BT Group plc (BTA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
June 23, 2021
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Robert Shuter
executiveA big welcome to everybody that's joined us here in London and, of course, to those joining on the Webex. My name is Rob Shuter, and I'm pleased to be giving my first briefing as the CEO of BT Enterprise. Before we get started, if I could just draw your attention to the usual caution on forward-looking statements. So this is our agenda for today. We've divided into sections covering, firstly, the market potential; our strong competitive position; our strategy for growth and our commercial priorities; and also that how that translates into our financial plan and growth strategy. I'm joined by a number of my colleagues from the Enterprise leadership team, who will be assisting me with the presentation and also, of course, our group CTO, Howard Watson. We'll make sure to leave plenty of time for Q&A at the end of the session. So I'm going to start by giving you an overview of the Enterprise business. In the U.K. and Ireland, we serve around 1 million businesses and public sector organizations. You can see from the breakdown on the slide that we support businesses of all sizes, from around about 800,000 micro enterprises and the 200,000 small- and medium-sized businesses, which are really the lifeblood of the economy, all the way through to large corporates, many of whom are household names like DPD, FirstGroup and of course, public sector organizations, both in central and in local government. This is not all about retail and the U.K., BT Wholesale is an important part of Enterprise, where we've got unique scale and reach. We also operate at both a retail and wholesale level in the Republic of Ireland. If you look at the size of the segment by revenue at the bottom of the slide, you will see that we also have in-market scale across all of those customer segments. And that really allows us to invest in platforms, products and distribution to compete across the full spectrum. The scale of the business is reflected in our contribution to the group financials. Last year, we generated GBP 1.7 billion of EBITDA, which represents 23% of the group's EBITDA. And from a cash flow perspective, Enterprise contributed around 49% of the normalized cash flow generated by the BT trading units. So we are a significant part of the group, and we're determined to deliver a plan and a performance that will continue to support the group's ambitious investment and growth plans. The key messages we want to share with you today are summarized on the slide. Firstly, that we are operating in a growing sector against the backdrop of an improving macro environment, where the type of services we provide are increasingly relevant and valued by customers. Secondly, that despite the challenges of the past, we have a very, very strong position in the market, and we believe we've got a unique set of assets, scale assets. We'll talk about the stabilization of the underlying operating performance in the last years and also demonstrate that our performance going forward much more relies on levers that are under our operating control. And we'll take you through the steps we've taken this year to sharpen our commercial model, to make the business more market-oriented, to make the business more agile and more focused on execution. And finally, to demonstrate that against this position of a growth market and a strong position in the market, that we've got a clear execution-focused strategy to return our business to growth after a long period of decline. So let's get started. And we'll start with our Chief Operating Officer, Ashish Gupta, who will talk through the market potential and our strong position. Thanks, Ashish.
Ashish Gupta
executiveThank you, Rob. So before we sort of talk about BT, let's look briefly at some of the macroeconomic trends affecting the markets that we serve. So this chart basically shows the way we look at it in 3 dimensions. We are seeing an improving macroeconomic environment with strong forecast GDP growth over the coming period. We're seeing growing inflation, which will help some aspects of our business because we have price indexation built into our contracts. We're seeing business confidence is also increasing amongst business leaders across all segments. And last, but not least, we're seeing growing spend on IT and communication services. And in addition to this, we're seeing that technology is creating new opportunities for businesses. Over 70% of decision-makers referenced investments in digital capabilities, significant growth in connected devices and increased security spending as priorities for their businesses. Customers are accelerating their digital transformation. They're all adapting to hybrid working. They're leveraging technology solutions to improve productivity and investing in digital capabilities to create new revenue streams. And last, but not least, communication services are more critical than ever. Ubiquitous, reliable and secure communications capabilities are critical to all businesses, all of that driving growth in bandwidth requirements, increased investment in cloud and security services. Now all of these macro and customer trends are driving growth across retail and wholesale markets, with growth across all BT segments. What this chart is showing you is a view of BT's addressable market in retail across all our segments in 2021. For completeness, we've shown the MNC segment as well. But as you're aware, this is a segment covered by our Global division, but we across Enterprise and Global, share assets and capabilities so that we can cross-reference and cross-sell those capabilities in the segments that we serve. And last, but not least, what makes BT unique is the strength of our Wholesale business. This materially increases the size of the markets that we can address. For clarity, there's also a little bit of overlap between the retail segment and the wholesale segment, but wholesale also addresses some B2C markets through that channel. Now if we look at the same market but look at it by product category, what this chart shows us is a view of this market size in 2021. If we look at the forecast growth rates over that portfolio in the medium term between '21 and '26, what you can see is that whilst we continue to face headwinds in our traditional voice markets, there is forecasted growth across all other product categories. And of course, operating in retail and wholesale, as I referenced before, gives us a broader base to address. So I mean, hopefully, having established the baseline of a strong macroeconomic environment, let's now shift focus to talk about how is BT positioned to service this market for our customers. We believe BT is uniquely positioned to serve customers in this market while underpinning our growth ambitions for 5 key reasons. First, BT has unmatched depth and reach in network infrastructure, it has the broadest portfolio of services and industry-leading investment plans, it operates strong brands and has unparalleled distribution and reach, it is a partner of choice for a number of leading companies in the U.K. and, last but not least, we are the wholesaler of choice. Now to take us through the first of these pillars, I'm really pleased that Howard is joining us today so that we can talk about our network and how it's bringing it to life. Thank you, Howard.
Howard Watson
executiveThank you, Ashish, and good afternoon, everybody. I'm Howard Watson, and I'm the BT Group CTO. I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about the unmatched depth and reach that BT has in our U.K. network infrastructure that is used by Enterprise. If I start with our fixed network, think about it as 1,900 Ethernet-enabled exchanges capable of reaching the whole of the U.K. with 10 gigabits per second Ethernet, with minimal need for any civils work. Now 106 of those locations are our main hub and metro sites, which is where traffic is aggregated and routed. And this is where keeping up with the scale and pace of growth is critical. Now over the last 2 years, we have fully upgraded the capability at these locations with new routers that are capable of individually switching 57 terabits per second. The key point there with that number is that this provides a lot of future-proof capability for growth. And if you add to that the 20,000 cell sites that comprises our mobile network, we have the largest geographic coverage in the U.K. at 85.6%, and that is a significant difference to our next nearest mobile operator. That network is the network that runs the U.K.'s 999 service, the air traffic control service, our voice platform, the U.K. broadband platform and the significant amount of mobile backhaul and TV services. So very much built to the scale and level of resilience required to match these demanding services, and all enterprises benefit from that investment. Turning now to Mobile. 5G coverage growth is critical. And I know that there are many confusing messages in the market. We are very focused on ensuring that the towns and cities that we declare is ready have significant coverage. I think the coverage maps on the right here, which shows London, speak for themselves. We also continue to win the awards for the 4G network, the seventh year in a row that we've been recognized by RootMetrics for the best 4G network. BT now has 32% of the mobile spectrum in the U.K., including a significant share of the really valuable mid-band spectrum. Through the emergency services network contract we have invested in providing significant extra coverage, so 99% coverage of our mainland U.K. major and minor roads, which really cements BT as leaders in this category. And over the last 18 months, what's really been brought to front of mind of all customers is the critical importance of reliability. Our core network is built with either dual or triple resilience out to every single one of the 1,900 sites that I mentioned earlier. And this gives us a very highly resilient architecture. With that, we are achieving 5 9s (sic) [ 99.999% ] plus of core availability. And then in our mobile access network, because of the ESN investment, we've unmatched resilience at mobile sites, both from a power and backhaul perspective. And as you can see, bottom right, our ability to deploy rapid response vehicles as temporary sites to cover either high-capacity events, the G7 in Cornwall recently, for example, or periods of lots of mobile sites allows us to commit to the 99.74% availability of our 4G network for road coverage. If we move to the next slide, clearly, the technology is evolving. And as an operator with owner economics of both fixed and mobile with a common core, we're making significant investments in driving converged capabilities. As many of you know, we are changing out a substantial amount of our radio access network, and we've used the opportunity to leapfrog the technology and capabilities there. We were delighted with the 700 megahertz spectrum that we recently won in the auction, and that will be rolled widely out across the U.K. And we will also be ensuring that all locations have the ability for the 2 IoT standards, be that narrowband IoT or eMTC. We're also transforming the core and the edge of the network, whether that be the services edge, the network edge or indeed a private customer edge, the whole part of the network will be cloud-native. We are building what we call our network cloud platform, and that will host all future services, starting with the 5G core, which will provide 5G stand-alone services later this year. But then it will also be used to accommodate all future network services. So significant transformation happening across the BT network, be it across the lens of coverage, capacity, reliability or indeed, future technology capability, all underpinning the products and services that Enterprise can deliver to its customers. And with that, I'll hand back to Ashish.
