Liberty Global Aktie

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Liberty Global's First Quarter 2026 Investor Call. This call and the associated webcast are the property of Liberty Global and any redistribution, retransmission or rebroadcast of this call or webcast in any form without the expressed written consent of Liberty Global is strictly prohibited. [Operator Instructions] Today's formal presentation materials can be found under the Investor Relations section of Liberty Global's website at libertyglobal.com. [Operator Instructions]

Page 2 of the slides details the company's safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking statements. Today's presentation may include forward-looking statements within the meaning 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 fact. These forward-looking statements involve certain risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. These risks include those detailed in Liberty Global's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recently filed forms 10-Q and 10-K 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 on which any such statement is based.

I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Mike Fries.

All right. Thanks, operator. Hello, everyone. I appreciate you joining the call today. As usual, Charlie and I will handle the prepared remarks and the presentation, and then I have my core leadership team on the call with me and on standby for Q&A as needed. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so I'm just going to jump right in on the first slide, which provides some key takeaways from the quarter.

To begin with, we delivered strong operational performance and we'll go through it all in a moment. But one big headline here. This was our fourth straight quarter of steady broadband improvement across each of our big 3 markets with fixed to mobile ARPUs remaining largely stable. Now Charlie will walk through how this translates into our financial results, but the punch line is, we will be confirming all of our 2026 guidance today. There are lots of reasons for this commercial momentum, including our multi-brand strategies, our network investments, AI implementations around personalization and churn and call centers. And we'll talk about all that a bit today, but really what we'll do in our second quarter call is do a deeper dive on our AI initiatives. So stay tuned for that.

Equally important for this audience is the fact that we are making real progress on the value unlock initiatives announced this past February. The acquisition of Vodafone's 50% stake in our Dutch JV is on track to close this summer, and we see no obstacles to getting that deal done on time. And that, of course, is just one of the main building blocks underlying our strategy to spin off our Benelux assets in the second half of the next year. And I'll walk you through each of those building blocks in just a moment, as well as the value we could and should create for you all by spinning off the Ziggo Group.

Quickly on Netomnia, that transaction in the U.K. is now officially in the regulatory process. And while the noise from 1 or 2 competitors has escalated recently, we're pretty confident this deal will be approved. It's a very positive development for the U.K. fiber market, which is in desperate need of rationalization, as you all know, and it's a great outcome for VMO2 for all the reasons we reviewed on the last call.

And then finally, you won't be surprised to hear that we are highly focused on capital allocation at the corporate level. Over the last 2 years, we brought our net corporate costs down by 75%. We talked about that on the last call. And we've articulated what we believe is a clear investment strategy around telecom and growth, and we've strengthened our balance sheet. After funding the 1.2 billion needed to close the Vodafone transaction and are now executing on around 700 million of asset sales from our growth portfolio, we should end the year with around 1.5 billion of corporate cash. And as noted here on the slide, through April, we've generated around 300 million in proceeds. So we're sort of on our way.

And finally, just one quick remark on the broader telecom environment in Europe. As you would know, the sector has performed well in the last 12 months or so. That's driven in part by improved operational performance, reduced CapEx and general rotation out of software and into industrials. You're all familiar with those trends. I would add to the list, what appears to be an improving regulatory climate in Europe. When it comes to telecom broadly and more specifically when it comes to consolidation. We await the formal release of the EU merger guidelines, for example, but these changes are expected to redefine the rules, and that's going to be a big positive together with an increasing commitment to sovereignty to our sector in the broader telecom industry. So I'm sure you're aware of that, but important to note.

Now moving on to the next slide, let me start by saying that there will come a point in time when I don't need to put this chart in the deck. But for now, I think it's helpful. To summarize our operating structure, specifically our 3 core pillars of value creation: Liberty Telecom, Liberty Growth and then the central, Liberty Global itself. And to highlight the strategies we're executing to create and deliver that value.

Liberty Growth, on the far right, houses our portfolio of media infra-end tech investments totaling 3.4 billion today. And here, we're focused on rotating capital, investing in high-growth sectors with scale and tailwinds. We'll try to spotlight a few of those in each quarter and today, we'll lay out the thesis for the experience economy.

In the center system, Liberty Global itself, with 1.9 billion of cash and a team with decades of experience operating and investing in these businesses. And as we reported last quarter, we've restructured our operating model and reduced net corporate costs by 75% since 2024 to around 50 million this year. And these 2 asset pools alone, by the way, our cash and the market value of our growth investments, exceed the current price of our stock by around 30%.

Which means, of course, that everything in our core, Liberty Telecom business on the left, [indiscernible] 22 billion of revenue, 8 billion of EBITDA and [ 4 ] incredible converged telecom champions are receiving no value at all in our stock. In fact, negative value, if you give us credit for our substantial reduction in corporate costs. Now as we set over and over and over, our primary goal here in telecom is to drive commercial momentum and importantly, to unlock value for shareholders. And that was the impetus behind our Sunrise spin-off, which you all know about, and which we believe has worked extremely well for investors. And that's why in the last call, we described the information of the Ziggo Group, combination of our Benelux assets in Holland and Belgium, and our intention to spin off our interest tax free to shareholders in the second half of 2027.

So where are we on that specific initiative? I referenced earlier the building blocks that form the foundation of our expected value unlock for the Ziggo Group. And you can see, the most significant ones outlined on the left-hand side of the next slide. Let me just say that each of these steps, each of these blocks, if you will, are centered around strategic catalysts, free cash flow growth and deleveraging. And they each represent a foundational element of the value creation plan here. This is the primary blueprint we've been executing. Of course, with dozens of overlays and work streams, but it should give you greater confidence and awareness of our plans here.

Let's start with Belgium. The first step was, of course, separating Telenet from its fixed network, which is now a 2/3, 1/3 JV called Wyre. This restructuring accomplishes or accomplished 4 key things. First, it isolates a significant fiber CapEx and debt capital needed to upgrade the HFC network in Flanders into an off-balance sheet vehicle.

Second, it precipitated a comprehensive network cooperation agreement, which in Wyre and Telenet on one hand and Proximus and its fiber asset, Fiberklaar, on the other hand, which I'm pleased to say was just signed yesterday and will result in a single network ours or theirs and about 75% of Flanders, that's a great, great outcome.

Third, it creates a cleaner, more consumer and B2B focused Telenet, ServCo, with a significant free cash flow turnaround story, supported by declining mobile CapEx and mostly AI-driven OpEx reductions.

And then fourth, it facilitates a reduction in Telenet's leverage from both a rebalancing of debt between Wyre and Telenet and the sale of a portion of our stake in Wyre, at a premium, by the way, which will be used to repay debt at Telenet. Some really critical steps to getting where we want to be.

Moving to the Netherlands, for me, the first strategic catalyst here was bringing in a new management team, one that could set the tone for a return to growth and for winning results in the Dutch market, and Stephen and his team have delivered exactly that.

And the second strategic catalyst was, of course, reaching an agreement with Vodafone to buy their 50% stake in our Dutch JV. This deal, as I just said, is scheduled to close in less than 3 months. Now not only is that deal accretive from a financial point of view, but it strategically unlocks about EUR 1 billion in synergies we referenced, and provides the structural elements necessary to complete a tax-free spin-off next year. Each of these steps accelerates our commitment to reducing leverage at Vodafone Ziggo, which will accomplish through asset sales, a return to EBITDA and free cash flow growth and synergies.

Now on the top right of this slide, you can see a side-by-side of Sunrise and the combined Ziggo Group. If you look at 2025, the Ziggo Group is bigger. It's about 2 to 2.5x larger in revenue and EBITDA and a bit more profitable. But importantly, you'll see that in 2028, we're estimating free cash flow of around EUR 500 million and leverage of 4.5x, which presents a comparable financial profile to Sunrise when we spun it off in Q4 '24.

On the chart on the bottom right provides an illustrative bridge to the EUR 500 million of free cash flow, which is estimated to be EUR 120 million this year. And the biggest component of that, as you can see, are the nonrecurring nature of some costs this year in Holland, combined synergies, Telenet's mobile CapEx reduction and organic EBITDA growth.

We think the Ziggo Group represents a compelling equity story and it's anchored around 4 selling points. Number one, this is a strong regional business with 2 of Europe's most rational telecom markets that are best-in-class brands.

Number two, we have clear network strategies here, with declining CapEx as 5G investments subside and fiber costs are moved off balance sheet in Belgium, and a cost-efficient DOCSIS 4.0 rollout in Holland. So declining CapEx and great visibility to the network strategy.

Number three, rising free cash flow and declining leverage, and that's supported by organic growth, synergies and EUR 1.2 billion to EUR 1.4 billion of local asset sales have already described, towers, property, et cetera.

And then number four, a commitment to pay dividends from free cash flow as we've done with Sunrise. So we have lots of work to do. But this plan and this path forward is clear for us, and we look forward to updating you each quarter on our progress.

Now what does it all add up to? I'm sure many of you are wondering what sort of value creation do we think is achievable here? The chart on the next slide is actually simpler than it looks, but it moves left to right, and it demonstrates how we have and how we intend to create value through this unlocked strategy.

Let's start on the far left. The day we announced our intention to spin off Sunrise in February 2024, our stock closed at $18. Of course, 9 months later, we completed the spin-off, and using Sunrise's current stock price, we feel we delivered a tax-free dividend that's valued today at $13 per Liberty share. So together with our $12 stock, you get to $25 or about a 40% value appreciation in the last 14 months or so. So far so good.

About 2 months ago, we announced the second step in our value unlock strategy to -- with our intention to consolidate Benelux and spin off the Ziggo Group in the second half of next year. So what might that be worth? And these numbers are illustrative, lawyers maybe say that, of course. But if we -- if you move to the right on the third column, I think you'll see the answer. We believe a publicly listed Ziggo group, if it were to trade at, let's say, the same implicit valuation of Sunrise today, an essentially an 11.5% free cash flow yield could be worth up to $14 per Liberty share based upon the 2028 free cash flow estimate of EUR 500 million that we just discussed. Without debating the point, we believe this could be conservative. As you would know, many of our peers, KPN, Swisscom, Orange [indiscernible], they trade at free cash flow yields of 5% to 7%, albeit with different leverage profiles.

So let's stick with the 11.5% free cash flow yield. The primary question then is where will Liberty itself trade post spin? Remember, we believe that the entire Liberty Telecom Group has negative value on our stock today of around $4 per share. And despite our announced intentions regarding Ziggo, with our cash and growth assets worth $16 and our stock at 12, that's the only conclusion we can reach.

Now to arrive at $14 post the Ziggo Group spin, we simply added our pro forma cash balance after the Vodafone deal and asset sales, together with the value of our remaining growth assets, including our residual stake in Wyre, and we get to $14. By the way, these numbers assume that the market continues to assign no equity value, that's 0 equity value to our remaining telecom businesses in the U.K. and Ireland. Of course, we think there's substantial equity value in these businesses, but we don't need to agree on that to get to these numbers.

So to recap. If you follow the light blue boxes, from February [ 24 ], the day we announced our plans to spin off Sunrise, to today, we created $7 on what was an $18 stock. So that's 40%. And we believe for those who had held on to the Liberty stock and the Sunrise stock, that number gets to 41 with the Ziggo Group spin.

If you do the same thing with the dark blue boxes, for those who bought their shares after the Sunrise spin-off, we think we can take $12 today to as much as $28 by the second half of next year when we spin the Ziggo Group. Now while there are no sure things in life, and plenty to do between now and then, trust me, the building blocks we think are in place, and we feel good about the plans and these estimates here.

Now one of the reasons for that good feeling is the progress Stephen and his team have made over the last 5 quarters. This next slide summarizes some of those initiatives and some of the progress beginning early last year when we repositioned broadband pricing, changed the operating model or rejuvenated our campaigns, even expanded our footprint through the deal of Delta Fiber. As a result of that, we saw steady improvements right away in broadband, where we've been losing over 30,000 subscribers every quarter. Those changes continued into '26 when we rejuvenated the Ziggo brand with a new campaign, the everything network, that was supported by our [indiscernible], by the way, which we just extended. We also launched broadband into our no-frills [ flanker ] brand, bringing a simple and value-driven connectivity product to that critical segment.

You can see at the bottom right, the broadband net adds have been moving in the right direction for 4 straight quarters. In fact, our first quarter result was the best in 3 years, driven by all the initiatives I just referenced, pricing adjustments, new campaigns, product expansion, network improvements. And by the way, we have the largest reach of 2 gig broadband services in the country. And we just launched field trials with DOCSIS 4.0 in anticipation of launching 4 and 8 gig products later this year. So operationally, VodafoneZiggo is in great shape and improving, exactly what you want to see as we plan for a public listing next year.

The next few slides summarize Q1 operating performance across our 4 markets. I'm going to do this quickly since the CEOs are on the call, and they can provide color if needed. I think the main headline here is that we continue to see good broadband trends pretty much across the board and stable fixed and mobile ARPUs.

Starting with VodafoneZiggo, like I just talked about, our broadband performance improved for the fourth consecutive quarter and postpaid mobile net adds also improved sequentially. We continue to invest in our fixed to mobile markets in Holland, with both the Vodafone and Ziggo Networks receiving outstanding awards in the [ Ooma ] test, with ARPUs of nearly EUR 57 in fixed and EUR 18 in mobile staying steady, that's been a good outcome.

Turning to Belgium, Telenet delivered its highest quarterly broadband result in 10 years, driven by successful cross-sell campaigns and strong performance with our base, our flanker brand there. Postpaid mobile results remain subdued in Belgium as the market is pretty competitive. And here too, our base brand is outperforming, while both mobile ARPU at EUR 16 and fixed ARPU at EUR 63 remained largely stable, ahead of upcoming price adjustments in Q2.

Now turning to the U.K. on the next slide. Despite a market that remains highly competitive, Virgin Media O2 delivered a third straight quarter of broadband improvement, with just 6,000 losses compared to 43,000 losses a year ago. And this was supported by strong commercial and retention initiatives and of course, lower churn. Importantly, despite pressure on the overall market pricing, here, our fixed ARPU remained relatively stable at [ GBP 46.50 ], supported by more and more personalized and AI-driven pricing. And within the Netomnia deal working its way through the regulatory process, we continue our fiber-to-the-home expansion with 8.7 million fiber homes available today.

In U.K. mobile, we launched O2 satellite. You might have seen that making us the first operator in the U.K. to switch on direct device satellite connectivity. In addition, our mobile network transformation is progressing with new RAN upgrade agreements and the transfer of the second tranche of spectrum from VodafoneThree, that's usually important to us. O2 now has the largest 5G stand-alone footprint in the U.K. Net postpaid losses of [ 60,000 ] were materially better than last quarter as churn from the Q4 price adjustment, we've talked about that, subsided, and ARPU of around GBP 17 was broadly stable.

In Ireland, lastly, we continue to execute strategically, with growth in wholesale and off-net traffic more than compensating for retail pressure. On net, fixed retail ARPU of EUR 61 remained stable despite no price rise in '25. And importantly, our fiber rollout, this is critical, remains on track to be substantially complete in 2026, with nearly 20% of the retail base now taking a fiber product, and that will also drive free cash flow in 2027 and beyond.

Now just one slide on our limited growth portfolio currently valued at $3.4 billion and centered around 4 key verticals you know and love: infrastructure and energy, technology and AI, services and, of course, media and sports. Our strategy here has been consistent for some time. We are exiting positions that are no longer strategic in using that capital to both invest in new opportunities as they arise and as needed, provide capital for transactions that will unlock value in our telecom assets. That second point is really important. Historically, we've divested investment positions totaling something like 1.6 billion since 2019, and we've targeted another 700 million in sale proceeds this year, which, as I said, 300 million is already accounted for.

Now a few comments on sports and live events. Of course, we're already invested heavily here through Formula E, but we also believe there are significant structural tailwinds that warrant us evaluating additional opportunities, and we're doing that. These points are probably well known to all of you, I'm sure, but there's clearly a generational shift, from physical goods to experiences, that's live events, sports, travel and entertainment. And many of these markets are fragmented and most are protected from AI disruption. So it's an interesting space.

It's also a clear momentum in the sector, right? Just look at sports, global revenue and sports growing well in excess of GDP over the last 10 years, and by almost everybody's estimation, poised to increase and accelerate from here. What's our right to play, you might be asking, well, we know how to consolidated fragmented industries, both in telecom, but also we've been doing that for decades and recently with all 3 media before exiting at a premium. We've got strong relationships across these sectors. Really, the deal flow is the easy part.

And when you factor in our expertise in things like treasury, operations and technology, it's a pretty strong combination. And we have a good track record in sports, specifically with Formula E, the fastest-growing motor sport globally and 1 of only 8 global sports leagues, which is a great segue to my last slide. I always get excited when I talk about Formula E, sometimes too excited. But I think this moment is perhaps our biggest yet.

Like over the last 10 years, and you've been following this, we have constantly innovated, investing significant energy and time in the car, the technology and the racing. Well, the wait is over. Last week at the Power Car Circuit in France formally unleashed the next-generation race car, GEN4, we call it, and the motor sports world is still reverberating.

First of all, you have to see it in person. Yes, it is a beast, but it's a beautiful, beautiful racecar. The step-up in power performance is incredible. 600 kilowatts of power represents a 71% increase in base output over the current GEN3 Evocar. The acceleration is insane, 0 to 100 kilometers in 1.8 second. That's meaningfully faster than an F1 car, and top speeds in excess of 335 kilometers an hour, nearly 210 miles per hour. And we estimate -- it's an estimate at this point that lap times will decrease 10 seconds on average from the current generation car. That's a lifetime in racing.

It's also the first single seater race car with active all-wheel drive all the time, which will provide incredible acceleration in torque, kind of it turns. And of course, it meets all of our expectations from a sustainability point of view to make for at least 20% recyclable materials. It's 98.5% recycle itself, and allows us to continue claiming that our race-related carbon footprint for the entire championship will fit into one F1 team, by the way.

Speaking of F1, yes, we might have taken a few shots at them since the GEN4 launch. Might be deserved also, you're obviously aware of the issues they're dealing with currently and that they're going through with the hybrid engine. And it just reinforces our view that going halfway on anything does not make history, and we love the position that we're in technologically, competitively from an entertainment and motor sports point of view.

But hey, just don't take my word for it. In the next slide, you can see -- go ahead and scan social media, the motor sports press, there is widespread consensus. I know I'm quoting. This GEN4 car is a "monster." It's quoted, ushering in the most extreme era of electric cars, and it's expected to change perceptions of Formula E forever. Even Max gives it a thumbs up, as you can see on the bottom right. So I'm super excited about GEN4 car and Formula E.

And with that, Charlie, I'll turn it over to you.

Thanks, Mike. My first slide sets out the Q1 financial results for our Benelux companies. Now as you can see on this slide, we're now presenting Wyre's financial performance for the first time separate to Telenet to give investors clarity on their respective financials before we complete the full separation of the 2 companies and their capital structures later this year.

VodafoneZiggo reported a revenue decline of 1.8% in Q1, driven by a lower customer base and ongoing repricing impact. Now this was partially offset by the price indexation and higher revenue from Ziggo Sports, and adjusted EBITDA declined 6.4%, driven by higher marketing costs and some incremental investments in network resilience and service reliability in line with our guidance in March.

At Telenet, revenue was broadly stable in Q1, reflecting our strategic decision not to renew Belgium football rights, which was partly offset by a strong broadband performance, which was driven by effective cross-selling into the video customer base. Adjusted EBITDA grew 8.9%, driven by lower content costs following the exit from the football broadcasting rights.

And at Wyre, revenue declined by 1%, impacted by the implementation of a new pricing model, which was partially offset by strength in wholesale growth. Adjusted EBITDA declined by 4.6%, and this was driven by an investment in build capability as we start to accelerate Wyre's fiber build-out capability.

Turning to the U.K. and Ireland, Virgin Media O2 delivered a total service revenue decline of 3% on a guidance basis. Now this was impacted by competitive pressure in the consumer fixed market and lower B2B revenue as the newly rebranded O2 business rationalizes its product portfolio to support its long-term growth in the mobile segment. This was partially offset by wholesale revenue growth, which was supported by growth in MVNO revenue, and adjusted EBITDA declined by 3.4% as a result of the lower total service revenues and a noncash provision for legal matters recorded in the quarter. This was partially offset by cost reduction initiatives.

At Virgin Media Ireland, revenues declined by 1.4% in Q1, impacted by intense competition in the consumer fixed and mobile markets as well as a decline in advertising revenues at VM TV. This was partially offset by a strong wholesale performance. Meanwhile, adjusted EBITDA declined by 7.1%, driven by these top line pressures, and was also impacted by a one-off benefit in Q1 last year.

Turning to the next slide. We remain committed to our disciplined capital allocation model as we retake capital into higher growth investments and strategic transactions. Starting on the top left, Telenet reported EUR 10 million of free cash flow during the quarter and is expected to deliver at least EUR 20 million of free cash flow for the full year. Additionally, Liberty Corporate delivered adjusted EBITDA of negative $2 million, putting us firmly on track to achieve our full year 2026 guidance of negative $50 million.

Turning to the bottom left. CapEx has meaningfully stepped down at Telenet in Q1 on a guidance basis, driven by the 5G upgrade nearing completion at the end of 2025 and lower spend on digital platforms. Capital intensity remains elevated at the other OpCos, reflecting investments in our fixed networks and also 5G upgrades.

Moving to the Liberty Growth walk in the top right. The fair market value of our growth portfolio remained broadly stable versus 2025 year-end at $3.4 billion. This was driven by modest investments in AtlasEdge, Egg Power, Nexfibre and EdgeConneX, offset by the partial disposals of our ITB and some of our EdgeConneX stake as well as a positive fair market value adjustment at EdgeConneX, along with the recent decision to move Liberty Blume out of our Corporate & Services segment and into the growth portfolio.

Turning to our cash walk on the bottom right. We ended the quarter with a consolidated cash balance of 1.9 billion. Q1 distributable free cash flow was impacted by high CapEx levels related to the fiber-to-the-home rollouts at Wyre and Virgin Media Ireland. In addition to working capital movements at Telenet, now it's worth noting, we continue to anticipate that Wyre will draw on its stand-alone facility following BCA approval, and will fully repay the short-term funding provided by Liberty Global consolidated cash by Telenet. As a reminder, we are aiming to end 2026 with around $1.5 billion of corporate cash despite the expected outflows associated with the incremental Vodafone stake and also, to a lesser extent, the Netomnia acquisition.

And finally, turning to our full year guidance targets for 2026. We are reconfirming all guidance metrics of VMO2, VodafoneZiggo and Telenet as well as our guidance for corporate costs.

Now that concludes our prepared remarks for Q1, and I'd like to hand over to the operator for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Carl Murdock-Smith with Citigroup.

That's great. Three questions, please. Firstly, I wanted to ask on Virgin Media O2 about the wholesale service revenue growth. In the release, you said that, that included GBP 15 million of fixed reenablement and installation income. Am I right in saying that, that increase was due to a change in accounting treatment, meaning that it's now recognized as revenue whereas previously it wasn't? I recognize that it's low margin, but that has provided almost a 1% boost to service revenue overall in Q1. So my question is, did you know about that change in treatment when you issued the guidance in February? Or does it provide potential upside to the revenue guide of 3% to 5% decline, particularly as you've come in at the very high end of that range in Q1.

And then secondly, I just wondered if you could expand slightly on the O2 satellite news and your kind of level of excitement around that, How much customer interest are you anticipating? And more broadly, just what is your view on the role of satellite in telecom as a complement or competitor going forward?

Like question I go over to Lutz first, but let me just say that as we look at the satellite space, generally, we think, of course, satellite broadband, Starlink Broadband, has a role to play on the planet. There will be plenty of people who will utilize that broadband service and need that broadband service. We believe the direct advice mobile opportunity is far more limited by technology, by market access, but we do like the idea of having a satellite service attached to our mobile network. We think it adds just another level of service and commitment to customers. And of course, the U.K. is the first market to where we have done that.

So Lutz, I'll turn over to you for satellite and then someone, Charlie, I guess, will answer the wholesale question. Lutz?

Yes, Carl. So we are very satisfied with the launch of [ auto ] satellite, not disclosing numbers. But the fact that we have at the moment, not the iPhone available. We will have it available in a week from now. And we have already quite a high demand is leading us to the assumption that this is really a reliable service, an interesting and attractive service for customers.

And also in combination with our improved mobile network, our 5G stand-alone coverage, we are really creating the right perception for customers, which means we have the most reliable mobile network from everybody in terms of coverage and data speed. And so therefore, we are very happy with that.

Charlie, you want to adjust the wholesale revenue?

Just on the wholesale revenue. I mean I think it was basically in budget, and that is a very difficult business to forecast by its very nature because it's -- but I think it was a pretty strong quarter. But do you have anything to add on that?

I mean I can give some color, right? I mean this -- I think Carl, you're right, it was not -- we didn't account it the same way before. The reason for that was not to beef up our service revenue. As you see, right, we are coming currently more at the upper end of the guidance. The reason for that is that will be a growing and a continuous service revenue stream because we will more and more connect customers, either from other networks or from other ISPs.

So therefore, when you look at that way, I think that makes a change makes sense. But as you said yourself, right, we are coming in at the upper end of our guidance. And you could track that number a little bit. It is [ 0.7% ] of it, if you want to accrue for it, but it won't change anything in the guidance. And I mean we wouldn't change it. It's only one quarter, but so far, we are happy with what we have.

Our next question comes from the line of Polo Tang with UBS.

I have 2. The first one is just on U.K. competitive dynamics for Lutz. So can you maybe talk through how the recent price rises in April have landed because the percentage increase is quite large, and I think it's double digit for most subscribers. So I'm just wondering if there's been any change in terms of churn? Separately, your postpaid mobile losses are continuing. So how optimistic are you that this can stabilize for the year?

Second question is just a broader question on use of cash going forward. So you've talked a lot in this -- in the prepared remarks about ventures and the focus on sports and media. I think press reports suggested you were considering buying a European NBA franchise. So are you pivoting the group more towards media and sports? Or is the plan still to break up the group and return cash to shareholders? So any color on that would be great.

Sure. I'll start with that, Polo. They're not mutually exclusive, that's point one. Point two is our primary commitment, and I think it should be clear, but I'll repeat it here, is to create value for shareholders, and we believe, as I've said a few different times, the biggest opportunity to do that is to highlight and find ways to illuminate value in our telecom business. So that is our priority. That is number one.

And as I mentioned a moment ago, in my remarks, when we look at the use of capital, that factors in squarely to that to the strategy. So as I said, we will use capital and rotate capital into growth opportunities should they be presented to us, but also into the telecom business, if it helps to unlock value for shareholders, and then I think it went on to say that second one is an important point. So that's the first part of the answer.

I'd say secondly, we are opportunistically looking at and being presented with sort of opportunities. Sorry, somebody has got this -- somebody's ringing. Anyway, with opportunities in the sports space and in the media space generally. And there's a reason why the portfolio was 3.4 billion large because we have been very active as an investor. And maybe it's been quiet and we don't spend as much time on our earnings calls doing it, but it's -- it's arguably the biggest component of our stock price today are the investments that we've assembled strategically and purposely over the last, let's say, 5 to 7 years. And we're divesting ourselves of a huge chunk of those investments. And rightly so because we need cash to do the things we've been talking about today. And then we will opportunistically look at new investments if they make sense. But don't get me wrong. We are committed to the unlock strategy, and that is priority #1.

Lutz, do you want to talk about the competitive nature of the U.K.?

Yes. Polo, so in mobile, you see in our numbers that we have been tracking in service revenue around 3%, but this is before the price rise, right? The reason for the net losses in Q1 was the higher price rise we decided for. Now we are seeing this landing very well. We have the first month of the second quarter behind us, Polo. And our explanation for that is that those who didn't want to pay it left. And therefore, that has materialized. Now we don't see any spike in churn. And obviously, we also have to wait for the May, but findings here are so far so good.

On the fixed side, the competitive situation is also unchanged, I would say. So all steps are very aggressive as we are now and also, other competitors have to follow. But here, remember, I said at the last call, we have to optimize our prevention machine as we used to do it with the retention machine, which we have done now. So therefore, we are quite proud about the fact that we have almost stabilized -- managed to stabilize our financial -- our fixed customer base in Q1. And we expect something like that in the future. And yes, it comes at the cost of some ARPU, which is 1.6%. But in the scheme of things, that is a balanced approach.

And let me finish with -- remind you, when we've given the guidance, right, 70%, 80% of the service revenue decline is attributed to our expectation on the fixed consumer service revenue market. And that means that we are planning for a recovery in mobile service revenue, Polo, and we are going to see this as we speak from the price [ rise ] in Q2.

Our next question comes from the line of Robert Grindle with Deutsche Bank.

Yes. I see the progress on the long-form agreement with Proximus. But approval for the collaboration is still outstanding. What happens if you're delayed for another 6 to 9 months? Do you progress the build as planned? Or is the project pushed back? And I think Charlie said the Wyre revenues were impacted by a new pricing model. Could the Wyre Telenet [ Servco ] financial change from here? Should there be a change in the wholesale rates associated with any approval or this financial basis you've given us now be effectively unchanged?

Robert, we got [ John Porter ] on the line, who's worked tirelessly on this Proximus transaction to an outstanding result -- outstanding result for Telenet and for us. Do you want to speak to the regulatory process from here, John?

Sure. Well, we've been in lockstep with the Competition Authority and the BIPT over the last 2 years. They are right up to date on every aspect of the transaction between ourselves and Proximus. We have very positive inclination from them and believe that they will expedite the final review of the transaction. There is then a necessary 30-day review at the European Commission. That is not an approval process. It's just a chance for them to reflect on the transaction and see if it has broader implications.

So our -- we are cautiously optimistic that we will complete this transaction over the next, say, 6 to 8 weeks. And it's a virtual impossibility that it would go longer than that because I think we all down tools. But I think that we are -- the main critical path has been achieved between ourselves and Proximus, and everybody is ready to get going.

And let me just step in on the -- I'll just say, we're separating the 2 companies. There is a little bit of tweaking. For example, there is a bit of movement on the wholesale rate to Telenet, and there's also some management fees that are being reevaluated. So I think we'll get a more stable view on the numbers in Q2, but I would say it's pretty good news for the ServCo.

I'd also say on the financing side, just a real shout out to my treasury team, the 4.35 billion of underwritten financing that's clearly in place and we could draw, has now been fully syndicated, which is a great success, very successfully syndicated. With the completion of the BCA approval, we'll be drawing that down and indeed paying some of the money that we decided was more efficient to bridge from our balance sheet rather than draw revolvers to do so. So I think it's all around good news for the eventual Ziggo Group spin because I think the Telenet part of the equation is very much on track for the free cash flow target we set them in 2028.

Our next question comes from the line of Joshua Mills with BNP Paribas.

Two from my side. One is just going back to Slide 6, where you lay out the strategic plan for the new Ziggo Group. My question is around the leverage. So there's a lot of moving parts here. Can you just remind us what the pro forma leverage position of this business would be today if you put it together? How much you're expecting to bring in from the Wyre stake sale and then the other asset sales to make up the EUR 1.2 billion to EUR 1.4 billion. I just want to understand the assumptions underpinning that. And what are you at today and then how you get down to the 4.5x? That would be the first question.

And then the second question is just around the Dutch business. We've seen continued improvement in the broadband performance. Can you give a bit more color as to what's driving that on the customer side on perception? Is it people happier with price? Is it that they have noticed to change the network quality? Any detail you have would be great. And as a final add-on, your competitors have highlighted potential benefits from the data breach at [ Dido ]. I think in the Q1 and probably rolling into Q2, Q3 net add trends there. How much of an impact have you seen from that on your own business in Q1 and Q2?

Thanks, Joshua. Okay, Stephen will prepare answers to the Dutch questions.

On the asset sales, the EUR 1.2 billion to EUR 1.4 billion, those consist primarily of towers and technical facilities, et cetera, and it does -- and we're not really providing a breakdown of those numbers today because we're an active sale process. So we're not going to provide expectations or estimates of where we think guided. But we think that's the range of total combined asset sales, which would be used to pay down debt.

Charlie, do you want to address the pro forma leverage? It really depends on what point in time you look for that number and what's happening to the Wyre state. Do you want address that, Charlie?

