FY25_Results_Q&A_Transcript

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Vodafone Group Plc. FY25 Q&A Transcript JP Morgan

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Polo Tang UBS

It is on Germany but specifically fibre and MDUs. Can you maybe talk through what impact your fibre upgrades are having in terms of your German broadband net adds and NPS? Can you give an update in terms of how the OXG joint venture is doing in terms of upgrading the footprint of seven million MDU homes? Do you think you need to upgrade the remaining 19 million homes in your cable footprint to fibre? Just related to this point, about MDUs, Deutsche Telekom last week on its call highlighted it now has access to 5.7 million MDU homes. Are you seeing any signs of increased competition in the MDU space? And longer term, do you think that there will be one or two fibre infrastructures in each MDU longer term? Sure. I will start from, if you want, the impact of fibre in our numbers, in our customer satisfaction. There is no impact of fibre on that. You know that we have just opened our sales footprint to wholesale agreements that do include fibre, for example, from Deutsche Telekom and Deutsche Glasfaser because we want to give our customers in the DSL area access to fibre, which is why today we effectively offer gigabit products to three out of four of German households. This is our strategy, I would say, pretty much everywhere. You see we have the same approach in the UK. Now these connections are immaterial at the moment. We are talking about single-digit gross adds in a quarter. The results that you see in our numbers and the results in terms of customer satisfaction are actually a product of quite significant churn reduction in our cable estate because, obviously, this is the very vast majority of our customers. In a market, which now we should all recognise in Germany, does not have much growth in terms of penetration anymore. It is plateauing. The stabilisation of our customer base in the last couple of quarters has come from churn reduction. We are very pleased to see now our cable churn, where we also by the way the highest ever NPS Vodafone as recorded for cable. Our cable churn is now very much in line with what you would expect. It is actually below, for example, the fixed broadband churn that we have in the UK, which is growing strongly. This churn reduction is a function of the fact that we have really changed the customer experience. You have seen us and you have heard us talking about network investment over the last couple of years, improved customer base management and processes. Also we have done a lot of work on legacy routers, which are now less than 15% across the whole customer base of Vodafone. As an outcome of all this, we have had best in test results, as you have seen on the network across all networks in fixed broadband in Germany, just recently a third less network complaints, from our customers and this best ever NPS. This is the sort of structural customer experience transformation that I see as a leading indicator of performance and that we will continue to drive in that space adding what I said before, which is on top of a better service to our customers, also a wider footprint in which we can sell gigabit product is going to allow us to be a one-stop shop for the customers across fixed mobile and TV. This is a very clear objective for us. Now you asked where are we on fibre and then what is going on in the MDUs. Maybe just covering these aspects. In terms of our own fibre build, you have seen in these results that OXG has been running late compared to the original plan. The majority of the build was to be done with Geodesia, which obviously had some issues in the last 12 months. But we have taken action. We now have 29 different building companies working across 22 cities in Germany.

Margherita Della Valle Vodafone

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