Ashish Gupta
executiveThank you, Howard. So not only do we have the best infrastructure, we've also invested in a very broad portfolio of products and services that service all segments of the market, meeting unique customer needs. From traditional voice to IP voice and all the way to complex managed services, we have a breadth of capabilities that is second to none. As a recognized expert in managed services, we have the credentials, the scale and the skills to bring all of these solutions together. And all of this is supported by a market-leading investment program, investing GBP 0.5 billion a year in solutions. We bring all of these services to market under leading brand identities, which enjoy a very strong first choice consideration with our customers. And that, coupled with an extensive distribution network across retail, desk and field, means we are available to our customers wherever and however they would like us to serve them in all regions of the U.K. And that, combined with the fact that our market share, our brand strength and our scale of distribution makes us a very important partner of choice across a range of companies that want to work with us to take innovative services to market for our joint customers. We have partnerships across a range of capabilities with some of the world's largest companies. For example, with Cisco, BT is the largest partner in the U.K., and we are one of only 5 Global Gold partners on a worldwide basis. With Samsung, we are the #1 operator in the U.K. and one of only a few partners in Europe with whom they have deep strategic relationships. And then last but not least, as we mentioned several times before, our wholesale business significantly increases our breadth and reach in the market, allowing us to maximize the returns on our assets. As you can see from the chart, we're a partner with a significant number of fixed operators, we underpin all U.K. MNOs with critical national infrastructure, and we are the preferred network for 30 U.K. MVNOs. So I hope that's given you a view that fundamentally, BT is really uniquely positioned to capitalize on the changing markets and support our customers across all sizes to achieve their growth ambitions. I'll now hand back to Rob to talk us through how we will capitalize on this strong market position.
Robert Shuter
executiveThanks, Ashish. So you've heard how we operate in markets that all have predicted growth, there's strong demand for our services and we've got the best assets in the industry. But we can't dodge the fact that despite all of this, we've been shrinking in the last few years. Ultimately, our challenge in BT Enterprise is to unlock the potential that's embedded in our infrastructure, our assets, our people and our brands. So before going through the strategy, I'd like to introduce the 3-curve model to talk through how we see the evolution in the market. Essentially, this shows that most of our revenue today comes from what we describe on the left-hand side of the chart as Curve 1 or legacy markets. So this includes products like PSTN, landlines, 3G/4G mobile, MPLS networks, et cetera. Curve 2 are the next-generation services like full fiber, 5G, software-defined wide area networks, et cetera. And in the U.K., the industry is at the early stage of the migration from Curve 1 to Curve 2. And our opportunity over the next few years is to both retain our existing customers as they adopt the new services, but also to improve our inflow share of new business in our current and future customers as well. And BT is very well placed to take advantage of this migration from Curve 1 to Curve 2. Curve 3 reflects the market opportunity in adjacencies. But whilst close to the Curve 2 services are not directly linked to connectivity, so this includes services like security, 5G edge solutions and industry vertical solutions. And Curve 3 is all about placing intelligent bets now to invest ahead of the mass adoption. And so we need to build a strong platform for future revenue growth. And our strategy in BT Enterprise is built around maximizing the opportunities in all 3 of these curves. So turning now to our immediate priorities. I'd like to share our 5-point plan for pivoting to growth, which is based on, number one, the sharper operating model we implemented this year; number two, the complete service portfolio we are assembling for differentiation across all of the Curve 2 services; number three, our focus on improving our share of new business across all of our expanded customer segments; number four, to accelerate our focus on simplification and digitalization; and finally, a focused investment program into these high-growth adjacencies. So I'll deal with each of these on the next few slides. So we've made some significant changes to how we are set up to go after the market opportunities we see. And we've also refined our operating model so that we are more focused on specific customer segments. Historically, we aggregated the SoHo and SME, small office, home office and small- and medium-sized enterprise segments, and we focus this on companies between 0 and 100 employees. And we know from our customer insights that SoHo is a significant high-growth segment where customers have different needs, and they also buy services in different ways, and these sometimes trail both consumer and business requirements. So they need a partner that's focused on enabling their growth, and we've created a separate segment dedicated to SoHo, which is led by Chris Sims, who you will hear from shortly. We also identified that we need a new way of operating to design and scale our approach in the high-growth Curve 3 adjacencies. And so we've created a division called Division X which is going to put our arms around the Curve 3 activities. So they're given the resource, the attention and the focus they deserve. And I'll come back to this in a few slides' time. We've also evolved the model on 3 other fronts. We are creating a stronger, more focused SME segment, which is going to address customer sizes now from 6 to 250 employees. And this is going to address issues we had in our previous model where the mid-market was effectively split between 2 of our segments, which created a lot of inefficiency. We're also driving more responsibility and accountability in each of the segment teams by realigning the commercial and proposition teams directly to the segments they serve. We're also creating finally a single place to serve our corporate and public sector customers, and therefore, the Republic of Ireland business and the emergency service network program will align to corporate and public sector under Dean Terry. Turning to the portfolio and the solutions. You can see from the slide that we are stepping up our investment focus on those areas that map to the Curve 2 next-generation services. The team is going to cover this in more detail in the commercial priority section in a moment. But this activity represents a material step-up in the portfolio road map over the past 12 months, and there's a lot more to come during the course of this fiscal 2021, '21 to 2022 year. We are well advanced in assembling a full suite of market-leading services across these 3 categories of fiber 5G connectivity, voice over IP and unified comms and intelligent connectivity, also with customization and specialization for the expanded customer segments, and you'll see that later in the presentation. The third category, and as Ashish showed earlier, there is room for growth across all of our product categories. And we've got a strong position and we've got strong shares in the existing markets. But we have, over time, under-indexed in the next-generation services you see on the right-hand side of the chart. And with our new focus and scale across a broader segmentation structure with an improved product portfolio and a much more disciplined commercial execution, we see significant opportunity to improve our share of new business, and therefore, our market shares over time. Fourthly, we started our transformation in Enterprise in 2020 with the goal of simplifying our business, improving the customer experience and driving down cost. Both our first end-to-end digital journey targeting the flagship Halo bundle reduced the onboarding time from wholesale partners by 70%, launched a new digital partner program, we've reengineered our bid processes to see a 13% increase in win rates, we've automated our mobile order journeys. But increasing the digital penetration, both from a sales perspective and a service perspective, is a key, key, key focus going forward, particularly across the SoHo and SME segments. We're targeting digital sales to increase from less than 10% today to 30%, and we are well advanced in rebuilding the front-end digital content whilst also building the digital end-to-end journeys, both for sales and for service. End-to-end reengineering also of the high-volume customer journeys is going to drive efficiency and improve the customer experience. And through reengineering, we're also going to focus on creating a seamless experience for our bundled solutions. Rationalizing our sales and CPQ tools, combined with increasing the intelligence of our commercial decisioning tools, is going to increase our agents' ability to stay focused on the customers. We're consolidating 8 versions of Salesforce down into 1. We're also implementing our Pega and SA2 tools into 1 tool for our agent. The long-term strategic transformation plan will be looking at how we build products, services and operational processes in a repeatable, modular way. That's going to enable us to bring solutions to market faster and leverage the modern IT stack. And in doing this, we're going to reduce our product complexity, both in terms of the multiple price variance we've got, but also the sunsetting of old technologies and old platforms. We've got a very clear transformation plan. We call it internally our new BTB or new BT business program, aimed at simplifying the business, improving the NPS, building on our new growth areas and also very, very importantly, driving efficiencies and cost transformation. So the fifth part, finally, is our need to invest in the future and place these intelligent bets. So we're creating Division X to deliver on this focused investment in the high-growth adjacencies. And this division is going to have 3 core responsibilities. The first is solution selling. So supporting our frontline teams with dedicated sales expertise and technology consultants in the new areas of growth like 5G and edge computing, coupled with intelligent device management or IoT solutions. This will involve designing new outcome-based solutions for customers and creating new digital propositions and commercial models. The second part of Division X is industry solutions to design and launch industry-specific solutions in a few carefully selected verticals such as health and transport and logistics. We are well advanced in building our health care vertical. We recently announced the appointment of [ Professor Saulter Markwood ] to head that up. Third part of Division X is focused investment. So it will manage our existing investment portfolio. Those are our assets in Media & Broadcast, Redcare and directory and street as well as any further inorganic ventures, where we will work closely with BT digital, who are responsible for the incubation agenda within BT. In Media & Broadcast, we are investing into a new smart broadcast network which is going to bring into the cloud our existing wholesale connectivity solutions and augmenting these beyond pure connectivity. So we will now move into how the strategy and the 5-point plan translates into the commercial plans in each of the customer segments, and you'll hear from Chris Sims, Pete Oliver and Dean Terry. I will be standing in for our MD of Wholesale, Alex Tempest, as she is on a well-deserved vacation in Portugal. Chris, over to you.