Yes. I mean it's actually a very complicated question because clearly, the Belgian assets that are going to go into the Ziggo Group do not include -- because there will be a full separation of the Wyre assets, with the 4.35 billion of underwritten and now syndicated debt, we will therefore be paying down debt at Telenet or Telenet circa but Telenet will be what we'll call it going forward. And it remains that because of the investment profile, but Ziggo is relatively higher basis.

So there's a lot of moving parts in answering that question. I would just reconfirm what Mike said is we're very confident in a path to get down to the around 4.5x by 2028. It does depend on some asset sales, but we feel pretty good about those being delivered. And with those asset sales, and that indeed continuing organic EBITDA growth, particularly in Holland, I think we should be there or thereabouts on target.

Very happy to take it off-line to get some of the details because there's a lot of moving parts about why...

Yes. But it's in the low to mid 5s -- combined year. The combined group is going to be in the low to mid-5s. Telenet itself will be in the mid-4s, VodafoneZiggo will be higher, and then we'll start layering in the various deleveraging steps, additional steps as well. So there's a clear path, but perhaps next call, Josh, we'll give you a little bit more detail. But that is the general trend.

That's great. And this isn't assuming any injection of cash from the -- sorry, there's no assumption...

No cash from corporate, but I think it is important to note that we are putting our money where our mouth is. There's no distributions to Liberty Global in terms of equity distributions. We're reinvesting the free cash flow of Holland back in the business this year and indeed in Belgium. It is a commitment to our bondholders and also to the fact that we are very confident in this growth profile.

Do you want to answer the question?

Yes. And in terms of the operational performance of the broadband business -- yes, can you hear me? Yes. So in terms of the operational performance of the broadband business over the last 12 months, if you follow the story, we've done a number of very clear interventions. The first is we've got our pricing right for the broadband products that we're selling. We were mispriced in the marketplace. We fixed that a year ago. When we talk about the back book repricing, we're pleased with the progress we've made on that. You haven't seen that in the ARPU, so we've managed that, I think, pretty well.

Second thing we've done is we've gotten top of churn. We've been much more proactive in how we manage our customer base, which I think has had an effect on bringing churn down. We're now down 3 points year-on-year. We've invested more in marketing by repositioning the business. The business was underspending on marketing and was out of sync with how, in my view, connectivity should be sold. We've invested, as you saw in upgrading the speeds of the network. So you've seen us launch -- were the only 2 -- we're the only national 2 gigabit service. So we've taken speed as a headwind off the table for us.

And then more generally, I think we've done a pretty good job of just tightening how we take the business to market. And you've seen that flow through sequentially each quarter as each of these initiatives have landed. And we have a series of initiatives coming through the rest of 2026, which we anticipate to continue to help us with the momentum behind the story.

The [indiscernible] question, Stephen?

Great. I'm sorry, I missed the [indiscernible] question. Can you repeat that?

The question was are you seeing benefit from their cyber attack.

Yes. It happened late in the quarter, it happened around week 10. So we saw some impact from that, but it's -- we didn't see a lot of it in the quarter because of the size of their mobile base, we felt a bit more of it in the mobile base. But nothing that I think is material in the Q1 results because it only represented a handful of weeks.

Great. And then the -- I mean, I was more talking about the Q2 results. Obviously, it happened later in the first quarter, but are you seeing any impact so far in Q2?

No. We're happy with our progress on Q2 so far, but it's quite early. But I've to come back to you when we do the Q2 results in a couple of months.

Our next question comes from the line of James Ratzer with New Street Research.

Yes. I had 2 really both around Belgium. So in Telenet, you obviously had a very good quarter in terms of broadband net adds. And I'd love if you can just give a bit more color behind what's driving that. Is that now growth out of footprint in [ Wallonia ]? Is that coming on your kind of base brand within Flanders? Or is it something else? Be interested to kind of get just a bit more color on the drivers there of broadband subs growth.

And then secondly, just going back to the point that was raised earlier about Wyre revenue growth, which was down year-on-year in Q1. Is that a kind of one-off for this quarter? Charlie, you were mentioning around pricing, and it goes back to growth in the following quarters. So I'd just love to understand a bit more about the kind of dynamics there between kind of P and Q because I've been thinking that with kind of pricing there, we should see Wyre as a top line growth company.

[ John ], do you want to take the Belgium question?

Yes, I can take it. So on the first -- on the broadband, the BAU has been strong, particularly in the base brand, and their growth is about 50-50 between the Telenet footprint and growth in the South. So we are steadily growing and that growth in the south is increasing incrementally.

There is a -- what will be a year-long enhancement of that growth as we migrate out of [ DVBC ] and into full IP for our video distribution. So we are the last operator in the market to have DVBC, where you don't require Internet to get television, but we are shutting that down over the next year. So we're expecting to see continued strong growth. But as you can see in the last -- the quarter ending '25 and the quarter -- the first quarter of the year, very strong, and those are the main drivers.

On the Wyre revenue. There -- we implemented a wholesale deal, a new wholesale deal on the HFC, which is making essentially structuring the higher-speed tiers to be more accessible. The wholesale price is going down a little bit. And that's what you're seeing flowing through. That is -- will be part of the overarching deal done with Proximus, and we'll be able to give you more detail on that down the road. But the drop will not continue to drop, but it is the new HFC wholesale pricing.

So from those new prices, do prices then rise with inflation from the slightly lower level looking into 2027, '28?

There is an inflationary component to both the fiber wholesale and the HFC wholesale.

Our next question comes from the line of Matthew Harrigan with StoneX.

This is very much a conjectural question rather than kind of blocking tackling valuation anomalies. But you made a quick reference to more benign regulatory environment in your markets. But what's even more interesting on a macro basis is the emphasis on your industrial base and defense. And clearly, your telecom is a vital pivot in defense. Is there any possibilities for your telecom business or I guess, particularly your venture portfolio and that -- and I'm sure Charlie and [indiscernible] to be manufacturing drones, but it still feels like something that could be interesting tailwind, particularly since you're involved in so many areas and verticals.

Matthew, listen, the whole sovereignty debate -- it's no longer a debate, it's a verifiable conviction -- is net positive for us in the telecom space. Now we will all benefit equally, but every telecom player will benefit from the European Union and countries within the European Union's focus with their own cybersecurity, their own data protection, their own data centers, their own AI infrastructure.

So inevitably, whether it's AtlasEdge or investment in EdgeConneX on the infrastructure side in our [indiscernible] grow portfolio, whether it's our OpCos themselves and their ability to provide services and B2B services and connectivity to governments and others. I think it's a net positive for telcos in Europe, which is why I mentioned it along with the motioning regulatory framework, which I think will also be a net positive. We may or may not be part of any of that consolidation, but we know that consolidation itself brings benefits to customers as well as operators and investors. So I think it's a real positive step.

In terms of defense itself, we're not unlike perhaps some of our peers who are more closely aligned with the government. We are not involved in any specific defense type investment opportunities or infrastructure. But if we were approached, we would certainly consider it if it was consistent with our overall strategy. I don't see us veering off, if you will, into that. Does that answer your question, Matt?

[indiscernible] absolutely.

Our next question comes from the line of Ulrich Rathe with Bernstein Society General Group.

Two questions. First one is Mike, you talked about the improving regulatory climate with regards to consolidation. Other management teams in the sector have flagged mixed signals that perceived to come out of Europe. So could you talk through what specifically you have in mind there? What insights or news you have to share on but you base, there's more positive assessment.

And the second question is on the 1 billion synergies that you talked about in Ziggo, can you talk about the sort of rough makeup of that in terms of operational and other sources of synergies?

On the synergies point, I don't know if we've been specific, so I'm going to pause, but it typically -- you would be -- you wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's consisting of 3 or 4 key line items. There's a financial synergy that's more, I would say, a free cash flow type synergy from -- that we haven't -- well, from taxes, essentially, there's operating costs that we think are achievable and create more efficiencies around this procurement and CapEx type synergies. So it's not going to be -- and when we get closer to legal day 1, we'll clearly provide more detail to you. Right now, we're still in the midst of closing the deal. But there's lots of things we can be doing and we'll be doing in those 2 operations and within and among them to create those synergies. And if I had to put my team on the spot right now, they'd say that's probably a low number.

On the regulatory side, we did just get the EU merger guidelines released, and they are quite positive, at least in comparison to the kind of posture and position that your opinion would take previously when it came to in-market consolidation, right? I mean they're looking at a much more, I guess, modern and pragmatic approach, and they're seeing that benefits could certainly accrue from mergers versus just always seeing the negative in those mergers. There's always been a structural bias against scale. And now they're saying, well, actually, scale could increase investment, it could increase innovation. And it's actually spelled out in the document that was released recently.

So that to us is when it's in writing. If it's just a speech, I don't give it much credit. But when they put it in writing, as they have with these new EU merger guidelines, that is a -- that is a positive step. Now it needs to be put to the test, and there will be plenty of deals I will put it to the test soon, I imagine. But never before, have they written down in black and white, the sort of statements that we're reading today in terms of -- which are consistent with the arguments we've been making, the consolidation in market is the first step to repair in the European telecom space.

Our last question comes from the line of David Wright with Bank of America.

Okay. Yes, last question. So a couple, please. Just on the -- I guess it's for Ziggo. DOCSIS 4.0, I think you may have said, Mike, that there are some trials ongoing. If we could just get some estimates of maybe the sort of trajectory of commercial launch for DOC 4.0 in Holland? When do you expect the first sort of significant retail launch, et cetera? And is it something that you think you could even price a little as you move into the real sort of negatives of speed?

And then the second question, maybe a little more conceptual. We're observing a lot of discussion around the kind of InfraCo, Servco split, and you guys have obviously sort of embraced that. And there's obviously a clear sort of capital allocation justification and the ability to separate the 2 businesses that are quite structurally different. But I just wondered, does having a separate InfraCo make a more agile Servco in terms of just day-to-day operations? Is the business just more able to respond and sort of change shape in the sort of digital age? It's a little more conceptual. Mike, if you have anything to add on that, I'd appreciate it.

Sure, sure. Stephen, jump in here if I get it wrong, but I believe our 4 and 8 gig trials are the latter part of the year, maybe even late Q3, Q4. But what we did was get the field trials underway to demonstrate that it works. It works well. The technology we're using is really state-of-the-art even in relation to the U.S. operators. But as we get closer to going public in the latter part of this year, then we'll have more information, but it's happening. And we think it's going to be a big positive for the market and for our business for sure.

On the ServCo side, look, I mean, Belgium is the test. What does it do when you end up taking the fixed network, you still own the mobile network, but taking a fixed network and putting it into a separate entity, I think, and John will agree, I'm sure it forces you to be more efficient, more agile and your margins change. All of a sudden, there's a wholesale fee in your P&L that you have to account for.

In principle, Telenet will continue to be a very competitive brand and a very competitive B2C company and B2B company. It's -- with respect to its network, its fixed network, it will be renting instead of owning that network. But the relationship that's developed with Wyre is highly integrated, highly -- with mutual benefits, both directions. And so we're on balance, I think, and this is the only place we've done it, it really is Belgium.

I think on balance, and John can chime in. I think it does create a bit more energy in that ServCo, a bit more focused on margins and in competition, with a little less to worry about in a slightly better CapEx profile. That CapEx profile frees up free cash. Telenet will generate significant free cash here shortly as it has, and what if you got to reinvest that free cash, whether it's deleveraging or in actually new products and services. But anything more to add to that, John?

Yes, a bit. I mean the CapEx we are spending, we are now concentrating on customer experience. I mean we pivoted our strategy, obviously, away from network and product differentiation because we have to into customer experience. And the timing is right because, of course, with a lot of AI initiatives around the company and a new greenfield CRM platform, the focus is well and truly on straight through digital journeys for our customers, which delivers better experience and a better bottom line. So it's been -- I think -- certainly, your hypothesis is valid.

Listen, we appreciate everybody joining us on the call. Been a good -- Thanks, David. It's been a good start to the year. I hope you agree and really encouraged by the progress that we're making in. And trust me, we are laser-focused on value creation and value unlock, starting, of course, in the Benelux where we're not only performing well, but the strategic road map, and as I pointed out, the building blocks are all in place. So we'll keep you abreast and updated on those things. And we'll speak to you soon. Thanks, everybody. Have a good weekend.

Thank you. That will conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.

Mike, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

You were here last year. It was very inspiring. So excited to have you again. I thought it was.

It's inspiring for being reinvited.

Yes, exactly. It has to be inspiring. I mean you're also a man who needs no introduction, but I do want to make one point upfront to sort of, let's say, scope the discussion a little bit. In your role as Chairman and CEO of Liberty Global. Yes, you run one of Europe's largest telco operators. But you're also a, let's call it, majority owner, but also activist investor in infra technology firms like AtlasEdge, in media companies, in tech companies like Formula E, ElevenLabs, Univision. So you have an incredibly broad view of the market as a whole, tech, media, telco. And I'd love to get a bit more into the sort of beyond telco space with you today as well.

Great. Sounds good. I don't think this is all, but I'll speak loudly.

But let's start with telco. We were here last year. We started off by talking about pressure on margins, pressure on shareholder returns. And I think sentiment has indeed improved on the industry as a whole. But I said it this morning in sort of the opening words, I think the complexity, one has to navigate as a telco leader has also increased. But with that come massive opportunities, challenges and opportunities, AI, how do you scale it, maximizing ROI on your infrastructure investments, deepening your customer relationships. Where do you see the biggest opportunities to drive meaningful growth for the next, say, 2, 3 years for integrated telcos? And where is Liberty sort of playing in that space?

Yes. Well, we're playing where everybody is playing, let's start with that. It is still a challenging industry. Let's be clear. You're following it on every day, you're working with us on various projects. We're still too fragmented. Regulators are still too overregulated, that's clear. So there's a handful of things that I think still create headwinds in our sector.

Having said that, I think the narrative is starting to change. And you can see that in the stock prices, right? Stocks are up 20% year-to-date, 70% in the last 2 years. So the sector is starting to catch a tailwind, which it needs and deserves in my opinion. Why does it deserve that? A couple of reasons. Unlike our friends hyperscalers, CapEx is starting to decline, and we're seeing the end of that tunnel.

They're just going into the tunnel. It's a little bit of Karma, I think, actually. And we're coming out of that tunnel, and that's a positive thing for free cash flow for the basic economics of our business. So that's number one. I think regulators, you look at the CMA here and the structural changes that they've made are starting to back off a little bit, the Digital Networks Act in Europe. The are starting to show some potential for less regulation, which is super critical.

I think AI is going to be transformational. If anybody is telling you different, they're not being straight with you. In addition to this rotation from sort of software to hardware companies, these old school businesses like ours are all of a sudden in favor because we can't be disrupted by AI, we can only benefit from AI. And the benefit will be substantial. I'm sure we'll talk about that. So there are some things that I think are positive.

Our stock even up maybe 30% last couple of years, 40% if you add in Sunrise. And we're leaning into all the things you described. We're leaning into brands. So I'm sure you've heard a lot about brands here in this conference. Multiple brands, you have to have multiple brands. We're leaning into our networks. You have to keep investing in our networks. We're leaning into differentiation because I think it's impossible to compete if you can't sell yourself as unique and differentiated.

And we're leaning into, as I said, AI, which is, I think, one of those accelerants that we'll dig into, I'm sure, as time goes by and as we talk today, but it's probably underestimated. I don't know what kind of work you're doing, James, about AI, but we can talk about where I see it, but it's probably underestimated as a benefit.

And let's pick that up now, actually, AI. So it's reshaping how consumers interact with telcos, what's possible? How do you think about it? And maybe taking sort of a 1-year versus a 3- or 5-year lens. You said it's transformational. What does that mean for you?

Our industry is sort of the poster child for AI. Why is that? We have massive inefficiencies. We have massive software dependencies. I think we're only 20% on the cloud in our workflow in workloads. So we're poster child for all of the things that are percolating. And we're doing quite a bit. I mean, you would have heard from all of the telcos up here the same thing. So we're really excited about call centers.

Yes, we are. We're super excited about optimizing network design, reducing consumption of power, anticipating outages. 90% of our employees are using AI every day. That's all great stuff. But I'll tell you, it's super marginal stuff. I've said this before. It's going to add up to hundreds of millions, and we want that. We'll take that. But the capability gap that exists today, the OpenAI CFO in Davos the other day was saying, it's 10x. Meaning, we're only utilizing 1/10 of what this technology can do for us. I sat with another big tech CEO, and I said to him, you may have heard this as well, but I got $14 billion of OpEx. I'd like it to be $7 billion. I want to take $14 billion to $7 billion. That's transformation. Even you begin on [ Apples-to-Apples ].

I would like that. Yes.

It can be done. It will be done. There will be a few areas of our business that we will take massive chunks out of the cost. It will be beneficial for sales, for revenue, for retention, for churn, all those things as well. But I think the real benefits will be in how we operate our business, how -- and to me, that's the exciting bit. We're working on that every day. That's a big part of what we're doing.

Fantastic. And then I mean, given we're talking about, I suppose, kind of AI and everything that can happen here and the benefits for you, there are also potentially say benefits for some of your kind of challengers and maybe kind of new entrants that are potentially coming into the sector. We've seen some of the kind of fintech players come in now and kind of MVNO role, maybe kind of Revolut here within the U.K.

So I mean, when you think about the competitive advantages you have as a business, how do you see yourself kind of defending yourself against maybe some of these AI new entrants that could be coming into the industry?

Well, look, we know the MVNO space well. We're the largest MVNO provider in this market with Tessco, gifcap and Sky. And Revolut is an awesome digital neobank, but they're an old school MVNO. And they're feeling the pressure and the challenge with that. There's nothing digital or AI about their mobile launch. In fact, there are no AI native mobile companies I'm aware of. So I'm not saying it won't happen someday.

But Revolut launching in our market is about as far from an AI-driven launch as you're going to find. It's just old school MVNO, and they're having integration challenges. It's a highly defensive move, trying to maintain a sub base. I mean, I get while they're doing it, but it's not offensive. It's not AI native. It's just a brand, a great brand, by the way.

So they're taking advantage of that brand, and that's great. And we'll compete and do what we need to do and find other folks to join our networks as MVNOs if that's exciting to them. What do we -- what advantages do we have? Number one, we own the network. So our ability to pace innovation to anticipate innovation, to drive innovation that benefits us is first and foremost.

And MVNO doesn't have that. That's point one. Secondly, we have a huge customer base. And our customers, we have -- we can work with them. We know what they need, we can evolve with them technologically, commercially, and that's a huge advantage. And I think we're using AI in an offensive way, not a defensive way. We're using it to drive revenue, to reduce, to increase margin. These are things that I think we have unique capability to do. So there's plenty of advantages. There will be new entrants. That's the nature of our sector. But I don't see them having any advantage over us, at least when it comes to AI.

So you just talked there about innovation. And I suppose one area where you've just recently been very innovative is the Virgin partnership deal with Starlink. So how do you see kind of LEO networks fitting into your overall world of connectivity?

Well, I think, first of all, let's just take Starlink. It's a tale of 2 technologies. There is the broadband business, which is a business, 10 million subs, 160 countries, 10,000 satellites, he's going to go. It's a decent product. It's expensive in this country. And it has applications, maritime, aerospace, rural, mobile backhaul. And in certain constructs, you can even get more speed out of it.

So it's a real product, and it's going to be around for a long time. However, I think he's playing a different game. He's playing the game of a small number multiplied by a big number, i.e., 7 billion people is a big number. So he doesn't need a lot of penetration for that business to work. And that's great. I think it's -- is it a replacement for what we're doing in the center of London? No. Will there be an application for that? Absolutely.

So I think that's -- and that is what it is. The direct-to-device business, very different, highly dependent to get the O2 satellite product that we launched, which you referenced, we had to low him spectrum. There's no -- he does not have spectrum in every country. To do the direct-to-device business, you need to borrow spectrum from an MNO like us. And it's an edge case. We go to 94% coverage, we charge you GBP 3. It's a safety security thing, and it has a real market moment, but it's not a disruptor.

I think the physics of the satellites when it comes to devices will never reach a point where it's going to -- I think he said the same thing publicly, and I can't believe what he says. I have the time, but he has said it. So it's -- and even in the U.S., where they have 45 megahertz of spectrum, I think they're getting -- I think 2% to 4% penetration is all they can actually realize. So the direct-to-device business is heavily dependent on spectrum. He has it in the U.S. He has it only if you load it to them in this market, he might acquire other, but it needs a lot more than he's going to get to be a replacement product.

So I hear you about on could satellite on the broadband side challenge what you have here in urban London. No. But how much of like when you look at your cable networks around Europe, do you see exposure maybe in any of the suburban areas where it could become more of a threat? Or do you think just because of where your networks are physically located, you are better protected against that kind of broadband threat?

We're generally not in rural markets. There aren't a lot of fixed operators who are prioritizing rural markets. So I'd say from that point of view, we're seeing not very much of it. I read today is GBP 75 for 400 megabits. I mean it's a lot of dough and you got the kit and it doesn't work in all cases and it's weather dependent and et cetera, et cetera.

So I think it's going to struggle to replace fiber and HFC, but there is a market for it for people who either live on the edge. And I think in that case, it's a great business model. He's going to make a lot of money.

What about other wireless technologies? I mean at 4:00 today, we've got Christian, the CTO from A1 Telecom Austria speaking, and that's a market where FWA has been kind of quite a success. What are you seeing kind of in the, let's say, in the Netherlands with Odido starting to push FWA a bit, Vodafone here in the U.K. talking about it. Do you see that starting to kind of encroach on your business at all?

Not yet. I mean, listen, I think the fixed wireless access has a lot of buzz in the U.S. But in the U.S., remember, there's no wholesale access. So if I want to launch a product, I'm not going to get on Verizon's network or AT&T's network or Comcast network, I'm not allowed on it. They also have more spectrum in the U.S. That's a big benefit for them to be able to launch a viable product and not eat into their mobile product.

And ARPUs are very high. So you have all the conditions, I think, to make fixed wireless a product in America. You don't have those conditions here, sadly. ARPUs are very low. It's a very -- largely a denser market, at least in the core markets that we operate in. Spectrum, we're not spectrum rich, we're spectrum poor, and to use that spectrum for fixed wireless access is going to impact your 5G, 4G business. I think in the markets we're in, 1%, 2% penetration is what we see today. I don't think it's a winner long term. It's -- we've got bigger fish to fry when it comes to competition.

Got it. Clear. So let's pivot a little bit and talk about just kind of capital strategies. Obviously, since we were here a year ago, you've made some big changes. The Sunrise deal is now kind of well and truly successfully behind us, but you've announced the Ziggo kind of spin-off as the next big step. Trying to think now kind of step beyond that, I mean, how does that inform your thinking on what the next chapter could be in the Liberty structure? I mean, do you see more spins to come? Interesting about how you think about your portfolio development over time?

We were kind of backed into this is how I would look at it. Now there's a Liberty tradition of spinning businesses off. If they're not being valued fairly in a conglomerate structure, give them to your shareholders and let them value them. That's what we did with Sunrise. Nobody in the research community at $9 a share on the Sunrise stock in our stock, nobody. When we put $4 of cash in and spun it out, you now have a $13 dividend, tax-free. That's value creation. If you're a shareholder, that's value creation.

I could argue like many of my peers, well, but if I own it and I can synergize it and all these benefits, not true. There are no benefits. So in the end, giving it a life of its own is a way to deliver value to shareholders. That is a model that's worked for 25 years in John's world and it is working well for us. We spun out Latin America. Sunrise, will there be more? Yes. And will Ziggo Group be an asset that we look to build and unleash and unlock? Absolutely.

Will it work? I'm certain of it. Why? It has a lot of the same characteristics as some of these are rational markets, largely reasonable competition. We have 100 people building fiber in Holland. We're only going to have one person building fiber in Belgium, either us or Proximus, so rational as can be. We've got, I think, real strong brands in these markets, and we have a prospect or a chance to generate real cash flow, real free cash flow to pay dividends.

And by the way, Sunrise was a public company. We took it private. We brought it out to the market. People love it. Ziggo was a public company. You may remember, we took it private, built this great group. We're going to bring it back. And so it has a history. People understand the company as a public company. And I think investors have made it clear. If you can give us a clean story with dividends today and tomorrow and in a market that's largely rational, that's worth something.

Now you know what it's worth in my stock today, negative $4. I don't need it to be worth $14. Just give me $1 or $2 or $3. Negative $4 is where I think I'm getting in my stock, and you've said I deserve it, by the way. I read your stuff on the way. So I knew I was getting a dressing down. I wasn't quite sure. It took this long to get there.

The truth is I don't -- to get from negative $4, give me $5, give me $6, give me $10. My point is there's something there in these businesses. We will delever them. They will generate free cash. And I think that is an opportunity for investors if you own our shares. And the buyback we did has paid off. We spent $14 billion and $15 billion buying back stock. If you own 1% of Liberty, you own 2.5% of Sunrise today, and that will accrue to investors who have been hanging around our stock as well. when Ziggo Group goes public. So I'm encouraged by it.

So you mentioned that there could be other spins to come. I mean, how do we think about that practically? Is that a kind of -- I mean obviously, the big asset you own is Virgin Media O2. So is that something you have in mind? But is that possible whilst you're only a 50% shareholder in the asset? Or does that need to change?

Well, if you want it, we could spin our 50%.

We kind of okay. Yes.

That's not a great move, but we could do it. We would need Telefonica's cooperation to spin the company to our respective shareholders. So we'll see. I think this is the longest pole in the tent. We have work to do in this market structurally, commercially. And I think ultimately, we will sort this one out, too.

Can I just loop back to the Ziggo Group point because you announced some significant [ golden ] synergies potential for the group. We know that on both sides, Netherlands and Belgium, there have been also a concerted effort on AI and operations and commercial. Can you talk a little bit more around your view on the synergies with the group?

So what we said publicly is we think we can get to $500 million of free cash in this group. We're at -- I think we made it public, $120 million this year is our guidance. So how do we get another $380 million of free cash? Synergies will be substantial, bigger than we probably -- not probably bigger than we realized initially. There will be CapEx declines, especially in Belgium, where their mobile upgrade is essentially done this year.

So that will have a huge impact. And then there's EBITDA growth, some one-offs that will unwind and just performing better in Holland because we took it -- we took the EBITDA down to reestablish a competitive profile. That comes back. So it's not that hard to get from $120 million to $500 million by 2028, and we think maybe even sooner.

And the synergies are what you'd expect. There are financial synergies, I'll just leave it at that. There are operational synergies, tech supplier, procurement. So there -- we think the synergy story when we fully develop that will be substantial. We expect to close the deal in July in terms of buying Vodafone and we'll be -- day 1, we'll be working on that.

And have you given us part of that? I mean a big part of kind of Sunrise deal was also then the kind of dividend story as part of the spin. Have you given any thoughts yet as to what you can say around a dividend on the Ziggo Group spin?

You should expect that if we're going to spin that asset, it will include a dividend. In the Sunrise case, we're 70% of free cash. That might be a good metric. And to me, that's definitely part of the story.

And that's within then the 4.5x kind of leverage as well?

We get to 4.5x by -- we're selling assets, right? We're selling a stake in our Belgian fiber company, where we have towers in Holland, we haven't monetized property, we haven't monetized. There'll be free cash flow to delever. There's a handful of things that will drive deleveraging for us.

So if you were -- hopefully, you also read in the taxi over if you're reading my research that I was hugely applauding the NetOmnia transaction as a kind of think of very...

Yes, you were.

Generally, we're going the right direction. But anyway, so that looked like, I think, a great deal. I think it was a kind of accretive deal for value for you at the Liberty Global level. I mean, is that a kind of template you see that there is scope for further altnet consolidation here going forward?

I hope so. I hope so. I think there's been commentary around the price, how do we reconcile the price. We're paying GBP 600 per fiber home. I think that's 1/3 of what CityFibre has invested per fiber home. So it feels a good price to me. And it's a great deal for VMO2. I think you had questioned that, is this a value transfer somehow to nexfibre? I don't believe so. VMO2 is getting $1 billion of cash to delever. They're getting 500,000 customers to integrate into their platform. They're getting CapEx avoidance on 4 million homes. They're getting a stake in nexfibre, new nexfibre, and they're getting the ability and the control over the monetization of a 20 million fiber home footprint.

That's their job. That's a pretty good outcome for VMO2. And it's a great outcome for the market. We're unlocking new capital into the market. There's no question, this is smart and necessary in this fragmented altnet space. And anybody who complains, I think it's sour grades really because CityFibre was trying to do the same deal. So I'm not sure how it's a different outcome really for nexfibre versus Cityfibre.

And it should be a Phase 1 approval. That's clear in my mind. The government has talked about transforming regulation in this country, working at pace, not stifling innovation and growth. This is a test case for that. There's no theory of harm here that stands up. And I can tell you, all the counterfactuals are bad. Maybe we stopped building fiber, nexfibre stopped building fiber.

Only counterfactual that's certain is BT gets stronger as far as I'm concerned. So who's going to build a scale-based competitor to BT Openreach who's going to do that? Who has the capital, the wherewithal of the customers? I don't think there's anybody else. So the government should see this as a net positive for sure.

Right. That means -- I mean, you've said that kind of nexfibre results is going to 8 million homes. I mean from what you were just saying there, is that more of a kind of stepping stone and longer term, you would hope and have ambitions it could then scale up further.

Nexfibre is at 8 million and including the 4 million homes that get transferred over from VMO2 in terms of the traffic from [indiscernible] and VMO2 is left with 12 million homes. Together, there will be a branded wholesale provider on those 20 million homes, 2 separate companies owning the 20 million, but a single brand promoting and marketing that footprint.

Okay. Small pivot. Liberty growth. You said at the beginning, we would go there a little bit. You've taken a majority control of Formula E. It's a very cool proposition. I think, with the new cars, especially, super exciting. With Atlas Edge, you're sort of in the middle of the sovereign infrastructure debate in Europe. Where will this portfolio go? What is your plan to drive value there? I think last year, we also -- you put a bit of cold water on the point of synergies with the core, which makes sense. I think that probably hasn't changed. But where is the value in your eyes over the next few years?

Yes. Well, we have 3 verticals. It's about a $3.4 billion portfolio today, infrastructure, tech and media content. They're all intriguing. I think we have a great track record in all 3 of them. Tech is kind of funds itself or in start-ups, venture capital. This is real tech, and there is some synergy with what we're doing, ElevenLabs, you mentioned that. What we have to decide in tech is, is this something we do for the next 10 years? Or do we partner? Do we capitalize it?

It's $400 million, $500 million of great stuff. They kind of eat what they kill, meaning when they sell, they can invest, but they're not using our capital. How's the best way to monetize value that business? In the infrastructure side, as you mentioned, with AtlasEdge and EdgeConneX, the stuff we're doing in energy, it's right down the middle of what we do. There's lots of opportunity for now, anyhow, it feels like lots of opportunity to build data centers and metro fiber and energy suppliers.

So that's a business we have to decide how much capital we can afford to really drive that business. It's -- fortunately, we're sitting on high returns. I think in the EdgeConneX case, maybe we've got $100 million in it's worth $5 million or $6 million we've taken money out. In the case of AtlasEdge, a little more in it, but it's also been a 20%, 30% IRR.

So infrastructure is something we're good at. We understand really well, and we have to decide how do we capitalize that and grow that and stay present in that. In the middle is the trickier bit. A lot of the content assets we own are things we've owned for a long time. We exited all 3 media for GBP 1 million. We're starting to sell our ITV stake. You're reading that. We love these companies, but there is no -- we're not so sure where we fit, owning 10% of a company or being in the production business.

So there, we're much more interested in what we would call the experience economy. Formula E is a perfect example. sports platform, 1 of 8 global sports leagues on the planet, and we own it. And I think it's got great tailwinds, great potential, great opportunity. We'd like to do more of those if we can. And we'll see if we can. There's no guarantee that we'll find something or that we're -- it's the right thing for us.

But this portfolio, according to some analysts is $10 a share on a $12 stock. For me to say, I don't really want to talk about it or for an analyst or an investor to say, that stuff over there, I really wish you weren't doing it. It's $10 of my $12. I need to manage it, grow it, exit it, monetize it. So it's definitely worthy of conversation. And what we do going forward to build it out will be -- we'll see, but it will only be smart stuff. I think I don't think anything.

