with it in a positive way is two-fold. One, we are not offering promotions on broadband. We're not offering promotions on broadband around 21, 22 pounds. So we are staying more closer to 30 pounds, leveraging our speed advantage. So the promotions you've seen from us the last three months are selling more 350 mag close to 30 pounds and therefore we have less of a back book, front book issue. And the second thing is we are also with our digital capabilities, we now can test different ways of selling. So instead of an end of offer promotion step up, we are also offering within the minimum contract length that customers are paying half of it. but in the minimum contract length, then they pay a higher price, so there's less of a churn. So there's a lot of optimization going on, and stay tuned.

speaker
Mike

Great. Thank you so much.

speaker
Operator

Thank you, Mr. Patrick. The next question comes from the line of Robert Grindle with Deutsche Bank. You may now proceed.

speaker
Patrick

Yeah, hi there. Hope you can hear me. On the UK cable upgrade and new fiber JV, 1.5 million new fiber homes for the combination in 2023 doesn't appear massive versus 1 million achieved in full year 22. Are you being cautious here? Perhaps it takes a while to get to run rate. And perhaps related to the question is, the press has you looking at alt net acquisitions. Are you tilting away from build to buy? And how quickly can VM02 sell off

speaker
Liberty Global

the the new build once it's happened thanks yeah there's a handful of good questions there um and i think on the speed point i i would simply say that we've got till 2028 so this is not we've never given numbers or or time frames that we believe you know would imply this is going to happen overnight so we we think that it does take a bit of time to get the machine moving and The 50% uptick is reasonable, but could be exceeded. Let's see. It's not saying it's a marathon, but it's not a sprint either. We're hoping to have 80% of homes covered by fiber here by 2028. We think that is the right long-term strategy, but it's a long-term strategy. So we'll do it at the pace that makes sense for us. And as Lutz would say, we sit today with a one gig network that reaches 16 million homes offering an average speed of 300 meg, which is five or six times faster than the average British household receives from other providers. So we're in a great position even while we build out. It's not as if, you know, we have to convert a network from copper to fiber or we're in some sort of other foot race. Quite frankly, we are already leading the race, and so we're just fortifying the long-term position. Luke, you want to take the second part?

speaker
Luke

Yeah. Can you repeat the question, Robert? What was it again?

speaker
Patrick

How long does it take VM02 to sell off the new JV once homes are passed? And are you tilting more to buy than build in the JV homes?

speaker
Luke

Okay. So, I mean, the first one, we are, as you know, very experienced to get to the penetration on the Lightning Network with now Next Fiber, there's no change there, right? Because Virgin Media O2 is building the network for Next Fiber, and Virgin Media is also the anchor tenant of it, so we are selling into it. And so you know that we are getting to a far higher penetration than any altnet got to, and you know also how quickly we ramp up So don't expect any changes here in the future. So we plan exactly with the same. And then, obviously, Virgin Media O2 is not a shareholder of NexFiber. So this is more Liberty Global, Telefonica and Infovia. But all NETs are getting under stress. This is our perception. The reason is they don't get to the penetration they need to. So according to our numbers, there are 7.6 million fiber homes in the UK from Maltnets, and the penetration is around 15%. And from a pure wholesale perspective, we all know you need 40%. And cost of capitals are increasing. So opportunistically, we will look at it, and we will take the opportunities then as they come.

speaker
Operator

Thank you. Next question, Alberto. The next question comes from the line of Luis Sanchez-Lacrosse with Credit Suisse. You may now proceed.

speaker
Alberto

Hi. Thank you for taking my questions. I wanted to follow up on the previous question, and specifically looking a little bit deeper on the 1.5 million for next year. Can you give us the split between Upgrade and Greenfield rollout? And then looking into the UK guidance, can you let us know if you are factoring in the construction revenues from the new Fiverr JV and the retail business that you would get from Greenfield area? Thank you.

speaker
Liberty Global

Yeah, I mean, I think, Lutz, we've said the split's roughly 50-50, but I don't know, and Charlie, this is a question for you, whether we've identified

speaker
Q4

the revenues from Next Fiber or called them out, but there will be revenues, modest revenues, not material revenues.

speaker
Charlie

That's the correct answer. This is not a massive number, but there is some modest revenue baked into our numbers. Yeah.

speaker
Luke

Yeah. So, I mean, Next Fiber, right, we are... building the network, for that we are getting paid. On the other hand side, we are selling the network and for that we are now paying wholesale revenue. So this is the changes in the P&L. I think we haven't disclosed any number of the split between expansion and upgrade. And I think we don't want to do that, The only thing I'm saying is these are two completely different activities. Expanding, obviously, is much more heavy lifting, takes more work, and I think what we have said is that in 22 we have expanded faster than in 21, and in 23 we have the ambition to expand faster than in 22. And on the upgrade, What we have to do, just to remind everybody, is we have to pull fiber through our existing ducts. This is much less of heavy lifting. We have also guided that we are spending around 100 pounds per home passed, which also explains that the work is significantly less. And I want to simply reiterate the point Mike has made earlier, we first leverage our coax network as much as we can and selling fiber too early doesn't have really a commercial benefit for us at that point in time. So we have time. Okay.

speaker
Mike

Thanks, Luce. Next question, operator.

speaker
Operator

Thanks. Thank you, Mr. LaCrosse. The next question comes from Alana Poloteng with UBS. You may now proceed.

speaker
LaCrosse

Hi, thanks for taking the questions. I have two. The first one's on Switzerland, so a question for Andre. Can you talk through the competitive dynamics in the Swiss market and maybe talk in a bit more detail about the issues that you're facing with the retirement of the UPC brand? And going forward, should we expect maybe a relatively stable broadband performance in terms of net ads for Switzerland? But maybe it's just a case of repricing, taking its time to work its way through. Alternatively, where are the other moving parts that are driving the Swiss EBITDA declines in 2023? And the second question is really just about fibre wholesale in the UK. So I appreciate that you're still in the process of upgrading your cable network to fibre, but have you had any discussions with other communication providers about wholesaling on the VMO2 network? And do you think that this could be a meaningful revenue stream going forward? Alternatively, is the equinox to pricing from open reach now an unstoppable train, meaning you have no chance?

speaker
Q4

Well, let me take the second one first, and Andre, you can work up an answer to the first one. As I just mentioned, we're building a network we think will reach 80% of the market.

speaker
Liberty Global

It's going to happen over an extended period of time. It's not happening tomorrow. And what any investor in a telecom market requires or would like to see is some long-term certainty and a level playing field. Equinox II, from our point of view, is unlikely to make a long-term impact on our plans, but in the short term, feels to us to be a bit desperate and premature by BT, reflecting, I would say, an overreaction to the market more broadly. for whatever reason they felt that was necessary. On the other hand, we think Ofcom gets the larger picture here and is likely to, you know, look at Equinox two in a, in a, in a, uh, hopefully a comprehensive way. And we look forward to the consultation process, but, um, you know, from our point of view, uh, you know, whether we are providing wholesale services tomorrow or next year or the year after, remember, that in the upgrade of our Fiverr homes, which we announced some time ago, upgrade of the 16 million homes, we did not say at that point in time that that decision to spend 100 pounds per home was based upon the need to realize wholesale revenue. In fact, we said the exact opposite, which was we believe this makes sense relative to DOCSIS IV, regardless of wholesale revenue. That doesn't mean we don't have ambition. It just means to say that our economics are sound either way. Now, the next Fiverr JV, clearly, would love to expand wholesale revenue beyond Virgin Media O2 as its anchor tenant. And in that instance, that particular joint venture will make the arguments it needs to make and pursue the strategic ambition it needs to pursue. So hopefully that puts a little bit of context around how we see the market. This is a long-term process here. This isn't something that any one move by any one operator is going to derail, in our opinion, and we remain committed.

speaker
JB

Andre?