Chris Sims
executiveThank you very much, Rob. Good afternoon. I'm Chris Sims, MD for our SoHo business. And it's a really exciting time because next week, we launch our new SoHo business unit, which is going to help the U.K. smallest firms to rebuild and grow following the pandemic. And we principally see opportunities in 3 areas. So firstly, SoHo is highly profitable. Typically, we see ARPUs around GBP 5 to GBP 10 premium versus consumer tariffs. But equally, since about 2018, we've seen the proportion of small businesses taking business contracts actually decreased by about 5 percentage points. What we see is home-based businesses are generally happy with consumer services, enjoying consumer benefits, such as TV. And we see small businesses, who run their business from their own premise, often don't see the value of fixed business services. So to counter this trend, we are developing BT propositions to give more tangible reasons for businesses to take business tariffs. Earlier this month, we launched Halo for business with its improved business-grade functionality, including enhanced call features, additional security, backup and the like. On the EE brand, we're already providing a mixture of consumer and business benefits, which means our customers don't have to choose between their home life and business productivity. On both brands, we have further proposition launches throughout the next quarters. Now due to the scale of our investments and our really comprehensive channel model, we are brilliantly positioned to develop and to steer customers onto the right business proposition for their needs, and therefore, benefit from that ARPU uplift. Secondly, SoHos like to buy directly from their telco provider and also buy through digital channels, and we have opportunities to grow both. Today, we have modest transactions over digital, and increasing these to the 30% figure that Rob mentioned earlier will result in significant additional broadband sales or a reduction in cost to sell. Now this is unlocked by our really substantial investment in simplifying that SoHo customer journey, integrating broadband, voice and mobile into an improved digital estate, and work on this has already started and is already delivering tangible benefits to conversion and to mix. Now in addition to the digital opportunity, we also now have regional business consultants covering 300 of our EE retail stores. We know our customers value the ability to discuss their requirements face-to-face, and we see additional opportunity to drive more value through this retail channel as we evolve our portfolio. Now we already have leading sales coverage for the SoHo market. And by growing digital and making retail work better for SoHo customers, we will create a sales asset which I believe is unrivaled in the U.K. market. And finally, SoHos are ever more dependent on cloud-based technologies, especially in areas such as productivity, accounting, online selling and marketing. And we know from the Skills for Tomorrow digital training program that we run, the businesses often don't know who to turn to for advice and recommendations about digital solutions. And we have a really great opportunity to leverage our scale, our ability to partner and the high level of trust we have in our brand to provide a much wider range of services to our customers. And importantly, this isn't years away either. Our really unique digital marketing hub is launching shortly and is one such example about how we can make it simple for SoHos to digitally market across multiple channels. This is a lifeline for their business, and it's something that's going to be made a lot, lot easier by BT. Okay. So to unlock this opportunity, we need to broaden our propositions, invest in advanced commercial management tools, and we're also going to intensify our competitiveness, particularly on mobile and broadband. But our first priority is to broaden our overall proposition to SoHos. So our Halo for business proposition that I just mentioned is market-leading solution, and it covers 3 main product areas: broadband, IP voice and mobile into a fully converged solution. It's the first unbreakable WiFi package for business in the U.K. market. And we guarantee connectivity across the use -- the workplace, using the fastest full fiber speeds of up to 900 meg coupled with 4G backup and a mesh WiFi network that covers every part of your office. And it also includes business-grade IP phone with a whole myriad of features which are useful to businesses as well as enhanced security and cloud backup. The unrivaled customer service is underpinned by a free on-premise visit by one of our technical experts as well as 24/7 U.K.-based remote IT support. Halo is at the heart of our efforts to return broadband business back to growth, and with it, to drive FTTP. And today, we see the ARPU for FTTP is at least GBP 10 more than FTTC. And this, with a faster Openreach rollout announced last month, will give us a chance to accelerate the adoption of FTTP due to the much larger addressable market. Halo is also going to continue to grow our IP voice and functionality changes we've made recently mean that, that IP voice solution now has a significantly increased addressable market. And now over half of our voice sales could be placed over IP, and we expect this to grow dramatically over the next 12 months. All this is market leading. It's great for our customers, and through cross-sell, it will actually grow the overall value for our business. Now we have several other opportunities to cross-sell more and better manage value and customer retention. On cross-sell alone, we know that only about 20% of BT SoHos have both business fixed and mobile products with us, and that indicates a very material cross-sell opportunity. And we're exploiting that today with recent cross-sell activities, generating a 5% uplift in broadband sales. We've also invested in tools, processes and channel incentives to better manage commercial outcomes of retention. And on broadband, we're already seeing a meaningful ARPU uplift on the re-signed value based on a number of scale pilots we've completed, and we see opportunity to further reduce the broadband rate of churn in the future. Finally, throughout the plan that they make, we've continued to grow our mobile base. And unsurprisingly, mobile really remains a key area of focus for us. Strong relationships with key device manufacturers, coupled with our best network credential Howard talked about earlier, will help us maintain that momentum for the foreseeable future. We're also focused on base management capability and have identified a number of new opportunities to improve churn and underpin our acquisition volumes. And what these are going to do is bolster the additional revenue contributions we already expect to get from the CPI or the index-linked price increases, which are now part of our standard EE contracts. So to wrap up, SoHo is a really fantastic opportunity for BT. We see potential in truly differentiating the business bundle proposition and driving our digital channel mix and taking revenue from adjacent services. And we've got a really exciting road map of propositions for our customers and have also invested in increasingly sophisticated commercial tools to make sure we get the value outcomes we need. And with that, I'll now hand over to Pete to talk about SME.
Pete Oliver
executiveThanks, Chris. The U.K. SME market is a very attractive growth opportunity for BT. It represents over GBP 4 billion in annual telecom spend and is forecast to grow to just under GBP 4.5 billion by 2025. Today, our share of this market is only 26%, and we have plenty of headroom to grow. Following the pandemic, SMEs have had to rapidly change and adapt their business models. And as a result, we have seen some significant trends in our favor. Firstly, an acceleration in the take-up of both cloud communication and collaboration tools as SMEs have continued to allow their employees to work more flexibly. We've also seen a push to e-commerce, driving demand for high-speed connections and digital marketing. And SMEs are adapting and moving to contactless payments, driving the need for reliable connectivity and security. Demand for all of these services is growing, and SMEs need a trusted partner like BT to remove the complexity and help them make their businesses more digital. While the SME market is large and growing, it's still very fragmented with a long tail of smaller providers who are active in the market, all of whom have gaps in their product portfolios, service offering and sales coverage. BT is very well placed to offer a complete set of product solutions, and we also have the scale in service and sales to grow significantly in this market. And while we see a growth opportunity for BT across the whole of the SME sector, there is a particular group in the 100- to 250-size companies where our share is lower, and therefore, a bigger opportunity exists. And we're doubling down on this group of customers by moving them into our SME division to bring more focus, increasing the number of salespeople dedicated to targeting these customers and creating a commercial team who will be concentrating on growing our share in this segment. To drive growth and win in the SME market, we've been investing in our 3 key product pillars. On networking and connectivity, we have the broadest range of options in the market for SMEs, from dedicated BT net circuits with speeds of up to 10 gigabits, dedicated bandwidth and same-day repair, to multisite broadband with 4G backup. No other provider has a comprehensive and national set of options for SMEs. We've also been investing in security and WiFi solutions for our customers to improve our ARPUs and further differentiate ourselves from competitors. In IP voice, we've recently added Cisco Webex and can now provide a single solution for digital phones, video conferencing, collaboration tools and virtual call centers to our SMEs. And there are 2 critical IP voice focus areas for us. Firstly, migrating customers from our legacy voice products ahead of the network closing in 2025. We're using our local sales presence and engineers to be an expert partner for businesses making the move. Now while IP voice will reduce core revenues, we're upselling to collaboration tools as well as networking and mobile to reduce dilution as we move those customers. And our second focus is on acquisition of new IP voice customers. We have a significant opportunity to bring in new customers to BT using that same sales and service expertise to help them move on to modern IP voice solutions. In fact, over the last year, we've invested heavily in our acquisition sales teams and year-on-year are selling 5x more IP voice seats to new customers in our weekly sales. Finally, on mobile, we're launching a new version of our EE portfolio for SMEs later this year. And this is introducing the ability to flexibly add or remove employees; new tech phones, which make it easy for businesses to upgrade their handsets; and a flexible data part to avoid individual employees running out of data. And all of this is still backed by the U.K.'s best 4G and 5G network with the peace of mind that SME customers can benefit from in-store help and repairs with a store no more than 20 minutes away from them. To further accelerate our growth, we're moving our focus to selling SME bundles across networking, IP voice and mobile, providing a simple one-stop shop and a unified ordering and service experience. And this will drive up our ARPUs and reduce our churn. It's not just about price, by putting these services together, we are making products that work better. For example, calling hunt groups that work across fixed and mobile, while also offering a single service and billing experience for SMEs. And we're also focusing on specific sectors. For example, we've created an education team and are launching education offers aimed at schools, which put together high-speed connectivity, classroom WiFi coverage and a security solution with parental controls. Our sales coverage remains second to none. SMEs can buy from us via local sales teams, call centers and our EE stores and of course, via indirect partners. We've continued to invest in expanding our sales team in anticipation of a strong COVID bounceback. And we're investing in lead management, digital and sales tools to drive efficiencies throughout our sales channels and higher average deal values. To summarize, SME is growing. It's a GBP 4 billion market where businesses are rapidly moving to digital ways of working, representing a clear growth opportunity for BT. The competition is fragmented with a long tail of smaller providers, and we have further opportunity in the 100- to 250-sized businesses, where we are expanding our sales coverage. BT has the strongest product set, and we're investing across networking, IP voice and mobile to stay ahead. And not only that, we're putting those products together into solutions tailored for our customers, further differentiating ourselves and growing our ARPUs. And we have the best sales coverage with further investment going into leads digital and sales tools to improve our efficiency. I'll now hand over to Dean to cover corporate and public sector.