And what about Liberty Services? I mean, with Liberty Tech, you're in the services products business and Liberty Bloom especially...

Liberty Tech is very much an inside thing. We have about $500 million of revenue we collect from our OpCos, even Sunrise. By the way, when we spin Sunrise, when we spun Sunrise, they still have a very strong contractual relationship on technology. We do their treasury work. There's a strong strategic relationship.

Andre is still part of my core management team. He comes to my offsites. So we're spinning them, but they're still very much in the fold in the family. So I think it's -- I was tracking your question, but...

The value story behind Liberty Services, including Bloom Services because I think...

The Bloom side of it is about $100 million of financial services. And there, we've decided maybe they can do that for other people, some third parties, and so we'll see how that unfolds.

And leverage some of the domain knowledge you have in the industry, which I think is super interesting.

Yes.

Okay. So maybe closing thoughts. I'm sort of looking at the clock. We have about 2 or 3 minutes left. You're a telco operator in Europe, majority of your investments are in Europe. What gives you the greatest confidence in the European telco and tech sector? And what needs to change for you to make most of that?

I don't think you can do that in 2.5 years. the European telco and tech sector needs to kick in the pants if you're comparing it to the U.S. or China and everybody who operates in it knows that. I was just at the Mobile World Congress and basically, we go there to complain to regulators about how difficult things are.

And I think it can be better, and I think it will be better. I think this digital sovereignty point initially bothered me a lot. A year ago, I was talking about it, most people what is that? But it bothers me a bit to less so today because I see it as an opportunity for us and our infrastructure to be part of those solutions. So that's exciting. I think this is where we started.

There are tailwinds in our industry, but there are things we need to do better, right? What do we need to do better? We need to move fast. The pace, you're seeing it, you know it, the pace at which technology is evolving, AI is evolving, disruption is evolving is like nothing we've ever seen before. So the old school telco mindset, I got a few quarters to figure this out or I can launch this in 9 months or give me 18 months.

That's gone. We have to start thinking differently. And to do that, we need different talent. Let's be clear. We need different talent. I'm not really hiring a lot of people from other telcos. I'm hiring them from big tech, hiring them from other sectors. We definitely need that. And I think we have to find a way to remove these dependencies. We're highly dependent regulators for sure.

We've got to remove that. But also a massive software company. And there's no reason why software is trading off. We're spending a lot of time to figure out how to get off the stack to chop the stack, burn the stack because we spend massive amounts of money with these companies. And it is old school money. And in this world, as fast as AI is moving and the speed at which it's developing, we can take advantage, there will be better, faster, cheaper ways to do the very same things that will result in significant reduction of cost. And if we can remove those dependencies carefully, appropriately quickly, I think you're going to see a seismic shift in our economics.

Great. Thank you, Mike. Thanks for joining us.

I don't think inspiring was the wrong word.

I don't think so.

Yes.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Liberty Global's Fourth Quarter 2025 Investor Call. This call and the associated webcast are the property of Liberty Global, and any redistribution, retransmission or rebroadcast of this call or webcast in any form without the expressed written consent of Liberty Global is strictly prohibited. [Operator Instructions] Today's formal presentation materials can be found under the Investor Relations section of Liberty Global's website at libertyglobal.com.

[Operator Instructions] Page 2 of the slides details the company's safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking statements. Today's presentation may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 including the company's expectations with respect with 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.

These risks include those detailed in Liberty Global's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recently filed Forms 10-Q and 10-K 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 on which any such statement is based.

I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Mike Fries.

Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. As you would have seen by now, in addition to our results, we announced 2 significant transactions earlier today, which, of course, we'll address in our prepared remarks. As a result, I think this call may run over 60 minutes. I hope you can stick with us because there's quite a bit to talk about here. We've broken this down into our typical quarterly results presentation, which Charlie and I will breeze through, as we usually do. perhaps a little faster than normal. And then we'll move into more of a strategic update like we did 2 years ago at this time. I also think it might be a good call to follow the slides that we're broadcasting, especially the second half.

But let me jump right in on Slide 4. And certainly, by now, you are all familiar with how we organize and manage our business today. As illustrated here, everything falls into 1 of 3 operating verticals. Liberty Telecom comprises our 4 national FMC champions that generate $22 billion of revenue and $8 billion of EBITDA on an aggregate basis and where our primary goals are to drive commercial momentum and importantly, unlock equity value for shareholders. Much more on that in a moment.

Liberty Global on the far right houses our portfolio of media, infra and tech investments totaling $3.4 billion today. And here, we're focused on rotating capital, right, and investing in high-growth sectors with scale and tailwinds. And of course, in the center, sits Liberty Global itself with $2.2 billion of cash and a team with decades of experience operating and investing in these businesses.

Now I'll come back to this slide and the strategic update. But first, let me provide some highlights on each of these for 2025. So it has clearly been a busy year for us on all 3 fronts. And as Slide 5 points out, we feel like we've delivered on our core strategic priorities. There's a lot of detail here, so I'm just going to hit a few of the high points. We'll talk about our telecom company results in the next couple of slides, but we're pleased with the momentum that our commercial and network strategies are delivering, especially in the second half of the year, supported in parts by the benefits we realized in MII, all of our 3 large OpCos hit their guidance targets last year.

When it comes to unlocking value in telecom, a key goal for us, as you know, you've no doubt seen our announcements on the U.K. fiber transaction and our acquisition of Vodafone's interest in the Netherlands. We'll dig into both those deals shortly, but this is exactly what we said we would do.on our call last year and the year before. At Liberty Global, we've totally reshaped our operating model, having reduced our net corporate spend by 75% in the last 12 months.

Needless to say excited to see how this new guidance leads its way into analysts, some of the parts calculations. And we continue to allocate capital to the highest return. As you know, we did reduce the buyback last year from 10% to 5% of shares partially, to be honest, in anticipation of some of these varied transactions. And so far this year, we're not actively in the market, but we always remain opportunistic on our stock and we'll keep you abreast of our plans throughout the course of the year versus guiding to them.

With respect to our cash balance pro forma for the transactions announced today and for what we expect to realize in further asset sales, we should end the year with $1.5 billion of cash, and Charlie will get into that in a bit more detail in a moment. And then finally, our growth portfolio remains highly concentrated with 5 assets comprising 70% of the $3.4 billion in value. We couldn't be more excited about Formula E, the progress we're making on the Gen 4 car, our racing calendar, and of course, our sponsors and we have renewed focus on the Experian economy. I'm not going to get into much detail here, but by this, we mean live events, sports, et cetera.

We probably looked at 100 deals in the space. We've done real work in about 40, and we've only closed a handful of very small transactions. So that can give you some comfort that while we're excited about this sector, we're staying very disciplined as we look to rotate capital. Now the next 2 slides summarize Q4 operating performance for our telecom businesses. In the U.K., Lutania have implemented a number of things that helped improve broadband performance throughout the year. Initiatives like bundling Netflix and being recognized as a top U.K. broadband provider. Those things drove a strong Q4 as well as stable ARPUs.

Postpaid mobile results were impacted, however, by the increases that they took in October. Hopefully, we'll see improved performance in '26, especially as 5G coverage continues to grow and pricing pressure settles. In Ireland, combination of fiber wholesale activations, improved network performance, actually, they are also ranked the best provider in the market. And off-net expansion, supported net growth in the fixed base with stable ARPUs. Mobile in Ireland continued to grow steadily and remember, we're an MVNO there, helped in part by a senior offer launched in June.

In the Netherlands, Vodafone Ziggo's How We Win plan is driving substantial improvements in the broadband base, becoming the largest provider of 2 gigabit broadband speeds in the market and recent recognition as the best TV provider help make Q4 the single best resulting services in nearly 3 years with steady improvement over the last 6 months carrying into 2026. Postpaid mobile growth in Holland continued to be supported by nearly universal 5G coverage and a strong flanker brand. And then finally, Telenet had its highest quarterly broadband result in 3 years, helped by fixed mobile convergence in the South and a strong Black Friday period.

And similar to other markets we operate in, ARPUs were fixed in mobile are very stable. Now if it wasn't enough information for you, we will be discussing 3 out of these 4 markets in our strategic update later in the call, including a lot more commentary on their performance and outlook.

So in the meantime, Charlie, over to you.

Thanks, Mike. Now turning to our Q4 financial highlights. Our operating companies in the U.K., the Netherlands and Belgium delivered on their full year guidance metrics despite challenging market conditions. VMO2 delivered a revenue decline of 5.9% on a reported basis, which was impacted by lower Nexfibre construction revenues due to a slowdown in the fiber build and also sustained competitive pressure in both the fixed and mobile market in the U.K. .

On a guidance basis, excluding Nexfibre construction and O2 Daisy, we delivered modest growth for the full year. Adjusted EBITDA declined by 2.4% on a reported basis, primarily driven by lower Nexfibre construction profitability. Excluding this, adjusted EBITDA fell by 1% in Q4, but we still achieved growth overall for the full year of positive 1%. Moving to VodafoneZiggo, we saw a revenue decline of 2.3% in Q4 driven by fixed churn and reduced low-margin IoT revenues. This is partially offset by the annual price adjustment and higher Ziggo Sport revenues.

Adjusted EBITDA declined 3.4% in Q4 driven by this lower revenue and higher costs related to commercial initiatives. The full year figures were in line with the guidance in Q1 for the new How We Win strategy. At Telenet, we saw a revenue decline of 1.3%, driven by our strategic decision to not renew the Belgium football broadcasting rights and lower programming revenues. Adjusted EBITDA declined by 9.9%, driven by elevated labor and marketing costs as well as higher professional services and outsourced labor spend.

Turning to our treasury update. We've been extremely proactive through 2025 and nearly for 2026 and extending our 2028 and 2029 maturities. And we successfully refinanced $15 billion across our credit silos. And both VMO2 and VodafoneZiggo, we have fully refinanced all 2028 maturities, boring successful term loan refinancings, senior secured note issuances and private taps within these credit silos.

In Belgium, as we announced in Q3, we have EUR 4.35 billion of committed financing at Wyre which is contingent on BCA regulatory approval of our fiber sharing agreement. A portion of the proceeds around EUR 2.34 billion are allocated to repay the intercompany loan with Telenet and will be used to rebalance leverage at Telenet. We intend to further repay some of the 2028 debt at Telenet with the proceeds from our partial Wyre stake sale, which is expected to complete this year.

All of this proactive refinancing activity has significantly reduced our 2028 maturities and maintained our average tenor of around 5 years at broadly comparable credit spreads to our historic levels.

Turning to the next slide. We remain committed to our disciplined capital allocation model as we rotate capital into high-growth investments and strategic transactions. Starting in the top left, we successfully delivered against all free cash flow guidance metrics for the year across our OpCos and JVs. And additionally, following our corporate reshaping program, Liberty Services and Corporate closed 2025 ahead of guidance at negative $130 million of adjusted EBITDA, which is around $20 million better than our $150 million target.

Moving to the Liberty Growth walk on the bottom left. The fair market value of our growth portfolio remained broadly stable versus Q3 at $3.4 billion. This was driven by modest investments in Nexfibre, AtlasEdge and EdgeConneX, offset by the partial disposal of our ITV stake and the full exit of our Enfabrica stake as well as positive fair market value adjustments of Formula E and UPC Slovakia, which has been held in the growth portfolio until the sale process completes later this year.

Turning to our cash walk on the top right, we ended the year with a consolidated cash balance of $2.2 billion. During the quarter, we received $162 million of upstream cash and JV dividends and $140 million net cash proceeds from disposals in our growth portfolio, including $180 million from the partial ITV stake sale. We spent $34 million in our buyback program during the quarter, repurchasing a total of $0.05 of our outstanding shares during the year.

Moving to the bottom right, we are aiming to end 2026 with around $1.5 billion of corporate cash. After deducting for the cash outflows related to the M&A transactions Mike will touch on in a moment, we intend to replenish our corporate cash with a combination of dividends and cash upstream from our operating businesses as well as noncore asset disposals from our growth portfolio.

Turning to Liberty Growth in Media & Sports. Our strategy remains to invest live sports and entertainment platforms with growing global fan basis. Formula E is our leading example of this, and Season 12 has started strongly ahead of the launch of the Gen4 car. Our data center assets, EdgeConneX and AtlasEdge continue to show strong top line revenue growth, supporting a $1 billion-plus year-end valuation. And our energy transition assets also made big steps forward in 2025.

Egg Power secured GBP 400 million of senior debt to help fund over 400 megawatts equivalent of wind and solar power projects, and Believ, our destination charging business has now built 2,500 public charging sockets, which are averaging around GBP 1,500 EBITDA per socket with a further 23,000 awarded to them by U.K. local authorities. And they're currently bidding on a large number of additional sockets, which are being awarded. INSTECH focuses on AI. We made a strategic investment in 11 labs, and we're also moving our in-house AI investments into the growth pillar given their potential to sell services to third-party customers outside the Liberty family.

We've also established a new services pillar, and have transferred Liberty Blume into it from Jan 2026. Now Liberty Blume develops tech-enabled back-office solutions for Liberty Global companies as well as third parties. It delivered over 20% revenue growth in 2025, achieving over GBP 100 million of revenue with an order book of nearly GBP 400 million. The initial value has been set at GBP 100 million, and we've hired a new CEO to accelerate growth.

Starting January 2026, we're also introducing an annual management fee of 1.5% of assets under management, paid by Liberty Growth to Liberty Services. This fee will be funded by distributions from the growth portfolio, including disposals and will be used to fund direct and allocated operating costs such as treasury and related legal services, and these are all directly attributable to the growth portfolio.

Turning to our guidance for 2026, we're providing guidance by operating company. For Virgin Media, O2 from Q1 2026, we will move to new disclosure, which better reflects the 3 key operating verticals following the creation of O2 Daisy. Now these are consumer, business and wholesale. There's a pro forma information in the stand-alone VMO2 release, which explains this further alongside updated KPI disclosures. On this basis, the VMO2 revenue guidance is now set on total service revenues which we expect to decline by 3% to 5%. Now this is adjusted for the impact of the Daisy transaction, which is driven by continued promotional intensity as well as planned streamlining of the B2B product portfolio following the creation of O2 Daisy.

Adjusted EBITDA is also expected to decline by 3% to 5%, also against the comparable period adjusted for the Daisy impact, driven by lower revenue and lower gross margin due to the changing customer mix. Stable property and equipment additions of GBP 2.2 billion, excluding right-of-use additions due to continued investment in 5G and fiber to the home and adjusted free cash flow of around GBP 200 million for the year supporting cash distributions to shareholders of the same amount. For VodafoneZiggo, we expect stable to low single-digit decline in revenue driven by a lower fixed base and the flow-through of the front book pricing impact, albeit with support from continued price indexation and fixed and mobile.

Mid- to high single-digit decline in adjusted EBITDA driven by OpEx investments into network resilience and service reliability. Property and equipment additions to revenue is expected to be around 23% to 25% driven by continued 5G and DOCSIS 4.0 investments as well as a CapEx component of investments into network resilience and service reliability.

As to give more detail on this additional investment, we expect EUR 100 million of incremental investment of OpEx and CapEx into network resilience and service reliability during 2026. Now this will reduce to GBP 50 million OpEx impact in 2027, 2028. And we're expecting adjusted free cash flow to be around EUR 100 million with no shareholder distributions planned for the year.

For Telenet, we're introducing new full year 2026 guidance based on IFRS financials, excluding Wyre, we expect stable revenue growth, reflecting a stable operating environment and the annual price indexation under Belgium regulations, low single-digit growth in adjusted EBITDAaL, supported by OpEx savings from significant digital and IT investments and continued lower programming costs.

Property and equipment additions to revenue of around 20% as investments in 5G and digital upgrades stepped down and positive adjusted free cash flow of around EUR 20 million. And finally, for Liberty Corporate, we expect around $50 million negative adjusted EBITDA driven by the annualization of the cost savings from the corporate reshaping that took place in 2025 and the implementation of the new 1.5% management fee from the growth portfolio.

Thanks, Charlie. Great job. And now we're going to switch gears to what I think I hope is the most important part of today's call. And that, of course, is an update on the key transactions we've just announced and how they significantly advance our plans to deliver value to shareholders. .

I'll start by revisiting the first slide that I showed you today, and that's the 3 core pillars of our operating structure, Liberty Telecom, Liberty Growth and Liberty Global. We'll go back to the strategies for each of these. I think you've got them by now. But what I have done on this slide is present a very rudimentary sum of the parts valuation exercise for these 3 pillars at the bottom of the slide that shows that the Liberty Growth portfolio today, accepting the fair market value that Deloitte has prepared is worth roughly $10 per Liberty Global share.

Our corporate cash of $2.2 billion, even after a reasonable reduction of the value for the $50 million of corporate spend this year is roughly $6 per Liberty share, which means that with an $11 stock price today, there's at least $5 per share of negative value being ascribed to our Liberty Telecom businesses. And of course, there are multiple ways of arriving at these figures. Some people start by valuing Liberty Telecom and then applying discounts to cash and Liberty Growth and Corporate, but I like this approach.

Cash is cash, and we believe the growth assets are valued fairly and appropriately. More importantly, we're rapidly turning those growth assets into cash. We've already exited something that $1.6 billion in the last 6 years. So whether it's negative 5 or 0, you can see why we have focused a lot of time and attention on creating and delivering value in our telecom portfolio. Of course, the Sunrise spin-off just 14 months ago was step 1. That transaction delivered what is today, roughly $13 per share of value to Liberty Global Investors, far more than anyone expected at the time what the implied value was for that business at the time. And that's why we can say our stock price on a combined basis is up meaningfully over the last 2 years.

Now moving to the next slide. Here's another thing that gives us some confidence in the value of our telecom business. The European telecom sector has been experiencing a broad-based rally this year with the Euro Telco Index up 16% year-to-date. And just about every major incumbent telco and you know all the names, up even more than that, 20%, 25%. So what's happening here?

We see 3 key tailwinds impacting the sector. First, of course, is an improving regulatory environment. This is not to say that we're totally satisfied with where things stand. You know us better than that. But if you look at the U.K. and the changes they've made to the CMA or if you look at the recently published draft of the EU's Digital Networks Act, we believe there's a good chance regulators continue to loosen rules around consolidation and spectrum policies, especially in the age of AI, where telecom continues to be perceived rightly as critical infrastructure for consumers, for businesses and for governments.

Secondly, just as we are seeing in our own operations like Telenet, where 5G CapEx is largely behind us now or Ireland, where our fiber build is coming to an end, there is light at the end of the CapEx tunnel. And when you combine declining CapEx intensity, with Telecom's high margins and stable revenues, you've got a strong recipe for improving free cash flow.

And then finally, there is the AI thesis. It's hard to find an industry more ready to benefit from AI-driven efficiencies, customer improvements, network automation than the telecom sector. In addition, as AI permeates every aspect of our lives, our role, telco's role as foundational connectivity and data transport providers, I think, continues to increase.

And then lastly, there appears to be, and this is an area you're experts in more than me, but there appears to be a rotation going on here. Investors growing a bit sour on how capital light software-driven industries and rotating capital into more infrastructure-based or defensive sectors where AI is a net-net positive and quite frankly, unlikely to be as disruptive over time. I think the impact of AI, if you ask me on our industry will be positively transformational. I recently asked the CEO of one of the big tech companies. Look, how do I go from spending $14 billion a year on OpEx to $7 billion. That's what I want to do.

You said bring me your P&L and we'll go through it. The point is we're just scratching the surface today. I think the upside for us from AI is massive, and it's massive for our entire industry. Now so with that as background, on this call, last year and the year before, we laid out 2 very specific goals related to our telecom businesses, and they're summarized here on Slide 16. The first was to prepare each of our Benelux operating companies, this was last year, for the next phase of value creation. And I'd say we achieved that goal, bringing in Stephen van Rooyen as CEO has been a game changer for VodafoneZiggo. And of course, today, we're announcing the acquisition of Vodafone's 50% stake in VodafoneZiggo in order to advance our plans to spin off a new company that combines our Dutch and Belgian operations. More on that, of course, in a second.

In the U.K., we committed last year to advance our plans to monetize our fixed network infrastructure for both financial and strategic reasons. Now early last year, we pivoted away from a pure NetCo, as you know, but together with Telefonica, we continue to evaluate accretive ways to grow and finance fiber infrastructure in the U.K. Today, of course, we announced the acquisition of U.K.'s second largest AltNet creating what will ultimately be an 8 million home fiber platform with the opportunity to further consolidate a fragmented market. So let's get into these deals.

Beginning with the Vodafone acquisition on Slide 17, after what can only be described as a very successful and I mean, seriously mean rewarding partnership with Vodafone in the Netherlands. We're pleased to announce an agreement to acquire their 50% stake in exchange for EUR 1 billion of cash plus a 10% equity interest in a new company called Ziggo Group, which will own 100% of VodafoneZiggo and 100% of Telenet in Belgium.

Now there's 3 primary reasons for doing this -- 3 primary benefits from this deal. To begin with, we believe the net present value both operational synergies and incremental service revenues from this transaction and combination total about EUR 1 billion alone. And of course, pretty much all that accrues to us. Second, we think the combination of Holland and Belgium is a financial winner. As the chart on my right shows together, the 2 operations serve 7 million mobile subs and over 5 million broadband subs with total revenue of EUR 6.6 billion and over EUR 2.5 billion of EBITDA. Combination also creates a clear road map to reduce leverage to what we're estimating will be about 4.5x through a combination of synergies and improving operational performance.

In fact, we think we'll generate $500 million of free cash flow by 2028. And then third most importantly, we are announcing today our intention to list Ziggo on the Euronext exchange in 2027 and to simultaneously spin off our 90% interest delivered to Liberty Global shareholders as we did in Switzerland. Interestingly, similar to Sunrise, there is a strong epistory here. Belgium and Holland are rational markets, just like Switzerland. We have a clear network strategy in each country like we had in Switzerland. Our plan to reduce leverage are front and center and actionable like they were and are in Switzerland. And the financial profile should support both free cash flow and dividends in the future.

Interestingly, this is more anecdotal, just as Sunrise, it was one of a very successful public company that we took private and then relisted, Ziggo was also a very successful public company that we took private. So we will be reintroducing Ziggo to the public markets as we did with Sunrise. Now just a quick update on Slide 18 of VodafoneZiggo's recent performance. There's no question that Stephen's How We Win plan is driving clear operational turnaround, a combination of OpEx savings, repositioned broadband pricing, speed upgrades and a multi-brand strategy are delivering materially lower churn.

You can see that on the bottom right of this slide where Q4 '25 was the best broadband performance, I think, in 10 quarters and things continue to look good into 2026. We've also provided a medium term outlook for VodafoneZiggo on Slide 19 and while 2025 EBITDA was in line with our plan, 2026 guidance, as Charlie indicated, shows a decline impact and in part by our large one-off investment we're making in network resilience and service reliability. In 2028, however, we expect EBITDA growth to rebound. We're not giving you actual numbers here, but we are confident in that trajectory.

That EBITDA growth, combined with a very stable cash envelope should generate the meaningful free cash flow I just referenced. And as Charlie indicated, leverage will peak in 2026, but should decline thereafter, both organically, that's, of course, from EBITDA growth and through asset sales like our tower portfolio, the proceeds of which we intend to use to reduce debt.

And then a quick strategic update on Telenet on Slide 20. We can't underestimate the importance of the steps we've taken over the last 24 months in Belgium to both rationalize the market structure and create a clear operating road map for both of our businesses there. As you know, this is the first time we've completely carved out a fixed NetCo, which we call Wyre, and have even gone one step further by entering into a network sharing arrangement with the incumbent telco Proximus that will create arguably the most attractive fiber wholesale market in Europe.

And to facilitate the carve-out, we secured EUR 4.35 billion of new capital to both fund the Wyre build and reduce leverage at Telenet. And to discuss, we're in the process of selling a stake in Wyre with the proceeds earmarked for further deleveraging in Telenet. Goal here is to bring Telenet's midterm leverage down to the 4x level. And Telenet, as part of the new Ziggo Group, I think represents a very strong equity story itself with outstanding retail brands, significant B2B growth, an upgraded 5G network and long-term access to fiber.

Perhaps even more importantly, though, with CapEx declining significantly this year, Telenet's free cash flow is at that inflection point and poised for continued growth. Now let's switch gears to the U.K. and our announcement today to use our fiber JV -- Nexfibre to acquire Substantial Group, which consists of the Netomnia fiber network and a 500,000 subscriber broadband customer base for a total enterprise value of GBP 2 billion and a net payment of GBP 1.1 billion at closing.

Now I'll walk through the various transaction steps on the next slide, but the goal here is simple. The first goal is to create the second largest fiber network after BT Openreach. When you combine Netomnia's 3.5 billion fiber homes with Nextfibre's existing 2.6 million fiber homes, and then you add 2.1 million VMO2 homes that wouldn't be made available to Nextfibre for upgrade, the platform will ultimately reach 8 million fiber homes by 2027.

As I'll outline in a moment, there are significant benefits to VMO2 stakeholders. This is a fantastic outcome for VMO2. It's also a strong vote of confidence in the U.K. generally. We want the U.K. government to know that we, together with our partners are willing to commit significant capital to the U.K. based upon their pro-growth policies.

Now this next slide is one that you'll probably want to print out and tuck away somewhere. As I said, this is a complicated transaction, they often are, and this is an attempt to simplify it as best we can. On the left-hand side, you'll see the money and asset flows. The green numbers, when you take a look at the slide, if you're looking at it now, the green numbers simply show the cash and how it moves from and to the various parties here, approximately GBP 1 billion of equity will be injected into Nexfibre, the acquisition vehicle, and that's our 50-50 JV with InfraVia, of course. And this will consist of GBP 850 million of cash from InfraVia, and $150 million from Liberty and Telefonica.

So the first point to make is that Liberty Global directly will be responsible for GBP 75 million of cash in order to complete this transaction. The $1 billion together with the new debt facility, I think it's about $2.7 billion, we'll fully fund both this transaction and the longer-term strategic plans for Nexfibre 2.0. Now once capitalized, Nexfibre distributes a little over $2 billion of cash, GBP 950 million to Substantial Group for the Netomnia fiber assets and GBP 1.1 billion to VMO2, of course, VMO2 will use that capital to both acquire the broadband subscribers for $150 million and reduced leverage.

The vast majority of the GBP 1.1 billion going to VMO2 is in exchange for a significant commitment to utilize the Nexfibre network on a wholesale basis. That's how these deals work. Specifically, VMO2 will provide access to 2.1 million of its own homes that will agree to pay Nextfibre wholesale access fee on those homes once they're upgraded to fiber. And additionally, VMO2 will pay wholesale access fees day 1 on another 2.5 million homes that overlap Nextfibre's footprint.

So there's substantial value being contributed to the Nexfibre 2.0 plan by VMO2, and that's why it's being paid. Now as I mentioned, the benefits to VMO2 are substantial. To begin with VMO2 gets cash to reduce leverage. This is necessary, of course, given the increased wholesale fees paid out to Nexfibre. Second, it will end up with 500,000 additional broadband customers. Third, there will be substantial CapEx avoidance here, both in terms of the cost to build and the cost to connect millions of premises that would no longer be the responsibility of VMO2. We think the NPV of that is around GBP 800 million. Fourth, VMO2 will be able to continue providing construction and managed services to Nexfibre in exchange for revenue and positive EBITDA. And the NPV of that contract, we think, is around GBP 400 million.

And then finally, in addition to having access to the second largest fiber footprint in the U.K., VMO2 will also receive a direct stake in Nexfibre 2.0. Now looking ahead, I think this transaction also opens up the market for further consolidation, something that we have talked about for a long time and may just be on the horizon. One quick slide here, providing additional context on VMO2's operational outlook as I promised. On the left-hand side of Slide 23, we make the point that despite a highly competitive market, VMO2 has delivered pretty good financial results, especially in comparison to its peers.

While revenue has been largely flat over the last 4 fiscal years, and you know that, EBITDA has grown annually at around 1.5%. During the same time frame, VMO2 has generated GBP 2.6 billion of cumulative free cash flow and distributed GBP 5.2 billion to Liberty and Telefonica in the form of dividends. We are happy shareholders here. That's clear. Now the rest of the slide identifies the main drivers of growth moving forward and why we're confident in the VMO2 story, including 3 powerful brands, Virgin Media, O2 and Giffgaff that reach every segment and help drive fixed mobile convergence. There's also synergies in B2B growth on the recently completed O2 Daisy merger, strong wholesale position as the #1 MVNO provider and now a key partner in the second largest fiber footprint.

I mean Lutz and the team, we believe we have a pretty good head start in AI-driven innovation and efficiency as well. And on top of that, there's the opportunity to drive growth off-net to the 10 million homes we don't reach today. So a lot of really good things happening in the U.K. market for us.

Finally, this is the key takeaways here on the final slide, what we'd like you to bring home, if you will, from the second half of this call, right? Number one, we think the telecom sector broadly and equity values in Europe more specifically are poised for continued depreciation in the eyes of investors. Tailwinds from consolidation, stable cash flows and what appears to be a rotation into stocks that will be net beneficiaries of AI as opposed to roadkill are drivers here.

Hopefully, by now, you're convinced that we are serious about delivering value to shareholders. The Sunrise spin-off was always step 1. We told you that. And the transactions we announced today, in particular, the Vodafone stake acquisition and our intention to list and spin off the new Ziggo Group will be step 2. In the meantime, we worked extremely hard to reshape our corporate operating model. This is not just a cost-saving exercise, even though it did save considerable costs. We believe that our structure today is fit for purpose, both to continue operating and investing in the TMT sector that we've done over the last 20-plus years, but also to provide our unique form of expertise to existing and future affiliates.

Now why we were only marginally successful in convincing analysts to look at our corporate cost differently, we have been spectacularly successful at reducing those net corporate costs as I said, by 75%, that is going to accrue to the benefit of our stock price. And we're excited about our growth platform. We have a great track record here, and we're focused on the right centers, where we have a clear right to play, as they say, and where there are tailwinds and scale opportunities that I think we're uniquely qualified to pursue. So stay tuned to see what we there.

And then finally, in our world, capital allocation is everything. Now where you choose to invest your capital, especially in a capital-intensive business, has never mattered more. We've always run our telecom businesses as if we're going to own them forever. And even in that context, they generally have not required any cash from us to achieve their strategic and operating objectives. We will invest in a telecom business when it unlocks value for shareholders. We've said that many times. Like we did with Sunrise, delevering the company pre-spin and like we're doing with the acquisition of Vodafone stake in Holland.

We have been significant buyers of our own stock, $15 billion over the last 9 years to be exact, reducing the number of shares outstanding by 63% and ensuring that those who stuck around with us end up with a bigger piece of the pie. You owned 1% of our company in 2017, who ended up with over 2.5% of Sunrise, for example.

And finally, we do believe there will be opportunities in tech, infrastructure, energy, media, sports and live entertainment. These are areas where we have significant deal flow, great partnerships lined up, $10 per share of value and importantly, strategic flexibility to deliver that value to shareholders.

So hopefully, that update was helpful for you, especially on the recent announcements of the 2 deals this morning. So with that, operator, we'll get to questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question will go to the line of Robert Grindle with Deutsche Bank.

My head is spinning with all the news you guys have provided. So I'll ask one question about the U.K. deal. 8 million Nexfibre homes post deal completion and the 2.1 million HFC home upgrade. Do you think that definitively unlocks the U.K. wholesale opportunity in a major way. Do you think you have to wait to get to the full 8 million? Or are you on a course before you get to that point to get more wholesale business in.

I'll take a crack at it, Robert. Thanks for the question. And Lutz or others can chime in here. But the 8 million will be achieved relatively quickly, end of '27 probably. So that's a good fiber number for Nexfibre 2.0, both as you say, from the 3 -- the contribution of the 3 entities. And VMO2 will be a significant whole buy partner for that 8 million home footprint. And remember that Lutz and VMO2 continue to upgrade their network. So there'll be another 12 million homes on the VMO2 network that continue to be upgraded.

