Vodafone Group Plc

Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us today. Before going to Q&A, I'd like to outline the key highlights of our Alpha-1 results as well as the progress we've made on our strategic priorities. Overall, our results are in line with our expectations and consistent with our full year guidance which we have reiterated today. Group EBITDA grew by 3.8% in the first half, despite the impact of the MDU transition, and our decision to invest more commercially in Germany. This was supported by strong EBITDA growth across the rest of our footprint, with the UK growing at over 8%, other Europe at over 3%, and with Turkey growing by circa 50% in Euro terms. As expected, service revenue trends slowed in Q2, reflecting the big impact from the MDU transition in Germany. Moving on to our strategic priorities of customer simplicity and growth, I'm pleased by the progress we are making to deliver the transformation of Vodafone. Our main area of operational focus this year is, of course, Germany. We have now completed the formation of our new management team with new directors for business, consumer and IT. With an experienced team in place and having successfully navigated the MDU transition, we now need to make even faster progress with our number one priority, our customers. Our commercial KPIs are gradually improving and the investments we have made in our networks have delivered what is consistently recognized as the best fixed network in Germany. Together with our new wholesale agreements, we are now delivering gigabit capable broadband to 75% of German households. This will underpin our ability to start delivering on our target of taking at least our fair share of market growth. Looking at our other main areas of focus, in business, we have seen a good reacceleration in trends in Q2, with the drag from project phasing unwinding. Growth in digital services was particularly strong at 18%, and this is where we continue to expand our capabilities and product set. We are also continuing to take significant steps to simplify our business. We have now actioned and communicated over 80% of our role reduction program, and have also commercialized our shared operations, having finalized our partnership with Accenture. On our portfolio actions, we are close to completing the reorganization of the group as we work towards securing approvals in Italy and the UK in the next few weeks. And finally, in our newly created Vodafone Investments Division, there has been a significant amount of activity, with us most notably selling down a further stake in Vantage Towers for 1.3 billion in order to deliver the co-control structure we originally planned. In summary, our performance is in line with expectations as we move through this year of transition. The actions we have been taking will deliver growth for Vodafone this year and support a further acceleration into FY26. With that, Luca and I are looking forward to your questions.

Thank you, Margherita. As a reminder to analysts, please only pose one question to give everybody a chance to speak. With that, our first question comes from Morris Patrick at Barclays. Morris, please go ahead.

Good morning, guys. Hopefully you can hear and see me well. Maybe just start off with a question on Germany, please. Hardly a surprise, given the size. Clearly a lot of moving parts in the German business. Your results, as you show in the presentation, are clearly impacted by the MDU-TU migration process. To a lesser degree, the lapping of the price increases from a year ago. Your historic comments suggest a U-shaped recovery, I think, in Germany. And you talked about the market being healthy overall. I know you've got the one-on-one wholesale coming in, I think, from the third quarter, sort of 100 million euros a year run rate once it's fully there. But you still have broadband net ads negative. So curious to understand the trajectory and phasing specifically of broadband net ads, service revenues and EBITDA over the next couple of quarters in this next year. That'd be helpful. Thank you.