Dean Terry
executiveThanks, Pete. In corporate and public sector, we have a significant base of around 15,000 customers, ranging from central and developed governments, police forces, local councils, NHS trusts and both large and midsized private sector customers, all of whom are seeking a reliable and trusted partner to work with as they look to utilize their network and their company data and further exploit value for their business. In mobile, including managed mobile, we see the market is growing at around 3%. Our share today is around 30%, which is due to the reliability and coverage of our network. But as our customers start to look for enhanced flexibility and personalization, we see further opportunities to grow. We continue to invest in our future mobile strategy, providing improved customer experience and agility, which alongside our continued focus on managed mobile services, gives us an opportunity to expand across both the public and private sector market. IP voice technology usage has grown significantly in the last 12 months. The market continues to grow at 12%, and we are working with our fixed voice customers to understand their strategy towards migrating to new platforms. In addition, we are also closely collaborating with our technology partners to further exploit new acquisition opportunities, enabling us to further our market share position of 7% today. All of our customers need to drive better business outcomes and at pace to support their customers' and citizens' needs. With the enviable network leadership position that Howard described earlier, we are able to offer greater capacity, flexibility and speed through our leadership in 5G and software-defined networking; therefore, enabling our customers to have full flexibility for their business. The way people live their lives is changing. How they access public services, buy goods, seek entertainment has all been massively disrupted. And this has accelerated the demand for true digital transformation across many of our customers. We see a significant opportunity to support our clients in this area through further investments and especially in managed cloud and security, where we are seeing 13% and 10% market growth, respectively. Leveraging our strong market position today in public sector, we will also accelerate our position across the private sector. Our ability to provide a fully managed service will be a compelling offer as our customers' digital business needs become more complex. With the increasing resilience on technology and remote access, it's also not surprising that security is getting more and more important for our customers. Hardly a month goes by without news of another cyber attack. So keeping people and data safe is high up the priority list in most boardrooms today. With the total security market in our segment growing at 6%, there's a significant area for us to exploit. We are leveraging our experience of working with the U.K. government to further grow our position of 6% market share. So how are we going to win? As Rob mentioned, whilst we're investing significantly in next-generation technologies, we need to continue to innovate and grow our market share in our core market. We will lead in mobile through offering greater flexibility and improved customer experience. We're working with our partners to explore the business opportunity in 5G, both in terms of greater speeds, but also specific 5G business use cases. We will be the partner of choice for their journey to IP via a dedicated team working in tandem with our customers. Our strong base of fixed voice customers gives us a great opportunity for growth in addition to working with our partners, such as RingCentral, Microsoft, Cisco, Mitel and other providers to drive further acquisition and market share. We continue to capitalize on the strength and rollout of our network across businesses, supporting our customers with the speed and agility they need from LAN and WAN services. Through our network, they can bring further value to their business for their needs for digital transformation, such as IoT, data analytics and edge. And finally, achieve #1 position for managed services. We are further accelerating our strength in managed services across both public and private sector to support our clients' digital transformation journey. Using the strength of BT's core assets, we will also look to innovate in adjacent markets to further accelerate our growth. We've got a great opportunity to leverage our strength working across government departments in security. We're supporting our teams with continued learning, and we'll focus our growth further across both the private and public sector customers. In 5G, we have had some great success this year. Just some examples of the work we've done with Belfast Harbour to support its rejuvenation, with Unipart to support their manufacturing processes and a great example with North Lanarkshire Council on virtual education in schools. We are working across multiple industry sectors to further our clients' understanding on how 5G use cases can accelerate their business outcomes. We are increasing our focus on health care as a key growth area. It continues to be challenged on patient care, waiting times and early diagnostics. These are all areas where technology can make a massive difference and where we will play a significant role. I'm really excited about some of the solutions that we have coming to the market later in the year, together with our investments to hire a senior dedicated team from this industry. To help us to achieve all of this growth, we continue to invest in our sales and support teams. Through strong focus and execution, we will win in the market. As a proof point, in the last 12 months, our sales pipeline has increased by over 50% together with an improved win rate of 15%, which gives us the confidence that we are getting things right, and we are not stopping there. We have implemented a dedicated program to focus on a set of our key customers, which we call CPS 1. These are the customers where we see the biggest potential for growth. We're investing in expertise to support our clients' business strategy, further investing in the development of our teams to support their career development. And finally, these accounts will have senior executive support to further enhance our relationships. To help our customers shape their digital strategy and to best position CPS, we are also investing in a consulting practice. The consultants will engage with our clients' business to understand their strategy in context of their industry dynamics. And together, we will co-create our customers' digital journey to enable their success in their market, supported through our solutions. In summary, our key objective to drive growth in CPS is clear, and that is to further invest in the way we partner with our clients to support their digital journey. We will offer greater flexibility and customer experience through our products and services. We will drive better business outcomes for our customers focusing on 5G, health and other key markets. And finally, we will accelerate our market share in IP, security and managed services. And I'd like to hand back now to Rob.
Robert Shuter
executiveThanks, Dean. And as I mentioned earlier, wholesale is a really important part of Enterprise and BT. For context, at a group level, last year, wholesale contributed around 10% of EBITDA, and its revenue per head is the highest in the group at just over GBP 7 million. Over the last year, there have been also significant market headwinds, which I'll speak to separately. As you saw from Ashish's slide earlier, there are essentially 3 pillars within the wholesale business. The first is the MVNO market, which has grown to just under 10 million subs, if you exclude brands that are solely owned by the MNOs and just under 20 million if you do include the MNO sub-brands. The most significant trends in the MVNO market has been the reduction in prices and the big increase in data usage. We've been through a challenging time in that area with the loss of the Virgin Media contract, which I guess in the end was inevitable considering the subsequently announced Virgin-O2 merger. However, we remain focused on MVNO as a high-profit growth business unit that will contribute to our future earnings growth. The opportunities in the MVNO space are 5G and WiFi calling with MVNOs like utility warehouse, new MVNO partnerships across different sectors of the market and IoT, where BT will utilize wholesale partnerships to also maximize our share in that very important segment. The second part is the traditional fixed market. So this is where BT Wholesale is servicing communications providers to providing fixed services to their own customers. This has been declining in revenue over several years due to the movement from legacy services as well as significant ARPU declines driven by a very intense competitive environment. I think the challenges that exist in that market have also been exacerbated by COVID in the last 12 months or so. We do still see opportunities. Firstly, IP transformation. It's essential for our customers, the communication providers, as more Openreach exchanges come into scope. And the communication provider customers are asking for strategic guidance and leadership. We're working with customers like Wavenet and IDNet on multiyear transformation programs to support their move to all IP. Full fiber demand is trending up along with customers wanting higher bandwidths. Over the last quarter, our percentage of orders raised on full fiber or SOGEA, which is Single Order Generic Ethernet, is increasing week after week. It's also driving higher ARPUs across the sector. Digital transformation as a trend is accelerating. Having a great digital experience is now really a hygiene factor for our CP customers. Combining our expertise with the strength of the portfolio, leaves us uniquely positioned in terms of the reach of the network. And finally, flexibility. As with our retail SME business, we're going to capitalize on the move to cloud-based solutions. Then the third component of wholesale is where we serve the mobile network operators or MNOs. And there are a couple of overarching themes there. A big one is the investment in 5G and the need to remove Huawei equipment from the networks, which has driven a whole wave of opportunity in things like cell site connectivity, including professional services to accelerate the move to 5G and the simultaneous swap out of the Huawei kit as well as the exploration of 5G use cases, ultra-low latency services such as edge networks, neutral hosts, small cells, private networks are all in demand from our MNO customers, and BT Wholesale is well placed as a trusted neutral wholesaler with national coverage to exploit this. So if we turn to our priorities to win, I think the overarching strategy for wholesale from a commercial perspective is to realize value from the group assets by being the best partner. We're widening our appeal to more resellers by moving to converged and digital-first solutions with APIs, packaging the core product offerings with the right tools and solutions. This will create value through an increase in product holding for the customer and growth in ARPU with the move to fiber and higher bandwidth services. We'll continue pursuing broadband growth, leveraging the expertise we've got with all IP to solve the challenges that exist in this market around the commercials and the migration journey for the customers of our customer. We're also going to be shortly launching a market-leading managed broadband product, which addresses a number of specific challenges in the market head-on. We've almost doubled our share of Openreach orders on 1 gig access since October 2020, and our share of the 1 gig market is also growing. To meet the demand for IP, we are also developing flexible market-leading solutions that simplify the transformation to all IP. Our next chapter in the wholesale market is all about automation, orchestration and creating standout experiences. That's what the fixed market is really calling out for, and our customers are willing to pay a premium for it as it facilitates their internal simplification and the realization of their own internal cost efficiencies whilst also creating greater effective customer reach. We believe that being successful in the wholesale market really relies on mutually beneficial success with our customers. And recognizing this, we've also launched the partner program for fixed customers, which brings the strength and breadth and knowledge of BT together in a partner program ramp. And finally, we are investing to future-proof our portfolio by continuing to enable the rollout of 5G with market-leading solutions across small cells and high-bandwidth circuit portfolios, continue to offer market-leading professional services to solve some of the most challenging problems in the market and capitalize on the unique opportunity to provide services at the edge of our network, which is unique because of the geographic spread of our exchange estate and our ability to offer edge colocation services. So that really concludes the commercial priorities section. So thanks everybody and my colleagues for putting that together. And I'm going to hand over to our CFO, Damien, who will take you through the financial plan.