So we believe you're looking at what is effectively a 20 million home footprint in the end, the vast majority of which will be fiber. So obviously, first order of business is to grow and manage our own customer base on that 20 million home network, but also very much so to provide wholesale opportunity for the market, which is much needed for reasons that you understand very well. Does that answer your question?

It does. Mike, is there a time line on getting the rest of the VMO2 network upgraded?

Well, I don't know if we've disclosed that time line. Lutz, if you want to reference that, let me know if we disclose that or no. .

I would add only that we have already upgraded 5 million homes to fiber out of the 13 we are having. So you -- Robert, you can add these 5 million to the 8 million. So you have very quickly an access to 13 million fiber homes. And the second part, right, I think we always said that we will enter the consumer wholesale market. And obviously, the more homes and fiber we are able to offer, the more interested it is. Further guidance on how quickly we will upgrade the remaining homes we haven't given, and we don't want to.

Our next question will go to the line of Josh Mills with BNP Paribas.

Maybe I'll ask my question is on the VodafoneZiggo transaction. I think you're still talking about a stable CapEx envelope over the guidance period. But now that you're creating this new Ziggo group with more scale, does it change your appetite or opportunity to invest more on the cable to fiber upgrade strategy? Is there any synergies there you can take for your learnings in the Telenet business and bring them over to the Netherlands, it would be very helpful. .

And then secondly, I think on Slide 17, where you talk about the clear road map of bringing Ziggo Group leverage to 4.5x. Is that all organic deleveraging? Or would you be willing to inject cash into this business prior to a spin-off as you did with Sunrise.

Great questions. Listen, I think on the network strategy for Holland and Belgium, those plans are set. So we have made a definitive the assessment of the OpEx strategy and network strategy for a fixed business in VodafoneZiggo's market, and we are going with DOCSIS 4. The team has already done a great job of getting 2 gig rolled out nationwide with the largest 2 gig provider and they'll be at 4-giga and 8-gig right around the corner. So there is no strategy or plan to build fiber in the Netherlands, and we don't believe it's necessary either from a commercial and certainly not attractive from a capital point of view.

So the CapEx profile does not change as a result of this or any announcements that we're making today. On the leverage, I think the -- as we mentioned, there's 2 very clear sources of deleveraging. One is organic growth. the second -- or 3, I guess, the second is free cash flow and paying down debt as we're doing Sunrise. And then 3 is asset sales. So in the case of Holland, we have PropCo and TowerCo. In the case of Belgium, we have the Wyre stake. So there will be asset sales. With those proceeds used to delever, there will be growth in EBITDA organic and there will be free cash to organically delever. And that is the plan. At this stage, we don't anticipate putting any capital or cash into the Ziggo Group to get the plans launched in 2027. And Charlie, do you want to add anything to that?

No. I absolutely endorse what it is. I mean you remember there are some premature financial synergies that we get, which obviously give us strong free cash flow. I should clarify that, that $500 million is the annual target. It's not a cumulative target. I also think that with this, the team has performed and his team, by the way, performance fantastically. And as they give this EBITDA turnaround, I think you can do the math and figure out how that can treat to getting towards this 4.5% target, which we think works based on what we saw and summarized. .

The next question will go to the line of Matthew Harrigan with StoneX.

Since I'm the last American left in the draw again. When I talk to your U.S. peers on AI, they don't expect to see too much quantifiable benefit this year, but pretty substantially but by '28. Is that something that you layer into your numbers somewhat. And clearly, the market is not remotely assigning the value of the ventures plus cat, so they're not going to give you anything for having your telecom OpEx. But what are your thoughts on really seeing that discernible in the numbers? And when you look at AI, is that some -- I mean clearly, a lot of the value in your network has been appropriated by Silicon Valley and other tech companies. But when AI really sticks in, are you going to see 85% of the benefit on the cost side? Or do you expect to see some revenue enhancements that actively attached to you as well? And it's a fairly big question, but obviously, people are -- it will be very transformative if you can have your OpEx even if it's in 8 to 10 years.

Yes. Look, I'll address that generally and I'll ask Enrique to step in and provide a bit more color. But 3 things are really driving for any telco, driving the benefits from AI, right? Beginning with customer acquisition -- and very thin, which we're all seeing marginal improvements from the investment in our call centers and things like that. The second is frag credit, things like that, that can really drive down OpEx and inefficiencies. And then as you mentioned, in the network and operations. And I don't know, wealthily, those are each going to contribute 1/3, let's say, of the monstrable benefits we expect to see in the next, let's say, 1 to 3 years. And they're not small numbers.

They will be real benefits. And I think the nice thing that I'm seeing in the space is that whereas a year ago on this call, I would have said that we're inventing a lot of these applications right now, we're getting bombarded with start-ups and third-parties in Silicon Valley companies that are doing a much better job in many instances of creating these solutions for us. And so the pace of integration and implementation, I think, is speeding up, and it's real.

So as I said in my remarks, I don't think there's an industry better positioned to benefit from marginal improvement in CapEx, OpEx and revenue from AI, but I would emphasize the word marginal there. That's really all we're doing at this stage as an industry is finding marginal benefits. I think the real home run is to think more broadly and bigger about how we kind of disrupt our own supply chain, our own software stacks, our own operating models and to do that could be material.

I'll let Enrique chime in if you want, if you're on, Enrique.

Yes. I mean, I think maybe the first thing I'll emphasize, Mike, is, as you said, it is real. We have gone from a year ago, exploring AI to now seeing real benefits being delivered today and even more importantly, over the next 12 to 24 months, pretty material improvements, I would say, maybe most of the industry is seeing a lot of benefits on the call center and the support part of the business first. We see that going to operations. But we're really getting excited about what we're starting to see as innovation more on the revenue side. And I think we're going to see '26, at the end of '26, we're going to look back and look at those revenue opportunities as the year where they became real. .

Mike, can I just have a quick plug. Sorry, I was going to say can I have a quick plug at sort of Liberty point of view. Look, the other aspect of this is back-office services. which is not as big as what Mike and Enrique said in the front of is the middle office, but the back office still is material for a telco, and it's about $1 billion, $1.5 billion by some definitions of spend for us. And what Blume is finding out is there's lots of tech enablement with AI tools to significantly reduce their accounting or payments or procurement of these special products, et cetera, et cetera. .

And we're finding actually these are opportunities where we're getting massive savings by reducing heads, but we're able to scale our existing heads to grow revenues. And that's really what's driving that 20% revenue growth that we see in Blume. And actually, we see that continuing for many years.

Our next question will go to the line of Polo Tang with UBS.

It's really about VMO2 guidance. It was weaker than expected with a minus 3% to minus 5% decline in EBITDA, I think consensus on the same basis was probably going for about minus 1%. Can you help us understand how much of the decline relates to the rationalization in B2B that may be specific to VMO2? And separately, how much of the decline reflects weakness in the broader U.K. markets? And can you maybe just give us some color in terms of what you're seeing in terms of U.K. competitive dynamics in both mobile and broadband.

And I also have a quick clarification in terms of the Netomnia Nexfibre deal because VMO2 is receiving in EUR 1.1 billion of cash from Nexfibre. But can you clarify what VMO2 is giving up? So specifically, what is the minimum commitment on the 4.6 million fiber footprint? And can you give some sense in terms of what the wholesale rate is per subscriber?

Yes. Thanks, Polo. I'll let Lutz address your first question around VMO2 guidance and what we're seeing in the market. And then Andrea, you can work up a good answer to the question around VMO2's commitments. I don't know how specific we're being about that as we sit here now, Polo, but I'll let Andrea address that. Guys?

Yes. Polo, so you can broadly contribute 30% to the B2B restatement of numbers, including Daisy. And 70% is attributed to a cautious view on the fixed consumer market. So it's not mobile, it is fixed consumer. As we all know, competition is very high as we speak. Yes, as Mike alluded to, I think we had a pretty good Q4 with very low fixed net add losses and a pretty stable ARPU. But so far, right, the market is even more competitive. There's a fixed telecom access ready outstanding from Ofcom. And therefore, we have factored this in a cautious guidance. The reason why you see a similar number on EBITDA is simply that we are also paying more and more wholesale fees to Nexfibre, and that is, to some extent, up some of our efficiencies.

But just to be clear, and Charlie, you keep me honest here. The guidance we've provided today for VMO2 does not pro forma into that guidance the transaction with Substantial Group. So we'll have -- this is all happening real time. .

We're going to have to amend it.

Yes.

Completely excludes it also. I think, Mike, why I said Nexfibre is we have a growing customer base in the existing Nexfibre coverage.

I know why you said it. I just wanted to clarify it. Andrea?

Polo, I think there were 3 questions there. One was, are we giving any sort of -- is there any sort of minimum penetration commitments. Now there's an adjustment at closing depending upon how many subsets are transferred over, that's very manageable, but going forward is their minimum commitments. There's also no migration commitments. The transaction is being designed to give Lutz full flexibility in terms of managing the migration from HFC to fiber, which we obviously thought very important in the overall market context. .

I think your second question was just a clarification on what VMO2 was getting. I think if you break it down, VMO2 is getting $1.1 billion in cash and is getting a -- is getting a 15% stake in Nexfibre. In return for that, it's going to spend GBP 150 million to buy approximately 500,000 subscribers at closing, we think is the estimate that the Substantial Group will have. And it's also committing its traffic on 4.6 million homes, 2.4 million in the overlapping Netomnia area and then 2.1 million are in these new homes that we're contributing into Nexfibre 2.0, which has been carefully selected to make it a contiguous complete network. So it's not going to be a sort of Swiss cheese. And I think what was the -- there was a third point, I'm sorry, I'm just...

Third question is, are we providing any detail on wholesale rates and things of that nature. And the answer is no.

No. Yes. Thank you, Mike. Yes, thank you. We're not today, but it's a competitive wholesale rate. .

Our next question will go to the line of Ulrich Rathe with Bernstein Societe Generale Group.

On the Belgium deal, you mentioned a synergy figure there. Could you talk a little bit about what kind of synergies these are because this is a cross-border deal where the story in European telecoms has always been that it's harder to create synergies. And specifically on the synergies, would the financial synergies that Charlie sort of alluded to be included in that EUR 1 billion figure. And if I may just add a clarification, there was some Bloomberg sort of headlines about Telenet deferring a refinancing because of difficult markets. Could you comment on that, if that is appropriate at this time.

Charlie?

Yes. Let me just comment on the Telenet refinancing. I think we felt that the market fully understood the number of steps we were taking in Belgium, which we essentially were to pay down debt to 4.5x on Telenet through the Wyre sale and the fact that we docked in the refinancing to separate out Wyre at the EUR 4.35 billion, we thought have been well understood. I think it probably was in hindsight too much for the credit market to digest in one go. And that's fine.

I mean it was an opportunistic transaction as we always do. We thought that by halving the amount of available Belgium debt, there'll be a lot more demand than we felt. And it was a pretty choppy market. If you may recall, it was a softer market that we had a few a few weeks ago. So I think the discretion is the better part of -- and Nick and I felt that the right thing to do is take a pause. We will let these transactions settle. We'll prove out the various steps.

And at the right time, we'll go away and do what we usually do, which is in the $500 million to $1 billion tranches refinanced. But we still have plenty of time, I think, as we tried to show in the results call, we actually don't have any material debt maturities, particularly include our revolver until 2029 in turn, but we're very confident and hopefully the credit markets will support this, that as these steps unfold, we can essentially reprice the debt and extend the maturity.

And it's interesting, actually, the debt still trades at a very tight level despite this transaction last week, which perhaps is a bit bewildering. Look, I think in terms of the synergies, I think I slightly disagree, I think there are cross-border synergies. Enrique has proved that with the incredible work he's been doing on technology. I mean there's an awful lot of scale benefits and national technology doesn't really have a difference market to market. And I think also, as you rightly point out, the ability to drive financial synergies will come because we are able to use the platform that we will create in VodafoneZiggo and Telenet to really drive the technology across the broader footprint, which obviously has some benefits to us.

So I think we feel pretty good about the synergies. And actually, to be honest with you, we might have undercooked them because we were obviously operating on a clean team basis in this transaction. So stay tuned. Let's see what we can come up with.

Yes. Our track record on synergies is pretty good. And I would agree with Charlie's comment that we've probably undercooked them, especially on the OpEx and potential revenue side. Does that answer all your questions, Ulrich? .

Yes. I was just wondering, so are the financial synergies included? Or is the EUR 1 billion just the operational bit.

They are included.

They are included, yes.

Our next question goes from the line of David Wright with Bank of America.

Again, so much to absorb here. I guess when we're thinking about the Ziggo spin, Mike, it's a strong equity story similar to Sunrise, but that does ignore what I think you flagged at the time, which was Sunrise was a very clear and strong dividend payer, obviously, in a very low rate market, and we've seen that dividend growth just today in the Sunrise share price work so well. There's no dividend story here in Ziggo.

And I guess my other question is, what's the sort of run rate of synergy you guys sort of need to hit in the short term to really commit to the spin. Is that date really in stone there? And I guess my sort of associated question is, I think the VodZiggo guidance was also quite a lot weaker than most of the forecast alongside VMO2. I'm just wondering, is there a sense as you sort of restack this business that you're -- I don't want to use the phrase kitchen sinking, but you are guiding to find a level you can absolutely deliver on and maybe put a little bit more investment into 2026 to grow from.

Yes, David, that's a lot of good questions there. That's I'll try to address and Stephen can jump in here as well. With respect to timing, I mean, we were purposely general about timing. We believe 2027, as we especially get into the second half of that -- of next year, we are going to be able to see or forecast the kind of storyline here that the market will want to see. That does reflect and has comparisons to Sunrise, namely a deleveraging story from free cash flow, EBITDA growth and asset sales.

Secondly, the ability to project or forecast a free cash flow number. We gave you a number today, EUR 500 million. That's 50% more free cash flow than Sunrise generates. It's not coming this year or next year, but we're going to be -- we believe we'll be able to forecast that kind of free cash flow story when it's time to get to the market. And I think the growth -- we've talked quite a bit about How We Win plan and how it -- we even showed you some visuals on the slides about how '26 is an investment year for 2027 and 2028, we start to see a rebound.

So it's our view that all those things when they come together, will tell a compelling equity story. But here's the other thing to point out, which is unlike, say, Oddo, we're not listing this company through an initial public offering. We're not waiting to build a book. We're not looking for a minimum price. We're not going to raise primary capital. So those -- we don't have any of those strikes against us. We're listing the shares and spinning them off to shareholders exactly as we did with Sunrise and the market will find a value, we believe, a healthy good value well above the negative $5 we're getting in our stock today.

That's all you got to believe. That's it. You've got to believe that there's good equity value in this story that in the hands of our shareholders, that equity value will trade well on Euronext exchange with a compelling operating and brand-driven storyline and it will be less than 0. It will be more than 0. That's all you got to believe. And so I think we have lots of flexibility here, tons of freedom to plan how and when and what we do, which is -- which to me is very exciting.

Stephen, do you want to add anything to that on the Vodafone side?

Well, I think the only component I'd add to it as you said. Can you hear me, Mike?

Got you.

So look, as you said, I think the core of it is that we have an unfolding story of business improvement. So the underlying value of the core VodafoneZiggo business, I think, will come through as we get through the investment in 2026 and into 2027. We've shown a track record so far in the last 12 months, and we've got high confidence given what we're seeing today and given the plans we have ahead of us that 2026 will be another step forward in the plan.

And as you say, 2027 will show those return on investments, and we'll accelerate out of that. So I think the core business, if you value the core business, will look slightly different in 12 months from now.

Our next question is the line of James Ratzer with New Street Research.

So I was interested in following up on the slide you had to discuss the kind of Netomnia Virgin transaction in a bit more detail on Slide 22. So you've got a very kind of helpful chart there showing all the cash movements. Could you just run me through also what the debt movements are because Netomnia, I think, will have around maybe a bit over GBP 1 billion of debt on closing. Does that all go to Nexfibre? Or does some of it go to VMO2? And then of the subscribers or the homes, sorry, you've got the 2.5 million homes where VMO2 is going to pay committed wholesale fees on closing. How many subscribers does VMO2 have in that footprint, please?

And then secondly, on the 2.1 million homes that then Nexfibre will be upgrading, what's VMO2's customer volume in that footprint? And to give us an idea of kind of Lutz's incentive to migrate customers over to FTTH, can you let us know, please how many customers today within VMO2 have been upgraded from HFC to FTTH, where VMO2 has done that upgrade itself as a result of the overlay.

Thanks, James. Charlie, you hit the debt question, please?

Yes. So first of all, there's no incremental debt going on to VMO2. I'm not sure how much we're disclosing, but I would underline that Nexfibre will have a fully financed business plan to get to 8 million fiber homes, with a combination of existing debt, but also the undrawn facilities. So this is a fully financed cash flow positive AltNet, which I don't think we can say about all of them. And I think in terms of the details of the numbers, look, let's take that offline because I'm not sure what we've agreed to disclose or not disclose. But that is the key message, fully financed and no debt into VMO2.

And on the 4.6 million homes, Andrea, keep me honest, I think you could -- we're not disclosing the number of customers today, but you can read across from our broad penetration rates to those areas. It's going to roughly equal our current penetration rates. I think it's a safe bet. Lutz, do you want to address the fiber question? .

Yes. So far, we have a very low number on fiber in our existing Virgin Media, O2 cable coverage, right? Majority of our customers in fiber are coming from the fiber network Nexfibre owns. And so we still -- no customer is leaving us because of technology. Also, we are able to acquire exactly the same number of customers in the cable network as well as in fiber. So therefore, commercially, we don't have, at the moment, an incentive to put customers on fiber. And therefore, we have a low number for now.

Yes. But in this, you should assume in the deal we just announced, there will be some incentives. For example, cost to connect, wholesale rates, but we're not disclosing those details today. .

That will conclude the formal question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the call over to you, Mr. Fries, for closing remarks.

Sure. Thanks for sticking with us, guys. Sorry, we went a little bit over. We had a lot, as you said, to disclose. I just want to say quickly, thank you to everybody on the call today from my team because this has been a Herculean effort and just about everybody on this call is involved in the transactions and of course, delivering these results. So thank you to each of you for the great work and terrific, terrific outcomes.

And look at the deals we think were announced today, I'm excited about. I think they unlock both value, but also give us a tactical runway to control our destiny here, specifically in the Benelux region, but also, I think, increasingly in the U.K. market. So they're the right kind of deals. It's exactly what we told you we would do a year ago. I think you can trust us when we tell you we where we're focused, what we're focused on and how we intend to create value. So I appreciate you joining us. I know there'll be a lot of questions and follow-up, you know where to find us. So thank you, everybody.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes Liberty Global's Fourth Quarter 2025 Investor Call. As a reminder, a replay of the call will be available in the Investor Relations section of Liberty Global's website. There, you can also find a copy of today's presentation materials.

Okay. Good morning, everyone. Let's begin the next session. My name is Terence Tsui. I'm an equity analyst at Morgan Stanley, and I'm very pleased to be on the stage with Liberty Global and the company's CEO and Co-Founder, Mike Fries.

Mike, welcome. Really good to see you in Barcelona. Thank you for supporting this conference.

Year after year.

So let's get right to it. Lots has changed at Liberty Global over the past years. You've now established 3 core platforms in Liberty Telecom, Liberty Growth and Liberty Services and Corporate. Please, can you walk us through the strategic goals in each of these core pillars? And what you've -- and the progress you've achieved over the year?

Sure. Great to be here, as usual. We are like all the telco folks you'll listen to this week, in that we maintain very strenuously that we're undervalued on pretty much any metric, whether it's a net asset value, discounted cash flows, some of the parts. We're unlike the other telcos, though, in that I think we have really 3 unique pillars to create value. We have, of course, the telecom assets, which you know and love and so do we. We've been doing this for 3 decades, buying and building telcos, broadband, mobile, throughout Europe.

I think at one point, we're in 20 different countries across Europe, typically exiting at really good values and prices and remain today in a pretty sizable platform, $22 billion of revenue for core markets. And these are great assets. I mean, these are businesses that we'll talk about, I'm sure, have a lot of opportunity, probably getting 0 value in our stock today for those assets given that we're levered 5.5x and people are putting pretty low multiples these days on those cash flows for whatever reason, we can argue that.

Then we have a Liberty Growth platform, which is relatively unique. It's probably $8 to $9 a share. We're an $11 stock. So $8 to $9 a share just in our media-sports infrastructure assets, which we can talk about. And then we have embedded in our business, like a lot of telcos, we're carving out some service platforms. So we have one in particular called Blume, which we can discuss. But these tech and financial services platforms generate over $600 million a year of revenue and positive OFCF. So that, in our view, is another pillar of opportunity and growth.

And then lastly, we are heavily focused on our corporate spend. There's a reason for that. Again, $10, $11 stock a year ago, not even a year ago, 6 months ago. The average analyst put a negative $10 a share, negative $10 a share on our corporate, negative $10 on a $10 stock. Well, we got the message. We started the year with guidance of $200 million. We lowered it in Q2 to $175 million. We lowered it in Q3 to $150 million. We told you next year it will be $100 million. So at a minimum, our stock should be at $5.

If you're being honest, and straight with your math, it should be up by $5 just on that announcement in our Q3 call alone. We talk about how we've done it and what that means. So in each of those 3 pillars, we know there are opportunities to unlock value, and we are focused on them in each instance, and we can talk about them through the course of this conversation, I suppose.

Yes. Thanks very much, Mike, and that's very interesting. And lots of topics to follow up on. If I can begin with a discussion around the opportunity to separate some of your operating businesses, you've said that's important to help unlock the conglomerate discount in your stock. Please, can you update us on how you managed to create value at Sunrise, some of the progress that you've initiated this year as well? And what could you see coming up in the future?

Sure, sure. So for those -- I'm sure most people have followed it, our Swiss operation spun out in November of last year. We announced it in February '24. We spun it out tax-free in November, trading today at about 8x EBITDA, 8% dividend yield. Interestingly, when we spun it out, it was roughly 20% of our proportionate telecom EBITDA, 20%. The market cap is bigger than our market cap today. So that's a pretty good value unlock, but it says more about what remains in the business, in my opinion, than anything else.

What are the things that made that work, 4 things really. Number one, it's a great market, a highly rational market in Switzerland. Number two, we delevered the business from 6x to 4.5x. JPMorgan was adamant. UBS was adamant. Nobody is interested in 4.5x levered companies. Well, it turns out they are. Stock is trading brilliantly in the Swiss -- on the Swiss Exchange. Third, we had a very clear network strategy, a hybrid network strategy, where half the market was covered with 2-gig broadband on HFC. The 100% of the market was covered on a fiber whole buy by deal with Swisscom. So we had an excellent network strategy, 5G behind us, CapEx at 50% of revs.

And then lastly, we are generating great free cash. And that free cash, we're dividending 70% of it out. And we just raised the dividend for this year. So a progressive dividend strategy. By the way, the dividend is tax free if you're a Swiss institution. So it's not an 8% dividend yield. It's a 12% or 13% dividend yield because the dividend itself, because it's a return of capital in Switzerland, is tax-free. So that transaction obviously made it clear to us that there's real value in these businesses under the right circumstances. So we will look to rinse and repeat where we can in some markets. We can talk about those. Not every market is going to fit that mold, but much of what we operate today does fit that mold.

Okay. And you also mentioned some ECM opportunities in the Benelux.

Yes.

I wonder if we can explore that in a bit more detail. Do you see any potential for any cross-border synergies?

Well, let's start with Belgium. I mean, let's look at Belgium and line it up to Switzerland. For starters, Belgium is a pretty rational market, 3 operators today. There's a fourth entrant, Digi, but struggling. So we have a market in Belgium with 3 core operators. We have really good share, really good brands, strong, almost incumbency type position in that market.

Secondly, we've already fixed the network story in Belgium. We have carved out our fixed network. We are building fiber off balance sheet, fully financed. And that netco is a source of deleveraging, so we just announced $4.35 billion underwritten commitment that will fund the fiber build in Belgium as well as delever the netco -- the servco, pardon me, Telenet itself, because when you divide these things, the netco has different margins, different characteristics or more leverage on the netco, less leverage on the servco.

So -- and the third thing we're doing is going to sell down a stake of that netco called Wyre, which will take Telenet leverage probably down to 4.5x. So you've got a rational market. You've got a rational fiber market. We've announced this deal with Proximus, where each of us will basically agree not to overbuild each other. And we'll have 100% wholebuy -- wholesale market share in some portions of the country. They'll have it elsewhere. So highly rational fixed network market, fully financed off balance sheet, a source of capital to delever the servco, feels to us like that asset. And by the way, an inflection point coming on free cash flow as the mobile CapEx has declined. So all the ducks are lining up, so to speak, on that asset.

In terms of the Dutch asset, listen, we have a partner there going on, I think, 9 years. I was thinking about that this morning, 9 years. At 63 years in dog years, it's a long time. But we're good partners, and we -- the business is doing well. We'll talk about it, I guess. Whether or not we bring that together, merge things together, hard to say. But we can do any -- whatever we want with our 50% for the most part. So if we said, hey, we're going to spin off Telenet. We think it's right. It was a public company. KPN trades at 9x and a 5% dividend yield. It's a good comp.

We could put our portion of Vodafone to go into that trade if we tracked it. Spinning might require some approvals. But nonetheless, there's lots of optionality. The nice thing about our portfolio is we have dozens of tools in the toolbox, because of how we're structured, because of our tax position. We can spin track list really efficiently across the board in multiple combinations. So stay tuned. I think we said -- I said on the call, decisions are pending there. I think that's right. We'll make some decisions relatively quickly.

Great. That's very clear and lots to look forward to. Let's stay on the Liberty Telecom and talk about 2025 business performance so far and some of the growth initiatives that you've implemented. What are you pleased about? And what work still needs to be done?

Well, look, we're in a competitive market across the board. What's impacting that competitive position? Listen, we've got MVNOs that are getting quite aggressive, almost everywhere, flanker brands, budget brands, no matter where we operate and any operator up here, they're not telling you this or not telling you the truth. Wherever we operate, MVNOs are getting more aggressive. In some cases, like the U.K., we have altnets that are also getting quite aggressive with pricing.

So if you take the U.K. as an example, which is a bit of an outlier for us, I'd say it's highly competitive in the U.K. today, you've got MVNOs. Now, we have a flanker brand, too. So we're getting our fair share with giffgaff, but nonetheless, pricing on mobile -- even though our ARPU is up, pricing on mobile is tough. And, of course, broadband net adds are also tough because altnets are quite aggressive.

What are we doing about that in the U.K.? We've launched Netflix across all of our broadband and entertainment bundles the most part. We're doing a much better job proactively recontracting people dealing with this One Touch Switch challenge. We're doubling speeds where we can. We're, I think, doing a great job on retention. So there's a lot of tools that we're using in that marketplace to grow, doing reasonably well on postpaid.

I think we're flat in the third quarter if you exclude B2B on postpaid, but we lost mobile sub -- broadband subs in the third quarter. Now, fewer than we did in Q1 and Q2. So trajectory is good, but it's a competitive marketplace. And all the markets are, I think -- can be characterized similarly. We can all cut costs. We're doing that really well. We can reduce CapEx. We're all doing that really well. The topline is where you need to put your attention. What can we do? What can we each of us do? What can the industry do to drive top line growth in a competitive environment?

Okay. And that's kind of a nice segue to looking at the regulatory and the antitrust environment. Investors have hoped for a more favorable regulatory environment throughout the year. Can you highlight some of the changes that you've seen? And what you think still needs to be done?

Well, I think we're -- I think if you look at that, I've been up here many, many years, I would say this feels like a good moment. We're not there yet, but the Draghi report, combined with, well, say, what's happening in the U.K. around merger control, I think there's a nice tailwind here on regulatory, but it's not done. What do I mean? The EU has done nothing really about the Draghi report. You saw the letter that all the mobile operators sent out. We signed that letter. Really done very little to be honest around spectrum, merger controls, prioritizing growth. These are things that they haven't really done anything tangible. The Digital Networks Act hasn't come out. It's been delayed.

So I think we have to raise the temperature in Brussels. This is -- we are critical infrastructure. You've had your foot on our neck for 20 years. AI infrastructure is really cool too, but none of it works unless it all works. And so I think that message is getting through. I hope it is getting through. Some markets, like the U.K., where they've made significant changes at the CMA, and -- that's positive. So I think in principle, this consolidation message, and I know my peers talk about it all the time as well, this in-market consolidation message is starting to resonate. And I'm hopeful that we'll see more of that.

And in the U.K. specifically, there's a lot of noise around the upcoming budget, future tax changes. From a Liberty Global perspective, what are you pushing towards in the U.K.?

Well, fewer taxes. That's pretty straightforward. Look, if you want to tax the big tech guys on their AI infrastructure, have at it, but stay away from the small tech guys. We're small tech, right? We are trying to build fiber, build 5G, give the market a shot and the idea that they would tax us in that process, anybody in that process, altnets, incumbents, competitors, is crazy. So let's hope that's not in the budget. Let's hope that -- we're already paying taxes that I think are excessive, so let's hope that's not the case.

Okay. Let's drill in a bit more detail into some of the countries. Let's touch on the Netherlands, new management team at the start of the year. You've guided to mid- to high-single-digit decline in EBITDA for 2025. How do you envisage the turnaround taking place?

Well, it's already happening, right? I mean, we talk about it on our quarterly calls. You can see it in the numbers. Q3 was better than Q2. October was better than September. This week was better than last week. The trend has kind of been reversed. So Stephen has done a great job in getting the business turned around. That's number one. And how has he done that? Well, it's straightforward stuff, invest in the brands, number one, Vodafone is a good brand in that market, invest in it. We have done that, get the front book back to where it needs to be, and that's -- it happened pretty aggressively. We've launched 2 gig pretty much everywhere in that market, committed to DOCSIS 4.0 in that market.

So I think we've got the tools, and we've got the methods in place to drive continued improved performance there. I'm not going to give you guidance on what that's going to look like, except that we're patient. Why are we patient? Because it's also a 3-player market that's highly rational. Talking about KPN trades at 9x EBITDA, a great comp there. We are going to generate free cash. We do generate free cash, and we will continue to generate good free cash in this market. So we're patient in the Dutch market.

I think Stephen is doing a great job. I think the turnaround is working. He's created a winning spirit, sort of an edge that the company needed. We've got content differentiation. We've got a lot of real advantages to push in the Dutch market, and we're starting to do that, and the numbers are showing that.

Yes. And then on the U.K., you mentioned it's highly competitive. Do you think this level of competitive intensity can be sustained in the medium term?

It all depends. I mean, Simon is here from CityFibre. He will disagree with me, but most -- or maybe not, most altnets are going to struggle in this market and need to be either consolidated or shut down. Not all of them, but certainly most. So there's a lot of noise in the fixed marketplace today. And whether that's sustainable, I think, is a big question mark. We've got 4 big brands in that market, 3 networks plus altnets, plus 4 real brands, right, us, Vodafone 3, BT and Sky. Sky is sizable. They don't own network, but they've got a lot of customers. So there's 4 brands kind of punching it out. And then MVNOs and altnets on either side, grabbing share. So it's a highly competitive market.

As I said, I think it's an outlier for us in terms of the level and intensity of competition. But as I mentioned, we've got the right things, in that Lutz and the team are doing the right things. And there are some green shoots in terms of quarter-by-quarter and where we see the business going long term. It's growing. EBITDA is growing. There's no question about that. We think we can modulate CapEx.

We've got a fiber strategy. It's largely off balance sheet, but we have a fiber strategy, both on balance sheet and off balance sheet, that's reasonable. We're building -- upgrading fiber at GBP 100 a home. And that's like Latin American numbers, and we operate in Latin America. I know those numbers. So we're upgrading at very low prices at very low costs. And we reached almost 6 million, 7 million fiber homes today of our footprint are already fiber. So we're on that journey, and I think we're on it cost effectively. That's the key.

And then this highly competitive market, how do you balance price versus volume?

It's value. It's value. I mean, look at our ARPU in mobile is up, ARPU in fixed is stable, so we're prioritizing value over volume. That should be clear, and it's the right thing to do. Now, we have multiple brands. So we have giffgaff. We have Virgin Media. We have O2. So we have multiple brands. We have a multi-brand strategy like everybody in the telco business today. So we're attacking every segment, but I think we're trying to drive value.

