Vodafone Group Plc

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Alongside me, I'm pleased to be joined by Pilar, our new Group CFO. Welcome, Pilar. Thank you, Margherita. It's great to be with everyone today. Before going to Q&A, let me provide you, as usual, with a brief summary of our Q3 results. Overall, we continued to perform well and have maintained our good top-line momentum, having grown Group Service Revenue by 5.4% this quarter. This was supported by growth across both Europe and Africa, with continued growth in Germany and strong contributions from both Africa and Turkey. Moving to profitability, Group EBITDA grew by 2.3% in Q3 and 5.3% YTD, which is fully in line with our expectations and our trajectory to deliver the upper end of our FY26 guidance. Beyond these results, we continue to make good progress against our strategic priorities. In Germany, we continue to improve our customer experience. In mobile, our network test results have continued to improve despite having completed the migration of 12 million 1&1 customers, one of the largest in European telcos. We now have more mobile customers using our network than any other operator in the country. And in fixed, our NPS continues to grow quarter after quarter. And we have just increased upload speeds nationwide across our cable network. This has been supportive of our value strategy, whilst our price actions have impacted gross additions in the quarter, the improvement of our inflow revenue, with new customer ARPUs now 21% higher year on year, has stabilized consumer broadband revenues. However, we still have more to do in what remains a competitive market environment. Moving to the UK, Following an exceptionally fast start, our integration and network investment plan is now well underway. Our initial network upgrades have been delivered ahead of schedule and are already enabling customers to benefit from greater mobile coverage and faster data speeds. The progress that we have made in only seven months is already visible in independent network tests and has been noted by the UK regulator. However, this is just the start of our 10 year plan to invest 11 billion pounds to build UK's leading 5G network. And stepping back, I remain very excited about the potential of this merger. Vodafone has more mobile assets than any other operator, is the fastest growing fixed broadband provider, and we have clear line of sight on 700 million of annual cost and capex synergies, plus opportunities to realize revenue synergies on top. Turning to Africa, in December we announced that we would be acquiring a controlling stake in Safaricom, one of the strongest telcos on the continent. This transaction will strengthen our position in Africa even further as it simplifies Vodacom and reinforces its leadership position. We have structural growth opportunities with rapidly expanding population, increasing data usage and accelerating demand for digital services. And we are in a unique position with our scaled networks, digital platforms and admired brand. Vodacom is already delivering a strong performance today, and it provides some of the most exciting opportunities across the group. Finally, turning to business, we have now completed the acquisition of Scalink, which will support our growth in digital services across key areas such as cloud and security. In summary, as we enter the final quarter of the year, our performance has been good. Across the group, we are seeing net promoter scores increasing, complexity reducing, and we are accelerating our opportunities in digital and financial services. These are solid foundations for our multi-year growth trajectory. To summarize, we are trading in line with our expectations and we are on track to deliver the upper end of our FY26 guidance. And with that, Pilar and I look forward to answering your questions.

Thank you, Margherita. As a reminder, please only pose one question to give all analysts a chance to speak this morning. Our first question today comes from Morris Patrick at Barclays. Morris, please go ahead.

Good morning, guys. hear me well thanks to the um intro comments maybe just diving straight to germany that's okay um i mean if i look at slide four in the in the presentation you show your stabilization service revenues that's obviously helped by one on one you've got weaker net ads on the broadband side but a stronger front book arpu and you've talked about that valuable volume But investors ask a lot about the trajectory of EBITDA in Germany, specifically around this year and next. I think you were down 4% in the first half. Could you give us a sense of where you see the EBITDA landing for the second half of this year and then thoughts into the stabilization if that's the case next year? Thank you.