Damien Maltarp
executiveThanks, Rob. So you've heard from the team what our plans are to drive growth in the different parts of enterprise. And I want to pull that together to show what that means in terms of the financial plan. But before I do that, I just want to spend a minute looking back at our performance in the last few years and the progress we've made towards building a platform for growth. So this slide shows our year-on-year performance for both revenue on the left-hand side and EBITDA on the right. Now last year was clearly a difficult year given COVID with revenue down 7% and EBITDA down 11%.-- Now most of that decline was due to the impact of COVID. If we estimate that without it, our revenue would have reduced by around 2%, a similar decline to what we saw in the '19/'20 financial year. And this is an improvement on the roughly 5% decline we saw in the few years before that. Now to counteract this revenue decline, we've been focused on reducing our cost base. And for example, as you can see in the middle, we have removed around 2,000 roles since we formed Enterprise some 3 years ago. And this means that our underlying EBITDA decline in the last few years, again excluding the impact of COVID, has been around 1%, and that's a big improvement on the 10% decline we saw some 4 years ago. Now you can see this improvement in our operational metrics as well. We've improved the experience we provide to our customers as you can see from the Net Promoter Score on this slide. We have a lot more to do here, but it's moving in the right direction and has contributed to a reduction in our churn levels. We've continued to grow our key product volumes such as retail mobile, where the customer base is up by almost 10% in the last 2 years. And for those products that have been declining such as retail broadband, we've managed to slow the pace of decline. We're focused on stabilizing the base and then growing it from there. So we've made good progress on building a stable platform. As we look forward, we want to pivot the business to growth, and you've heard about the 5 priorities we have to support revenue growth. But at the same time, there are a few shorter-term challenges that we need to navigate through. Firstly, the loss of the Virgin Mobile MVNO contract, it will impact our business and particularly this year and next. Secondly, the decline in traditional voice remains a headwind, albeit smaller than it was a couple of years ago. Today, almost 40% of our voice lines are now in voice over IP. But that means we've still got 60% on traditional. So the migration to VoIP still has a bit further to play out before we're over the hump. And thirdly, our markets remain competitive, and we see continued pricing pressure. But our markets are growing overall. And so while like-for-like prices are declining, we do see businesses upgrade to higher speed, higher services and that helps support ARPUs and overall market growth. Our approach is, therefore, in driving both volume growth and market share growth. Now our revenue profile will change over the years ahead. And Rob referred earlier to the different revenue curves that we have. So today, most of our business is in the mature legacy curve. Now in the chart on the slide, that may look like a lot, but it's a pretty broad definition, including 4G mobile, anything that is copper related and even Ethernet. And this part of the business is going to decline, but mainly because customers are moving to the next-generation equivalent of those products, such as 5G mobile, fiber to the prem and voice over IP. And we expect these next-gen equivalents to grow at least in lockstep with the decline in the legacy products. The strategy for us is to grow our share in those growing markets. And finally, we have the new verticals that we are going to expand further into. We'll do so selectively supported by targeted investment. We won't be straying too far from our core business, but we'll focus on solutions such as 5G campus network, edge connectivity and also expanding our presence in the Internet of Things. Also developing solutions for specific customer types, such as health, as you heard earlier. We already made some revenue from these verticals and the plan is to supplement the growth that we expect from the next-gen curve to drive overall growth in the business. Now this change in the shape of our business will, however, have a modest impact on our EBITDA margins. And we therefore remain really focused on driving our cost reduction plans to both counteract that effect, but also to give us more flexibility to invest in driving top line growth. We still have plenty of opportunities to take costs out. And for example, our digitalization agenda will both reduce our IT costs and reduce our labor costs. And we'll have more sales completed online without the need for human interaction. We'll also have fewer manual processes when providing a service, and this greater automation will mean we need fewer people. Now we spend about GBP 1.5 billion a year on internal costs. Much of that is with Openreach. We have a program dedicated to making sure we properly match our revenue with the costs we pay internally. So we're making sure every service Openreach provides us is strictly necessarily and the right one for the customer. And we're ensuring that we align the correct billing processes and timing with the internal charges that we receive. Really, our biggest cost opportunity is with our third-party suppliers, where we spend around GBP 1.4 billion a year. And we're expanding the team that works with our key suppliers and partners to make sure we are negotiating the best deals and rebates. The creation of BT Sourced and the use of technologies and platforms such as Fairmarkit will also drive further savings. We continue to seek opportunities to reduce the total number of suppliers that we deal with. So bringing this all together, we have a clear plan to return our business to revenue growth over the coming years. The cost reduction will both protect margins but also give us more options to invest in growing the top line should we choose to do so. We will see a short-term increase in our CapEx as we invest in both digitalization and our new verticals. And over the medium term, we expect our revenue growth and a relentless focus on costs and efficiency to drive long-term sustainable growth in our cash flow. And with that, I'll hand you back to Rob.
Robert Shuter
executiveThank you, Damien. Well, folks, you may be relieved to know that, that concludes our presentation. And I'd like just to briefly close with the key message that we opened with, namely that against the backdrop of a growth market, a strong position in that market and improved operating performance and a sharper operational commercial model that we've got a clear execution-focused strategy to return our business to growth. We recently launched a new above-the-line campaign on our broadband offering, which is the first in many years, and we'll share that with you just for 30 seconds or so before we move on to the Q&A. [Presentation]
Robert Shuter
executiveRight. So we're going to start the Q&A. We'd really appreciate it if you could ask one question at a time. We've got very short attention span. And if I need to direct any questions to the team, we'll do so. And we're going to start with our 3 colleagues in the room, and then we'll move on to the Webex feed in a second. So anything from your side? And there's a roving mic. If you just give a sig, a colleague will be there. Yes.
Unknown Analyst
analystSo maybe actually start with a bit of a math question, if it's okay. Maybe this one is for Damien. So I think on Slide 31, you've showed your market shares you felt in you were achieving in the different categories -- and earlier in the presentation, you gave some growth figures for each of those categories. So if my math is correct, that would imply you think ET Enterprise should be growing top line around 1.5% per annum. Does that seem reasonable as the conclusion from the data you're showing here? And at the moment, I suppose you're even on an ex-COVID basis a little bit short of that. I mean, why is that? Is that because either my math is wrong or your -- maybe there's some market share impacts in here. So it would be helpful to understand how you're seeing your market share evolution within the different segments you've given.
Damien Maltarp
executiveCan I take that?
Robert Shuter
executivePlease?
Damien Maltarp
executiveI should start by saying that Jim and I went the same math class together at school. So I have no doubt that your math is impeccable. So look, I guess I'd say a couple of things. There are -- the numbers we gave are CAGRs, so they're over a period of time, and not everything is going to be moving in a straight line. And as you can see from our market shares, we are quite exposed to the traditional side of things at the moment, market declining 13%, 40% market share. So I guess in the shorter term, that has quite a slightly disproportionate effect on the overall shape of the business. So I'll definitely take that into account when thinking about CAGRs over a period of time. And then as well, in the shorter term, as I mentioned, the Virgin MVNO contract will have a bearing because the impact of that is mostly this year and next year. But I think in terms of broad direction of travel on a multiyear period, this business has been declining. We don't want this business to decline. Yes, there are some shorter-term headwinds. The markets are growing, the kind of broad figure you gave aspirationally, that is the kind of direction we want to be getting to at some point, maybe even more, frankly. But obviously, we do have some kind of shorter-term headwinds to navigate through.
Robert Shuter
executiveYes. Maybe just to build a couple. I mean, I think you saw from the slide, minus 5%, minus 5% pre-COVID. If you strip COVID out, still mid-single digit. And I think the message we're trying to get across this afternoon is the first priority is to stabilize those declines, and that needs to be in the really near term. And once we've achieved that, then there's no reason why we can't get respectable growth again because we are in a growing category, and we'll start to lap some of the issues of the past. And certainly, we should be targeting at least those kind of levels -- once we've got ourselves organized and executing properly, and that's going to take, I guess, another 6, 12 months or so.
Unknown Analyst
analyst[indiscernible] categories at the moment, please?
Damien Maltarp
executiveYes. So in terms of market share, clearly, probably the main transition is the fact that we've got 40% in traditional and 10% in the voice over IP equivalent. We are absolutely focused on growing our market share. I think there's a bit more we need to do. And frankly, as the traditional market declines, I don't see why our market share in traditional would necessarily deviate hugely, frankly, being at 10% voice over IP, we've got clear big aspirations to do a lot more than that. And I think on one of those charts that you referred to having 3% share in IoT, a 13% share in Managed Services. Those aren't -- those are definitely numbers we want to be shooting more for. Similarly, if you look at it from a segment point of view, when we've only got 16% share in the CPS market, again, that is something we'd clearly want to improve them.