Okay. And then switching back to Belgium. So you mentioned some of the strengths of Telenet compared to the competition. How do you see the competitive landscape evolving over time? I didn't think Digi have had that big an impact so far this year, but they could be a bit stronger next year. How things are looking like?

I mean, Telenet has a lot of advantages in the mobile space, the best 5G network. We've got a kind of real greenfield opportunity in the South, so I think -- and 3 quarters of improved performance. So Telenet is on a good run. Digi has struggled, but we don't count these guys out, ever, ever. And those who operate in Spain can speak to that. You can't count these guys out, and we don't. Now, they've had a tough time of it, and this is not Spain or Portugal. This is a different market, Belgium, for all kinds of reasons. But I think one thing for sure that we've done, which has been a real positive, is at least we've rationalized the infrastructure side of the market.

It will be one thing to have 3 competitors, maybe a fourth, and also massive disruption and chaos in infrastructure. But what we've agreed with Proximus, which is now being market tested, is essentially a rational approach to fiber build. We build here, you use our networks, everybody uses our network. You build there, we'll use your network, everybody uses your network, a very rational approach to spending because it's an expensive build in Belgium. And that, I think, will lead to a more rational market long term.

Okay. Very clear. I'm just going to pause for a short moment to see if there's any questions from the audience on Liberty Telecom or I switch to the other core pillars. Anyone got a question about the U.K., Holland, Belgium or Ireland? Okay. Let's turn to Liberty Growth. So actually, let's just begin with an overview of this division, let's familiarize investors.

Sure. Well, it's a -- okay, I'm sure most of you have some basic appreciation for it. It's about $3.5 billion of assets, principally in media, in digital infrastructure and tech. This is stuff we've been doing for quite a while, building over time. And so that's $8 to $9 a share, something like that, that sits in this business. We can talk about each one of those if you want. But it's -- so we're looking for scale-based opportunities. We think we have real capability to do that in many instances. It's also a source of cash for us. And we've talked about what our goals are in terms of re-rotating capital out of this bundle of assets into opportunities to unlock value, whether it's in telecom or elsewhere.

I think 6 investments in that group account for 80% of the value. So if anyone is interested in doing the work, here's the good news, you don't have to look at 70 things. You have to look at 6 assets that account for 80% of that value. Two of those are in infrastructure, digital infrastructure. We were very early as a telco, I think, to the data center game. Now, we're not in it as big as we would like to be in it, but we definitely saw early on that data centers and this need for this infrastructure will be growing and important. So we have 2 businesses there.

We have a small stake in a global data center company called EdgeConneX. We invested 10 years ago in this business. I think our IRR so far is 30%. We've got a net $150 million in it today. It's worth $600. And if anybody wants to buy it, come see me afterwards, we would monetize it just because it's a 5% stake, but it's real value creation. So if anybody is wondering like what are you doing with all these things? What makes you think you know what you're doing? Just look at that one, put in $150 million, it's worth $600 million. We've already taken $50 million out. We built it.

We started another one, more of a homegrown play called AtlasEdge, where we seeded some property assets in together with DigitalBridge. And we are a Tier 2 data center player looking to get to about 200 megawatts, something like that. And maybe about $350 million in that, we market conservatively at $500 million. And this piece of the ecosystem is pretty vibrant right now. So we're in a good spot with those 2 businesses. But that's over $1 billion of value that another $3 a share, we don't get credit for. So what will we do with that? Watch. We'll exit, we'll use the cash. We'll maybe create a digital infrastructure spin-off of some sort, combine other assets. So it's a real opportunity for us.

The tech space is traditional venture capital, where we've got about $400 million net in today in AI, cyber, cloud, real smart investments. And then, the media space is mostly sports. But out of that $3.4 billion, we've exited about $300 million this year. There's another $1 billion we can exit there. So it's a source of cash to do some of the things I described earlier in the telecom platform that's yet to be utilized. I'm not giving you a time frame on the $1 billion. I'm simply saying that we think as we look at the portfolio, a lot of these things that don't fit or we had for a long time, we can turn into cash. So it's a source of cash, it's a source of growth. Many of these things are big assets, Formula E. These are big assets that are worth hundreds of millions or billions and will over time be what we're talking about up here. So I'm pretty sure of that.

Yes. And you've got the target of $500 million to $750 million in noncore disposals within that. Can you just highlight some of the progress that you've done, like on ITV, for instance?

You had to go there. Well, we said $500 million to $750 million. We've done $300 million exits this year. In every call, I'm saying we're going to be patient. We're going to be smart. We felt a little pressure. We sold half of our ITV stake, and then, the Sky rumor. So it's a good example of we shouldn't -- on things like this, it's not guidance, it's sort of an aspiration. And so we'll see. We don't have the need, but we're sitting on $2.2 billion of cash by year-end. Assuming no more asset sales, we will have $2.2 billion of cash at year-end, arguably no use of proceeds today. We can talk about the various things we'd like to do, but we're sitting on quite a bit of cash as we sit here, $5, $6 of cash or more. And we've got to figure out what we're going to do with that, but we can replenish that cash, and we'll continue to do it in a smart way at the right time.

And then a word on Formula E.

Okay. Get me started. Listen, I think you zoom out, no question that Formula One and certainly a lot of other sports have thrived post-COVID. This experience, economy is -- in our view, I think many people share this view, is really strong and vibrant and probably going nowhere but up. It's difficult to own anything in sports that's global, that has global reach. And we think motorsports, in particular, is pretty exciting.

Now, add on top of that, we're starting our 12th season, so it's early days. But if you look at it, what makes it interesting? Why are we reaching this tipping point that's got me excited? It's awareness, it's excitement, but it's speed. This car is doing -- I mean, we're all Formula One experts now, so I'm not going to pretend I know more than anybody else. But Formula One car inches faster changes, sometimes it's slower depending on the season. This car is doing this. When we first started, the thing was lucky to go 140 miles an hour. We are testing the Gen 4 car now. You can go online, check it out. It's awesome looking, well over 200 miles an hour, 0 to 60 in 1.8 seconds. It is physics.

I don't care if you ever buy electric vehicle or if you give a cred about electric vehicles, electric motors kick-a**, and they are going nowhere but up. And I'm excited to see Gen 5, Gen 6. We put some slicks on this thing. So the racing is what's got me excited. The speed of the racing. We got to do a better job of getting noisy, being noisy, getting celebrity, you see, well, that's all going to happen. We're in our 12th season. But to me, we pretty much break even. So it generates $0.25 billion of revenue, breaks even. We're not putting a lot of money into it in this season. But it's exciting. And so -- we're racing in China, in Tokyo, in Brazil, in Mexico, in the U.S., in Europe. It's got all the ingredients to be, I think -- and I talk to people in and around F1 all the time, right? And they don't disagree. It's got all the ingredients to be, I think, super important in motorsports. Put the sustainability stuff aside, it is a net zero since day 0. That's awesome, but it's fast. And that's what's got me excited.

Very clear. Let's turn to Liberty Services and Corporate. So this is an area where you had the improved EBITDA guidance actually throughout the year. So what savings have you made in this area? How sustainable are these?

Well, as I said, we started the year saying we're going to spend $200 million net corporate spend. Again, remember, at our topco, we have no debt. We just have people and expertise and relationships with our opcos and service agreements and these types of things. So we said we would spend $200 million. That's now down to $150 million for the full year, just in-year reduction of spend. And that run rates to $100 million next year. So it's in the bag, sort of $200 million to $100 million. This is what we are getting a $10 ding on our stock book. How did we do that? Got more efficient in some of our tech service platforms, but mostly headcount reduction.

So we've reduced the headcount at the topco by 40% by year-end year-over-year. We went to 4 days a week and gave people an option to voluntarily leave and 20% did, which is by book, just fine. And then, we had another 20% of involuntary departures. So we were much leaner. We reshaped the operating model, and we go into '26, spending 50% less at that corporate. And we think there's opportunities to bring that down further, not necessarily with further headcount, but that's always in the possibility, but also reallocating some of that corporate to certain of these growth assets where we're providing services, getting better at how we're charging the opcos for services. So there's ways of generating incremental revenue to the topco. That would bring that down -- that number down further. I might give you an estimate of what that might be, but meaningfully less.

That's upside, that's definitely not in our stock. And maybe we have to prove it to get there, but we already demonstrated $200 million to $150 million and run rate is $100 million next year. So at some point, a couple of analysts have started doing the work. The rest will do it when they get around to it. But that's a pretty significant adjustment in the corporate operating model that I think is -- we have room to grow, room to do more.

And then the value creation opportunities in this unit around Liberty Blume?

Well, I think Blume is interesting. I mean, everybody -- I don't know how many of our peers have done this, but Blume is -- essentially was a department that we've carved out, right? Service carve-outs are happening right and left. In this case, we do about GBP 100 million of revenue, mostly to the opcos. Back-office solutions is about 2/3 of that, procurement, insurance, energy management, not really sexy stuff. But we generate a margin on this. So we decided to pull this out, call it, Liberty Blume.

And now we've got Virgin, Atlantic, Zayo, Canal+. We're starting to build a third-party revenue stream. We'll partner with people in this space. We've made acquisitions. So it's a separate unit. It's got its own brand, its own team, its own P&L. We'll probably create a segment around it. And these types of businesses trade at much higher multiples than we trade at. And if some -- if it's doing GBP 100 million of revenue today and that goes to GBP 200 million or GBP 300 million, and they stick with their reasonable margin, $1 billion business.

So as far as we're concerned, all the pressure is on the management team. You want to go give this a shot, we will carve it out and give it a shot. So it's -- but it feels like it could be something substantial. Again, when you're trading at $10 a share, $1 here, $4 there, it all adds up. And these are things not really -- nobody is doing the work on this. Fair enough. We're doing the work on it. And in time, we'll demonstrate the value.

And then turning to share buybacks. I mean, consistently bought back shares. I think you're trending towards 5% of shares being bought back since the start of the year. Given the share price where it is, is there scope to do more do you think over time?

Listen, I mean, just a little bit of history for those who may not know it. I think in the last 8 or 9 years, we went from 900 million shares to 335 million shares by the end of the year. So that's 65% reduction, something like that, in our share count since 2017. By the way, it cost us $15 billion. So I think we've done a substantial amount of shrink on a relatively small company to begin with. If you own 1% of Liberty Global in 2017, when we spun off Sunrise, you owned 2.5% of Sunrise. That's a good trade. So it's worked, right? I mean, you already multiplied your ownership stake through our buybacks.

And, well, buy back, as you said, trending towards 5%. We'll do that next year, too. Let's see. But we have multiple uses of capital. I've talked about a few of them, deleveraging to unlock value, potentially some things in the growth area, buybacks. So we'll be opportunistic about it, and we'll give you a heads-up in February, where we're trending and what we're seeing. But I think we want to -- the value unlocks, like Sunrise, these are the things that are really going to move the stock. So you're saying you should walk out of this room and say, I should buy the stock.

Okay, we're a telco, we're doing all the same things everybody is doing, trying to drive revenue, be efficient, use AI, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I think it's -- what makes us unique is this commitment to unlocking value. We're not resting. We're not -- I'm not an empire builder. This commitment to unlocking value is an urgency that I have that John shares, that our Board shares. And we will be using all the things we have at our disposal to do that. And we've talked about a lot of them today, that will be value creation right there. And this is something we know how to do.

Okay. Very clear. Let's just pause once again to see any questions from the audience, anything has come up. [ Shawn ] at the front. Please, can we have a microphone brought to the front?

We can repeat the question, I guess.

I was hoping you could comment on John Malone's kind of movement to less involved on your Board and kind of across the portfolio of all the Liberty companies. Does that change anything functionally? What's kind of your thought process there? And then, for the first time in a long time, European cable and telco is in a better position than U.S. Maybe, how would you assess the competitive landscape kind of across the globe? And how it affects Liberty Global specifically?

Sure. Let me start with John. I think I've worked with him half my life, this guy. And I won't ever work with anybody as impactful, as unique as him. Now, here's the good news. I'm still working with him. He may not be on the Board Jan 1 and have a Board vote, but he's my first phone call. So I would not overestimate the news. I wouldn't now address the impact of the news. I think he's going to be 85. He's certainly looking to be less tied down, and he wants to have time to do lots of things, but he has tons of energy, and he's definitely focused as a significant shareholder on what we're doing, on what everybody in his ecosystem is doing.

And we've had a relationship for 25, 30 years that we will continue to have one, and he's my go-to. So I wouldn't overestimate the change there. He's always given us the bandwidth and the freedom to do the things we want to do. He's been a great coach, a great mentor, a great cheerleader, and he'll always be that for us. So I think it's -- I guess, it's an interesting news, it's important news. But I think from my point of view, we're -- it's business as usual.

In terms of Europe versus U.S., I couldn't agree more. I think the U.S. has hit a rough patch, at least in the fixed space, partially because I don't think the CapEx window looks as interesting. In Europe, what's clear is 5G nearly done, depending on the market. Fiber and/or upgrade fixed networks, nearly done depending on the market. So there's light at the end of the tunnel. And that light at the end of the tunnel means one thing, free cash flow. You can drive free cash, you're seeing it in our peers and to some extent in our markets. If you can drive free cash, pay dividends or you allocate capital effectively, there's a value creation story there.

There's this -- also this tailwind that the U.S. doesn't have, this idea that, quite frankly, not only is this critical infrastructure to consumers, it's critical infrastructure to governments. With AI, we can talk about that all day long, but this notion of sovereignty in Europe is quite strong. And governments are looking at their players, incumbents and otherwise and saying, wow, this is really -- we got to get this right. This is not something to mess around with. Yes, we need cheap products and consumers have to be happy, but this is much more. It's a bigger game we're playing now with $1 trillion -- coming up with $1 trillion of annual spend on AI infrastructure, all the changes that are going to happen, good and bad in this space.

So I think Europe has some tailwinds that the U.S. doesn't have. It has this CapEx window, I think, starting to look better. There's light at the end of the tunnel. It has, I think, as we talked about, some regulatory support, political support for investments and consolidation, which is critical. We've already lowered prices. I mean, 85% of our customers in the U.K. are already at the front book price. So we don't have this massive back book to front book erosion that the U.S. might encounter if it continues on that path. Pricing has been established here. It's cheap. Let's just be clear. It is dirt cheap to do -- to have mobile and broadband in Europe compared to the U.S. or almost anywhere else.

So we've been there, have done that. It's behind us. So I think there's lots of things to be positive about. And quite frankly, you don't need a big move in multiples. Let's be clear. Give me half a turn, give me a turn. It's like $8. Give me half a turn, just half a turn. Walk out here and say, you know what, I like Mike, I'm going to give him half a turn today. You watch my stock go up 50%. I don't need complete reinvention of the business model. You just need sentiment to be more aligned with what we think is reality. So that -- you don't have that in the U.S., I don't think right now. And so a good place to invest. Yes.

Another question here, please.

You guys have always been great at clearly leverage, tax. Is it inconceivable that Liberty needs to be a listed stock?

Does it need to be or it needs to be?

Well, in your view, to do everything you want to do, does it need to be listed?

Not necessarily. Not necessarily. No, I don't think so. Now, there are advantages when you have public shareholders who you can spin things off to tax-free, that's an advantage, right? The shareholders who hung on to Sunrise did well and got the stock tax-free in a dividend -- sorry, in a corporate dividend to them. So there are some advantages, and then, there are disadvantages. I got to get up on stage like this and whine and whinge. But I think in the end, it doesn't change what we do. It does open up the aperture a bit for value unlock opportunities, although we could take something public just as easily as we spin it, and there's opportunities to do that. And then, you can -- so I think there's -- you can achieve a lot of the things we achieve on a private basis. There's -- permanent capital is a positive thing.

The reason why private equity shops want to go public. There's this idea of having permanent capital gives you longer-term horizons. When you rent money and you rent assets, you have a different approach. I'm renting money and I'm renting the asset because the money has got to go back to somebody in 5 years. And quite frankly, I got to sell the asset to give it back to them. That kind of -- that's a difficult -- it's doable, of course, but at a public company, you don't have to think that way.

You mean a rights offering, something like that? I think it would be going quite a ways back, Rick. I'm going to test your memory here. It would be -- yes, maybe so 10 years ago, if we did it then. But we did a couple ways back. Listen, this is John's favorite tool. He loves these things, rights offerings because he's always in. And if you're not in, he'll happily buy your rights. I'll happily buy your rights. So depending on how you structure it. But we're sitting on over $2 billion of cash. And I just told you, I think I can raise another $1 billion from my portfolio.

So let's say we've got $3 billion of cash. Cash isn't my biggest issue. It's putting that cash to work to unlock value and whether that's delevering an asset in Belgium to get it out to the public and I've traded 7, 8x and not 5, whether that's other businesses within the growth portfolio that are needle-mover businesses, not small thing or whether that's buying stock. So I've got some uses of capital, but I don't think cash is the biggest concern as we sit here. But yes, those are the right questions that you're asking.

Very good. And if I was to follow up on that and just thinking very long time, maybe into next decade, assuming that you are still a public company, and you've completed all of the value unlock and various spinoffs in Liberty Telecom, how do you see your equity story? What will Liberty Global be in the very long term?

Well, look, that's the existential question. To me, it's less relevant than how much wealth have I created for these people? I don't really care what it looks like to be honest with you. As long as getting to that point has resulted in more things like Sunrise, more value-creation moments, that we'll figure that part out. That isn't what drives me or John, if it disappears because it doesn't need to be around anymore, that's okay. I'll find out something else to do. It's more about we delevering value, returning value. That's really what it's about for me and for him and for you. So I'm not as stressed about the existential endgame and what it all looks like. I'm much more focused on today, tomorrow and next year, how are we delivering on the promise to create value for shareholders who have been in the stock a long time or those who have just gotten it and believe that there's an opportunity for real upside here.

Okay. And I wanted to end with a question about Dr. John Malone. That's been partly asked. But I wanted to ask you about the highlights working with him.

Goodness. I mean, I don't know if you've read the book, you should read it. It's pretty interesting. It's definitely, to steal a line from Hamilton, it brings you in the room. There are some red threads in there that I think are absolutely right. The people that he's done business with in his life, myself included, I think, are what has been the highlight for him. There's a lot about Rupert and Barry and Ted Turner and other people that he's worked closely with or mentored. So a lot of really good lessons in there.

He talks about his first mentor who said to him, "Okay, just focus on one question. What's the worst thing that could happen? And if you can live with that, take the risk". What's the worst thing that could happen? If the worst thing that could happen is acceptable, then you absolutely take the risk. He learned that at mid-20s or something like that. You have to adapt. He has one chapter called Adapt or Die, and he's right. If you look at how -- we're a case study in that. When I started this business, we were 100% cable television. Now, that's less than 15% of my revenue. We're 50% mobile, B2B, broadband is the third. So I mean, we're very much about adapting, and he certainly makes that case clear.

I'll tell you an interesting bit, though, which I tell people, we did this book launch for him. I was on stage with Barry Diller and David Zaslav with John. And it occurred to me as I was arriving for that, he sold TCI in -- when he was about 60 years old in 1999-2000 for $58 billion. And it was an okay deal because the AT&T stock didn't work up or whatever, it was the first big thing. Almost everything he's done that you know about, he's done since the age of 60. So I don't know how old you are, it looks like some of you are young out there. But it's certainly encouraging for a 62-year-old like me, he's 84 and still going at it and most of what he's done in the last 24 years. This guy has endless, endless energy. And so I would encourage you to read the book. I've got lots of copies. If you want one, give your e-mail, give your business card to Rick or Michael or Louis, and we'll get you a copy. But anyway, it's fantastic to work with him.

Okay. Thank you very much, Mike.

Thank you.

Great to have you.

Nice to see you, all.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Liberty Global's Third Quarter 2025 Investor Call. This call and the associated webcast 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 of Liberty Global is strictly prohibited. [Operator Instructions]

Today's formal presentation materials can be found under the Investor Relations section of Liberty Global's website at libertyglobal.com. [Operator Instructions]

Page 2 of the slides details the company's safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking statements. Today's presentation may include forward-looking statements within the meaning 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 fact.

These forward-looking statements involve certain risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. These risks include those detailed in Liberty Global's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recently filed Forms 10-Q and 10-K 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 on which any such statement is based.

I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Mike Fries.

All right. Welcome, everyone, and thanks for dialing in to our Q3 results call today. After Charlie and I run through our prepared remarks, we'll open it up for what we hope is a lively Q&A. And as usual, I've got my core leadership team on the call with me. And before I jump into the presentation, I just want to acknowledge and be sure that everybody has seen the press release we put out yesterday regarding John Malone, who has decided to step off the Board and move to a Chairman Emeritus role at the end of the year. Of course, he's making a similar move at Liberty Media.

I won't repeat all the key messages that we put in the public statement, you can read that, and I encourage you to do that, except perhaps to emphasize how important, impactful and enjoyable my relationship with John has been over the last 25 to 30 years and how pleased I am that as he implies in the release, he intends to stay very engaged with me and the Board as we execute our strategic plans. And knowing John as I do, he will surely do just that. Of course, I'm happy to take any questions on this as well at the end.

Now getting back to our results, let me kick it off with some key highlights from the quarter. If you're going to breeze through these slides later, these first 2 are perhaps the most critical in my opinion. I believe everyone is familiar with how we're organized today in order to create greater transparency around strategy, capital allocation and value creation, everything we do falls into 1 of 3 core platforms at Liberty Global. These include, of course, Liberty Telecom, where we're focused on driving commercial momentum in our broadband and mobile businesses and most importantly, finding ways to unlock the intrinsic value of these companies for the benefit of shareholders, and I'll get into that a bit more in the next slide.

Of course, that starts with operating performance. And as you'll see, despite intense competition, we had a strong third quarter with sequential improvement in broadband net adds across all 4 markets, for example. Importantly, our networks are proving to be critical sources of both competitive differentiation like our 5G expansion in the U.K. that's being fueled by the recent spectrum purchases and value creation, like our agreement with Proximus to rationalize fixed networks in Belgium, which I'll cover off in just a moment.

Now a theme you will hear a few times today is lowering leverage and strengthening our balance sheet at Liberty Telecom. And Charlie and his team have worked tirelessly this year to strengthen the balance sheet, beginning with refinancing over $9 billion of 2028 maturities, particularly in the U.K. and NL at very reasonable credit spreads. And that includes the debt financing we just announced that funds the fiber rollout in Belgium while deleveraging Telenet, our serveco in the market, and Charlie will dig into that.

Now turning to Liberty Growth, which includes our investments in media, infrastructure and tech that today totaled $3.4 billion and by the way, provide a source of capital to drive future value creation. This is a highly concentrated portfolio where the top 6 investments comprise over 80% of the value. We're still targeting $500 million to $750 million of noncore asset sales from the portfolio.

And as I mentioned on our last call, we're not going to rush this and price bad deals in the process, but we have generated proceeds of $300 million year-to-date when you include the partial sale of our ITV stake last week. So we are well on our way. Of course, one of the bigger portfolio companies is Formula E, which heads into season 12 in December with significant tailwinds, including double-digit growth in revenue, fans and viewers last year, a knockout calendar of 18 races and the public reveal of the Gen 4 car, which debuts a year from now and doubles the max power of what is rapidly becoming the coolest car in racing.

And we'll highlight in just a few slides our data center investments. With the boom in AI infrastructure, we believe we have a tiger by the tail, as I say, with over $1 billion in assets today and growing. And finally, the quarter brought some great progress at Liberty Services, where we manage large and profitable tech and financial platforms and at our corporate level, where we are in the midst of reshaping the operating model.

I think the big news here is that we are improving for the second time this year our guidance for net corporate costs in 2025. We started the year forecasting around $200 million of net corporate cost. In the second quarter, we improved that to $175 million, and now we're improving it further to $150 million for this year. Perhaps even more importantly, we see visibility in 2026 to just $100 million of net corporate costs.

Now this is a hot button for us as most analysts reduced their target price for our stock by, I think, $8 to $10 per share, just related to that $200 million net corporate spend. These announcements today should dramatically improve our valuation narrative, and you can bet we'll be pounding the table on it starting right after this call. I think Charlie will also address it.

Lastly, on this slide, we note that we're forecasting $2.2 billion of cash at the holding company at year-end, assuming just the $300 million of asset sales year-to-date. Now the next slide provides an update on our strategic plan to unlock value for shareholders. And I guess this is the key takeaway today. First, let me reiterate what we laid out on our second quarter call back in August.

Following the continued success of the Sunrise spin-off about a year ago, we remain committed to pursuing similar transactions that would further unlock value for shareholders. This may include the separation of one or a combination of core operating businesses you see on this slide actually through a spin-off, tracking stock, listing or similar equity capital markets transaction.

I imagine many of you still own or follow Sunrise. The stock has performed well and trades around 8x EBITDA with an 8% dividend yield today. And looking back on that deal, I think 4 key factors laid the groundwork for its success. Number one, Switzerland is a largely rational telecom market. Number two, Sunrise had a less levered balance sheet, thanks to our capital contribution at around 4.5x on the date of the spin-off. Number three, Sunrise has a clear network strategy and CapEx profile. And number four, Sunrise has a solid free cash flow story that supports a progressive dividend policy. That was the formula.

Strong balance sheet, a rational market and a predictable path to stable or growing free cash flow. I won't surprise you to learn that this looks a lot like the things we are working on in the Benelux. For example, at VodafoneZiggo, we've installed a new team with a winning plan that is built around generating long-term free cash flow in a largely 3-player market. We have now refinanced something like 80% of the 2028 maturities with the remainder targeted for this quarter or early next year.

In Belgium, we are even further along. Our recently announced agreement with Proximus, which is currently being market tested by the regulator, rationalizes the build-out and wholesale monetization of fiber in a large part of Flanders with really only one network in 65% of the market. On the back of this, we just announced a EUR 4.35 billion financing for our netco there, which we call Wyre, which fully funds the build-out of fiber and allows us to reduce leverage at the Telenet servco, including all 2028 maturities.

Even more exciting, we're in the early marketing stages of selling a significant stake in Wyre. This is an increasingly common value creation strategy in Europe, as you know, with the proceeds used to further deleverage our Telenet servco to about 4.5x. That's going to take a quarter or 2 to finalize all of these steps, but we're feeling more and more encouraged about the possibilities in this region for a value unlock in the time frame that we articulated.

Now of course, we continue to work on other ideas, which we'll update you on in time. And as I said last quarter, all of the operating businesses or assets you see on this slide and some that aren't even shown can be singled out or combined with one another to achieve a value unlock transaction. So stay tuned.

Now as I said, a key enabler of that strategic road map is ensuring that our operating companies are driving commercial momentum in what are increasingly competitive markets, right? And the long-term goal here is generating meaningful free cash flow. Now towards that end, each OpCo has been implementing a series of commercial initiatives and network improvements that are starting to impact results positively.

This next slide summarizes a handful of those initiatives, which provide important context for the results that follow. Starting in the U.K., where Lutz and the team have been busy across a number of fronts, including the recent rollout of our new pay TV and broadband bundles, which now include Netflix for free that further differentiates us from the competition, in particular, AltNets. VMO2 is also redefining the flanker brand segment with the introduction of Giffgaff broadband services that complement Giffgaff mobile leadership.

And we're rapidly transforming the O2 mobile network using the recently acquired spectrum to launch our first 5G gigabyte, plus we announced the U.K.'s first direct-to-cell satellite service with Starlink for what we call rural hotspot. So a lot happening in the U.K.

Stephen and the VodafoneZiggo team have completely reversed trend in the Dutch market, delivering the lowest broadband churn we've seen since early 2023 and positive mobile net adds in the quarter. Lots of things are working right here, including being the first to roll out 2 gigabit speeds nationwide with upgrades underway for a DOCSIS 4.8 gig launch next year.

We're also investing in the Vodafone brand on the back of the iPhone 17 launch. So the how we will win plan that Stephen has developed is quickly becoming the why we are winning plan, which is exactly what we needed in this otherwise rational telecom market. John Porter and the Telenet team have gone from strength to strength in Belgium in the last 3 quarters, supported by doubling of broadband speeds for nearly 1 million customers, their rollout in the South and a multi-brand strategy in mobile.

And the fiber upgrade in Ireland is proceeding at pace with over 650,000 premises built now, and Tony and the Virgin team are ramping up our wholesale business with Vodafone and Sky and expanding their own reach to new off-footprint territories with fiber. And just to put a marker out there, with CapEx set to fall by 50% in the coming 2 years, we're planning for significant free cash flow out of the Irish business as well.

Now the results on the following slide illustrate this improvement. Don't get me wrong, we are in a dog fight everywhere, but we are fighting right back and differentiating our products and services, attacking vulnerable competitors and driving better results each quarter. In fact, 3 out of our 4 markets, we've demonstrated improved sequential fixed and mobile subscriber results throughout the year and in Holland over the last 2 quarters.

Again, at VMO2, our fixed churn initiatives, things like proactive management of the base and one-touch switching activity are gaining traction and improving broadband performance in a very competitive market. Meanwhile, postpaid mobile subscriber performance has consistently improved quarter-after-quarter this year, including ARPU growth supported by pre to postpaid migrations and our loyalty plans.

VodafoneZiggo reported its third straight quarterly improvement in broadband losses with another strong ARPU result and postpaid mobile adds were positive again, driven by the initiative described just a moment ago. Telenet maintained positive broadband net add momentum for the second quarter running, driven by successful cross-sell campaigns, including back-to-school, while fixed ARPU growth was supported by price adjustments that they implemented during the second quarter.

Postpaid net adds in Belgium were negative despite a strong performance on the base brand, while mobile postpaid ARPU continues to show pressure from the competitive environment. And in Ireland, Virgin Media's broadband base was largely flat with aggressive fiber offers in the market driving higher churn and impacting fixed ARPU.

Postpaid net adds on the other hand, remained strong, and that's supported by a EUR 15 for life offer launched in May, boosting gross adds. So Charlie will walk through our financial results that are tied to these numbers in just a moment.

Let me first turn to Liberty Growth. And by now, you're hopefully more familiar with the components of our portfolio, which, as I mentioned, increased in value to $3.4 billion at Q3. That's around $10 per share. As you can see here, 45% of the value or about $1.5 billion consists of premium media, sports and live events businesses, which we and most everyone else these days see as great long-term investment strategies.

Another 40% is in digital infrastructure, which I'll dig into a bit more on the next slide. And then most of the balance resides in our tech portfolio, which consists largely of venture capital investments in companies, many that are leading the way in AI, cloud and cybersecurity. Now while it might appear like a complicated and diversified mix of investments from the outside, as I said earlier, it's important to remember that 6 of these deals comprise over 80% of the portfolio's value today. You can see them listed at the bottom of the page. Things like a controlling interest in Formula E, which I spoke about, and our remaining 5% of ITV, for example, and the 2 largest assets in our digital infrastructure vertical, which I'm going to highlight on the next slide.

Now both of these infrastructure investments are substantial, adding up to over $1 billion of value for us today, and they performed extremely well, especially in the current environment where the development of AI infrastructure seems to have exploded. We're thrilled to own a minority interest in Edgeconnex. It's a global data center platform controlled by EQT and focused on hyperscalers across over 60 Tier 1 markets in 20 countries around the world.

And we first invested in this company back in 2015. It was much smaller, and we have a net $150 million invested today. And the good news is that we've already taken $50 million off the table and our residual stake is conservatively valued at over $500 million. That equates to a 30% IRR over the last decade. On the right, you'll see our 50-50 JV called AtlasEdge, which is a regional data center provider focused on Tier 2 markets. The company has strong positions in Germany, Austria and Iberia and is seeking to expand capacity to 180 megawatts.

We have a net investment here of about $345 million, and we've had our interest valued by third parties at around $600 million today. Again, both of these companies find themselves in the middle of multiple AI infrastructure and data sovereignty projects, and we are focused on driving continued growth right now in what is an increasingly hot space.

So I look forward to your questions on all of this, but let me first turn it over to Charlie to walk through Liberty Services and our numbers. Charlie?