speaker
spk32

In regards to competitive dynamics, I would say Q4 has seen a lot of liquidity in the market, also seasonally. Black Friday was probably the biggest sales event in the last year. As such, we have also seen a very high level of promotional activity. We were benefiting from that from a customer perspective. As you've seen, not only us, but also competitors gained quite a lot of new customers in the market. But the pricing levels or the discount levels on those promotions are not really sustainable and are also causing some of the pressure that we have with the migrations at customers that are looking at the front book prices and are migrated at back book prices. That is, of course, a tension that is not making our life easy with all of the customers that we want to migrate over to the new Sunrise portfolios. As a result of that, we have started already in Q1 to reduce our promotional aggressiveness mainly on the main brand. Our flanker brand will not be addressed by that, mainly because the flanker brand has a different role and needs to play also the role of being more price aggressive. But on the main brand, we want to protect the back book better with lower promotional aggressiveness, in particular with promotions that do no longer offer discount over the first two contract term but at maximum only half of the first contract term so that customers get again used to actually pay the normal list price now in terms of dynamics for for next year Clearly, the main driver for next year is those right pricing of the mainly fixed customers coming from UPC. That is roughly less than a third of our total customers, and not all of those customers will be necessarily a drag to ARPU and a drag to our revenues. But some of those are, if you think about it, there are, of course, certain customers that are sitting on one or two products where we still have good opportunity to cross and upsell products, provide more for same, for example, or more for more. While there is a certain segment of customers that has already maxed out the product range and is sitting on an outpriced price point that no longer exists on the new front book, And in order to maintain those customer relations healthy and to continue working with them, we are doing this wide pricing exercise. That's the main drag, I would say, also on the top line for next year. On top of that, I would say on the EBITDA guidance, we, of course, continue to actually prep the business to capture growth going forward. So we continue to actually do OPEX investments on the digital side. We also do have some increase in OPEX that is coming from cloudification, things moving from CAPEX to OPEX. And we have a number of other, I would say, marketing activities that for the first time will hit a full year range, like, for example, the SwissKey sponsorship, which we only started in 22, but we'll see for the full extent only in 23. But the major driver, I would say, of the headache is really this wide pricing in that relatively small fixed customer segment. All other growth engines, if you look at mobile, if you look at B2B, if you look at Flanker Brand, maintain healthy. But we are accelerating this exercise now to actually create a growth platform that we can start from going forward.

speaker
Q4

I'll just add that I have confidence in Andre and the team to manage through this. There's deep knowledge and understanding of the market

speaker
Liberty Global

And this is a blip, not a change in direction. On the other hand, I would also point out that Charlie skipped over in his guidance slide the fact that Switzerland is guiding to 320 to 350 million of free cash flow in 2023, which I'm going to guess here, Andre, I think is up 30 to 40% over 2022. So despite the challenges that Andre is working through at the revenue and customer level, which I'm sure we will get through, the business is generating significant free cash flow and on pace for the kinds of free cash flow results we had initially anticipated when we made the acquisition.

speaker
Charlie

Clear. Thanks.

speaker
Operator

Thank you, Mr. Tsang. The next question comes from the line of Steve Malcolm with Redburn. You may now proceed.

speaker
Tsang

Yeah. Good afternoon, guys. And I'll go for about one and a half questions. One on the UK, just a quick follow up to an earlier question. First, just going back to the UK and the price moves that you're enacting at the moment. I guess if I look at 2022, looking from the outside in, my perception would be that the fixed line price rises didn't land probably quite as well as you'd hoped. And the mobile price rises maybe landed a bit better. I don't know if that's right or wrong, but that's my impression. As you go into 2023, You said you've got more tools at your disposal, but obviously it's a very, very big price rise. So I guess the instinctive reaction would be that you're going to see more churn, you're going to see more promotional activity. Could you just elaborate maybe on those actions that you can take to prevent that and give us sort of a bit more confidence that we don't see the RP reactions that we saw following the price rise last year? That would be great. And then just coming back to the point on Vodafone, Mike, you said that the reason for the investment was not to sort of create more touch points at Vodafone. What was it exactly? Was it just because you thought the shares were cheap? And if that is the case, can you maybe give us some sort of guidelines as to what is sort of in and out your scope? Is it just sort of contiguous sector, telco, media, anything that you think is sort of opportunistic? Or does there have to be some kind of existing relationship for you to invest shareholders' money in stocks like Vodafone? Thank you.

speaker
Mike

Luke, do you want to start with that?

speaker
Luke

So, I mean, your high-level observation is right for last year. but I think the reasons are a bit different. So if you park the price rise for a second, right, on the fixed side, customers are optimizing their bill because simply, right, the average up here is 50 pounds. So if you want to optimize household spend, you look more at the fixed side at the mobile side. And so irrespective of price rise, customers are canceling their landline because they use their mobile, and customers are optimizing and picking more the video content they really need. This is what we have been seeing. And the mobile side, you don't see that. What you see on the mobile side instead is they keep using their old phone for longer. So these are developments that would have been happening with price rise or without price rise due to the cost and living crisis. Now, the price rise itself, and this is then the question, how do you define that? Last year, and I think this is what Mike said earlier on, if you would say, well, everything you take into account two months after customers have seen the first bill, then you can say that also on the fixed side, we landed something like 50% of the price rise. And on the mobile side, because it's only on airtime, not on hardware, the overall number of the price rise is much lower, and it is embedded in the T's and C's, so you see barely zero or very little reaction to it. Now, what does this mean for this here? And we are not guiding on fixed RPU, but we are doing a lot of things different. We are sending out the letters to customers over a period of two months in a staggered approach. This is number one. That has two benefits. One, we always can ensure we have enough agents dealing with it, which weren't the case 100% last year. And second, we have really real-time data so we can see how many customers are calling, And what is the best possible retention for them in terms of customer and ARPU? And then we see within 24 hours delay what is actually happening. And when you take this all into account, there's a lot of room for optimization. We can leverage convergence. So for fixed customers, we can sell mobile. We can sell in interesting content. We can sell in hardware. And I'm not disclosing anything, but so far, as I said early on, we are on plan with a fixed price rise. And on the mobile side, we have landed it also now. So it is communicated and out. And the reactions so far we have been seeing are not higher than a year ago. Hope that helps.

speaker
Liberty Global

Thank you.

speaker
spk44

Looking on Vodafone.

speaker
Liberty Global

Yeah, a lot of people we've said publicly, yes, the stock seems undervalued to us. There's a lot of undervalued stocks out there, by the way, ours included. And that's why we spent one point seven billion dollars last year buying it. But certainly this one also looks undervalued with some near term catalysts that, you know, should play out here, we think, in a positive way. And it was a relatively small investment. If you look at the if you see through how we financed the position, Now, we have a lot of touch points with Vodafone, as I just mentioned, and I look forward to a very constructive dialogue with the current and future CEO, whoever that will be, around all of those particular issues and, if necessary, with the board. So, as I mentioned, we're not an activist here, but we certainly hope to be engaged and understanding of what their strategy is and to perhaps even influence that if it makes sense. But we're not doing this to create tension or tension. stress we're not trying to rattle the cages here we thought it was an opportunistic transaction that was financed we thought very effectively with relatively small amounts of capital we could put to risk um you know in a stock that was at or near a 25-year low so that that's really the way to think about it are we going to do 10 more of these no no uh but we will always be opportunistic in situations that we think are strategically and financially aligned

speaker
spk01

We have time for one more or are we calling it?

speaker
Tsang

Go ahead. Sorry, it was just, when you say catalysts, I mean, can you elaborate on what they may be?

speaker
Liberty Global

Oh, I can't give you anything that hasn't been talked about 100 times publicly. UK mobile consolidation, rationalization, Spain and Italy, pending Vantage deal, towers in the UK and NL, a German strategy, evolution, et cetera. I mean, there's Africa. You just have to read the press.

speaker
spk11

There's a handful for you right there. Okay.

speaker
Liberty Global

Thanks a lot. You got it. Rick, I don't know if we have time for one more. We're six minutes past. Should I close it off?

speaker
Rick

Let's take one more, Mike, and then shut it down.

speaker
Liberty Global

Okay. All right. Thanks for hanging in, guys. We'll take one more.

speaker
Operator

We'll take the last question from Carl Murdoch-Smith with Berenberg. You may now proceed.

speaker
Carl Murdoch - Smith

Hi, thanks very much for the question and taking the time for one last one, so I'll just ask one. I think slide nine is a very powerful one on the long-term buyback commitment over time. Obviously, you've committed to a floor of 10% of buyback this year. That commitment was first actually made two and a half years ago at the Q2 2021 results, and I think that long-term commitment, as also shown on slide nine, is very, very important. Did you at all think about giving a longer-term buyback commitment rather than just committing to the 2023 buyback? And how should we be thinking about your ongoing commitments in future years? Thanks.

speaker
Liberty Global

Yeah, that's a good question, Carl. I appreciate you asking that. We're not today providing any additional long-term guidance, but you don't have to do much reading between the lines to conclude based on everything I said in my remarks that we're committed to shareholder remuneration. So, you know, you should expect over time we'll continue to provide updates on that long-term strategy and, you know, I think past is prologue.

speaker
Q4

Hope that helps.

speaker
Liberty Global

Okay, that's great.

speaker
Carl

Thanks very much. You got it. Listen, thanks. You got it. Thanks, everybody, for hanging in.

speaker
Liberty Global

Appreciate you enduring the long remarks. If you're still on, we had a lot of info and a lot of talk about, and, you know, a very strong 22, and I think all the building blocks in place for a strong 23, and most importantly for value creation. So appreciate your support, and we're always around for questions if you have any as follow-up. Thanks, everyone.