Robert Shuter
executiveAnd then IP voice, unified comms, IoT shares away low. And they should not be that low. If you look at the infrastructure, we've got the existing customers, the distribution reach, the segmentation, the breadth of the portfolio. So there is a part of -- historically, we've not really organized ourselves well enough to take advantage of this wealth of assets we've got. And I think that really is probably my strongest feeling having come in and been here now 4, 5 months is when we get ourselves properly organized, we will couple the agility of the smaller players. We have been taking some of that market share with the breadth and reach of BT. And then I think we will compete much more strongly. Yes.
Jeremy Dellis
analystIt's Jerry Dellis from Jefferies. I've just got a question related to Slide 68, if I may. On Slide 68, if I read it properly, you're sort of suggesting that between now and the medium term, the overall sort of revenue base from sort of curve 1 and curve 2 will be relatively stable. So in other words, growth in curve 2 offsets the decline in legacy curve 1. At the start of the presentation, on Slide 7, you talked about inflation being a potential revenue driver. And you talked about CPI forecast to get up to 3.7%. So I suppose the question is sort of how -- what is the inflation assumption in Slide 68? How sensitive are these outcomes to the inflation assumption? And then generally, just in the Enterprise arena, how confident are we that CPI price increases maybe stick in the same way that they might do in consumer where everybody follows suits, which may not be the case perhaps in Enterprise.
Damien Maltarp
executiveYes. I think a couple of aspects to your question. I think in terms of the curves, your broad hypothesis is right, but you'll notice we have a -- there were going to be a range of outcomes, and we intend to put into the dotted lines to show that actually there is a -- if you look at curves 1 and 2, in a few years' time, we can see those 2 together growing modestly. And actually with top of the dotted lines, growing not meaningfully. And then the idea is that the new verticals supplement what we see as the base growth and the base business to provide further growth on top of that. I think in terms of your point on inflation so we've assumed for a proportion of our customer base, particularly SME and SOHO. So for a subset even of those that we do get some CPI benefit from those. But I think -- to your point to what extent it sticks. I think we need to be cognizant of -- that applies automatically if you stay on the same package, but customers will shop around and different offerings will come into the market. So I'd certainly be pretty cautious about applying that level of inflation across the entire base because people will always look for good offers out there. And we know, frankly, we operate in a pretty price-competitive market.
Charlotte Perfect
analystIt's Charlotte Perfect from Arete Research. Just could you provide a bit more color around the focus on the particular verticals you've chosen on health and education as opposed to, let's say, financial services? Is that capability-based or is it size of market-based or growth opportunity-based? That would be helpful.
Robert Shuter
executiveSure. Thanks, Charlotte. Look, I guess the focus is slightly different across some of the segments. So in the mid-market business, in SME and Pete's business, we have a strong focus on education there. And we've got a focused team and we've got good products and services and the kind of connectivity plus services. Financial services is really a key part of BT Global's strategy because they're looking after the multinationals and the U.K.-based banks, which is a very kind of specific vertical when you need vertical solutions. So for BT Enterprise, we're looking at business customers across the spectrum, excluding the U.K.-based multinationals and the U.K. banks. So that's why you wouldn't see financial services in there. So of course, what's left then is the ones we've picked of which I think the primary one is health. So we know that it's a big economic segment in the U.K. economy. We know that we're one of the few European countries who've got a unitary health care system. So you can build scalable, repeatable solutions. It's obviously getting a lot of investment and attention as part of the kind of COVID pandemic. And we really want to broaden the business up because we have a decent penetration today in the health care sector, but it's connectivity, connectivity plus. And so part of the benefit of starting to resource up a bit in Division X, is that we get a focus team of people are looking beyond that, industry-specific vertical solutions, both in the consumer and the enterprise space. So that's why we've selected that one. And then transport and logistics is also one of the key segments where we see the 5G edge IoT use cases emerging, which kind of, I guess, goes without saying because one of the key benefits of 5G is the ultra-low latency and high bandwidth of a connection that's coming in on a mobile, on an air interface, which is uniquely suited to lots of devices in a concentrated environment and to moving devices. And that's why transport and logistics have been selected. And I guess the final point is we're not spread betting as BT. We've got financial services in Global, we've got education in SME and we've got health and transport in vertical -- in Division X. And we'd rather have a proper go at a couple then to spread ourselves too thin, which I think has been a mistake of the industry over many years that we've really just tried to do too much at the same time. But that's helpful. Okay. So perhaps we could see any questions coming in on the Webex, and then we'll come back to the colleagues in the room.
Operator
operatorThe first question on the Webex is coming from Nick Lyall, representing Societe Generale.
Nick Lyall
analystCan you hear me now?
Robert Shuter
executiveYes, we hear you now. Please go ahead.
Nick Lyall
analystIt was just a question coming back to SME, if possible. I was surprised how upbeat the SME presentation was given we've got the end of furlough coming up in the end of rent protection and things like that for the SME market and for some SOHOs. So it was just a question, a very basic one. What sort of conversations are you having at the moment? And can you give us some metrics? Is it that you've had conversations and you know everything is fine? Or is it just something that's not possible to know yet? And because of that, what have you penciled into guidance because of that in those dotted lines, Damien, when you talked about it? What should we think about in terms of the risks?
Robert Shuter
executiveSure. Thanks, Nick. So maybe, Pete, if you could give us some sort of a few general comments on what you're hearing from customers, and then, Damien, you pick up on the financials.
Pete Oliver
executiveYes. Certainly, in terms of what we're seeing in the market, as the lockdowns are lifting, we're seeing demand start to increase from SMEs. So for example, we've reopened our retail stores and across SOHO and SME that has lifted our mobile numbers, not quite to pre-pandemic levels, but we're starting to see things coming back. And there's certainly a lot of interest in IP voice and more flexible solutions. Clearly, the big question is bad debt. And our plan does take into account a provision for bad debt through the rest of this year and into early next year. And yes, there's some degree of uncertainty there, which Damien may comment on further, but we have got a provision against that. But we are seeing from the businesses that are viable, the majority of businesses are starting to come back, and demand is starting to pick up, albeit not at pre-pandemic levels.
Damien Maltarp
executiveYes. I think just to add a little bit more to that. If you look at things like our insolvency rates at the moment, they're pretty low. In fact, generally speaking, solvency is a lot lower than we would have anticipated, but that's mainly because of all of the government support schemes. The customers are generally paying their bills. So at the moment, things are looking pretty good from that point of view. But we absolutely recognize that a lot of the government support will come to an end in the coming months. And that's certainly what we've anticipated in terms of our thinking. So as Pete mentioned, we've got a bad debt provision, which takes into account an increase in solvencies. So we are expecting businesses to go, but we have got a bad debt provision against that. And we've also tried to capture that in terms of our expectations around trading as well. So I think at this stage, I'd feel comfortable with how we've thought about it. Clearly, there's still a lot we'll have to learn as we go through. But I think at this stage, we feel broadly comfortable.
Robert Shuter
executiveGood. Thanks, team.
Nick Lyall
analystAnd so just to come back on that. Is it possible to give us any sort of quantity on either the bad debt provision? I think you talked previously about 20% of SME revenues being vulnerable area. So is it may be possible to give us a number at all that we could put against revenue or EBITDA to at least have an idea of what you're thinking?
Damien Maltarp
executiveI probably don't want to give us a specific number, but actually, what I would say is the bad debt provision we had at the end of our last financial year was actually higher by some low tens of millions than it was at the previous financial year when things were really kicking off. So I think to give you some context, I think we're reasonably well covered from that point of view. Our debtor balance at any point in time is about GBP 400 million, give or take, does vary. And we've got a comfortable part of that covered with a bad debt provision.
Robert Shuter
executiveThanks, Nick. Any other questions coming through?
Operator
operatorYes. The next question is coming from Polo Tang from UBS.
Polo Tang
analystI've got 2. The first one really is for you, Rob. I mean, you've previously worked at Vodafone and MTN. So as a result, I'm just curious in terms of what surprised you the most either about BT Group or the Enterprise unit when you joined? And what are the main changes that you started to implement relative to the prior strategy? So that's the first question. And second question is really just about voice declines. So voice revenues are still about GBP 1 billion per annum in terms of revenues. And if you look at the breakdown of your voice lines, I think you said it was about 60% still traditional voice, so about 40% is voice over IP. I think in terms of ARPU, a voice over IP seats about half the price of a traditional voice line. So given that there's ongoing voice line loss and spin down to cheaper products, can you maybe give us a sense of when we should kind of think about those legacy voice declines starting to ease? And can you maybe just talk about when we can maybe see revenue reflection for Enterprise revenues as a whole?
Robert Shuter
executiveOkay. Maybe I'll kick off. I mean, I guess, I was fortunate that I had some time to do kind of onboarding and orientation towards the back end of last year. So I think I came in with my eyes wide open. And I've said from the very start that I think the biggest opportunity in BT is to unlock the potential that's embedded in the wealth of assets and infrastructure and reach and brand and presence. And I still very much believe that. I do believe the business needs in future to be more externally oriented, more focused on the competition, more focused on the customer, more focused on the daily, weekly, quarterly heartbeat trading and perhaps less focused on our own internal challenges. So I think we've already made quite some steps to reposition that in the business. I did also find that there were some key commercial building blocks that need to be in place to be successful that were relatively underdeveloped. So things like the decisioning engines, base management and some of the trading metrics. But we've actually made, I think, pretty decent progress just in the last couple of months in putting that together. And it's one of the advantages when you tackle something maybe a few years after others did, it's much easier to implement it because there are already a whole variety of industry-based solutions that you can buy off-the-shelf cloud-based solutions that can be implemented. I guess the third issue maybe on a more positive note is BT has got a lot of infrastructure resource, a lot of smart people, pretty much any question you ask, someone will send you 20 or 30 pages of intelligent PowerPoint on exactly what it is and why it's like that. So I think we've got all the resources to work out what's going on and what we should do, and I'm trying to couple that with a very deliberate and disciplined execution machine that is fundamentally focused on the market and winning in the market. And yes, enjoying the journey. Damien, on voice.