Thanks, Mike. Turning now to Liberty Services and Corporate. On the left-hand side of the slide is an overview of our central services, which focus on 3 core activities: our corporate group provides strategic management and advisory services in operating and managing financial and human capital as well as technology strategies and investment. Liberty Tech focuses on the delivery of scaled tech solutions, particularly in entertainment and connectivity platforms as well as cybersecurity for our telecoms companies.

And Liberty Blume develops and provides tech-enabled back-office solutions, not just to companies within the Liberty Global family, but also increasingly to third parties. We are reinvesting these tech-enabled efficiencies within Liberty Blume to drive 20% plus organic revenue growth in 2025.

During the third quarter, we undertook a significant reshaping exercise around both Liberty Corporate and Liberty Tech to drive cost efficiencies going forward and make both organizations more agile and well positioned for the future. Starting with Liberty Corporate, we undertook both voluntary and involuntary redundancy schemes, which have reduced headcount by around 40%, with 90% of those leaving by year-end. And in Liberty Tech, we can continue to leverage our successful Infosys partnership with 4 years of proven track record to help secure additional efficiencies and simplification savings.

We expect both the corporate and Liberty Tech initiatives to drive around $100 million of annualized cost savings. Bringing all this together, you will recall that we began the year guiding to less than $200 million of negative adjusted EBITDA, and we've already upgraded this to around $175 million of EBITDA at Q2. Now we're pleased to reduce this further for 2025 to around $150 million of negative adjusted EBITDA, supported by the in-year benefits of our corporate reshaping programs.

Now perhaps more importantly, turning to the fully annualized impact. Once we see the benefits of this reshaping annualized from 2026, we expect our corporate adjusted EBITDA to broadly halve to around $100 million. And from there, we still see scope for further improvement as we evolve our operating model through additional third-party revenues, advisory fees and management services agreements alongside the scope for further cost optimization.

So to put this in context, at the beginning of the year and the average analyst sum of the parts valuation, there was around $10 per share negative impact based on the capitalization of these corporate costs, which was typically at around 12x to 14x enterprise value to operating free cash flow.

We now expect the run rate of negative corporate costs to essentially halve versus the start of the year going forward, which would drive a significant reduction around half of this discount in our analyst valuation. And we would also argue that an EBITDA multiple more in line with the telco comparables, which is much lower, is the right way to value these costs, which would further reduce the impact.

Moving to the treasury slide. We've been extremely proactive year-to-date and through Q3 in dealing with our 2028 maturities in what has been a favorable overall high-yield market, in particular in the bond market. Overall, we've successfully refinanced close to $6 billion across our credit silos year-to-date, and this actually increases to $9 billion if you include the underwritten Wyre financing that Mike has already discussed.

At Virgin Media O2, using existing benchmark financings, we were able to complete mainly private tap transactions amounting to $1.4 billion, bringing to total refinancing year-to-date at Virgin Media O2 to over $3 billion, which leaves us only with around $100 million of outstanding 2028 maturities. VodafoneZiggo, we issued just under $1 billion of senior secured notes during Q3, leaving us with around $500 million of outstanding 2028 maturities. And at Telenet, we've already completed $600 million of financings year-to-date and have recently secured a EUR 4.35 billion underwritten facility for Wyre.

Now this will allow us to significantly refinance Telenet overall and formally separate the Wyre and Telenet servco capital structures and in the process, repay all the 2028 maturities. Now all of this proactive refinancing activity has significantly reduced our 2028 maturities and has actually maintained our average life of our debt at close to 5 years and broadly comparable credit spreads versus our historic levels.

Turning to the next slide. We remain committed to our capital allocation model and strategy to both replenish our cash balance while also rotating capital into higher growth investments and strategic transactions. Starting with cash generation, we continue to see free cash flow in line with our expectations as set out for the year across our opcos and JVs. As has been the case in previous years, we expect the JV dividends to be largely paid in Q4 given the free cash flow phasing of Virgin Media O2 and VodafoneZiggo.

Across all the OpCos, CapEx remains elevated, primarily driven by extensive 5G rollouts in the U.K., Belgium and Holland. And also fiber investment is ramping in Belgium, and we continue to invest in Virgin Media O2's fiber up and Virgin Media Islands fiber-to-the-home program. And this is along with our DOCSIS upgrade path in Holland.

Turning to our cash walk on the bottom right. Our consolidated cash balance was $1.8 billion at the end of Q3 with an additional $180 million received since then with a partial ITV stake disposal in October. During Q3, we saw modest investments into Liberty Growth of $77 million, which was primarily Formula E and AtlasEdge and spent $56 million on our buyback program. We're currently tracking towards a buyback of around 5% of shares outstanding for 2025.

Moving to the Liberty Growth walk. The fair market value of our Liberty Growth portfolio remained stable versus Q2 at $3.4 billion. This was primarily driven by the investments in Formula E and AtlasEdge, offset by the partial disposal of our Airalo stake and a small fair market value reduction in our Liberty Tech portfolio.

Turning to the key financials on the next slide. Virgin Media O2 delivered a modest revenue decline of 1%, excluding the impact of handset sales, nexfibre construction revenues and 2 months of Daisy contribution. This was driven by declines in our B2B revenues, which were offset by growth in our consumer businesses. Adjusted EBITDA at Virgin Media O2 continued to grow at 2.7%, supported by cost discipline and lower cost to capture year-on-year.

Moving to VodafoneZiggo. We saw a revenue decline of 4%, largely driven by the decline in ongoing repricing of our fixed customer base. Adjusted EBITDA was impacted by the revenue declines and commercial initiatives supporting the new strategic plan. Telenet revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth were both impacted by a positive deferred revenue benefit in the prior year of $18 million. In addition, revenue growth was also impacted by the decision not to renew Belgium sports rights, which was more than offset by associated lower programming costs.

Turning to our guidance slide. We're updating 2 items of guidance. Firstly, Virgin Media O2 revenue guidance, where we are confirming growth in the consumer and wholesale revenues. But given the Daisy transaction, which completed during the third quarter and the creation of O2 Daisy, we're currently reviewing the impact of Daisy on B2B reporting, but can confirm our previous guided M&A impact from Daisy of around GBP 125 million of revenue in 2025.

And secondly, as discussed previously, we're improving our Liberty Global Services and Corporate adjusted EBITDA guide to $150 million in 2025. All other OpCo guidance remains unchanged. Now that concludes our prepared remarks for Q3, and I'd like to hand over to the operator for the questions and answers.

[Operator Instructions]

The first question comes from the line of Maurice Patrick with Barclays.

Congrats Mike, on the new role. Just maybe a question given the topical FC article this morning around [indiscernible] in the U.K. I wouldn't expect you to comment on that transaction. But maybe a good opportunity, Mike, ahead of Telefonica's CMD next week to talk a little bit about your outlook and view on investments in the U.K., specifically around the fiber side, whether you -- the NetCo sale plan could still be resurrected,our view around buy versus build and the cost. You've always said you'd consider buying if the cost was comparable to your own build cost. How your thoughts are evolving there would be very helpful.

Sure. And we're not sure what Telefonica will be addressing next week, obviously. We'll all find out. But I think we've been consistent on the fiber point, at least through the course of this year, which is that we'll continue to upgrade our own fiber, and we're now reaching Lutz and his team have access to 8 million fiber homes through a combination of our own upgrade of the Virgin Media network and, of course, the next fiber footprint.

So we continue to, at least with our own homes at the Virgin Media side, continue to upgrade fiber and increase the footprint and the reach of that technology. That's point one. Point two is we've always stated and if you -- we are actually now deal down with the up deal we did about a year or so ago, we've always stated that the market requires rationalization that AltNets, most of them will find it difficult to continue doing what they're doing in the manner in which they're doing it, and we're supportive of opportunities to consolidate and rationalize the fixed network environment, period.

So I'm not commenting, as you suggested, on any particular deal. I would simply say, if you look at our history, where we used nexfibre in the case of up to begin the process of rationalizing, we're open-minded and open for business, if you will, for opportunities that would achieve just that. So I think it's still a bit of a moving target everywhere, but we're hopeful that in the next 6 months, things will start to settle, and we may or may not be part of those transactions that precipitate that settling.

The next question is from the line of Polo Tang with UBS.

I've got a question about the Dutch market and the improvement in terms of broadband that you're seeing there. So can you maybe just talk about competitive dynamics, both in the broadband market, but also in terms of mobile? And how confident are you that you can stabilize the broadband base in 2026? And will this come at the expense of further declines in terms of ARPU? And can you maybe also comment in terms of whether FWA is having any impact on the broadband market?

Sure. That's a great question for you, Stephen.

Yes. Thank you, Mike. So like 3 questions. Can you hear me.

Yes.

Yes, can you hear me? So I think 3 questions. So first is stabilizing broadband adds. We see the market is pretty competitive, although rational. We've set out a plan, which we've spoken to you about at length over the last 12 months, which is working. The heart of the plan is to get us back to broadband growth. That will take us, I think, the balance of next year, but that's what we're pushing towards. It's an uncertain journey because we can't predict what the competition will do, but certainly, we are pushing our plan forward.

The heart of that plan is bringing down churn. You'll have seen and we are pleased with how much we've been able to deal with the churn in our base, and we'll continue to push on with that through the next year.

In mobile, I think it actually was. I think there's a lot of activity like most European markets in the value segment. We're well positioned there with hollandsnieuwe, which has done pretty well for us. We think that there's more we can do in that space, and we'll continue to pursue that through 2026.

And then on fixed wireless, look, I think it's a variable in the marketplace. It's probably a question more for Odido than for us. We're focusing on our plan, reducing our broadband losses, getting our broadband back to growth, and we've accommodated for that within our plan. So I don't really have much to say about what's happening on fixed wireless there.

The next question is from the line of Joshua Mills with BNP Paribas.

My question is on the U.K. market and the competitiveness we're seeing. So wondering if you could give us a bit more color on what you're seeing on the ground. I note that the ARPU development this quarter for fixed line was negative, which may be expected, but perhaps disappointing following the 7.5% price increase in April.

And then on B2B, I understand that there's some moving parts with the Daisy acquisition. But could you just give us an idea of what the underlying B2B growth would have been this quarter and whether that's running ahead, below, in line with expectations, that would be great.

Lutz, why don't you take the broadband and ARPU question and Charlie, you can address the B2B question.

Yes. I mean the market is -- the broadband market is very competitive as we speak. On one hand side, you see offers already around GBP 20 for 1 gig from AltNets in the market per month. And then Openreach came with 2 promotions. I don't know if you're aware, but for copper to fiber migrated customer, you are paying to Openreach for the next 24 months, GBP 16 for 1 gig. So this one promotion, the other one is you don't pay anything when you migrate a fixed wireless access customer onto the fiber network of Openreach, which leads to the fact that you see a very price-driven market.

You see in the affiliate market, which is the most price-sensitive market prices from Sky also in Vodafone around GBP 21 for 1 gig. How are we doing in this? I think we are doing pretty well here because as you all know, we have the highest ARPU in the market. We have the customers who have the demand for the highest speed in the market.

And yes, on one hand side, to now lower churn of our customers, we have offered prevention offers with some dip on ARPU. And also, obviously, we have to get our fair share of acquisition, which leads to lower ARPU. But in the scheme of things, losing only 28,000 customers and having only a dip of 1% of ARPU, we personally think it's pretty good outcome within a pretty competitive market. But let's wait for the announcements of our competitors.

Charlie, do you want to address the B2B.

Yes. So look, as you know, we closed those O2 Daisy in the quarter, we've got a lot of work to do to try and reconcile accounting policies, the revised plans because things like a clean room. So what we've been trying to do is say, look, the businesses that remain outside that perimeter, we still expect to see growth and have had growth year-to-date.

The business that we've actually contributed into O2 Daisy, which is our fixed and mobile B2B connectivity business, that has declined this year. You're right. We haven't actually broken that out and how we take that offline. But I think what we need to do is now we've got this not a joint venture, but a partnership. But in the Q4 results, we'll give you the separate financials and obviously explain how the impact of that business is and how we think it's going to grow in the future as we finalize the integration plans.

The next question is from the line of Robert Grindle with Deutsche Bank.

Congratulations, John, as well as Mike for his new position. I'd like to pick up on the central costs and valuation point, if I may. I suppose that's for Charlie. What would you say the costs are to drive the EUR 100 million annualized savings at the center? Do you reckon it's like a 1-year payback period or longer? Is there any stock impact at all from all these redundancies and any CapEx which goes to offset the savings? Or is effectively the EUR 100 million a straight drop through?

Sorry, it's a pretty good payback. I mean it's de minimis CapEx. Yes, sorry, it's a pretty good payback. There's de minimis CapEx, which is one of the reasons why I think an EBITDA multiple is perhaps a more appropriate way to look at it. If you do take the view that these are costs necessary to run a telco and we just scale them across the portfolio and indeed across our growth assets. So I think whether it's the telco multiple, what that is, but it's certainly along those lines in my mind. In terms of the cost to achieve it, there is some degree of restructuring, but broadly speaking, pays back within, I would say, less than 12 months. So very little frictional cost.

The next question is from the line of Nick Lyall with Berenberg.

Just a very quick one, please, Mike. On Slide 4, I'm just interested why you picked the Benelux markets first and maybe not VMO 2 in the U.K. market. Is it simply just because of size? Or are there any one of those 4 criteria that you just don't think it ticks the box on yet and maybe others are far closer to? Could you just maybe describe why that might be, please?

Sure. Yes, I think we're -- we want to trend towards a Sunrise type framework everywhere we operate. And I think there is a pathway to do that everywhere we operate. We seem to be making and are making meaningful progress in the Benelux for all kinds of reasons, both Dutch market and the Belgian market are highly rational markets, closer to Switzerland than anything else, I would say. They have their own unique peculiarities around competition, but largely rational 3-player markets.

We've been able to attack the balance sheet, specifically in Belgium, where we've successfully created a netco and the servco there and have done the -- are in the process of executing the classic move of putting more debt on the netco as it builds out. It's a higher quality credit. I'm not allowed to tell you what the credit rating is of this EUR 4.35 billion financing, but it's the first time we've ever seen one. I can promise you that.

And using the proceeds and the financing capabilities of a netco to delever the servco, which is the remaining core commercial business. And those combination of steps have been in the works for quite some time. And now we did and have attempted to do similar things in the U.K. as somebody mentioned just a moment ago and not suggesting we can't get to the same place in the U.K. at some point.

But it does appear like, in particular, in Belgium, we are on our way to executing on those 4 key measures. And so that, to us, is worthy of highlighting and letting you know we're busy, very busy in this part of the platform and the portfolio and that if we made a commitment to make some decisions around these things, and I think more likely than not, we'll be making some decisions around this part of our business in the relatively near term, certainly within the time frame that we've outlined. We hope in all of these markets. Ireland, I mentioned, is going to have a massive reduction in CapEx. It's going to start generating free cash, but it's small.

But certainly, Virgin Media Ireland looks and will tick the box on many of these particular metrics. The U.K. is -- look at a trophy business for us, certainly something we are committed to for the long term and is an increasingly important investment. And we are by no means suggesting that we can't achieve similar results or benefits in the U.K. We're simply saying there, we have a partner, and we have to align with our partner on the best next move.

We have a market that's a bit fragmented today. And as we discussed a moment ago, it's going to require some form of rationalization. And so these are things that we work on with our partner. So I'm not suggesting for a second, we can't achieve similar things in the other assets or markets identified on that slide. I'm simply saying we're making good progress here. We'd like you to know about it.

The next question is from the line of David Wright with Bank of America.

Congratulations, Mike, on the new role. It's obviously quite a significant event to see John stepping away after such a significant impact on the industry. A couple of questions, please.

And the first is just on the U.K. guidance and maybe my colleagues are better at this than me, but I'm trying to understand whether there seems to be a change in perimeter here. And I'm looking at the numbers, I'm inclined to think that the same perimeter with the shift in B2B could have forced you to possibly push the revenue guidance lower. This is like-for-like without Daisy. It does feel like you could have had to push the revenue guidance lower. I'm just wondering if that's the case. I'm just struggling to reconcile that.

And then the second question I had, it's just your language you used before, Mike, which I just found a little surprising, which was you sort of said we'll have to see what Telefonica wants to do. Now I might have expected you to sort of say we'll announce our plans jointly next week. Does Telefonica have any sort of strategic rights or priority around the U.K. business in the shareholder agreement? Maybe I've just read this incorrectly, that might be the case. I appreciate that.

No, David, I'm glad you asked that question. Yes. I appreciate that second question because as I spoke those words, I occurred to me those probably didn't come out very clearly. No, first of all, no, this is a 50-50 joint venture. We make decisions jointly, and I have a very good dialogue and working relationship with Mark, we are 100% aligned on everything that's happening in the U.K. So that is not what I intended to say. There was a reference to their Capital Markets Day and I'm just pointing out that we're not part of that. They have a lot of things to talk about to the market, and they will surely talk about those.

But we don't expect any surprises, if you will, around the U.K. market. We're aligned and talk every week about what we're going to do together. So thank you for asking that. I'm glad I could clarify that.

On the guidance, listen, I'll let Charlie dig into it. The way I see it is we're providing greater transparency at a time where it's probably needed for analysts to understand what's growing and what's not and what are we getting our arms around. So Charlie, do you want to address that?

Yes. So look, I'm sorry if it's confusing. And you're right. The difficulty is that we've now got this company called O2 Daisy, and we own 70% of it. 30% of it we don't own. And therefore, at some point, hopefully very soon at the end of Q4, we're going to give you the key financials of that. And as we align that company, it is tricky because there's different accounting policies, as I'm sure you'd d and blah blah. So we're trying to do is confirm what we can't tell you.

So we can tell you that the businesses, excluding the ones that went in there are growing and we expect to grow. And we have told you that to date, the B2B connectivity business, mobile and fixed that we have put into O2 Daisy is in decline. Now if that means you would interpret that as the combination of O2 Daisy would have meant that the business would have not been growing, maybe that's right. But it's somewhat academic because we've got to work through what the O2 Daisy combination is going to develop. And the whole idea was the 2 companies are very synergistic and not just in costs, there's a material cost saving there but also with some revenue growth. So I mean, I apologize if that's not clear enough and having to take it offline, but certainly how we see it.

Super, Charlie. Could I just add a quick one? Are there any puts and calls around that 30%? Or is that just the ownership at Infinite right now?

Charlie, do you want me to take that. It's Andrea.

Yes. Yes, Andrea. Sorry, yes, you should answer.

Yes. No, there are no puts and calls, David.

The next question is from the line of Ulrich Rathe with Bernstein Societe Generale Group.

My question is about the refinancing, obviously very impressive. Question to Charlie. Are all of these financings, can you confirm fully swapped in the usual policies that you used to have in terms of into the local currencies of the operating units and also in terms of fixed rate swaps? Because I do think -- I do remember you did some refinancings where you actually didn't implement these older policies. So just wanted to confirm that the refis now are back to the old policies?

Yes. To be honest, I don't think we've changed our policies. The bonds, we've all swapped at our fixed rate at the rate we issued at, which in some cases is actually higher. So just to confirm the 2 questions. One is all currencies are matched. So everything in the U.K. is sterling. We're not taking dollar or euro risk. So that's a tick on all the policies.

On the interest rates, all bonds are fixed by nature. And on any bank debt, we haven't done a ton of bank debt because the bond market has been so strong, to be honest. We have maintained the swaps. Remember, the swaps are independent of the original bank financings. So we are monetizing or riding those low interest rates until '28, '29, '30. But thereafter, we would have to come in at higher rates, and we are gradually pushing out those hedges. So we are maintaining a pretty good 3-, 4-, 5-year sort of fixed profile depending on which market it is. I hope that sort of answers the question.

The next question is from the line of James Ratzer with New Street Research.

I was going to ask one question. I mean tough to keep it to one. But on Virgin Media, in their release, they are saying they're planning to bring to 4x to 5x in the medium term. I was wondering if you can kind of talk us through the plans to get there. I mean does that require some inorganic steps like a kind of dividend removal, you in Telefonica injecting capital into VMO2? Or do you expect to get there organically through EBITDA growth?

James, that was a little hard to hear. I want to be sure we got the question right. I think you're asking about leverage expectations at VMO2 staying within the 4x to 5x range. And I think that is our objective, and I think that is achieved in a number of ways. But one you didn't mention, which is organic EBITDA growth, which Lutz and the team have been able to deliver consistently.

So organically, the business should delever over time. I don't think we're in a position today to talk about dividends or asset sales or things of that nature, although we do have tower -- residual tower interests that could be used in that regard, and we're always open-minded about it. But getting within the range that we've maintained historically is always our underlying goal. Charlie, I don't think there's much to add to that, but go ahead if you think there is.

No, no, I think that's absolutely right. Look, listen, we are 4x to 5x levered. We're definitely through that in the U.K. So some good synergies potentially from the O2 Daisy deal, which we've talked quite a bit about today. And as Mike said, we expect some organic growth, and let's see how we go.

The next question is from the line of Matthew Harrigan with The Benchmark Company.

I'll just ask one question right out of the blocks. I mean I think when you look at the U.S. and the U.K., it's kind of competing dysfunction on the political side. But that look was recently quoted on Starmer's infrastructure tax. And I don't think there'll be any implications this year, but what might be the longer-term implications? I was on the comcast Q&A, so I apologize if you talked about this in the main discussion, but I'd rather suspect you didn't get to the topic.

Matt, you're asking -- that's a big question, politics in Europe vis-a-vis our business. I mean, I'll step back a minute to say that I think we are approaching -- hopefully approaching a bit of an inflection point here where our industry, for example, the mobile industry just put a letter out to Von der Leyen, I think, 2 days ago, 3 days ago, making it clear to her that change is critical, necessary, needed if Europe is to maintain any sort of path to leadership in digital, industrially, really any category productivity.

So we continue to make our case as an industry, as a sector that we're not just critical infrastructure. We are necessary for pretty much every aspect of growth and productivity that regulators and politicians are searching for. So maybe get off our throats. And that is, I think, being received positively.

In the U.K., in particular, I think the government has had a growth initiative, a growth-minded approach to regulation. Recent changes at the CMA, for example, the Competition Commission there are positive in that they seem to be reflecting a much more growth-minded approach to M&A and to industry consolidation.

So I think there's green shoots across the markets we operate in. There are still pain points, broadband taxes and things of this nature that are unnecessary, and we continue to fight those on a regular basis. But I think more broadly, I would say it's more of a tailwind these days than not. And whether it's sovereignty, where governments are realizing that their -- the critical infrastructure of telco is part of the solution for broader sovereignty and independence or whether it's just good economics that you need healthy telecom infrastructure to compete in the global marketplace. All of those things, I think, are coming together a bit, and I'm more encouraged now than I've been in a long time.

This will conclude the question-and-answer portion of today's call. And I would like to hand back to Mr. Mike Fries for any additional remarks.

Great. Well, thanks, everybody. I appreciate you joining as always, and we look forward to getting back on the phone for our year-end call probably in the February time frame, hopefully, with updates on the strategic road map on how we're driving commercial momentum and more importantly, also how we're reshaping or continuing to reshape our corporate operating model. So I appreciate your listening in today, and we'll speak to you all very soon. Take care.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes Liberty Global's Third Quarter 2025 Investor Call. As a reminder, a replay of the call will be available in the Investor Relations section of Liberty Global's website. There, you can also find a copy of today's presentation materials.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Liberty Global's Second Quarter 2025 Investor Call. This call and the associated webcast are property of Liberty Global, and any redistribution, retransmission or rebroadcast of this call or webcast in any form without expressed written consent of Liberty Global is strictly prohibited. [Operator Instructions]

Today's formal presentation materials can be found under the Investor Relations section of Liberty Global's website at libertyglobal.com. [Operator Instructions]

Page 2 of the slides details the company's safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking statements. Today's presentation may include forward-looking statements within the meaning 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.

These risks include those detailed in Liberty Global's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recently filed Forms 10-Q and 10-K 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 on which any such statement is based. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Mike Fries.

All right. Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today for our second quarter results call. I hope your summer is off to a great start, wherever you may be. As you know, by now, we try to keep these calls fairly consistent, which means I've got my key leadership team on here with me.

And as soon as Charlie and I finish with the prepared remarks, we'll get right to your questions. Now we do speak from slides, and I'm going to get us started on Slide 3 with some highlights, really, I think, the key messages from the quarter. And the first point should not be a surprise to anyone on this call.

When you cut through it all, this management team, this Board remain 100% focused on creating and delivering value for shareholders. We do that through 3 core platforms, Liberty Telecom, Liberty Growth and Liberty Services, beginning with Liberty Telecom, where our goal is to drive commercial momentum and unlock value for you as we did with our Swiss subsidiary, Sunrise.

I'll come back to how we might do this at the end of my remarks, but let me first make some operational comments. I think the main takeaway here is that our markets remain highly competitive with new entrants like Altnets in the U.K. and low-cost providers, typically MVNOs, impacting both gross adds and churn. In the face of these headwinds, our subscriber results are mixed with some markets seeing improved churn and green shoots and others facing continued pressure in both sales and net adds.

Despite these challenges, we're performing reasonably well financially, delivering revenue and EBITDA in line with guidance expectations, and that's helped in part by price increases and strong ARPU results. Not surprisingly, every market is employing similar strategies to drive commercial momentum using fixed mobile convergence or FMC and flanker brands to support mobile sales, AI-based retention and marketing tools to improve churn and speed upgrades and loyalty programs to bolster NPS and harden the base.

We're also committed to having the highest quality networks everywhere we operate. And to that end, our fiber and 5G upgrade plans are on track. We've acquired spectrum in the U.K., which will be very beneficial, and we recently expanded our footprint in the Netherlands. We're also focused on monetizing these networks where and when we can. And we have both tower and fiber transactions planned for the second half of the year to support growth and deleveraging. I'll talk about those.

Now moving to Liberty Growth. Our strategy here also remains the same. Today, our portfolio is worth $3.4 billion, representing a small increase from Q1, primarily driven by additional investments and favorable FX movements. And this is a highly concentrated group of assets. I know we keep telling you that. I think it's important to remind folks, the top 6 investments comprise over 80% of the value here, 3 investments in media, 2 in infrastructure, and that's along with our tech portfolio.

The goal moving forward is simple. We want to rotate capital into higher return investments in sectors that have tailwinds and where appropriate, use some of that capital for accretive transactions at Liberty Telecom like we did with Sunrise. Now our guidance for the year is to sell assets totaling $500 million to $750 million. We believe this is achievable, but of course, we won't sacrifice price just to get to an end date. In other words, if it takes us into Q1, for example, that should be fine.

Along those lines, we've exited our position in Vodafone, which netted around 10% to 15% of the goal. Happy to take questions about that. Now jumping into a couple of updates. I could not be more excited about Formula E's progress this season. Our London race last weekend capped off an extraordinary year. And you may have seen that we just announced an extension to our exclusive license with the FIA covering all electric single-seater racing through 2053.

30 years is a lifetime in this sport, especially with the step changes we are seeing every 2 years in the speed and performance of these cars as well as the growth in fans around the world, which now total $400 million. Now finishing up on Liberty Growth, our commitment to digital infrastructure continues to expand, both through investments in businesses like Atlas Edge and the value attributable to existing assets like Edge Connect, a data center platform and one of our largest and most successful investments to date.

And I'll finish up on this slide, a few comments on our service platforms and corporate operating model. Trust me, when analysts deduct $8 to $10 per share of your stock price for this stuff, it's worth a minute or 2. I'll start with Liberty Bloom, which delivers a multitude of business solutions for 36 enterprise customers, over 1/3 of which are external to the Liberty family.

This new division is on track to exceed $100 million of revenue and generate positive EBITDA this year. I'm excited about the organic and inorganic growth plans at Bloom, which is a great example of how we're taking corporate capabilities and turning them into valuable enterprises. I can tell you, Charlie's goal is to build a $1 billion company here to which I say, go get it.

Similarly, our Liberty Tech platform generates $475 million in revenue and has been driving ever-increasing profitability over the last few years with sophisticated outsourcing arrangements. I think we've been updating you on these, but you may or may not have paid attention. These arrangements keep our team in control of IP and product development, but they reduce our cost to serve. And there could be more of these types of deals down the road.

Perhaps most importantly, we've been acutely focused on our own net corporate costs. Our guidance for the year was to spend a bit less than $200 million when you add it all together, and we are today improving that guidance by at least $25 million as we begin to reshape our operating model. And this is really a good news story, and you should stay tuned for more information throughout the rest of the year. We're confident we can continue to optimize this number through both revenue generation and strategic reshaping.

Finally, at the end of the quarter, our cash balance was $1.9 billion. We bought back about 3% of our shares and depending on asset sales, we expect that cash figure to be higher at the end of the year. So with that as background, I'm going to spend a few minutes double-clicking on our telecom business before handing it over to Charlie for the numbers.

Now I'm on Slide 4, which presents some key headlines for each operation, starting with Virgin Media O2, where we're really excited to be nearing the completion of our merger with Daisy, which will create a B2B powerhouse in the U.K. and the second largest solutions provider to small and medium enterprises with $1.4 billion of revenue and EBITDA of $150 million. As with most of our deals, synergies are substantial with an NPV of $600 million, including integration costs, and that's based on an annual run rate savings estimate of around $70 million by 2030. So this is a great deal.

On the mobile front, VMO2 recently closed on the purchase of 80 megahertz of spectrum from Vodafone 3 that was following the completion of their merger and part of that deal. And this brings our share of spectrum in the market to 30%, which is really significant. It secures our competitive position in the mobile market for a very long time.

And then finally, Lutz and the team are hard at work driving commercial momentum, including a customer service transformation plan that has more than halved Virgin Media complaints year-over-year. That's an incredible achievement. Also, we've been working on product enhancements like data rollover on O2 premium plans and multi-SIM capabilities for the Volt proposition.

So a lot of work going on here. I'm sure there'll be plenty of questions on the U.K. So let me move to VodafoneZiggo, where, as I mentioned, we're starting to see some green shoots as a result of management's strategic pivot in the market. And I'll come back to this on the next slide.

On the M&A front, the sale of our Dutch towers is progressing well, and we anticipate completion in the second half with proceeds likely to be used to deleverage the business. And then finally, we announced a great deal with Delta in the market. That gives us access to another 600,000 homes, greenfield homes really off-net in the South. That makes us a true nationwide operator. In Belgium, we continue to make good progress with Proximus on a fixed network sharing deal. I'll touch on this in a moment, but it's really shaping up to be a great example of regulators seeing the bigger picture on the need for infrastructure investment.

Two more quick headlines here in the south of Belgium, our launch of B over a year ago continues to perform well and unlock 2 million greenfield homes in that part of the country. And after a material investment in 5G over the last 3 years, I'm sure you've been following that, it was great to see Telenet recognized by the government as providing the best 5G coverage in Belgium, both indoor and outdoor.

So well done, John and the team. And then in Ireland, we're racing towards completion of our full fiber rollout. with 80% coverage expected by year-end, with the balance built in the first half of next year. Both with DOCSIS and with fiber, we are the speed leader throughout the country. We recently launched Ireland's first 5 gigabit fiber broadband service. And importantly, we also just added our third wholesale fiber customer in this market. So after Sky and Vodafone, that helps to bring our utilization on the fiber network to 16%, which is great as we've just gotten started.

And then finally, we're picking up momentum in mobile in Ireland with the launch of our 15 for Life offer in May, an opportunity for us to be disruptive. Now okay, just 3 more slides before I hand it to Charlie. I want to be sure that we provide a bit more detail on 2 significant strategic developments in the Benelux region.

Beginning in the Netherlands, where our last call, I think we outlined Stephen and the management team's new strategic and operating plan for the Dutch market. The plan is organized here on Slide 5 into 4 core initiatives. And I'll touch on each briefly. Suffice to say things are coming together well. beginning with the recent implementation of a more agile operating model, and that's been characterized by exactly what you'd think you'd see, simplified processes, accelerated decision-making, optimized costs and all that will result in significant OpEx savings, but more importantly, a more competitive posture vis-a-vis KPN.

And mostly, Stephen has instilled a culture of winning and pride across the organization. That's exactly what we needed here. I love that. Second major initiative revolves around repositioning broadband pricing, which happened in April. And after 1 month, really a 1-month lag, May and June saw a 50% improvement in churn intent compared to April. That's supported by moving to a 24-month contract, but so far, so good. Those are green shoots.