speaker
Operator

Ladies and gentlemen. This concludes Liberty Global's fourth quarter 2022 investor call. As a reminder, a replay of the call will be available in the investor relations session of Liberty Global's website. There you can also find a copy of today's presentation material. Have a good day.

speaker
Liberty Global 's

Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.

speaker
Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Liberties Global fourth quarter 2022 investor call. This call and the associated webcasts are the property of Liberty Global and any redistribution, retransmission, or rebroadcast of this call or webcast in any form without the express written consent, Liberty Global is strictly prohibited. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Today's formal presentation materials can be found under the Investor Relations Session of Liberty Global's website at libertyglobal.com. After today's formal presentation, instructions will be given for a question and answer session. Page two of the slides details the company's safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking statements. Today's presentation may include forward-looking statements within the meeting of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including the company's expectations with respect to its outlook and future growth, prospects and other information, and statements that are not historical facts. These forward-looking statements involve certain risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. The risks include those detailed in Liberty Global's filing with Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent file forms, 10-K and 10-Q, as amended. Liberty Global disclaims any obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements to reflect any change in its expectations or in the conditions of which any such statement is based. I would now like to turn the call over to Mike Freese. You may now proceed.

speaker
Liberty Global

Okay, welcome everyone and thanks for joining our year-end results call. I hope you're all doing well. As usual, we have some prepared remarks that Charlie and I will manage and then we'll get right to your questions. And for that, I'll bring in my key leaders who will be ready to respond as needed. We're working off slides as we usually do and they contain quite a bit of good information this time, so we'll assume you've got those in front of you or you'll access them at some point. Just a warning, this is our year-end call, so there's a bit more information than usual, but bear with us. We'll try to keep it crisp. I'll begin on slide three with some highlights for the quarter and the full year. And I have to start by saying that I'm extremely proud of my team and each of our operating businesses for how they executed through a challenging year. Just when we thought things were getting better, Europe was hit with a war in Ukraine, rising energy costs, record inflation, and a cost of living crisis that impacted customers really across the region. But despite these headwinds, we hit or exceeded all 16 guidance metrics for our big FMC operating companies that we established a year ago. And we beat our forecast for distributable cash flow at the Liberty Global level by $100 million, and that's using GuidanceFX. So this is the third year in a row that we were faced with external uncertainty but still managed to deliver on our public targets. Second, and perhaps not surprisingly, Q4 was a very strong quarter for us across the board. We delivered positive broadband and post-paid additions in every market, fueled by convergence offerings and Black Friday campaigns. And our largest operation, Virgin Media 02, delivered their best financial result yet with a double-digit EBITDA growth figure supported by price adjustments, synergies, and net ads. And then third... We continue to benefit from consistent and steady revenue growth in our three most important segments, which are B2B, broadband, and mobile. And just as importantly, we're actively addressing headwinds in our B2C fixed businesses more broadly with smart network and product innovation, and I'll dig into both of these topics in a moment. And then fourth, we've maintained a clear and consistent approach to capital allocation. In 2022, we bought back 40% more stock than we guided to a total of 1.7 billion or 14% of the shares outstanding. And we're on track for at least another 10% this year. And in a few slides, I'll expand a bit on how we see our capital allocation framework going forward. And then finally, I'll let Charlie cover the details of our guidance, but I'll just highlight upfront that despite continued investment in fiber, 5g and digital this year, we expect to generate another 1.6 billion in distributable cashflow in 2023. So a strong year for us operationally and financially, and as we'll discuss in a moment, we're well positioned to drive value for shareholders moving forward. Slide four is our standard schedule showing connectivity trends for our four large FMC telcos over the last five quarters. One quick observation is that for the first time in over five years, every market experienced positive broadband and postpaid mobile ads in the fourth quarter. The top left shows VMO2, which has delivered three straight quarters of sequential growth in both broadband and postpaid net ads, despite intense competition and a cost of living pressures in the UK. Broadband speed upgrades, together with strong momentum from our Volt bundle, drove our best broadband quarter of the year. By the way, we outperformed BT again, and we garnered an even higher share of national gross ads than we did a year ago. Q4 also saw strong pickup in postpaid net ads in what is always an important trading period for mobile companies. And the O2 brand continues to perform very well, especially at the top end of the market with sector-leading churn well below 1%. Now, Sunrise in Switzerland also had a strong fourth quarter with 53,000 broadband and post-paid ads. Importantly, after two quarters of losses in Switzerland, we delivered positive broadband growth helped by a strong Black Friday period. focused on one gigabit offers and a new Netflix bundle we put into the market. This was particularly good performance given the continued higher churn we've experienced related to the UPC brand migration that we flagged really mid-year last year. Now, in post-paid, Sunrise delivered another strong quarter with 34,000 ads supported by the Sunrise brand refresh and, interestingly, our Swiss ski sponsorship, which is off to a great start now that the ski season is fully underway. After nine quarters of broadband losses, Vodafone Ziggo delivered 7,000 net ads in Q4, in part supported by its Ziggo Sprinter and Black Friday campaigns. Look at the Dutch market remains highly competitive with price and quality of service now becoming more important than fiber. When you look at customer return, incidentally, KPN lost broadband subs in the quarter. Vodafone Ziggo's 26,000 postpaid ads were negatively impacted by the loss of some corporate accounts, but were still higher than KPN in the quarter. It's also interesting that T-Mobile took some pricing in January up 9%. And then finally, Telanet added 13,000 broadband and postpaid ads, which is largely consistent with prior periods. And postpaid mobile ads were steady, supported by their bundles and really strong performance from the base brand. So solid execution across all of our markets in broadband and mobile. Slide five is also becoming a standard chart for us, showing revenue growth across the four main FMC opcos and then broken down by revenue segment. So there's Five key takeaways here. First, if you look at the total revenue growth for each FMC Opco, you'll see that revenue remained resilient, with broadly stable to positive trends across the group. As you move down the chart, however, you'll see that consumer fixed revenue as a whole is consistently negative, from negative one to negative 4%. And that's impacted by losses in video and voice RGU, something you're well aware of, as well as pressure on ARPUs and MIX during this cost of living crisis. But interestingly, while we continue to lose video subs, you know, at a rate, you know, a third of what's happening in the US, video is now only about 15% of our revenue. I'll spend a moment on how we're addressing the headwinds in fixed on the next slide. Now embedded in this fixed B2C result are broadband revenues, which continue to grow, albeit modestly, and will increasingly become a larger and larger part of the fixed consumer story in every market. And then third, revenue growth in consumer mobile is all green across the board, driven largely by service revenue, which is growing 2% to 4% across the group. This is a function of strong post-paid additions, of course, and price adjustments through the year. And then fourth, B2B remains a growth engine across all assets, with revenue increasing 1.5% to 4% and significant upside as we expand our reach and market share. And then finally... As the pie charts at the bottom make clear, we have a highly diverse and arguably defensive revenue mix, with mobile, both B2C and B2B, now representing almost half our turnover, and B2B itself comprising 20% to 25% of revenue. Slide six dives a bit deeper into our fixed consumer business and how we're addressing some of the headwinds today. I'll start by showing fixed ARPU trends on the top left, which, as you can see, have been relatively stable in Belgium and Holland, even slightly up. with both markets betting down price rise as well and dealing with limited front book, back book dynamics. In the UK, in Switzerland, however, we've seen around a 3% decline in fixed ARPU related partly to the fact that we start with fairly higher ARPUs in each market. And then that's compounded in the UK by declining video voice and cost of living pressures. And in Switzerland, as we discussed, we're managing through a migration from UPC to Sunrise, which has impacted ARPU. So what are we doing here? First of all, we're taking price increases on fixed. You know that. Around 14% in the UK and mid-single digit in Belgium and Holland, and those are outlined on the bottom left. You can see what we've done. Secondly, we're implementing a number of commercial initiatives that are critical here. By far, the most important is our broad convergence strategy, which, as we've demonstrated, helps improve churn, MPS, and cross-sell opportunities. We've talked about it before in Holland. FMC households have on average 20 points higher MPS and 50% less churn. These are real, not theoretical benefits to the fixed base as we converge. We've also invested significant effort into integrating streaming apps into our video platforms. Netflix, for example, is bundled in just about every market, and we're increasingly able to add these subscriptions to our bill. We're also focused on rolling out all IP and app-first video devices across our markets. In the UK, for example, we're now adding video subscribers, not losing video subscribers, actually adding video subscribers in January as a result of our Stream TV launch. And then our investments in digital are reducing friction and cost in the fixed consumer business. The tools we're rolling out are driving more online sales, reducing call center interactions, improving self-install rates, and driving cross-sell opportunities. And then finally, we're making good progress on new revenue streams. And these include things like home security or telehealth and energy. We've rolled out products just like this in most markets, and we intend to continue to take advantage of our customer relationships and digital platforms to widen our revenue lens and find new areas of growth. Now, certainly a significant part of our plans to keep growing broadband and improving our fixed consumer business relates to our fixed network investment strategies in every market, which we provide an update on in slide seven. It's also important to remind folks that we are the broadband leader today in Europe with over 31 million gigabit homes ready for service. And just as importantly, we have a clear path to 10 gigabit speeds in every market with mostly creative structures, really creative structures that will ensure we're optimizing CapEx intensity. So the chart on the bottom left shows you that by 2028, we'll be 70% fiber to the home across what will then be a 36 million home footprint. Now, that excludes whole-buy arrangements in markets like Switzerland and Ireland that add another 4 million fiber homes, takes us to 40 million, and brings that fiber percentage to 75%. So we could be at as many as 40 million homes by 2028. That's good organic greenfield growth. Now, our plans to get there are summarized on the right. familiar with our approach in the UK. We added or upgraded 1 million fiber homes in 2022, and that will accelerate by at least 50% in 2023. Again, most of that CapEx, especially the new-build CapEx, is being invested through our JV with Telefonica and Infravia, so off-balance sheet. In Belgium, we've announced a deal with Fluvius, you're aware of that, to build fiber across