Vodafone Group Plc

Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us for our Q3 trading update. Before taking questions, a brief summary as usual. Let me first start with our results. Overall, we have performed well across the group and we continue to trade in line with our full year guidance which we have reiterated today. Service revenue accelerated to 5.2% this quarter and EBITDA grew by 2.2%. This was driven by good growth across most of our markets with an acceleration in trends in both the UK and Africa. Turkey also delivered another strong set of results with growth in Euro terms over 50%. Operationally, I would like to call out performance in the UK, where we have achieved several records this quarter. We reported our best ever set of net motor scores and are beating the market across every single consumer segment. The level of deep detractors is at a record low, and we reported our highest ever broadband net additions in Q3. This demonstrates the importance of investing in a market leading customer experience with consistent operational execution. In Germany, our performance was similar to Q2 as we continue to be impacted by the MDU TV law change. While this transition continues to have a significant financial impact, the migration of this customer base is now effectively complete, fully in line with our expectations. We have also seen further improvements in our commercial performance with our gigabit broadband base now stabilized. A result underpinned by structural changes to our customer experience with a strong network and continued investment in customer satisfaction and brand. Our transformation of Vodafone Germany will now leverage the full reset of the leadership team with new directors for business, consumer, IT, and HR having joined in the last few months. However, as we highlighted in our results today, the combination of more challenging mobile market conditions and some one-off items will impact the pace of our financial recovery in the second half of the year and the entry point into FY26. Beyond this set of results, I'm pleased to say that we are now nearing the completion of our portfolio reshaping that I announced just over 18 months ago. In late December, we successfully completed the sale of Vodafone Italy, having received 8 billion in cash. Proceeds from the deal have been used to reduce net debt and will also support the next 2 billion share buyback program, which we intend to commence after the current program has completed in the middle of this year. And in the UK, we have received approval from the CMA on our merger with TRI. We now expect the deal to complete in the next few months, after which we expect to make a fast start in integrating the two businesses, capturing significant cost synergies and delivering on our multi-year investment plan to build UK's best network. With these two transactions closing, we complete our portfolio transformation, with Vodafone now having good positions and scale in all of our markets. Looking ahead, we will continue to prioritize the turnaround of Germany, as well as accelerating our growth opportunities across the rest of our portfolio. All the markets where we have been performing consistently well and following the UK merger will now represent around 70% of group revenue. 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. Our first question this morning comes from Robert Grindle at Deutsche Numis. Robert, please go ahead.

Good morning. I'd like to ask about Germany, which is the issue du jour amongst decent performances elsewhere. I see improving KPIs, but note the commentary around tougher mobile, delays to B2B, turnaround investment and one-offs. And eins and eins also appears to be a bit sluggish. Please, could you add some color on Germany into Q4? What has changed in H2 and how is that evolving into next year, please? Thank you.