Above all else, it was particularly important to finalize a clear network strategy in this market. analysts have penalized us forever based on what I think is a false belief that we need to build fiber here. Let me be clear, the HFC network at Holland is incredibly robust today and capable of lightning fast broadband speeds tomorrow. So perhaps to put a pin in it, we will maximize the 1 gig speeds we have today across the HFC footprint.

We will aggressively roll out 2 gig speeds using the current DOCSIS 3.1 technology, and we will accelerate our upgrade of DOCSIS 4 with 8 gig speeds expected in 2026. It might also be worth reminding everyone that the cost of DOCSIS 4 in the Netherlands, including the 1.8 gig network upgrade is 90% cheaper than building fiber. 90%. So a pretty clear decision there.

And lastly, the team is reinvesting in VodafoneZiggo's core strengths, in particular, our brands, our loyalty programs, our FMC propositions. This has come to life with things like a new WiFi guarantee, the relaunch of the Vodafone brand and a renewed investment in our Flancin brand. So hopefully, that gives you a slightly deeper understanding of the organic plans the team are busy rolling out, all of which have given us more optimism about 2026 and beyond in Holland.

And next, just a quick update on Belgium and in particular, our discussions with Proximus to rationalize fixed networks. As a reminder, Proximus and FiberClar on one side and Telenet and our NetCo called Wire on the other side, have made significant progress on an agreement to collaborate on the acceleration of fiber across Flanders.

I know this has taken quite a while, but the teams have been working very closely with local regulators, the BCA and BIPT really from the beginning, and we expect that they will launch a market test of our arrangement in September, which is really good news. In fairness, this is a complicated deal. So the right-hand side of this slide attempts to clarify for everyone what's going on here.

To simplify, there are 4.1 million homes in Flanders and Brussels, about 1.4 million of those homes or roughly 35% are in areas that we would consider dense and urban. And in those territories, they're denoted in gray on the pie chart, both Proximus and Wire will continue to build fiber on their own and compete as we currently do.

But in the balance of the market, represented here in different shades of green, we will collaborate really for the benefit of consumers in the end. In the medium dense territories, representing 2 million homes or the lighter green on this chart, Wire and Proximus will split the market up with Wire building 60% or 1.2 million of those homes and Proximus building the remaining 40% or 800,000 fiber homes.

But regardless of who builds where and regardless of which territories, all parties will use the same network for distribution of their services, which means that Wire, for example, in those light green areas, will have 85% utilization of its fiber network and 100% market share of the wholesale business, again, on those 1.2 million fiber homes.

In addition, and this was a bonus in the 700,000 homes that are considered rural, Proximus will use and migrate their customers to our existing HFC network. So we're really excited about this transaction, which improves on what is already a great story in Belgium. By the way, there are some additional value creation steps for us to take here, including creating unique capital structures for Wire and Telenet, bringing new equity investors into Wire and driving free cash flow at Telenet to ServCo from 2026 as CapEx starts to decline. So a lot of positive things in Belgium.

Let me move to my last slide then, it's #7, I believe, which is really the main message I want to leave you with today. I started my remarks by repeating our mission, so to speak, and that's to create and deliver value to shareholders. Before we spun off Sunrise 8 months ago, it was valued at around 5.5x EBITDA as part of Liberty Global.

Today, as a Swiss public company, Sunrise trades at 8x EBITDA with an 8% dividend yield. Now looked at it in a different way. Prior to the spin-off, Sunrise represented about 20% of our proportionate EBITDA. Today, the market cap of Sunrise exceeds the market cap of Liberty Global, where the remaining 80% of that proportionate EBITDA resides along with over $15 of cash and growth investments. Clearly, there is a big disconnect here, and we intend to bridge that gap.

Now you're probably asking the question, how do we do that? How do we continue to unlock value? Well, the simple answer is to continue separating out the parts. So we're sharing with you today that we are currently working very hard on how and when we might be able to separate out the remaining operating assets from Liberty Global. The rationale here is straightforward. It shouldn't be surprising to anyone.

As I just said, the opportunity to eliminate that conglomerate discount in our stock is substantial. We've shown we can do it. And we have built in advantages to achieve that, that others don't. whether it's our siloed debt structure or our tax position or our Bermuda domicile or our NASDAQ listing, we have a wide menu of options available to us, including spin-offs, tracking stocks, IPOs, et cetera.

On the right-hand side of the slide, you'll see our portfolio of businesses and assets today, including Sunrise, which is now owned by all of us, the Liberty shareholders. We believe that over time, each one of these businesses can be tracked, spun off or listed, by the way, in multiple combinations.

Now what's the timing here? And this is where I need to be careful and not to be too vague, but we believe we can complete one or more of these transactions in the next 12 to 24 months. But rest assured, as we get closer to definitive plans, we will surely let you know what those are. It's also important to say that these transactions are not dependent on any M&A, and that includes our joint venture markets.

You can read into what I'm saying there. We don't need to consolidate to get these things done. The key takeaway is that the strategy illustrated here will not change. Our goal is to use all means available to reduce and essentially eliminate the discount in our stock, and I'm confident that we can do that. Charlie, over to you.

Thanks, Mike. Moving on to our operating highlights slide, and starting with Virgin Media O2. In broadband, despite delivering our highest market share of gross adds during the quarter, net adds saw a similar decline to Q1, and this was driven by a continuation of higher churn due to the competitive pressures in the U.K. market, largely from the A Mats as well as the impact of One Touch switching.

Fixed ARPU was stable after 4 consecutive quarters of growth. In postpaid, the decline in net adds was primarily driven by lower value B2B disconnects in the quarter. But encouragingly, O2 postpaid churn fell year-over-year, and we continue to drive initiatives to improve performance going forward and see growing momentum on the Gift Gap brand.

We continued recent growth in mobile postpaid ARPU, supported by price adjustments, which were implemented from April. Moving to Vodafone Ziggo. In broadband, despite the continued competitive fixed market dynamics, we saw encouraging early signs of the new strategy with a modest improvement in broadband net adds supported by lower churn through the quarter.

On fixed ARPU, despite the front book repricing impact starting to flow through, ARPU continues to have some support from the prior year price adjustments. Postpaid net adds were again impacted by B2B port-outs, though it's worth noting that consumer net adds did grow modestly in the quarter. And mobile churn also improved, including the impact of our B brand, Holland Seyer.

Turning to Telenet. We returned to broadband net add growth, supported by improving churn and some easing on the competitive front. We continue to gain momentum with B's fixed mobile convergent offering, including expansion in the south of Belgium. And we delivered strong fixed ARPU growth driven by the earlier implementation of the price adjustment across Telenet from April, which was compared to June of the prior year.

Encouragingly, we saw positive postpaid net adds during the quarter, leveraging base to defend against the impact of Digi's launch in the market late last year. However, Belgium mobile postpaid ARPU remains under pressure from the competitive environment, especially B brand price points in the market.

And then lastly, turning to Virgin Media Ireland. Broadband performance was impacted by an intensified competitive environment, resulting in higher churn during the quarter. Now despite this, our growing wholesale traffic is acting as an offset and supporting strong fiber uptake. Fixed ARPU also remains under pressure due to the pricing environment.

And Irish postpaid mobile saw an improvement in performance following the launch of new mobile offers in May. The next slide sets out a summary of the quarterly revenue and EBITDA performance in our key markets. VMO2 reported a modest revenue decline of 0.4% on a guidance basis in Q2, which was primarily driven by lower B2B fixed revenue, whilst overall fixed and mobile service revenue remained stable.

VodafoneZiggo reported a revenue decline of 2.4% during the quarter, mainly driven by a decline in the fixed base and the impact of the front book repricing, which was partially offset by improved monetization of Ziggo Sport and the Away for content. Telenet reported a revenue increase of 0.6%, supported by growth in both cable subscriptions off the back of an earlier price adjustment and continued strong programming revenues.

Moving to our Q2 adjusted EBITDA performance. BMO2's adjusted EBITDA grew 1.1% on a guidance basis, supported by lower year-on-year operating expenses. And Vodafone Ziggo's adjusted EBITDA declined 0.1% in the quarter, driven by the fixed base decline and the impact of its new strategy and in particular, the repricing of its front book. Telenet's adjusted EBITDA grew 2.8%, supported by price adjustments and lower direct costs. The next slide provides an update on our key capital allocation metrics.

Now starting from the top left, in the first half of the year, we saw cash flow generation in line with our expectations and with our full year guidance. As has been the case in previous years, we have limited cash distributions from the JVs in the first half, which tend to come in Q4.

Moving to the bottom left, I wanted to reinforce a number of midterm free cash flow drivers. Firstly, there's no expected material U.S. tax expenses at Liberty Corporate from 2026 with the U.S. transition tax now behind us, and that's been around $100 million a year annual headwind. As we noted earlier in the year, Telenet ServCo free cash flow is expected to turn positive from 2026 as 5G and digital CapEx spend falls away.

Similarly, with significant progress made on the Irish fiber-to-the-home rollout, CapEx is expected to fall from 2026, driving free cash flow back into positive territory at Virgin Media Ireland.

Turning to our cash walk at the top right. Our consolidated cash balance sits at $1.9 billion at the end of Q2, down modestly from our Q1 closing balance of $2.1 billion. We saw outflows in the quarter related to continued investments in the Liberty Growth portfolio and the execution of our share buyback program.

Moving to the Liberty Growth walk in the bottom right. The fair market value of our Liberty Growth portfolio increased by around $100 million during Q2 to reach $3.4 billion. This was primarily driven by the increase in dollar terms of our largely European currency-denominated investments as well as additional investments in EdgeConnex and Formula E.

Additionally, the exit of our Vodafone collar position generated around $82 million in proceeds. Turning to our treasury update. We maintain a strong balance sheet position with our debt split equally between bank debt and bonds. We maintain a siloed and portable debt capital structure at our operating businesses, where the variable bank debt is fixed using independent swaps, allowing us to refinance the credit spreads on our near-term maturities, whilst also benefiting from the full term of the swaps.

Across the opcos, the cost of debt is around 4% to 5% with an average tenor of approximately 5 years. Now in general, we look to manage our debt maturities so that there are no material refinancing commitments over the next 2 to 3 years.

During the quarter, we remained very active, completing an $850 million private tap to extend the 2028 maturities of VMO2, and we also successfully completed just over $1.3 billion of debt financing for the Daisy acquisition by VMO2, which closed today. In aggregate, we've completed $5.5 billion of refinancings during 2025 at attractive spreads. We remain opportunistic and flexible in our financing approach, and we intend to continue to proactively push out existing maturities to maintain tenor.

Turning to our guidance slide. We are improving guidance on 2 metrics. At Telenet, we're tightening our adjusted EBITDA guidance, which we now expect to be low single-digit decline, which is an improvement and at the top end of our previous guidance range. And this has really been supported by a strong first half performance by the company.

The revised guidance continues to include the tough comparator coming up at Q3 due to the prior year having a EUR 17 million one-off deferred revenue benefit in Q3 of 2024. And at Liberty Services and Corporate, we're upgrading our adjusted EBITDA guidance to be around negative $175 million as opposed to $200 million. We are reconfirming all the remaining guidance metrics of BMO2, VodafoneZiggo and Telenet.

Now that concludes our prepared remarks for Q2, and I'd like to hand over to the operator for the questions and answers.

[Operator Instructions]

The first question comes from the line of Robert J. Grindle with Deutsche Bank.

I'd like to ask about Telefonica's comments on the U.K. NetCo. So is this just not a good idea for one of the parties, and that's it? Or is it an idea to be debated further? Why do you think the idea has not landed in Madrid?

Thanks, Robert. Look, I think our partner has been pretty clear, and you can read into their remarks, they did their call the other day around their position on the ownership of networks, the financing of networks. And I'm not going to go back through that. But I would make this point, which is there are other ways to achieve some of the very same goals that they seem to be supported.

So we have a great joint venture called NextFibber together with InfraVia. NextFiber is in the midst of building, has already built over 2 million fiber homes. It's well capitalized and represents a terrific vehicle for exploring altnet consolidation, for example. There's a lot of strategic and fiscal cooperation that VMO2 can do with NexFiber.

So I do see us playing a role in the consolidation, which was one of the main benefits of the NetCo project that we were exploring together. I think there is an open mind to playing a significant role in consolidation, just perhaps doing it through different vehicles and in a different manner.

So as we get closer to having specific either transactions or structures to communicate, we will. But we have a very good dialogue on this front. I think there are many things about the NetCo strategy that Telefonica would agree with and other aspects, they don't. And so as good partners, we'll work to find the areas of agreement and head forward. So that's the answer.

Got it, Mike. Is the HFC upgrade piece of the strategy still moving ahead?

Sure. We are upgrading HFC homes to fiber at a relatively strong clip with economics on those upgrades looking very similar. Remember, today, VMO2 has about access to about 18.5 million homes, if you include the NexFiber homes in that number.

And of those 18.5 million, 7 million are already over 7 million are fiber. So there's an 18.5 million footprint that VMO2 markets to today, of which 7 million are already fiber. It's a combination of NexFiber and our own upgrades at VMO2. So we're already a very large player in the fiber business in the U.K., and I expect that we will continue to get larger.

The next question comes from the line of Joshua Mills with BNP Paribas.

Coming back to Slide #7, which is a helpful outline of the rationale you're putting forward for taking more corporate action. Firstly, if you could maybe just clarify when you talk about timing in the next 12 to 24 months, is that focused on the Liberty Telecom assets? Or could we see Liberty Growth and Liberty Services assets monetize in some way first before coming to the telecom assets?

And then secondly, if I look at the telco businesses, and you correctly point out that Sunrise created a lot of value. I guess that asset has a relatively stable revenue and EBITDA growth profile, visibility on the network upgrades and subsequent to your cash injection brought leverage down to 4.5x given that the leverage for VMO2 and go some way above that.

And Telenet is in the midst of a big network upgrade at the moment, how many steps do we have to go through each of these assets before they're in a position where they could be spun off in IPOs? And do you think that leverage or operational performance is the key thing you need to get in place before you take corporate activity on the Liberty Telecom assets?

Excellent questions, all of them. And I'm glad we've got a chance to talk about it further. The timing -- and there are a lot of -- a few issues we're trying to dance around here. Our lawyers and our tax people want us to be very thoughtful about what we're committing to, what we're talking about because there are a lot of moving parts here. So without -- I'm not trying to be vague, I'm just trying to be careful.

That's point one. 12 to 24 months seems like a window in which one or more of these ideas can come to fruition. As you rightly point out, it could be one or more assets in the growth portfolio. It could be one or more assets in the telecom portfolio in multiple combinations, depending on what makes sense.

The main message here is that we do have the "technology" to be flexible in terms of figuring out which of these businesses and which of these assets presents the most realistic opportunity and the most value-creating opportunity. So that's the main point. In terms of your question around growth versus leverage, I think they're both important.

Sunrise, as you well know, is not a high-growth business, but a very profitable business and committed to a dividend strategy that is quite popular and should be, especially among Swiss institutions, an 8% tax-free dividend yield in a market with 0% interest rates is pretty appealing.

And in that particular case, it's worked well. I think the #1 thing on the operational side isn't so much growth at the EBITDA revenue line, but can you deliver free cash? Is there a dividend strategy with the telecom asset that can support long-term investor interest from that perspective. And I think all of these assets, as you well know, the bigger ones in particular, do generate free cash.

Your leverage point is also a good one. In the case of Sunrise, we did delever that business relatively materially down to 4.5x. But it doesn't appear that, that investors need further delevering for that business to be attractive. So if we think that 4.5x is a good spot, then I think we have to be creative and aggressive in how we might get there.

And I'm not going to be specific on this call about ideas, but we have plenty of them. The last point I'll make is we can spin an entire business or track an entire business as we did with Sunrise. We can also track or spin an interest in a business. And that's what I meant with my M&A comment.

I'm not suggesting we would do it. But if we decided to simply track or spin our interest in VMO2, for example, we could do that and give investors an opportunity to own directly -- the shares that we own or an interest in the shares that we own in that business.

Now I'm not suggesting we will do that. I'm just simply pointing out that there are a multitude of options here, which, in my opinion, is exciting because we know that there is a path to shrinking that value gap, and it's nice to have a lot of opportunities to do it in different ways.

The next question comes from the line of Polo Tang with UBS.

I have a question on the U.K. for Lutz. So if you look at Virgin Media O2, it posted a second successive quarter of heavy broadband declines. But can you comment in terms of your view in terms of what has driven the declines?

And how optimistic are you that the level of broadband declines can reduce going forward? So do you need to accelerate the upgrade of the cable network to fiber? Do you need to accelerate footprint expansion with NexFibber? And what have you seen in terms of broadband net adds in July?

Lutz, go ahead.

Yes, sure. So I mean -- so your observation is right, right? Second quarter, we lost as much fixed customers as we did in Q1. The only driver for that is churn. So our share on gross adds are pretty strong, and this is across NexFiber and our existing coverage. So we absolutely don't have a sales problem with a churn challenge.

The churn challenge comes from predominantly onetime, which in combination with a very aggressive competitive market, right? As you might know, competitors are paying GBP 300 to really buy a customer out of the existing contract length.

And therefore, customers join less retention, they are leaving us before even talking to us. And the reason for leaving is only one with price. That is the only reason. So we are not losing a single customer because of technology. So what are we doing?

We are -- we have put together a very sophisticated retention machine, which led us to the fact that we have been growing ARPU over the course of the last 18 months in this market, sitting on the highest ARPU in this market. And now we have to create a similar successful prevention machine because we simply have to extend customers into customer lifetime value into new contracts. And this is what we are doing.

So a significant number of customers now are sitting in a minimum contract length and also a minimum contract length exceeding 6 months. Your last question, how was July a bit better? Yes, but it is still tough. And we are not giving a guidance, as you know, right, on fixed net adds on a quarterly basis.

But what I can say is we're getting our arms around in the prevention machine. We have more customers within the minimum contract length, and we are confident that we will stabilize the situation. I hope that helps.

The next question comes from the line of Matthew Harrigan with the Benchmark Company.

I was just curious what you see on the broadband consumption front that is driving consumer utility and pricing power, maybe as AI agents, live sports, streaming, gaming, low lag apps. But do you see the consumers being more facile in the use of broadband? Or is it fairly plain vanilla?

And then secondly, as you're well aware, I mean, Charter has had some postponements on DOCSIS 4, really talking about some of the expensive network requirements. Clearly, I guess, your network topology in the Netherlands is very favorable.

And as people know, it's very dense population and flat topology, but it's still pretty striking that it's 90% less expensive than doing fiber all the way. It seems like a bit of an anomaly. Could you just clarify that?

Sure, Matt. On the broadband consumption side, it's interesting. I know we don't have the chart here on the deck or in the appendix, but I would say consumption, both on mobile and on fixed is not growing as fast as it did historically.

Consumers -- I'm not suggesting consumers have stopped or in any way don't have a lot of things they want to do or continue to do or do more of. It's just that whereas before we might see a 20% to 30% increase in consumption, particularly on mobile. I think the consumption patterns are leveling off a little bit.

Now they might spike again with for all the reasons that you indicated, whether it's streaming or apps or things of that nature, it's very possible. And that's a good news story for us because it's giving us the ability to provide greater quality, perhaps invest tiny a bit less in capacity, and we'll see how it transpires. But we're at a moment now where that rapid appreciation or increase in consumption is starting to level off just a little bit.

Our pricing power really comes from the quality of the network we provide and the speeds that matter and the apps that people want to use, they want them to -- they want it to be quick, fast, lightning fast. And so that's really what they're paying for versus massive consumption or knowing even how much they're consuming.

On the DOCSIS 4 side, I'm happy to let Enrique chime in here. There are quite a few differences between the U.S. and the Netherlands. I mean, we already start, for example, with an 862 megahertz network and getting to 1.2 megahertz is not as complicated, and we will get our way to 1.8 megahertz.

So the network upgrade piece of it is not in any way complicated for us. And we believe we're getting access to the right equipment and the right technology on a timely basis to start trialing and rolling out sometime next year, speeds up to gigs.

Now we -- the other benefit we have, which I think Charter and Comcast take advantage of as well, is the ability to squeeze more capacity out of the DOCSIS 3.1 network and perhaps get all the way to 2 to 3 gig.

And that's a pretty good number for most consumers. So we're not -- we feel pretty good about the time frame and the cost envelope, which is essentially happening within our existing CapEx allocations. We don't see a massive spike in the CapEx costs here. And I don't know, Enrique, you want to add anything to that, in particular or Stephen, the relative cost of fiber versus DOCSIS 4 in the market.

Yes. Nothing really to add. I mean we've been together with the other Cable Lab members developing the technology over the last few years. We're pretty confident we've done live demonstrations of DOCSIS 4 in the VodafoneZiggo network.

As Mike pointed out, we're not going all the way from where we are today to DOCSIS 4. We are also doing upgrades on 3.1. So we're pretty confident these numbers are accurate. And as you pointed out in the question, the VodafoneZiggo network is quite friendly to the upgrade. So we're certainly taking advantage of that.

And if you don't mind, one follow-on actually prompted by Lut's -- sorry, Lut's earlier answer. I mean you can see in the U.S. on postpaid, I mean, T-Mobile is just ripping away share for various reasons and you dominate the switching share in kind of the matrix and it's kind of like a very happy fluid dynamics problem.

But I would understand with all the stresses in the U.K. on the economy and the financial condition of the altnets and City Fibre doing what it just did, how can people possibly be willing to pay -- I assume $30 million -- $300 million, $300 of a customer's contract.

I mean this just doesn't seem like economically rational behavior. And it's not like people haven't had a lot of time to figure this out. It feels like some people are pretty slow learners here, sorry.

Yes. Well...

Yes. I mean, go ahead...

Yes, sorry, sorry. Especially all net are under pressure, right? I mean cost of capital is high. They have to refinance and investors are desperate to see higher usage of the network they have built, which is nothing else than penetration. And they don't have anything other than price, right?

And so what they do is they come up with very aggressive pricing and they are buying customers out of existing contracts. And if you are on your back foot, this is what you do. It's absolutely -- I agree with you, it is not a long-term sustainable position for the market, absolutely not.

The next question comes from the line of James Ratzer with New Street Research.

Question as you've given some hints around kind of cash flow generation for 2026, where you're kind of calling out changes in CapEx at Telenet and in Ireland. So I was wondering if we could just dig into that in a bit more detail to understand the magnitude there.

I think Irish CapEx currently running around EUR 180 million a year pre the fiber upgrade, it was at about EUR 80 million. So do we kind of fall back to that kind of level? And then in Telenet, because we -- I mean, you're saying that's going to go to free cash positive in the ServCo, but we don't have guidance on the NetCo.

So I think total CapEx this year for Telenet is going to be around EUR 1.1 billion. Where do you see that going to next year?

Well, I appreciate the question. James, those are good ones. I'm pretty sure we're not going to be able to give you guidance for 2026 on this call. But Charlie, do you want to manage that?

Yes. I mean, to be honest, I'm afraid it's almost like saying, give us guidance for '26. It's just too early. I do understand why you'd want to know that, but we have to be allowed to go through our planning process. But what we can say is that certainly in the case of the Telenet Serco, which I agree, we haven't clearly shown the separation.

That's one of the things Mike referenced in his slides. We have seen the peak level of CapEx, particularly on 5G and also on digital. So there should be a positive free cash flow profile from next year onwards.

Same with Ireland...

Maybe another way is -- Sorry, another way, you say 5G digital CapEx fall. I mean, how much should that fall by if you're willing to make the comment in the presentation. We're not going to give on Irish FTTH.

Yes, we're not going to give you the specifics. I mean these are directional statements. We clearly understand why we want them, we're not trying to duck it. But you have to understand we've established a principle of not giving forward guidance in the middle of the summer for the following year. We have to be allowed to go through our processes and make some strategic decisions as well.

The next question comes from the line of David Wright with Bank of America.

So I guess just following on from Josh's question, I believe it was in your answer, Mike. I'm just trying to think about these opportunities for tracking, spinning, IPO or evolutions of that. You did mention, I think, Mike, that maybe analysts were not recognizing or penalizing you guys on the sort of cable side of network versus fiber.

I'm just thinking it was clear, and you alluded to this, that the Sunrise asset always had a real fighting chance because of the interest rate environment in Switzerland, but that is quite unique. Why do you think analysts would value any of the other assets any differently from where Liberty Global is currently?

I appreciate that the market is a lot smarter than analysts. I'm not going to argue that one. But what do you think creates value when these assets come out of the Liberty Global Group?

Is it maybe just that a lot more European PMs can buy them within their mandate? Is it just a technical kind of opportunity there instead of buying the U.S. list? Or what gives you confidence that the markets would value these assets any higher than they currently are in the Liberty Global Group?

I think it's a few things, David. I think it's a few things. Number one, you pointed it this. There is a demand among European institutions to own either pure-play or local telecom assets. You see that across the board.

As a NASDAQ-listed company, we were able to attract some of those investors, but many don't look at it either because it's perceived to be offshore, not onshore or perhaps has a layer of complexity that makes it challenging for them to assess value. But when you can create a pure-play telecom asset as we did in Switzerland, I think, number one, you start to look at peers more in a different light.

While Swisscom is an excellent peer, KPN might be even better, trade at 9x EBITDA. And when you line VodafoneZiggo up to KPN on almost any operating metric when it comes to physicals or financials, it looks pretty good. What are the differences?

The difference of the balance sheet, of course, you've already raised that point, leverage and squeezing free cash flow out of the operations. And I think those would be only 2 hurdles to a higher multiple on VodafoneZiggo, for example, as a pure-play stand-alone business, I'm pretty sure we can find a way to improve that.

Second big difference is investors in Europe and investors of European telecom assets like dividends, clearly, and that's most of our peers, if not all of our peers, pay a large dividend. Sunrise is demonstrating that an 8% dividend yield even with that high yield, it's trading at a great multiple. I think the dividend yield at KPN is maybe 5%.

So can you generate enough free cash in these businesses to adopt a capital markets strategy or a balance sheet strategy that delivers dividends to investors on a reasonable, predictable long-term basis. Those are not hard equations to solve when you have stable businesses as we do. pI understand it's not immediately obvious how we do those things. But trust me, when I say that to put a slide like this up on the screen implies we believe we have a path in each of these instances to create a story that will be -- should be appealing to investors. And that's how I'd leave it.

The next question comes from the line of Carl Murdock-Smith, Citigroup.

I was just wondering if you could expand a little bit more and talk about your turnaround in VodafoneZiggo and early evidence both competitively and operationally in terms of how that's going. Wondering if you could talk a bit more.

Sure. I'll let Stephen do that. We didn't -- I don't know if you're on for the remarks, but there's a whole slide in the deck on this. But Stephen, why don't you add some more to that?

I think the slide that you published, Mike, earlier in the slide deck is probably the best summary of it. So we've got 4 specific areas that we've looked at as I came into the organization. We've tucked in behind each of those -- we've reset our organizational model.

It gave us an opportunity to take some costs out as well, which we needed to do, specifically pointed at being more aggressive in the marketplace. I think over the last couple of years, we've taken a step back from that.

Secondly, as part of that, getting broadband pricing right for the market, I think we're at a kilter with the marketplace and getting that as a first step right was important. Like Ls, tackling the churn problem. We don't have a gross adds problem either. We have a churn problem. Part of the solution set there was fixing our pricing, but also fixing our trading practices and our contracting. You are seeing the green shoots. May and June were pleasing to us having implemented much of this in April and May.

The overhang of are we good enough broadband network, we've taken away. We're fully back in the plan to roll out HFC. We've got an aggressive plan, I think, over the next 18 months to land at. And then I think we were short on marketing. We were short on positioning the Ziggo brand where it needed to be back in the connectivity world.

We were short on investing in FMC, which you'll see coming soon. And we think there's great opportunity for us to attack with Holland N. We think there's a market space for us to go after that.

So I think just tightening everything up, being more focused and bring an organization behind a plan that puts us, as I said, on the front foot and in the attack, and that's where we are today, and you'll see more from us over the next 12 months.

And then just as a follow-up, kind of just looking at the voluntary redundancy scheme that was announced the other day and then also the improvements in the services and corporate guidance today, should we be drawing a line between those 2 things or not?

And given the timing within the year, could that potentially mean that next year could see further improvements within that kind of services and corporate EBITDA line?

Yes, I want to be really thoughtful on commenting on internal restructuring or employee matters as they should be, that article was obviously not authorized by us. But suffice it to say, the trajectory we're trying to illustrate here is a good one. And there are lots of tools in the toolbox to ensure and deliver an operating structure that is more flexible and more aligned and fit for purpose.

All that really means is, yes, I think you can assume that over time, we will be through either new revenue sources or new operating models, we will be providing to you guidance for that number, which is lower and lower and lower.

So I do think if you're one of those analysts that puts a big multiple on it, I would get the pencil out, start determining on your own what that number could be, might be. And hopefully, that's a tailwind to your target price. I think we have time for maybe 1 or 2 more operator.

The next question comes from the line of Steve Malcolm with Rothschild & Company Redburn.

I want to come back to the U.K. and maybe a sort of slightly less your question. But clearly, your churn is a problem. Part of that, I guess, has always stemmed from the fact that you don't cover the entire U.K. And it seems like your ambitions to do so have slowed a bit in the last 12 months.

I mean NexFiber is being thoughtful, I guess, on whether to deploy fiber in areas where there are already 2 providers. You talked about the consolidation. I guess it's a kind of 2-part question. One is, is it something you give a lot of thought to is how you bridge that gap?

Openreach covers 30 million lines, you cover 18 million. And then secondly, what -- how do you think about the opportunity of bridging that gap? And would you consider -- you haven't wholesale from Openreach for a while, but it seems a pretty obvious step given the mismatch between your fixed and your mobile footprint to do so just to sort of expand your addressable market and possibly deal with some of those churn -- natural churn impediments you face. Just curious to know your thoughts on that.

Thanks, Steve. It's the right question, and it's a good one. As you point out, we do reach 18.5 million homes. It's not the entire marketplace. Obviously, we do look at other means of reaching another 10 million homes, let's say.

And I'm not going to be specific on this call, except to say it is the right long-term strategic move for VMO2 to be a national player on fixed as it is in mobile. How we get there, with whom we get there, those are more technical questions, which I'm not going to get into this morning, but you're right to ask us about it, and we see it similarly.

Okay. So -- and all options are on the table, Mike, in your consideration. Is that fair?

Yes.

The last question comes from the line of Albert Rat with Bernstein General Group.

My questions -- most of my questions have been answered. So let me ask this. Mike, I think in your prepared remarks, you said you would actually frame the exit from Vodafone, but maybe I missed it, but could you just frame that for us a little bit, how you look at what happened there, why you exited at this point in time and give us context.

Sure. Sure, sure. And I will say right upfront, I don't necessarily want you to assume that the reason we've exited the position is because we don't have faith in the stock or in Margarita, that's not the case. We just have to look at what's the best use of our capital. We had really limited exposure to the stock given the collar structure of the position anyway.

And there was not much strategic value in the end to the position. So I think it's the right move for us to put our capital into the best possible use. And in this case, I don't think that long-term holding was achieving that. So that's really the only color I can give you on that.

So is that a change?

Appreciate when you actually bought it...

Not necessarily. I think we didn't know at the time what the future held. We were optimistic perhaps that there might be more tailwinds and a different result. But in the end, just like you, we have to make decisions about our -- where we put our cash every day.

And this is just a decision that would put more in that category than any sort of long-term strategic view of Vodafone as a company. Anyway, I appreciate everybody joining the call. We're after the hour here. The markets are challenging. You got that message, but we are not sitting still and the management teams you're listening to here really are on their game, investing, innovating, winning.

And lastly, just our value creation -- value creation is our North Star, we'd like to say, right? So it's shareholders' turns here to try to see that value creation realized -- we got a lot of optionality, as we pointed out. We will look for the executable strategies and communicate those when they become executable and clear.

And whether we succeed in those or not, they will lead to outcomes, which I think is exactly what we need to do here. So one way or the other, we're really confident about the opportunity to create value for you. Hope you have a great summer, and thanks for joining, everybody.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes Liberty Global's Second Quarter 2025 Investor Call. As a reminder, a replay of the call will be available in the Investor Relations section of Liberty Global's website. There, you can also find a copy of today's presentation materials.