Flanders in a net-coast-serve-coast structure. That should close this summer. And in the meantime, we've agreed a reciprocal wholesale access deal with Orange That ensures that Telenet is the undisputed leader in the north with 70% plus utilization and also capable of entering the south. And we completed our one gig upgrade in Holland last year. And in Switzerland, as you know, we're going to use a hybrid approach with DOCSIS, Fiber and Holdby. And then finally in Ireland will be our first market to launch wholesale services on our own Fiber network in 2023. And that's after announcing a wholesale agreement with Vodafone. So we have a sound and we think efficient set of plans in every market. remain the speed and quality leader in fixed connectivity, and you should expect that we'll keep you posted on progress here every quarter. Now, moving to slide eight, we decided to hit the valuation question head on this quarter. So if you back off and squint your eyes a little bit, this might look like a complicated slide, but it's really quite simple. The purpose here is to help decipher the valuation gap in our stock a bit and focusing on our FMC Opco. So One way to look at our current market valuation is to break it down into three parts, as we've done on the left side of the chart. So assuming full value for our cash balance and our ventures portfolio, the implied valuation of our FMC opcos at the $21 price level is roughly five and a half times EBITDA and around 13 times operating free cash flow using our actual and reported figures for 2022. By the way, cash is cash, and our venture investments are conservatively marked They're held in very tax-efficient structures, and we've already returned over $500 million to the parent. Now, interestingly, the free cash flow yield at $21 once you reduce the market cap by ventures and cash is well over 30%. Now, moving to the middle of the slide, the analyst community has an average price target on our stock of $30. That implies a 40% premium to our current market price of $21. So running the same math, and attributing all of that premium to the FMC telcos result in an EBITDA multiple of around 6.5 and an operating free cash flow multiple of about 14.5. By the way, our peer group trades between 6.5 and 7.5 and some as high as 8.5 times EBITDA. The free cash flow yield at $30, by the way, is still compelling at around 15%. So while our peers would be really mid to high single digits, the analysts correctly cite, in our view, a handful of narratives to support their price targets, right? And this includes things like telco sector tailwinds in Europe, where we can now have pricing power, market rationalization and mobile revenue growth and regulatory relief, and we agree with that. But their arguments also typically include three other drivers, like the benefits we're realizing from a sub-base that is now 50% converged, or the expectation of continued and on-target synergy realization in the UK and Switzerland, and the inherent free cash flow profile of our businesses, especially given that we believe we're in a peak CapEx period right now. So I guess the message is that $30 doesn't seem like a big stretch to us. One of the reasons is that we don't believe analysts have captured all of the drivers that, in our view, support a premium market valuation. We don't specifically quantify what a premium market price looks like. Our lawyers wouldn't let us do that. But we do identify the key elements that should support values well above our stock price and perhaps even twice the analyst price target. And those are summarized on the right-hand side of the slide. To begin with, we have been on the receiving end, as most of you know, of six private market transactions in the last six years where EBITDA multiples were as high as 12 and OFCF multiples exceeded 20. Now, admittedly, synergies did factor into some of those valuations, but these were subscale cable TV operations, not fully converged FMC champions. You can run your own numbers, but in today's environment, we believe 8 to 10 times EBITDA and 18 to 20 times operating free cash flow are not unrealistic multiples and are based – if you look at historical transactions for high-quality FMC businesses in Europe. In addition, there are a handful of other value drivers that we believe would support a premium valuation that analysts don't cover. First, we've gone to great lengths to build true national champions that are shaping the market structure in every country we operate in. We have embedded infrastructure upside in the form of towers as well as our fiber networks. That's not recognized. Third, we're only beginning to realize now the benefits from new revenue streams like security, gaming, and telehealth, all of which we've launched. And finally, we are arguably at peak capex levels this year, which will result, obviously, in even greater long-term cash conversion. And we add to this equation our unique approach to value creation that relies on agile capital allocation, a leveraged but de-risked balance sheet, and a commitment to buybacks, you've got a winning combination. So building on that last point about our levered equity model, slide nine digs a bit deeper into our capital allocation framework. And we know this differentiates us from our peers. It all begins with shareholder remuneration, which we show graphically on the left-hand side of the slide. As you know, we've now retired over 50% of the shares in the last six years, averaging 11% per year. And in 2022, We exceeded our initial buyback authorization, as I mentioned, by 40%, buying 14% of the shares and returning all distributable cash flow, $1.7 billion, to shareholders. Now, for 2023, we remain committed to the 10% buyback floor again, and we are well underway there. On the right-hand side, we try to put the buyback into context. If you look at our overall capital allocation framework, We have three principal sources of cash, right? Of course, we start with our existing cash balance at the corporate level of $3.4 billion and the modest interest we earn on that before investments. Then you add the $1.6 billion of distributable cash flow that we receive from our operating companies that we're just guided to, which includes recaps. And then finally, we expect cash proceeds. That's the bottom line from the sale of venture investments and non-core assets over time. Now, we're clearly a cash generative business. So where do we invest that capital? First, as you would expect, we do prioritize our networks. So our fiber and 5G investments are important to us at the company level. None of that PP&E is funded out of our cash balance since we generate free cash flow at the Opco level. But we mention it since it does impact the amount of distributable cash flow we receive, and therefore it is a capital allocation decision. And as I mentioned on the previous slide, we see ourselves right now at peak levels of capital intensities. By far, the largest use of cash is directed towards our buyback programs, where we've allocated over $12 billion since January 17, and we are committed to this strategy again this year. From time to time, we will allocate capital to our FMC opcos for strategic transactions that create value. A good example of this is an X-Fiber JV in the UK, or even the acquisition of Sunrise. And then finally, we have been building a sizable portfolio of strategically aligned assets in tech, media, and infrastructure. Now, building on this last point of investing capital into strategically aligned assets, we thought it would make sense to provide a bit more background on our current portfolio of investments and how we intend to manage this part of our business growing forward. If you look at the top of slide 10 on the left-hand side of my last slide, you'll see a familiar chart that breaks down the $3.1 billion Ventures portfolio into principally tech, content, and infrastructure, and then a few notes beneath that on how that value moved modestly in the fourth quarter. As a reminder, we're not coming up with these values on our own. We use a big four accounting firm to provide an independent assessment of value on an annual basis. Then in the three boxes in the top right, we highlight some really important updates that we thought you should be aware of. First, we have 60-plus investments in our tech portfolio. Five of those investments, five companies today, represent about 75% of the value, and we've listed them here for your references. Three of these are companies that provide innovative cloud-based solutions. Plume, you know well, and BitSight is a cybersecurity business. Our net investment in these five companies is about $100 million, and they are conservatively valued today at $700 million. Importantly, each of these companies is currently doing or planning to do business with our FMC Opcos, and that's part of the flywheel we provide in Vesky Companies, and quite frankly, why our pipeline of deals is so robust. The bottom line is that our tech ventures team has an eight-year track record of making money in strategically aligned product, service, and technology companies, and has already returned $500 million to the parent. Next, you'll also see our three largest infrastructure investments. Atlas Edge, our 50-50 JV with Digital Bridge, the Edge Connect data center business, where we are a 5% shareholder with EQT, and NextFiber, the JV I've discussed already with Telefonica and Infravia. That's going to build 5 to 7 million fiber homes in the UK. In each case here, we are using either existing opco assets or our strategic position in a market to create and benefit from these infrastructure platforms. It's also important to point out that these figures do not include our tower assets in markets like the UK, NNL, which we own through joint ventures. Now, on the far right, we provided just a few bullets on the announced Vodafone investment. I'm not sure there's much to add to what we've said publicly. We do think the stock is undervalued, and there are a handful of near-term catalysts that should be beneficial. We've also put in place a very clever structure which minimized the amount of equity we had to put up while protecting our downside. By the way, there is no scenario where we would have to invest further capital beyond the relatively low cost of borrowing, which is partially offset by dividends. We also intend to replenish that equity investment, as we said in the press release, with asset sales, and there are more than a handful that we're focused on presently. I suppose it's good to see that the Vodafone stock is up since our announcement. We don't take credit for that, but obviously that's a positive. And then finally, on the bottom right, we've provided a few points in how we see this part of our business evolving. And you'll see that the three main verticals, tech, content, and infrastructure, are targeting technology, services, or platforms that are right up our alley, as they say. We have expertise, history, or unique synergies in each of these areas. We've added a fourth pillar that we simply call financial, for lack of a better word, which captures existing and potential investments in the debt or equity of situations that we feel are strategic, distressed, or provide a unique opportunity to put capital to work. Now, across the first three pillars, our investing principles are straightforward. We're looking for businesses that provide significant growth opportunities. This typically means businesses with scale, sector tailwinds and strategic benefits to both our opcos or perhaps other portfolio investments. We're also interested in companies built around new or disruptive innovation that either diversify or amplify our core businesses. And then lastly, we intend to be extremely disciplined here with exits and what we refer to as capital rotation. We've already begun to evaluate every position and believe there are more than a handful of assets that could be monetized both in the ventures group and outside the portfolio, like towers, for example. So those are the core building blocks of value creation. First, we're going to continue to drive growth and free cash flow in our FMC champions and optimize our ownership positions in these businesses over time. This may include capital investment in M&A or strategic growth. And some of those markets also will be very flexible and agile about, as we've said in the past, listings or spins and things like that. Secondly, we're going to continue to put our capital to work in an efficient buyback program, as we've consistently done. And then thirdly, We're going to remain opportunistic about investments that we feel are strategically aligned with our core mission and within our capability set. This last one is not easy, right? But we've surely earned the credibility to work here given our history of building, buying, and exiting assets in our sector over time. I don't want to be on this call in three years' time sitting on $3.5 billion of corporate cash and $6 billion of liquidity. I don't think you want that either. So we're focused on value creation first and foremost, and I think we're in a great position to do that. Charlie, over to you.