Damien Maltarp
executiveYes. Thanks, Polo. So on voice, at the moment, we do make just under GBP 1 billion of revenue from fixed voice. And if I guess I break that down, around half of that is from the traditional space and the rest is going to be a combination of a good chunk in VoIP, but also some interconnect in there. Now that GBP 500 million of traditional voice has been declining every year by GBP 100 million, GBP 150 million a year. In reality, that GBP 500 million by the time we switch off the PSTN network around 2025, that would be pretty well 0. So what you can take from that is that rate of decline GBP 100 million a year plus a bit, that's probably the kind of rate of decline going forward. But in terms of the interplay between traditional and voice over IP, I guess I'd say a couple of things. If you go back 2 years when we did the briefing beforehand, that 60-40 split that I was speaking about today, that was 75-25. So we're actually getting not too far away from a 50-50 type territory. And I think what I'd add in as well is that when businesses transition from traditional lines to VoIP, it's not a one-to-one move. So a business with, let's say, 30 employees, they might have 20 PSTN channels because not everybody is on the phone at the same time. When they move to voice over IP, if they've got 30 employees, they might want to get 30 VoIP seats. So typically, actually, it's not a one-for-one relationship. What we do assume and what we do see is that there are more VoIP seats than there might be traditional channels or traditional lines. So I think that's just something else to kind of play into the mix. But I think the point is we're not -- we're getting closer to that 50-50 ratio. So we're getting closer to the hump, not quite there, but a lot further forward than we were a couple of years ago.
Robert Shuter
executiveBeth, can you take the next question?
Operator
operatorThe next question is coming from John Karidis from Numis.
John Karidis
analystI'm sorry for asking a specific number of questions. Firstly, could you please say at the end of fiscal '21, how many FTTP lines did Enterprise -- had Enterprise commercialized? And then secondly, Damien, in the spirit of helping us given that we are at the right time, can you now say how large the Virgin Media MVNO business was in fiscal '21?
Robert Shuter
executiveDamien?
Damien Maltarp
executiveSo I'll take both of those. So -- yes, for your first question, John, I'd refer you to our KPIs where we have a line in there, which is the proportion of our customers, which are ultrafast. So that will be essentially FTTP proportion of our broadband base. You can get that number from there. And in terms of Virgin Media, so to kind of contextualize, our MVNO business is over GBP 200 million, it's about GBP 250 million of revenue. And the largest part of that is going to be Virgin Media. So probably well over 50% of that is Virgin Media, and that's what we expect will transition away over the next couple of years.
John Karidis
analystSo you're saying the Virgin Media business is just GBP 130 million?
Damien Maltarp
executiveI don't think I said that. I think I said that our MVNO business is GBP 250 million, and over half of that is MVNO. So...
Robert Shuter
executiveIs Virgin Media.
Damien Maltarp
executiveYes, it's Virgin Media.
John Karidis
analystOkay. So clearly, I wasn't in the same math classes as Jim.
Damien Maltarp
executiveI think the key point is the over, I didn't say -- and 50% is Virgin.
Robert Shuter
executiveI'm talking in code, but I guess that's what you've got to do because there also confidentiality undertakings with Virgin as a customer, which we've got to respect. Yes. Next question, please?
Operator
operatorThe next question is coming from Sam McHugh from Exane.
Samuel McHugh
analystJust one on kind of the inflection in revenue, if you like. So I guess the barriers to entry in these new services are gently a bit lower, hence the market fragmentation. So I wonder what gives you confidence that you can hit higher than 10%, 15%, 20% share in some of those new services. And then when I look at your competitors, people like Gamma or CityFibre who are undercutting your lease line pricing by about 20% taking share in backhaul, ramping up their deployment. Vodafone has been quite aggressive with pricing. Virgin is growing double digits and is hoping to cross-sell O2 as you did with EE. All of those guys have structural drivers that make me think that they can accelerate their share gains? I guess, Rob, you talked about it a bit, but what makes you think you can kind of inflect and gain more share aside from just doing things better than maybe they've done in the past. What else could you point to that could maybe give you more of a structural change and help you address those market share losses you've seen in the past?
Robert Shuter
executiveOkay. I guess, I mean, in the fixed market, I spent most of my career in the challenges rather than in incumbents. I mean, particularly Vodafone Europe is much more a challenger. And when you're challenging in a market, you always envy the infrastructure and resource of the incumbent because they have got the access networks, they've got owner economics, they've got reach, they've got distribution. And they've got a big base of customers who's sitting on the legacy products. And I see that very clearly now from this side of the table, but we have more natural advantages to have a strong position in NGN services than anybody else, which makes it even more peculiar that the inflow share is so low because most of these people are existing BT customers, and they are migrating off existing BT services. So why would the most natural place to go and not to be -- to get a BT next-gen service move from PSTN to VoIP, move from FTTC to fiber, whatever migration. So I believe we have not organized ourselves well enough commercially to take advantage of all of these assets. And it's not that we have slightly under-indexed in next-gen service. We have significantly under-indexed in the next-gen services. So I don't dispute the fact that there's more competition and there's also more infrastructure competition. But if you looked at some of those market shares, less than 10% unified comms, IoT. I've got absolutely no doubt we can increase the inflow share there despite the competitive pressures you're naming. And there will be more competition also, of course, for infrastructure and for assets and alt nets, et cetera. But we've got a national network with FTTC. The group's announced a GBP 25 million FTTP rollout. It's the most ambitious program pretty much across Europe. I mean, GBP 5 billion a year. You really don't see pretty much anything like it anywhere else in the industry. And around 5%, 6% of that rollout is going to be nonresidential, so it's focused on business premises. So this is a scale game, and BT has got scale in spades. We just need to couple it with the commercial execution. So I'm -- in our strategy and our plan going forward, I would say it's one of the areas that I have the least concern about, which is indexing up in the next-gen services. I think we've got so much to play with them.
Samuel McHugh
analystSuper. Nice one. If I can ask a follow-up maybe for Damien, just on kind of obviously your ambition to do this. To what degree should we expect CapEx to go up in Enterprise. I think you flagged it in there. It's been pretty stable at GBP 500 million. And how much you happen to fight against [ Clive ] for resources on CapEx at a group level? Do you think you should spend more in CapEx to try and accelerate the transformation?
Damien Maltarp
executiveYes. So as I indicated earlier, our CapEx this year will be higher than it was last year. It's always a healthy discussion around CapEx, and I think we held our own this time. I think the way I think about CapEx is that there are probably broadly 3 different buckets. There is direct customer-related CapEx, trading CapEx. So if a large customer wants us to spend building some network connectivity, we'll do that. And that's pretty good CapEx because that pays back pretty quickly. There's then the CapEx we undertake for things like digitalization, product development, and that element will be going up because we want to accelerate and move more towards automation and digitalization. And then I guess more for this year, we will be spending more on that curve 3 CapEx. And I guess, just to size that, at the moment, we're thinking we'll probably spend low tens of millions, maybe in the GBP 30 million range of CapEx, specifically focused on these new areas. Last year, that was a pretty small number. That was probably more around the GBP 10 million mark. So there is a step-up in the level of CapEx that we'll be undertaking focusing on the curve 3 areas.
Robert Shuter
executiveYes, maybe just the last thing to build on that. I think the discussions we have with our Openreach colleagues is more around what is the right mix of residential and nonresidential rollout rather than Enterprise trying to get a bit of CapEx of Openreach. I mean, we have a CapEx program of around GBP 500 million a year. Bear in mind, that doesn't have network CapEx in there. So that's products, platforms, customer equipment. I mean it's a -- I mean, personally, I think it's a sizable investment if you consider what it's going into. I mean, it's more CapEx in that category than some of our competitors spend in total. Yes. We've just got around 5 minutes to go, so we'll try and squeeze in the last few questions. Perhaps I could come back to the colleagues in the room, and then we'll go back to the Webex for the last few. There's 5 questions left. Okay, James, well, you can jump in here.
Unknown Analyst
analystYou gave some numbers showing the COVID impact on your business last year. It'd be great to just could you just drill down a bit more what were those specific COVID impacts you were seeing? And therefore, how much of those do you actually think can recover in the coming years ahead?