Thank you all for attending. I think I know most everyone here, but for those who don't, my name is David Wright. I run the telecom franchise here at Bank of America. Delighted to have with me Liberty Global, of course, my pre-CEO, always delighted to introduce Mike, who's an ex competitor of mine. So always welcome.

Mike, thanks so much for coming. If you don't mind, I'll wind you back. It's not far off 18 months since the full year results and the strategy reset, we might have called it at the time. And you identified the 5 things at the time that you were planning to do. One of them has been undoubtedly successful, is the Sunrise spin. We're not far off the same share price as we were before, but with a handsome dividend paid to investors.

You can probably leave that one where it is. I guess you'd regard that as a success.

Come on. Give me a shot. I got to take a victory lap.

Well, listen, let's -- why don't we start with that one? I think it was a very successful spin. Like I said the share price is not far off where it was...

We're up 20% over the last 12 months, if you add those 2 together. But I assume people know what we're talking about. If not, I'll spend a minute. And you're referencing our year-end call a year ago?

Yes.

I The main message was enough is enough, sense of urgency here in my part, John's part, try to unlock value for shareholders. And the first thing we did or committed to do, and it took us 7 months to do it was to spin off our Swiss subsidiary, which we did on a tax-free basis. In our stock, Sunrise was probably trading at the same multiple as everything else, 5.5x as a Swiss company is trading at 8x with a roughly 8% dividend yield, tax-free to Swiss shareholders. The dividend yield is -- the dividend is tax-free. And you add that stock price into the Liberty stock price were up about 20% over the last 12 months. But no, that's not the end game.

It's just one -- as you pointed out, 1 of 4 or 5 things we identified as critical tactical steps to try to unlock value. But I think it's worked. And one thing we did, which is important to point out is in addition to just saying we're going to spin it off. And let me add that -- what sets us apart from other telcos, I don't know who you're talking to this week, probably everybody is we have the ability to do that all day long. We can spin stuff off tax-free everywhere.

So that might seem like, well, everybody can do that, not necessarily. It's not simple stuff. And having successfully done that, I think it gives us the credibility for other things we might decide to do. But we put $1.5 billion into the asset to delever it pre-spin. That was also a form of a dividend really because that was cash on our balance sheet, which we handed to shareholders by reducing the debt and increasing the equity value of that dividend. So I think it's worked. And that is an example, just one example of how we intend to continue to unlock value here. I looked at your questions ahead of time, one of them, what's the future of Liberty Global?

Fair question, but I'll tell you something. If it's $12.40, which is your price target, I'm to be really disappointed. And that's up 30%, by the way, and you still have us as underperforming. I don't know why. Because we are committed. And I think we have the flexibility, the will to do things that a lot of telcos don't do. We sold those assets at Vodafone at 12x. Some people would never sell assets. We spun off Switzerland. That's like descaling, who would do that. So I think we're in the position, whether it's Liberty Telecom, Liberty Growth or Liberty Services, we'll talk about all 3, I imagine. Try to unlock value for shareholders, that's the main narrative.

What I thought I might do is if we think about -- and you've kind of given an indication of the ability to spin assets, et cetera. But I guess with the Sunrise asset, it was kind of in a nice shape. It had a fairly defined strategy. I went to the CMD. It was very comprehensive. I think if we think about some of the other core assets, whether that be Holland, whether that be the -- or whether that be Belgium, there are more work in progress. I think we could probably agree on that to begin with. And I guess one of the most recent presentations that your management has given is on the, let's call it, a reset as well at VodafoneZiggo, right? You've revitalized the strategy there or reset the strategy a little. I wonder if you could talk to us a little about the genesis of that, what you felt maybe wasn't working and the measures you're taking to put in place.

Yes. So this is our joint venture with Vodafone in Holland, relatively big business, roughly equal in size to KPN and everything except B2B. So we don't have the same enterprise business they do. But roughly, if you look to the side by side, we're equivalent businesses on consumer, fixed and mobile. For 7 years, we've been in this joint venture, John likes to say, I have 2 catholic marriages. That's one of them. And talk about separately what that might mean down the road. But I think it became clear that while we had done pretty well, competed effectively that we were at an inflection point. And we brought Stephen in, Stephen van Rooyen, who you may know, ran Sky -- was at Sky for 17 years.

I basically said to him, clean sheet of paper here. You tell us what you think about the asset, the market, the opportunity, how do we go out and win? How do we stop coasting here? And I think he came back with 4 recommendations, all of which are spot on. Number one, our prices are too high. If you look at our overall ARPU in that market, we're higher than KPN. And so the front book needs to start matching the market. And we've started that already. We're seeing already benefits in churn. Secondly, the way we were working as an organization, not to get into the operating model issues, but there was not a winning culture. It was a little bit stagnant in terms of how we're making decisions, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think he's really opened people's eyes to how a competitive market ought to be managed and run. He's committed, I think, correctly, and we'll debate this happily to DOCSIS in that marketplace, which is the right answer. And I only have to give you one stat. We can get to 8 gig across 7 million homes for 90% less than it costs to do fiber. Just write that down. It's all you need to know. 90% less than it costs to get to, let's say, 8 to 10 gig on fiber. We can get there on DOCSIS in Holland by 2026, at least launching the 8-gig product by 2026. So we were -- we -- Vodafone, we were all sort of spinning around that subject. We're really saying -- and you said, look, in the Dutch market, people care about speed and price. They don't care about technology.

We're already twice as fast as the average -- we already have a customer. Our average customer has twice the speed as the average Dutch customer today. That includes our numbers in it. So we're already the best network, highest quality network, fastest network. And we can go from 1 to 2 by the end of this year, almost 2 gig everywhere to 4 to 8 in a relatively quick period of time for 90% less, repeat that and make sure you get it, than it cost to build fiber. So EUR 1,000 to EUR 100 or less. And once we commit to that and we stop dilly dallying around a little bit with M&A and these sorts of things. And then lastly, we have some really strong things there. The brands are strong. We have a strong flanker brand. We have a very strong premium brand in mobile and fixed.

We have sports, a fantastic sports business there that we don't have anywhere else. We're massively converged. We need to benefit and take advantage of that. So there's -- and we have great loyalty programs with the Ziggo Dome and stuff. So we really had all the bits and pieces to drive the more commercial side of things. And we're ready to go. What that means, and I think we said it on the call, is that means VodafoneZiggo instead of doing -- it's going to do one of these. And so this year, we had to reset guidance because when you start to reset prices and things of that nature, there are impacts. So -- but we're in it to win it over the long term.

I say this all the time, we run these businesses as if we'll own them forever. And so you got to make decisions that you think are the best for the business over the long term, and that's what we're doing in that market. It's a highly rational market. I don't know. I see somebody wrote down Altnets, who was in here before me. We don't have that s***, sorry. We're not broadcasting, right? We don't have that stuff in Holland. There's KPN and then there's 2 private equity-led groups that don't even overbuild each other, one of whom has 800,000 homes in areas where we don't have network when we've signed a wholesale deal with them, highly rational. They're really a duopoly marketplace. You don't see in many other places, this country included. So a lot of positive characteristics. Somewhat amusingly we do have all in the U.K. and it was BTC of [indiscernible].

If I was to challenge you on the VodafoneZiggo strategy, what it does have is quite a lot of leverage. And when you have price down, price down comes with a high margin, high operational leverage, which drops through quite heavily to the free cash flow line. I accept that 4.0 is, I don't know, were saying [indiscernible]...

Yes, including connection -- that's within our existing CapEx envelope.

Is it the right thing for VodafoneZiggo to be paying a dividend?

Well, that's a complicated question because it's -- we must have people from the credit side in here as well. That's historically what we've done. We've taken free cash, and we've dividend it out to shareholders. if we don't -- I mean, it gets caught up in some governance issues. If we don't agree on that, it goes back to last year. So we are at an interesting inflection point on leverage. I don't disagree with you. With the reset on EBITDA, the leverage is higher than we'd like it. And so we have to be thoughtful about how we maintain -- we did announce on the call, which I think many of you might have listened to that we have already hired somebody to sell the towers. That will be EUR 600 million, EUR 700 million.

We intend to reduce leverage with that -- those proceeds because we never sold the towers there. There are property assets that could be worth something that could be monetized. So I think -- and we and Vodafone agree on that. So I think we both recognize, hey, we have to start being thoughtful about leverage in this context.

I've always thought about -- when I thought about VodafoneZiggo, I mean, I remember being the Ziggo IPO, it always seems to me there's a lot more Liberty DNA in that market than maybe Vodafone DNA. Do you need to resolve governance? Or is it -- we've seen the odd headline. I don't expect you to obviously comment on that. But is the joint venture, the realistic option for this asset in the long term?

No. No, and probably not for this market either. And these were -- just like Vodafone will realize in this country with its recently completed deal, these are not great long-term situations. So in the case of VodafoneZiggo, we have -- we passed through the IPO. There's a soft put, right? There are things we could do. As partners, we have a good relationship. We talk about this all the time. But longer term, I think they would agree as well. Something has to give you. Now they can't buy us because, well, I don't think they can. You would have to make your own conclusion on that. They can't absorb the leverage, see how they could without impacting potentially their -- well, maybe it's small enough, they wouldn't care. I don't know, you would know better than me.

So but I guess it's a segue into one of your other strategic proposals, which is the creation of the Benelux Co. And we can obviously talk about Telenet as a separate stand-alone business. But I think one of the theories we always had, and I think I even spoke to Charlie about this on stage a couple of years ago, is that bringing the 2 assets together under the Benelux Co could even derive some synergies, specifically fiscal synergy. Is -- am I thinking about that the right way?

Yes. Well, I think we said that on that conference call you referenced 15, 16 months ago, we said that was one of our strategies. Why? Two countries, contiguous, similar languages, at least Flanders and the Netherlands, rational markets, I think over $3 billion of EBITDA would make us bigger than [ KPI. ] It would be -- there are synergies market to market, and it could be an interesting opportunity. So for sure, we put that out there, and it may still be an interesting opportunity. But to achieve that, certain other things have to happen. Like I can't -- if I could convince Vodafone to roll their equity into that, that would be great. I can do it.

Listen, I mean based on what may or may not happen in Spain, maybe she'll do that. I don't think that's a great outcome for them in Spain when they sell something for $500 million and it gets bought at $7 billion or whatever the number is going to be. I mean, whereas we could give them -- so who knows. But look, they'll make their own decisions, and I'm not foreshadowing anything here because I can promise you there's nothing to foreshadow at this point. But just theoretically, that would be something they should consider. So that is an option. That's an option. I wouldn't pay my head on it, but it's an option.

Now let's drop it, therefore, into Telenet. Again, another asset that I remember IPO, showing [indiscernible] great asset. It's quite curious what you guys are potentially doing with Proximus. Talk a little bit more and maybe a bit of education...

It's curious, and it's also highly encouraging for people who, God forbid, spend time thinking about regulators around here. But I'll just lead into it for a minute. I mean, I've been operating in this part of the world for 30-plus years. And regulators have been on our throats almost that entire time, certainly in the last 15 years. And for the first time in a very long time, maybe ever, they're slowly starting to step off and whether that's the drudge report or Trump or AI sovereignty -- who knows what it is, but you can see it here in this market. I think this government is quite clear. Regulators will not get in the way of growth, and they're acting on that, which is super.

I think Europe is doing the same thing, trying to create industrial policy, hopefully, riding the wrong [indiscernible] regulation in the telecom space, which I'm not going to rehearse because you all know it too well. One, the example David is referencing in the Belgium market, we compete with Proximus. It's pretty much a duopoly there. And we had committed to building fiber across 70% of Flanders, 4 million homes, and we were going. We're moving. We the NetCo. We've separated the businesses, and they had a fiber JV with EQT that was falling apart. And with the government owning half their equity, not surprisingly, the phone call saying, maybe we shouldn't overbuild each other.

Maybe what we should do is just have one fiber network. Well, you can kind of see this in France a little bit, too. But -- so we will continue to -- the deal we have -- we hope to announce shortly will see us essentially using each other's networks. We'll still build quite a bit of fiber. They'll build quite a bit of fiber, but we won't overbuild each other, except in one section of the country where we're largely already there. But for the vast majority of the country, we won't overbuild each other. We use each other's networks, which obviously has the benefit of giving this entity we call Wire, our NetCo there, basically 100% market share of wholesale and Orange is the really primary wholesale customer and they're ours exclusively. That's kind of what was the final straw.

When we announced that Orange was going to exclusively use our fiber network because they're already on our HFC network as a wholesaler, full buyer. I think Proximus realized, there's nowhere for us to go. So if we get it done and it passes market tests, and it will be a highly rational NetCo, but one of the most attractive infrastructure assets in Europe, which we've already separated out. So that would be an interesting value creation opportunity.

Right. I was going to say that's one potential second derivative of this particular transaction is that you've isolated a much, much higher value...

I think that's right. I know that's right.

Interesting. I guess U.K., possibly a little -- the most contentious with quite a few moving parts. Operationally, we've obviously seen some pressure on the ARPU. I think that's a sense of the spin down from the TV customer base. It hasn't impacted the EBITDA as much. But still, that's compromised your ability to maybe take price or at least realize some of the price that's been taken in the high inflation period of the U.K. market. How would you categorize the sort of wider performance of O2, VMO2?

Yes. Well, on the ARPU point, first of all, it's not apples-to-apples, which I think you've kind of indicated there a little bit. Our ARPU includes video on 50% of our broadband base. So our broadband base is paying us more than other broadband basis, at least Sky would be more comparable. You can't compare us to others really. And that, by the way, having 50% of our broadband base take video is a great thing. It's -- even though we're obviously slowly losing them, they're sticky and some will never lose. They really like the innovation that we're delivering in terms of the entertainment platform, and they want a provider that has all the apps on it, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think that's a positive thing. The other thing I'd remind you of is our average broadband speed today is 400 meg. The market sits at 200. So our customers are getting more for more. They are getting more for more. And in that context, we have seen 4 consecutive quarters of ARPU increases in the fixed business. which is great, 1%, 2%, not huge, but we've been taking ARPU up. Reason is we did take some price in April, GBP 3.50. And secondly, we've got tools that are really working well to retain customers when they call and when -- so these hyper-personalized tools, the AI-based tools that are starting to work extremely well.

So I think the ARPU picture looks good for us. The volume picture is not as good, right? Because Altnets are slightly desperate and they're pricing their products to drive whatever little bit of penetration they can get. And I'm not saying it's the last gas, but it's close to it. And so we have to suffer that. We're not going to chase them down. So volume might be different. You're not going to see us chase Altnet pricing. I would imagine ET would say the same thing. Voda would say the same thing, while Voda is already pretty cheap. But we're not going to chase Altnet pricing down. We're going to start to use that same AI platform for proactive recontracting which I think is also going to be a positive.

So I feel pretty good about the fixed business overall. I think Lutz and the team have really got the secret sauce sorted out. It's not just a retention tool, but also potentially a proactive recontracting tool. And that will serve us really well as we continue through this rough patch of broadband volatility, but the ARPU continues to inch up, and that's a positive.

Now on the mobile side, there's obviously this quite exciting dynamic, which is the spectrum you've taken from the Vodafone Hutch merger. Obviously, Vodafone and Hutch presented themselves very much as this creates the best network in the U.K. I'm sure O2 -- don't just stand back and watch. You've obviously taken some spectrum from them. How should we be thinking maybe a little bit about the CapEx curve? Or what can you do, do you think to sort of defend the business...

Well, I mean, the spectrum is a big one. I think it brings us to roughly 30%, which is great in this new environment. I think we've said publicly, we had GBP 700 million we put into the mobile network. So we have been investing for the last couple of years really, over-indexing on the network quality. And it has nothing to do with the fact that when I moved here 2 years ago, my O2 service wasn't very good...

That wasn't the only customer...

Yes, that's my point. It's a beloved brand. We have a great customer base, loyal, but we have to deliver. And that message has been given to the management loud and clear, and they've invested a ton, not just in network, but also in products and innovation, right? Giffgaff now has a broadband product. So we can tackle that sector of the market really effectively. So there's lots of that we're going to invest meaningfully in the O2 brand. You'll see that coming out. O2 is a great brand, and we want to get that brand better positioned than it has been in the last few years. So the MVNOs have done what Altnets have done, right? They're taking all the share because it's low cost. And -- but consumers in the end, I think, remain relatively loyal to great brand and great quality of service and quality of network, and that's what we're focused on.

And big mergers have often -- during the integration stage, there does tend to be a bit of a churn pool out there. Is there an opportunity to go and grab a little.

Potentially, yes. I mean I think I'm sure they've had 18 months to work on. Not having that happen, but let's see. You're right. That can be an issue. They've had a long time.

Okay. So now on to the network infrastructure in the U.K. We've obviously got the coax network and the plans to build fiber. We've then got nexfibre. -- and nexfibre more recently sort of guided down a little bit on the ambition or maybe just slowed the ambition. Can you talk about why that was the case?

Well, I think we've been quite straight up about the fact that our partner has decided to revisit some of the strategic decisions of the prior leadership team, which is their prerogative, by the way. I think I said on the call, the tables were turned. I would ask for the same thing. Every new management team needs a shot at rethinking what's happened. So we'll give them that time and we'll react when they come back with what their position is. But clearly, one of the things that they were reacting to was the NetCo conversations we were having, the nexfibre structure, all these things.

So we have agreed to pause that, which I think in this room, I would say, is highly unfortunate. But I understand it and we'll support it because not only was Nova going to help delever BMO 2, help create a currency for consolidation, but it was going to raise capital at really accretive prices. Had some good interest to accelerate fiber rollout and get us into wholesale. So it was like 5 things, boom, boom, boom, but we'll wait to see what they think long term about this market, #1 and about the asset #2. So we're kind of on hold.

And in that context, nexfibre is a pretty significant commitment of capital. We are happy to make that investment. We just made a big -- wrote a big check. They've got -- will have by the end of the year, 2.2 million, 2.3 million homes. And VMO2 is penetrating those homes. I mean these are greenfield homes. So the VMO2 network reaches, let's say, 17 million -- 16 million, 17 million homes today with HFC and some fiber through the upgrade. And then these 2.2 million homes that nexfibre has been building with our French partner. And we need -- and just in the last 6 months is really -- they really started to accelerate the penetration of that greenfield territory, which I think is helpful, but it's been a little slower than we thought.

Also important to remember that VMO2 takes quite a bit of -- well, is providing quite a bit of services and value to nexfibre in the form of construction services, IT, et cetera. So nexfibre is a super asset-light platform. And so decision to put capital is easier for us when money is coming in both directions, not as easy for our French partner. So we're at an inflection point here, but I think we're good through the year-end, and we'll see how the bigger questions I just addressed with Telefonica sort themselves out.

I mean I think what confused me a little, and I cover Telefonica. I agree with what you said. The NetCo concept had so many obvious advantages. What I don't quite understand is why they would want to pause that.

I think look, I mean, this isn't Chatham House Rule, I imagine. So -- but I can -- let me surmise, give you my sense of it. I think there's a couple of things at play there. Number one is the guy who took [indiscernible], who's the #2 now in the company. CEO comes from the defense industry, brand new to the telecom sector, but it's not rocket science. He'll figure it out. He's a very smart guy. But he brought in as his #2, the individual who's running Spain, who kind of oversaw this fragmentation and complication in the Spanish market and long to control and become again the leading player in that market.

So control, clarity, consolidation, these are things that he thinks about. And perhaps looking at this market and seeing Nova and AltNets, just said, let's -- maybe we need to hang on to this stuff, keep more control over it. It's not a well-thought-out position. I don't know if that's the ending position. That's my -- that's what I suspect. And then the second thing is, and this is not speaking out of school because I do think many European telcos, not me, think this way, which is this is a big moment for Europe. I don't know how many of you are American or English or European. It's a big moment for Europe, where telecom may just be an important player in not just data sovereignty, AI gigafactories, but defense.

And I think, therefore, when you look at each of the markets, that changes how you financially engineer things. If your bias -- if your industrial bias is control and maybe industrial military, yes, I mean, I don't think I'm speaking out of school because I think that's just where it is. Then you have a different lens on things. And I think that could be also part of what's happening. And so who knows? Look, thankfully, they're going through a review. I think they've hired Bain or BCG, and they're doing the work, and we'll all wait and find out what it has to say.

I guess the challenge is, though, it's difficult for other party to exit.

Well, we have the IPO, right, not clear. Next summer, we have the soft put -- but I would be surprised -- surprise is too strong a word, but I would say in the next 24 months, we have to decide if we're each in this together the way we used to be or we're doing something different. And I think you would say the same thing if you were sitting here and say, yes, we need to get clarity on this point.

So say in the U.K. market right now, we've got -- [indiscernible] was here before. I don't know how many Altnets there are, let's call it, somewhere between 90 and 100. There's a couple of big ones out there. Now of course, what you have -- and if I understand this right with VMO2 is you have a much easier route to fiber because the quality of ducting is very good. And I think you previously quoted GBP 100...

Right. For upgrade. Yes.

So that's a very credible economic route to building fiber and all the benefits it begins. But of course, there is an opportunity, and I think you've addressed this with NetCo even as the vehicle to maybe consider consolidating the market to some extent. The small guys are all fine and good. I think it's a lot of hard work to do that. There are a couple of big guys. Now CityFibre is out there right now. The refinancing is still maybe not quite over the line. I think Greg has given a slightly different message recently on why that might be the case. You've got a lot of customers, they've got a lot of network. Is that ever something that we can think about?

You should assume in typical Liberty fashion, we are whiteboarding everything. There isn't a transaction, a combination, an opportunity that we are not thinking about, including that one. We have to be, right? Because with or without our partners, we have to be thinking about all of these options because it's a really important moment for this market. This is a market-shaping moment. But this next 12 to 24 months will be market shaping in our critical -- slightly shy of existential, but really important. And so we want to be part of that conversation and thinking about those things. And we have -- there's not a transaction, not a large off-net that we either don't have an ongoing conversation with or haven't already been talking to.

I don't know what will happen if anything will happen. Here's the good news, though, from our point of view, which is what I care about most, is we have the second biggest network in this market. We control 19 million homes, 40% of them are already fiber. And the rest can be fiber pretty cheaply. So over the long haul, we're going nowhere, 6 million broadband subs. We are here to stay, and we have all the tools we need to penetrate, grow ARPU, converge customers that CityFibre doesn't. These guys, [ Natomya ] love those guys. Community Fiber, terrific. But they don't have -- they will never scale, right? And they're not really hoping to scale. They're hoping to survive and make money, which some of them will.

So we're not going anywhere. It's just a question of what role do we play in this consolidation and rationalization. I'll tell you, I think -- again, don't publish this, but I was on the phone with Johnny Reynolds, Secretary of Commerce Trades the other day, and they get it. Government gets it, not a good moment for the U.K. right now if fiber customers lose service, if fiber investors lose money. So they're anxious to see us and others get involved here. And we will. We will.

Okay. Interesting. Let's go back to the TopCo and some of the strategy. You've got this ventures portfolio. And I think it's tricky from our side. You talked about POs and valuations, and I simply take the number that you put on the spreadsheet.

Yes, it's not our numbers, Deloitte's number.

Right. But it's interesting to understand the businesses. Now each of them has got their own, I guess, time line to some kind of monetization potential, whatever that might be. Is there a better play on ventures? Could you do something different with ventures?

Yes. But I'll remind you, and again, just to make it taking people back to their level set here, it's $3.3 billion of assets that we've accumulated in tech, media content, sports infrastructure. 6 deals, not even 7, 6 investments represent 70% of that, 6, not 65 of which there are probably 65 different -- if I had to say, here's the whole portfolio, de would have it, there's 65 things, 6 account for 70%. So when I get to all, it's too complex. I don't know how to do the work with 6 which I think you can do the work on.

Three of them in infrastructure. nexfibre, you've already referenced, pretty easy to model that, understand that. We own 5% of a company called EdgeConnex, which is a massive global data center business that EQT and others own, and we're happy to own the 5%. We'd like to get out of the 5%, but we're in it, and it's growing. And we have this business called AtlasEdge, which we own with Digital Bridge, which is another infrastructure partner that's building -- acquiring and growing data center across Europe. Those 3 assets, $1.2 billion, $1.3 billion in value.

The other $1.2 billion, $1.3 billion is 3 content assets. Our stake in ITV, which is highly liquid, and let's see what we do with that. Our stake in Televisa Univision, which we put $100 million in. We market 350, which is the largest Spanish language content creator and platform on the planet based out of Mexico City of Miami and our stake in Formula E, which I think could return the fund if we keep doing it right, one deal. So I appreciate that there's a lot of stuff in there. The tech portfolio, $400 million, sure, I wouldn't spend 1 minute thinking about all these little deals we've done, AI, cyber, cloud, it's complicated.

Some of them actually help us out quite a bit in our operating companies. But yes, there, maybe we bring a partner in. Maybe we think about, hey, do we really need to be doing $5 million, $10 million investments in these B round? Maybe not. It served a purpose. It made us smart, gave us access to technologies and stuff we didn't have. But maybe that's something we could -- and then the infrastructure stuff is really those 3 assets and some early-stage renewable energy, and we're building -- we have, I don't know, 20,000 already scoped to build charging stations across the U.K., where we have infrastructure, right? We have power. We have everything. So that's a business we think could be a pretty interesting business. So infrastructure media content, 70% of it in the 6deals, which there's a story there. Maybe we need to make that story clearer for people, which I appreciate.

But is it sort of spend story? Does that make it clear?

Yes, some of these assets, we're -- spinning is not simple. You have to have what they call an active trader business and you have to have certain other tax elements of it. But yes, Formula E could be spun with something could be sold, could be merged, could be -- we have $400-plus million in that business. We own 70% of it. It's not Formula 1. I might want anyone to walk out here saying [indiscernible] one of the same, but they're trading at $22 billion. I don't need to be the same. I just need to be a little better. And what I will tell you is that this champion -- it's not easy to own a global championship. There are not very many of them.

And we have a 15-year exclusive on electric racing and we're going to extend that. And the 3 things that make me excited about that. Number one is the car. I don't know if you've ever been to a race. But this Gen 3 EVO car racing this year is faster than F1 car 0 to 60, 30% faster, 1.8 seconds and is incredibly quick around the track. In Monaco, we had 190 overtakes in 1 race. I think Formula 1 had 2 on a good day. So it's incredibly exciting racing, and we have a new car coming out after next season, so 18 months from now, the Gen 4 car, which will double power.

I mean, there's just nowhere to go but up with this with the technology of these cars. We look to feel, even the sound. So the racing is becoming incredibly exciting. And we have 400 million fans racing in all the great cities in the world. It's really, to me, a great ground floor opportunity that I'm excited to own. And I think rising tides.

Yes, sure. Mike, I'm going to return to my -- I guess, the sort of first question with my final question. And it is, what is the future of Liberty Global, right? So we've talked about -- there was the spin of Sunrise. We've talked about assets and you've outlined essentially routes to strategic -- the strategic reset in Holland. We've obviously got this opportunity in Belgium and there's the potential to realize value there. The U.K. feels a little bit on hold right now. But are we in a situation where we could be looking 2 to 3 years down the line at all asset spin off and you go home. Is that what we think? I mean what's the...

Well, I don't know because I don't control those outcomes in those 2 big cases. But I think you could map scenarios like that. I mean, why is Sunrise trading so well? Because there's not -- I mean I love Sunrise. I'm a big shareholder, trust me, I chair the company. So I have great respect for the business and Andre, but it's not a high-growth business, right? I mean if any of you are investors are following it, it's a modest growth with nice free cash flow profile and slightly delevered into the mid-4s or something like that, low 4s and generating nice free cash, of which 70% we had to shareholders. And in Switzerland, that seems to be -- and in Europe, that seems to be a winning formula.

It doesn't strike me as a difficult formula to replicate necessarily now Holland, we might have been on that path, but it was -- but Stephen has opened our eyes to the fact that if you want to be on that path long term, you need to allow me to reset here. It will be back to that path. It's generating free cash this year. It's free cash flow generated. This market still generates lots of free cash. It could be more free cash once we get through the mobile build, once we finish the fiber build. So if free cash is your metric, and I think it is the right metric for this sector, it's something we are absolutely focusing on that perhaps some of these businesses will be more highly valued if they were isolated and into different investor groups.

My shareholders and many of you are here, I hope, I think I understand the challenge. We're a complex story. Just look at the things we've talked about today. It's not simple. We're trying to simplify it with this Liberty Telecom, Liberty Grow, Liberty Services, which is another hidden asset. But within the Liberty Telecom bit, which is $22 billion of revenue, $8 billion of EBITDA, it's still a lot of work to do to drive commercial momentum. We're going to deal with all the things we've talked about today around churn and pricing. And then we have to find ways to unlock value. And that is the goal.

One last little question. We're asking it to all the telcos we have here, which is -- and I have this conversation with you once where you talked about how -- I mean, U.S. broadband is, what, $70, $80 right now. So if you want 500 meg fiber these days, you're paying $80, $90, right? In Europe, you're paying $20 to $30. The industry has not -- I don't think has done a great job at valuing itself to the consumer. And I'm talking primarily B2C here. There is still so much of the consumer market that looks at the industry as a price utility essentially.

And I think COVID was a great opportunity for the industry to go out to the consumer and say, "Hey, here we are. Look, we've kept you working, we've kept you educated, connectivity to your family, et cetera. And I think the industry dropped the ball, right? I don't know...

Yes. I don't disagree. I mean I think keeping the love was -- I remember saying something, how do we bottle this magic? Yes, because there was some magic in COVID. Difficult to do when you have in this market, Altnets selling fiber for GBP 15 in Belgium, where Digi rocks up and sells mobile for GBP 5. It's difficult to do when regulators have -- coming back to them have created an environment where all that matters is consumer price. It seems they're moving off that pivot, that pedestal a little bit. But that has been the nature of it. And so when you have that kind of dynamic, that pricing dynamic, that competitive dynamic, stuff falls through the cracks, you can't invest as much as you want, your innovation slows down, but it makes it more difficult to hold on to that.

Now what we're investing in with AI, we can talk about, but we can -- what we're investing in with our networks, if you get it right, you can win the day because these aren't going to win the day. They're not going to have the same capabilities that we have. And that's what we're doing. We're investing in consumer brand, consumer loyalty, consumer experience, which you hear from all the telcos, but we're all doing it.

And AI is going to be a game changer for our industry. I mean there -- everybody -- if you're an automotive analyst or if you're a -- no matter what industry you follow, I'm sure everyone is saying the same thing and why wouldn't they? But in our -- in the telecom industry, it is so easy to get 1%, 2%, 3% of OpEx, so easy. We're finding it already. I was with Telenet yesterday. I can give you this stat, don't publish it. With what they're doing on their consumer-facing mostly acquisition, but also retention tools, they expect that they will reduce human interactions by 50% in 36 months in shops and on phones, 50%, which means maybe 50% fewer humans, I don't know. But power consumption, optimizing network build and design, proactive maintenance, call centers, these are small numbers multiplied by big numbers that equal big numbers. And I think it's going to be a game changer for our industry. And we're not even to the cool stuff yet.

I mean the interesting stuff, hyper-personalization and agentic AI, I mean, all the stuff you read about. We're not even talking about that stuff. I think we're going to look back on this period where I say, hey, good news, $300 million of savings, and we're going to say, wow, that was so rudimentary. It was so early days. Remember those days when we were thinking about that. I think it's got nowhere to go but up, and I really feel like it's been a game changer for our industry in particular. And by the way, we're also building the digital railways that make it work. I tell every regulator when I say, don't forget, none of it works without really fast, low latency connectivity, whether it's mobile or fixed.

And so there's this virtuous circle that I think politicians and regulators are starting to see that they just didn't think about. And again, whether it's Trump and data and AI sovereignty and military self-sufficiency or whether it's just growth and the need for growth and the lack of productivity or Europe feeling isolated, would you ought to feel isolated in some ways from an economic point of view. All these things are kind of conspiring together to hopefully give us a moment here. So...

Brilliant. We're out of time, everyone. Thank you very much. Thank you Mike.

Thank you. Good to see you all.