speaker
Charlie

Thanks, Mike. On the next page, we provided a summary of the revenue profile in our four key markets. 2022 saw stable revenues in three of our four markets and slight growth in Belgium, despite the challenging macroeconomic environment. Fixed consumer revenue pressures across our markets were softened by sensible price adjustments in Benelux and in the UK, and we saw strong mobile and B2B growth across our portfolio. Virgin Meteor 02 delivered stable revenues in Q4 and across 2022, with continued pressures on fixed consumer ARPU and challenges in B2B being offset by strong mobile subscription revenue growth. Switzerland saw Q4 revenue growth decline as continued strong mobile growth was offset by weaker B2B wholesale revenues and continued pressure on the consumer ARPU mix as the business resets the pricing of its UPC customers in the migration to the Sunrise brand. In the Netherlands, despite a strong net outperformance, we saw a slight decline in revenue growth due to weakness in the consumer fixed business, partially offset by price adjustments, which we implemented in July. We delivered mobile service revenue growth of 6.3% in Q4, which was supported by a mobile price adjustment in October. Belgium delivered Q4 revenue growth of 1.7% and 1.5% across 2022. as the mid-June price adjustment continued to support top-line fixed ARPU growth in the second half of the year. The next slide sets out our adjusted EBITDA performance in the quarter. The standout performance in Q4 was delivered by Virgin Media O2, posting full-year adjusted EBITDA growth of 6%. In Q4, Virgin Media O2 delivered accelerated EBITDA growth of 10%, driven by synergies from the merger, and the continued impact of price rises earlier in the year. This was despite $40 million of cost to capture, which hit the OPEX line this quarter. Versus the exceptional EBITDA growth in Q4, we do expect Q1 growth to be much more muted. And this is impacted by the phasing of a delayed fixed price rise and tougher synergy comparison versus the prior year. Sunrise saw an EBITDA decline of 8.1% in Q4 as tailwinds from the MVNO synergies faded, combined with a continued weaker fixed ARPU mix. This continues to be as a result of the rotational churn challenge associated with the UPC migration to the Sunrise brand. We expect headwinds from this migration to continue to impact EBITDA trends in 2023, and in particular impact the Q1 numbers. Vodafone's Zygo saw a slight decline in EBITDA growth in Q4, driven by cost inflation headwinds, which offset the impact of price adjustments. We expect cost inflation headwinds, in particular in energy, to impact our 2023 outlook, with an estimated EBITDA hit of over 100 million euros from energy and wages. Telenet reported EBITDA growth at around 5% for the second consecutive quarter, driven by price adjustments. The business anticipates ongoing headwinds from energy inflation, as well as mandatory wage increases of 11%, which will hit from the start of 2023. The next slide provides a more detailed update on our energy costs. Before the Ukraine invasion, energy typically accounted for a low single-digit percentage of operating costs, and historically, our policy was to hedge those costs forward on a rolling 12-month basis. This hedging policy helped soften the impact of rising energy costs in our 2022 results, and we were able to absorb the impact of the unhedged costs and still meet a Revit DA guidance in our opcos. However, in 2023, you will see a full impact of the increased energy costs resulting from the invasions. And as you can see from these slides, we have broadly hedged the energy costs in each of our markets for 2023, but this has been at significantly higher rates than 2021 and 2022. We've highlighted the impact on each of our markets, but if you were to add them all up and use today's dollar exchange rates, broadly, our 2021 energy costs are around $280 million, increased to around $410 million in 2022, and will be around $600 million in 2023. representing a hit to free cash flow across our portfolio of around $330 million as a result of the invasion. Now, like everyone else, we don't know where energy prices will settle out, but in the meantime, we continue to execute our rolling 12-month hedging program and have started on the 2024 hedges, which, thanks to recent price declines, are at lower prices than we've locked in for 2023. We're also investigating longer-term fixed-rate deals through PPA agreements. The next slide gives an update on our progress on the UK and Swiss synergies, resulting from the O2 merger and Sunrise acquisition. We remain on track in both the UK and Switzerland with our overall synergy targets, with a very strong finish to the year in the UK. Now, just to remind you, at Virgin Media O2, we expect to deliver £6.2 billion of MPV synergies, or an annualised run rate target of £540 million from the O2 merger. In 2022, we come to be delivered over 30% of our synergies in the first 18 months of the combined business and are on track to deliver over 50% by the end of 2023. Meanwhile, cost to capture peaked in 2022 with over £300 million recorded out of the total £700 million cost to capture envelope. Cost to capture are expected to roughly halve in 2023, falling to around £150 million as investment in mobile capacity to support the MVNO migration took place in 2022. In 2023, trends are expected to benefit from the continued flow through of MVNO synergies, along with the unlocking of further synergy streams, including labour and commercial. Moving to Switzerland, we reaffirm our target to deliver 3.7 billion MPB Swiss francs of synergies and incur 400 million Swiss francs of overall cost of capture. 2022 represented a peak year for CostaCapture, as approximately 140 million Swiss francs of CostaCapture supported the business in achieving nearly 50% of our synergy run rate target, including the early benefit of MVNO synergies supporting half-won trends in 2022. The business aims to deliver around 60% of the synergy run rate target by the end of 2023, with key focus areas being the build-up of the DSL migration and headcount synergies, and delivery of these synergy projects will be supported by an expected 50 million Swiss francs of cost of capture spend in 2023. Turning to capital allocation, Q4 saw a step up in capital intensity across our key operations. This is as we expected and was consistent with our full year capital intensity guidance for the group. Moving to distributable cash flow, we achieved our distributable cash flow guidance for the year, delivering over $1.7 billion of full company distributable cash flow in 2022, based on the FX rates at the time of our 2022 guidance. On a reported basis for the full year, distributable cash flow was around $1.6 billion, including $455 million of dividends from Virgin Media O2, along with $478 million coming from our share of the recapitalization of that company, and $321 million from Vodafone Zika. Finally, our outlook for 2023. Now, I appreciate there's a lot on this slide, but to help you understand our current view on the 2023 key financial drivers and ultimately the free cash flow and cash flow distributions of our key assets, we've added our view on some of the drivers behind those assumptions. Starting with VMO2, on an IFRS basis, we expect to achieve revenue growth mid single digit adjusted EBITDA growth supported by synergy execution and inflation link price rise adjustments with headwinds from inflationary pressures impacting our cost base, including energy. Now these numbers are excluding cost of capture for the year where we expect OPEX and CAPEX cost of capture of around 150 million pounds, which is still within our multi-year expectation of 700 million pounds. We also guide to property and equipment additions of around 2 billion pounds Benefits from Project Lightning moving off balance sheets, but this is offset somewhat by the fibre upgrade accelerating and the 5G mobile investments. On cash distributions to shareholders, Virgin Media O2 is going to around £1.8 to £2 billion versus £1.6 billion distributed in 2022. Turning to Sunrise, we expect low single-digit revenue decline for the year, along with low to mid-single-digit adjusted EBITDA decline, including cost of capture, as the business continues to navigate the impact of the UPC brand migration and lower tailwinds from the synergies in 2023. We guide to property and equipment additions as a percentage of sales to be around 15% to 17%, also including cost of capture. Cost to capture spend will drop this year, falling to around 50 million Swiss francs, of which 10 million Swiss francs is expected to be attributed to OPEX. Vodafone Ziggo is guiding to an improved revenue profile, supported by pricing actions, and low to mid single-digit adjusted WDA decline as the business will be impacted by cost inflation headwinds of around 100 million euros from energy and wages. Property and equipment additions as a percentage of sales is expected to be 21% to 23%. The Dutch JV is guiding to shareholder distributions of €300 million to €400 million of cash, which is impacted by higher cash taxes and a tougher EBITDA outlook. This is versus cash distributions of €602 million in 2022. And finally, on an IFRS basis, Telenet are guiding to revenue growth of 1% to 2%, supported by price adjustments and broadly stable adjusted EBITDA, impacted by wage and energy inflation headwinds. Property and equipment additions, as the proportion of sales, are expected to be around 26%, with an adjusted free cash flow outlook of €250 million for the year. This is lower versus the €409 million delivered in 2022, as free cash flow will be impacted by higher capex on 5G fibre build. And finally, on group distributable cash flow guidance, we're guiding to €1.6 billion of distributable cash flow in 2023 at guidance FX rates. we reiterate our commitment to buy back 10% of our shares outstanding in 2023. And with that, operator, let's turn to questions.

speaker
Operator

The question and answer session will be conducted electronically. If you would like to ask a question, please do so by pressing the star or asterisk key followed by the digit 1 on your phone. In order to accommodate everyone, we request that you ask only one question. If you're using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. We'll pause for just a moment to give everyone an opportunity to join the queue. The first question comes from the line of Sam McHugh with Zane. You may now proceed.

speaker
Sam McHugh

Thanks very much for the question. I'm just trying to wrap my head around slide 21 and the central cost update. It's kind of a two-part question. The first bit is just I see that there's some changes happening with the P&E allocations. Just to confirm, that's all already captured in the OpCo guidance that you gave separately, for example, like the Switzerland OpEx charge shift. That's already in the Swiss guidance. And then secondly, how should we think about the cash burn in central in 2023 relative to what looks like maybe 200 million loss in 2022? Thanks very much. Charlie?

speaker
Charlie

Yes, I confirm. Just so everyone understands what goes on, we do this with our joint ventures as well as our wholly owned companies. We have what we call technical service agreements to really support the tech spend, which has been coming consistently down, actually, over the years. And so that's baked in at the Opco level. We've actually got a renegotiation with one of them pending, but broadly speaking, it's all fully baked in. And then at the center... As you know, we've been running around this 200 million euro time number. There's gives and takes on that, depending a little bit on how much money we spend on development and new areas. But I think you should assume it's going to be broadly consistent around that number for the upcoming years.

speaker
spk40

Very easy. Thanks very much. Cheers, Charlie.

speaker
Operator

Thank you, Mr. McHugh. The next question comes from the line of James Radcliffe with Evercore. You may now proceed.

speaker
McHugh

Thank you. Two, if I could, one sort of big picture and one more specific. You talked about you're seeing for converged customers, you know, higher NPS scores, lower churn, et cetera. What's the comparison to that? Because I, you know, certainly imagine that, you know, if somebody isn't happy with their broadband service, they're probably not going to add the mobile service as well. So can you talk about what sort of the comparison set and for specific customers who do, add-on broadband, what you're seeing versus customers who don't go the converged route. And secondly, just on the Vodafone investment, you're now a meaningful holder of a core partner of yours. Can you talk about anything that that would facilitate or anything you would make more difficult or limit in terms of your relationships around the JVs in particular? Thanks.

speaker
James Radcliffe

Thanks, James.

speaker
Liberty Global

Listen, on the convergence figures, Jeroen is on the call. I can let him chime in a little bit too. But in the case of Holland, which we cite regularly, I think we're simply comparing FMC converged customers to non-converged customers. Now, fair point, if that's one you're making, there could be some sort of self-selection there. If you are happy with us, then you're likely to buy more products, which means you become happier. Whereas people who are not happy with us generally may not buy more products, in which case you might say, well, clearly they're not happy customers. At the same time, there's no other way to do it. I mean, you're either converged or you're not. And when you can drive 20 points of MPS and have your churn, that's a big enough gap, so to speak, to support the premise that convergence works. Now, we can maybe endeavor to provide a bit more color and detail around that going forward, but that is the basic set of statistics. On the Vodafone stake, We are good partners with Vodafone. We do business together, quite frankly, in three countries. We own a power network together through this beacon arrangement in the UK. We just signed a wholesale deal to provide them fiber access in Ireland and, of course, we're partners in Holland. So our touch points with Vodafone are many. This may or may not change that dialogue. We'll see. It's certainly not the reason we did it, not a direct reason we did it, but I think it doesn't hurt to have you know, to ensure that our conversations with them going forward about all of these business arrangements are, you know, open and direct. That's really all I'd say there.

speaker
Operator

Great. Thank you.

speaker
spk09

You got it.

speaker
Operator

Thank you, Mr. Radcliffe. The next question comes from the line of Maurice Patrick with Barclays. You may now proceed.

speaker
Radcliffe

Oh, thanks, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Yeah, if I could ask a question on the UK ARPU trends. I think the UK ARPU, the fixed-land ARPU, is down about 3% or so this quarter, despite the 6.5% price increase you put through earlier in the year. Just curious to your thoughts in terms of how you think the next price increase lands. Obviously, you've communicated the increase and wondered how much of that you thought would flow through into better ARPU, and therefore, what's baked into your guidance would be helpful. And just link to it, if I can. We're curious to know your thoughts around front book and back book pricing in the UK. Clearly a lot of back book pricing increases, but the front book is still very promotional. What do you think that's set to narrow? Thank you.

speaker
Liberty Global

I'll take the first one. Luke, you take the second one. I think on the pricing, all we'll say is that we anticipate our mobile and fixed pricing to behave, the impact of that pricing to be similar to prior years. And we've said in the past, I think what we believe generally happens in fixed pricing, where we get roughly half that, if not more, in mobile pricing, a larger percentage. And so for sure, we expect to either do as good or better. It's a larger increase, that's certain, in which case you might argue, hey, it's going to be harder. On the other hand, we have a lot more tools in place to manage customers in this particular go-around. And as you would have read, going forward, we have put into the T's and C's of contracts in the fixed side of our business in RPI plus 3.9% moving forward. So now you'll know next year what that price rise is based on January's RPI. It won't be something we're making. It won't be a decision we're making on a discretionary basis. It'll look like BTs. Lutz, you want to handle the front book, back book question?

speaker
Luke

Yeah, maybe the only thing I would add on the pricing is, Mike said it, we have much more tools in place. So we are a month into it. And we know exactly how many customers of which cohorts have reacted in whatever way or form. And we also therefore understand exactly how much of the retained revenue we got. And I won't disclose any number, but so far we are fully on plan. Last year you referred to that there are two things. One thing is you do a general price increase and you get a certain reaction. And then second, during the entire year, customers have been optimizing their bill irrespective of price rise because they don't want to keep using their landline or they want to get rid of mid-tier video content to simply optimize their bill. And therefore, you're right, last year the net of the parts have been negative. Now, we are not giving a guidance for this year, but we are guiding an overall revenue growth And so we are much more confident on this piece of it as well. Front book, back book. So in general, you're right. This is the strategic challenge, right? So you see price increases now across most of the operators. but you still see high competition in the acquisition market. Now, the way we are dealing with it in a positive way is two-fold. One, we are not offering promotions on broadband. We're not offering promotions on broadband around 21, 22 pounds. So we are staying more closer to 30 pounds, leveraging our speed advantage. So the promotions you've seen from us the last three months are selling more 350 MB close to 30 pounds and therefore we have less of a back book, front book issue. And the second thing is we are also with our digital capabilities we now can test different ways of So instead of an end-of-offer promotion step-up, we are also offering within the minimum contract length that customers are paying half of it. But in the minimum contract length, then they pay a higher price, so there's less of a churn. So there's a lot of optimization going on, and stay tuned.

speaker
Mike

Great. Thank you so much.

speaker
Operator

Thank you, Mr. Patrick. The next question comes from the line of Robert Grindle with Docebank. You may now proceed.

speaker
Patrick

Yeah, hi there. Hope you can hear me. On the UK cable upgrade and new fiber JV, 1.5 million new fiber homes for the combination in 2023 doesn't appear massive versus 1 million achieved in full year 22. Are you being cautious here? Perhaps it takes a while to get to run rate. And perhaps related to the question is the press has you looking at alt net acquisitions. Are you tilting away from build to buy? And how quickly can VM02 sell off the new build once it's happened? Thanks.

speaker
Q4

Yeah, there's a handful of good questions there.

speaker
Liberty Global

And I think on the speed point, I would simply say that we've got till 2028. So this is not, we've never given numbers or timeframes that we believe, you know, would imply this is going to happen overnight. So we think that it does take a bit of time to get the machine moving and The 50% uptick is reasonable but could be exceeded. Let's see. It's not saying it's a marathon, but it's not a sprint either. We're hoping to have 80% of homes covered by fiber here by 2028. We think that is the right long-term strategy, but it's a long-term strategy. So we'll do it at the pace that makes sense for us. And as Lutz would say, we sit today with a one-gig network that reaches 16 million homes offering an average speed of 300 meg, which is five or six times faster than the average British household receives from other providers. So we're in a great position even while we build out. It's not as if, you know, we have to convert a network from copper to fiber or we're in some sort of other foot race. Quite frankly, we are already leading the race, and so we're just fortifying the long-term position. Luke, you want to take the second part?

speaker
Luke

Yeah. Can you repeat the question, Robert? What was it again?

speaker
Patrick

How long does it take VM02 to sell off the new JV once homes are passed? And are you tilting more to buy than build in the JV homes?

speaker
Luke

Okay, so I mean the first one, we are, as you know, very experienced to get to the penetration on the Lightning Network with now Next Fiber, there's no change there, right? Because Virgin Media O2 is building the network for Next Fiber, and Virgin Media is also the anchor tenant of it, so we are selling into it. And so you know that we are getting to a far higher penetration than any altnet got to, and you know also how quickly we ramp up So don't expect any changes here in the future, so we plan exactly with the same. And then, obviously, Virgin Media O2 is not a shareholder of NexFiber, so this is more Liberty Global, Telefonica and Infovia, but all NETs are getting under stress. This is our perception. The reason is they don't get to the penetration they need to. So according to our numbers, there are 7.6 million fiber homes in the UK from Maltnets, and the penetration is around 15%. And from a pure wholesale perspective, we all know you need 40%. And cost of capitals are increasing. So opportunistically, we will look at it, and we will take the opportunities then as they come.

speaker
Operator

The next question comes from the line of Luis Sanchez LaCrosse with Credit Suisse. You may now proceed.

speaker
Alberto

Hi. Thank you for taking my questions. I wanted to follow up on the previous question and specifically looking a little bit deeper on the 1.5 million for next year. Can you give us the split between upgrade and landfill rollout? And then looking into the UK guidance, can you... Let us know if you are factoring in the construction revenues from the new fiber JV and the retail business that you would get from Greenfield area. Thank you.

speaker
Liberty Global

Yeah, I mean, I think, Lutz, we've said the split's roughly 50-50, but I don't know, and Charlie, this is a question for you, whether we've identified the revenues from Nextfiber or called them out, but there will be revenues, modest revenues, not material revenues.

speaker
Charlie

That's the correct answer. This is not a massive number, but there is some modest revenue baked into our numbers.

speaker
Luke

Nextfiber, we are building the network for that. We are getting paid. On the other hand, we are selling the network and for that we are now paying wholesale revenue. So this is the changes in the P&L. I think we haven't disclosed any number of the split between expansion and upgrade. And I think we don't want to do that. The only thing I'm saying is These are two completely different activities. Expanding obviously is much more heavy lifting, takes more work, and I think what we have said is that in 22 we have expanded faster than in 21, and in 23 we have the ambition to expand faster than in 22. And on the upgrade, what we have to do, just to remind everybody, is We have to pull fiber through our existing ducts. This is much less of heavy lifting. We have also guided that we are spending around 100 pounds per homes passed, which also explains that the work is significantly less. And I want to simply reiterate the point Mike has made earlier. We first leverage our coax network as much as we can, and selling fiber too early doesn't have really a commercial benefit for us at that point in time. So we have time.

speaker
Mike

Okay. Thanks, Luis. Next question, operator.

speaker
Operator

Thanks. Thank you, Mr. LaCrosse. The next question comes from with UBS. You may now proceed.

speaker
LaCrosse

Hi, thanks for taking the questions. I have two. The first one's on Switzerland, so a question for Andre. Can you talk through the competitive dynamics in the Swiss market and maybe talk in a bit more detail about the issues that you're facing with the retirement of the UPC brand? And going forward, should we expect maybe a relatively stable broadband performance in terms of net ads for Switzerland, but maybe it's just a case of repricing, taking its time to work its way through? Alternatively, where are the other moving parts that are driving the Swiss EBITDA declines in 2023? And the second question is really just about fibre wholesale in the UK. So I appreciate that you're still in the process of upgrading your cable network to fibre, but have you had any discussions with other communication providers about wholesaling on the VM02 network? And do you think that this could be a meaningful revenue stream going forward? Alternatively, is the equinox to pricing from open reach now an unstoppable train, meaning you have no chance?

speaker
Q4

Well, let me take the second one first, and Andre, you can work up an answer to the first one.

speaker
Liberty Global

As I just mentioned, we're building a network we think will reach 80% of the market. It's going to happen over an extended period of time. It's not happening tomorrow. And what any investor in a telecom market requires or would like to see is some long-term certainty and a level playing field. Equinox II, from our point of view, is unlikely to make a long-term impact on our plans, but in the short term, feels to us to be a bit desperate and premature by BT, reflecting, I would say, an overreaction to the market more broadly. Uh, for whatever reason they felt that was necessary. On the other hand, we think Ofcom gets the larger picture here and is likely to, you know, look at Equinox two in a, in a, in a, uh, hopefully a comprehensive way. And we look forward to the consultation process, but, um, you know, from our point of view, uh, you know, w whether we are providing wholesale services tomorrow or next year or the year after remember. that in the upgrade of our fiber homes, which we announced some time ago, upgrade of the 16 million homes, we did not say at that point in time that that decision to spend 100 pounds per home was based upon the need to realize wholesale revenue. In fact, we said the exact opposite, which was we believe this makes sense relative to DOCSIS IV, regardless of wholesale revenue. That doesn't mean we don't have ambition. It just means to say that our economics are sound either way. Now, the next fiber, JB, clearly, would love to expand wholesale revenue beyond Virgin Media O2 as its anchor tenant. And in that instance, that particular joint venture will make the arguments it needs to make and pursue the strategic ambition it needs to pursue. So hopefully that puts a little bit of context around how we see the market. This is a long-term process here. This isn't something that any one move by any one operator is going to derail, in our opinion. And we remain committed.

speaker
JB

Andre?

speaker
spk32

Yeah, in regards to competitive dynamics, I would say Q4 has seen a lot of liquidity in the market, also seasonally. Black Friday was probably the biggest sales event in the last year. As such, we have also seen a very high level of promotional activity. We were benefiting from that from a customer perspective. As you've seen, not only us, but also competitors gained quite a lot of new customers in the market. But the pricing levels or the discount levels on those promotions are not really sustainable and are also causing some of the pressure that we have with the migrations at customers that are looking at the front book prices and are migrated at back book prices. That is, of course, a tension that is not making our life easy with all of the customers that we want to migrate over to the new Sunrise portfolios. As a result of that, we have started already in Q1 to reduce our promotional aggressiveness mainly on the main brand. Our flanker brand will not be addressed by that, mainly because the flanker brand has a different role and needs to play also the role of being more price aggressive. But on the main brand, we want to protect the back book better with lower promotional aggressiveness, in particular with promotions that do no longer offer a discount over the first contract term, but at maximum only half of the first contract term so that customers get again used to actually pay the normal list price. Now, in terms of dynamics for next year, Clearly the main driver for next year is those right pricing of the mainly fixed customers coming from UPC that is roughly less than a third of our total customers and not all of those customers will be necessarily a drag to ARPU and a drag to our revenues. But some of those are, if you think about it, I mean, there are, of course, certain customers that are sitting on one or two products where we still have good opportunity to cross and upsell products, provide more for same, for example, or more for more. While there is a certain segment of customers that has already maxed out the product range and is sitting on an outpriced price point that no longer exists on the new front book, And in order to maintain those customer relations healthy and to continue working with them, we are doing this wide pricing exercise. That's the main drag, I would say, also on the top line for next year. On top of that, I would say on the EBITDA guidance, we, of course, continue to actually prep the business to capture growth going forward. So we continue to actually do OPEX investments on the digital side. We also do have some increase in OPEX that is coming from cloudification, things moving from CAPEX to OPEX. And we have a number of other, I would say, marketing activities that for the first time will hit a full year range, like, for example, the SwissKey sponsorship, which we only started in 22, but we'll see for the full extent only in 23. But the major driver, I would say, of the headache is really this wide pricing in that relatively small fixed customer segment. All other growth engines, if you look at mobile, if you look at B2B, if you look at Flanker Brand, maintain healthy. But we are accelerating this exercise now to actually create a growth platform that we can start from going forward.

speaker
Q4

I'll just add that I have confidence in Andre and the team to manage through this.

speaker
Liberty Global

There's deep knowledge and understanding of the markets And this is a blip, not a change in direction. On the other hand, I would also point out that Charlie skipped over in his guidance slide the fact that Switzerland is guiding to 320 to 350 million of free cash flow in 2023, which I'm going to guess here, Andre, I think is up 30 to 40 percent over 2022. So despite the challenges that Andre is working through at the revenue and customer level, which I'm sure we will get through, the business is generating significant free cash flow and on pace for the kinds of free cash flow results we had initially anticipated when we made the acquisition.

speaker
Charlie

Clear. Thanks.

speaker
Operator

Thank you, Mr. Tsang. The next question comes from the line of Steve Malcolm with Redburn. You may now proceed.

speaker
Tsang

Yeah, good afternoon, guys, and I'll go for one and a half questions. One in the UK, just a quick follow-up to an earlier question. First, just going back to the UK and the price moves that you're enacting at the moment, I guess if I look at 2022, looking from the outside in, my perception would be that the fixed line price rises didn't land probably quite as well as you'd hoped, and the mobile price rises maybe landed a bit better. I don't know if that's right or wrong, but that's my impression. As you go into 2023... As you said, you've got more tools at your disposal, but obviously it's a very, very big price rise. So I guess the instinctive reaction would be that you're going to see more churn, you're going to see more promotional activity. But could you just elaborate maybe on those actions that you can take to prevent that and give us sort of a bit more confidence that we don't see the RP reactions that we saw following the price rise last year? That would be great. And then just coming back to the point on Vodafone. Mike, you said that, you know, the reason for the investment was not to sort of, you know, create more touch points at Vodafone. What was it exactly? Was it just because you thought the shares were cheap? And if that is the case, you know, can you maybe give us some sort of guidelines as to what is sort of in and out your scope? Is it just sort of contiguous sector, telco, media, anything that you think is sort of opportunistic? Or does there have to be some kind of existing relationship for you to invest shareholders' money in stocks like Vodafone? Thank you.

speaker
Mike

Luke, do you want to start with that?

speaker
Luke

So, I mean, your high-level observation is right for last year, but I think the reasons are a bit different. So if you park the price rise for a second, right, on the fixed side, customers are optimizing their bill because simply, right, the average up-year is 50 pounds. So if you want to optimize household spend, you look more at the fixed side at the mobile side. And so irrespective of price rise, customers are canceling their landline because they use their mobile and customers are optimizing and picking more the video content they really need. This is what we have been seeing. And the mobile side, you don't see that. What you see on the mobile side instead is they keep using their old phone for longer. So these are developments that would have been happening with price rise or without price rise due to the cost and living crisis. Now, the price rise itself, and this is then the question, how do you define that? Last year, and I think this is what Mike said earlier on, If you would say, well, everything you take into account two months after customers have seen the first bill, then you can say that also on the fixed side, we landed something like 50% of the price rise. And on the mobile side, because it's only on airtime, not on hardware, the overall number of the price rise is much lower, and it is embedded in the T's and C's, so you see barely very little, barely zero or very little reaction to it. Now, what does this mean for this year? Right, and we are not guiding on fixed ARPU, but we have been, we are doing a lot of things different. Number one, we are sending out the letters to customers over a period of two months and in a staggered approach. This is number one. That has two benefits. One, we always can ensure we have enough agents dealing with it, which weren't the case 100% last year. And second, we have really real-time data so we can see how many customers are calling and what is the best possible retention for them in terms of customer and RPU. And then we see within 24 hours delay what is actually happening. And when you take this all into account, there's a lot of room for optimization. We can leverage convergence. So for fixed customers, we can sell mobile. We can sell in interesting content. We can sell in hardware. And I'm not disclosing anything, but so far, as I said early on, we are on plan with a fixed price rise. And on the mobile side, we have landed it also now. So it is communicated and out. And the reaction so far we have been seeing are not higher than a year ago. Hope that helps.

speaker
Liberty Global

Thank you. Looking on Vodafone, yeah, Vodafone, I would just repeat what we've said publicly. Yes, the stock seems undervalued to us. There's a lot of undervalued stocks out there, by the way, ours included. And that's why we spent $1.7 billion last year buying it. But certainly this one also looks undervalued with some near-term catalysts that you know, should play out here, we think, in a positive way. And it was a relatively small investment, if you look at the, if you see through how we financed the position. Now, we have a lot of touch points with Vota Fund, as I just mentioned, and I look forward to a very constructive dialogue with the current and future CEO, whoever that will be, around all of those particular issues, and if necessary, with the board. So, As I mentioned, we're not an activist here, but we certainly hope to be engaged and understanding of what their strategy is and to perhaps even influence that if it makes sense. But we're not doing this to create tension or stress. We're not trying to rattle the cages here. We thought it was an opportunistic transaction that was financed. We thought very effectively with relatively small amounts of capital we could put to risk. you know, in a stock that was at or near a 25-year low. So that's really the way to think about it. Are we going to do 10 more of these? No, no. But we will always be opportunistic in situations that we think are strategically and financially aligned.

speaker
spk01

Rick, we have time for one more or are we calling it?

speaker
Tsang

Go ahead. Sorry, it was just, when you say catalysts, I mean, can you elaborate on what they may be?

speaker
Liberty Global

Oh, I can't give you anything that hasn't been talked about 100 times publicly. UK mobile consolidation, rationalization, Spain and Italy, pending Vantage deal, towers in the UK, a German strategy, evolution, et cetera. I mean, there's Africa. You just have to read the press.

speaker
spk11

There's a handful for you right there.

speaker
Liberty Global

Okay. Thanks a lot. You got it. Yeah, Rick, I don't know if we have time for one more. We're six minutes past. Should I close it off?

speaker
Rick

Let's take one more, Mike, and then shut it down.

speaker
Liberty Global

Okay. All right. Thanks for hanging in, guys. We'll take one more.

speaker
Operator

We'll take the last question from Carl Murdoch-Smith with Barenburg. You may now proceed.

speaker
Carl Murdoch - Smith

Hi. Thanks very much for the question and taking the time for one last one. So I'll just ask one. I think slide nine is a very powerful one on the long-term buyback commitment over time. Obviously, you've committed to a floor of 10% of buyback this year. That commitment was first actually made two and a half years ago at the Q2 2021 results. I think that long-term commitment, as also shown on slide nine, is very, very important. Did you at all think about giving a longer-term buyback commitment? rather than just committing to the 2023 buyback? And how should we be thinking about your ongoing commitments in future years? Thanks.

speaker
Liberty Global

Yeah, that's a good question, Carl. I appreciate you asking that. We're not today providing any additional long-term guidance, but you don't have to do much reading between the lines to conclude based on everything I said in my remarks that we're committed to shareholder remuneration. So, you know, you should expect over time we'll continue to provide updates on that long-term strategy and, you know, I think past is prologue. Hope that helps. Okay, that's great.

speaker
Carl

Thanks very much. You got it. Listen, thanks. You got it. Thanks, everybody, for hanging in.

speaker
Liberty Global

Appreciate you enduring the long remarks. If you're still on, we had a lot of info and a lot of talk about, and, you know, a very strong 22, and I think all the building blocks in place for a strong 23, and most importantly for value creation. So appreciate your support, and we're always around for questions if you have any as follow-up. Thanks, everyone.

speaker
Operator

Ladies and gentlemen. This concludes Liberty Global's fourth quarter 2022 investor call. As a reminder, a replay of the call will be available in the investor relations session of Liberty Global's website. There you can also find a copy of today's presentation material. Have a good day.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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