Damien Maltarp
executiveSure. So I guess the -- there was a revenue impact and there was an EBITDA impact, which clearly overlap, but not entirely. So what we saw on the revenue side of things is we had an expectation of how much -- what our trading volumes would have been, what our order intake would have been and what we would have converted. So we had that view before COVID hit, and then we were able to kind of compare what our trading volumes were and things like that. There was a bit of insolvency as well, less roaming. So we have said, for example, that typically pre-COVID, our mobile roaming revenue is about GBP 50 million. That largely disappeared last year, just to give you some context, and that's a reasonable margin there. So there were a combination of things that impacted the revenue. And then on the EBITDA, we got the revenue flow through plus then additional bad debt provisions that we would have taken as well. To answer your question, we do anticipate new business formation at some point. There will be some insolvency, but volumes will come back, but you don't get the revenue benefit on day 1 because you need to -- volumes need to go up, you need to provision it and then the revenue comes through. So there's a slight lag on the recovery on the bounce back.
Robert Shuter
executiveJerry, Charlotte, anything to throw in before we go back? Charlotte, you're okay. Jerry?
Jeremy Dellis
analystIs this working? Okay, this is Jerry here. So just -- in your presentation, we understand there are lots of moving parts and it's quite complex. But for those of us who are trying to track progress day-to-day from now on, how will we -- what are the milestones that we should really look for to sort of gauge whether this is on track, maybe 12 months from now. I mean, you said that maybe things will remain tough in various ways in the near term. But how can we really gauge that the plan is on track?
Robert Shuter
executiveYes, Jerry, I think I would point to a few things. We're very focused on the customer numbers, and that's fairly binary. So -- it's broadband, SME and wholesale. It's IP voice base, it's the Ethernet base. Because our business is kind of in a way in 2 parts. There's a customer times monthly ARPU kind of part of the business, and then there's managed services, large contracts, contract part of the business. So I think the first place to look for progress is in a stabilization and growth in the customer numbers, and we are completely obsessed about that in the last few months. I think we are also increasing and we're pointing to this overlap between the efficiency metrics and the improvement in the customer experience because NPS, digitization of journeys, less resource focused on processing the journeys. I think there is an area of overlap there that will also be visible earlier on. Internally, I always say we have to look at staff engagement because we've got to bring our people along with us, but our scores are actually reasonably healthy. We have a very good score for engaged workforce. But we have quite a low score for how easy it is to get things done within BT. So we've got work to do there. And I think as we bring the customer numbers through, the customer experience through, we keep people along the way, obviously, the next place to look is in the financial results and in the quarterly reporting. And there, we really need to start seeing that top line stabilization moving back into growth. And I think when we've got a couple of positive quarters behind us, we're all going to feel much more comfortable. Good. So let's go back to the Webex. If I understand marks, just speculation as well. We've got around 5 questions left there, so we can get through those all. So yes, back to you guys.
Operator
operatorThe next question on Webex is coming from Carl Murdock-Smith representing Berenberg.
Carl Murdock-Smith
analystIt's quite an open question for Damien. The first, I just wanted to say that looking at the adverts, I thought you were saving some money by starting in yourself. I just wanted to ask, obviously, you've been on the sell side, you've done the IR role. So you know better than anyone what we think about BT. I'd like to ask being the last 5 years as CFO, first of Wholesale then Enterprise. What has surprised you? And what do you think sell side investors most misunderstand about Enterprise?
Damien Maltarp
executiveSo yes. You've thrown me with your previous comment, but so I guess, what has surprised me. I think probably 2 things. Actually, one, there's probably more looking at it from an Enterprise point of view. This is the point I alluded to earlier. But in the -- for CPS, which is focused on large major corporates or public sector, that our market share is only 16%. Now I know our market definition expands into IT and things like that. But you step back and you look at our other businesses were in the high 20s. You step back and think, well, 16%, that just can't be the right number for BT. But given that these customers, they need reliability, trust, they need these long-term contracts, you step back and think, well, we should be hitting far above that. And I think that to me is clearly not going to be easy, that's why there's got to be an opportunity. So I think that was probably one of the things that surprised me standing from an Enterprise point of view. I think the second thing is we do sometimes make things a bit difficult for ourselves and to the point Rob just made, the feedback from our people is that it's hard to get things done. And that's why we talk about digitalization, simplification. Philip talked a lot about modernization. These are absolutely critical because we do sometimes make it particularly difficult for ourselves. And that's why what you're hearing from us and from BT more broadly, why there's so much focus on that. There's a huge amount of self-help that we can do. Again, not easy, but we need to invest in it, and that's what we're doing. And if we do that, we'll make it considerably easier for our people and a much, much faster and better experience for our customers, then in turn will help drive the top line.
Operator
operatorThe next question is coming from David Wright, representing Bank of America.
David Wright
analystJust a couple of questions, possibly a little open here. But the first is, how do you balance the need to partner with external guys such as in the cloud services or the hosting space? To what extent do you look to do that versus develop yourselves, given you do have the scale and resource? And then just a second, I guess, relatively open question is we have very clear B2B ambitions. Well, what I should probably say is that Liberty Global with the new VMO2 business are making B2B a clear target, arguing that they are significantly under-indexing in that space. So I just wondered to what extent you are considering their potential entry and whether you're seeing any moves yet in the market from them as a midterm risk?
Robert Shuter
executiveYes. So maybe I'll pick up on those. I mean, I think on the first question, solutions like cloud are now often just one component of the solution that the customer buys. And because our customers have got their own array of vendors, what we've tended to do in B2B is to make sure we've got relationships with the hyperscalers, so we can serve the needs of our diverse group of customers. So there were those that are Microsoft that want Azure. There's people who are looking for Amazon, there's people looking for Google. I don't think it makes any sense for a telco today to start building their own cloud services if you look at the scale of the hyperscalers. I think a more intelligent approach is to recognize that you need to be multi-vendor for cloud so you can integrate it into your solutions depending on your customers' own technology landscape. And that's very much the strategy we've been following on cloud. It's the same strategy we followed on unified comms, where we've got a multi-vendor approach. So when it comes to build versus partner, I don't think anybody really is building in scale in the underlying components. What they tend to be doing is building solution-selling capabilities, which is very much obviously what we're trying to do in Division X. And I think at least we feel for BT, it's important to start building some vertical industry solutions. But they will be, in the end, an aggregation of component building blocks from BT and other vendors. So I think that's -- you hear now some of those in the industry like Enterprise as a Service in the sense that we are a platform provider of a variety of other external vendor solutions. I mean, I think on VMO2 or perhaps more just general competition, I mean, I do believe we need a separate focus on SOHO because it's a big segment, and it's an important segment and we can do well there. But it also generally is where the newer entrants into B2B start, particularly if they're coming from consumer-centric businesses because it's an easier extension from a consumer to SOHO. So part of the big resource and effort we're putting into SOHO that Chris took you through is slightly also in advance of anticipating more competitive pressure there. Outside of that, we've competed in business mobile against all the MNOs, historically, O2 included. And the fixed providers without mobile have been competing in the MVNO space. So the competition has been there for some time. I think the difference is, once you've got converged operators with converged fixed and mobile, will they approach the B2B market differently. And I think there will be more competition, which is why it's so important that we are getting this really sharp segment product commercial strategy in place, so we can protect and aggressively grow. And...
Operator
operatorThe next question is coming from Michael Bishop from Goldman Sachs.
Michael Bishop
analystJust coming back to the VoIP issue again. I think the last time there was an enterprise teach in, essentially, BT pointed to not having the right product set to get that conversion ratio in VoIP. And I think, Rob, you mentioned a couple of times now, you felt like it's more agility needed. So I just wanted to really draw down to like exactly what you see the key issue out? Is the product fixed and now it's agility in sales? Is that the right way to take today's presentation? And a super quick second was just on the FMC in SOHO being less than 20%. Is there something structural there? Or is there no reason why that couldn't be similar to where we see FMC and consumer?
Robert Shuter
executiveOkay. Great. Well, I'm going to get Ashish to weigh in on VoIP, and Chris will pick up the SOHO question.
Ashish Gupta
executiveYes. Sure, Rob. So yes, first of all, over the last 2 years, we have significantly moved our voice portfolio ahead. I would say we've got more than sufficient product capability to target all our markets, whether that be in wholesale, SME or CPS. I mean there are obvious issues with moving certain PSTN services to VoIP, things that depend on dial tones and emulation type capabilities. This is not an issue just for BT but for industry as a whole. And we continue to work with our customers to find innovative ways to move those services across. But for the bread and butter services, which involve people using IP voice devices to communicate with each other, we've got a very evolved portfolio with multiple partners right across our segments. So I'm pretty confident that those gaps have narrowed. They're not completely closed for the reasons I've just described, but they've narrowed significantly, and it is about agility getting close to our customers and helping them on the journey to figure out how they migrate from one service to the other. That's the key focus for us over the coming 12 months.
Robert Shuter
executiveThanks. And Chris, on the SME question.
Chris Sims
executiveOn the SOHO question. There's nothing structural there. If you think about how the BT product sets have emerged, the different brands appealing to different parts of the market. As part of our plans going forward, we want to bring those 2 worlds closer together, and we're kind of designing that convergence into the proposition. And as I mentioned during the presentation, where we have driven specific cross-sell campaigns between the 2 brands, it has been highly successful. So it's going to be a big focus for us going forward.
Robert Shuter
executiveGreat. Thanks. So we've got time for the last 2 questions. So if we can bring those up?
Operator
operatorThe next question is coming from Adam Fox-Rumley representing HSBC.
Adam Rumley
analystI just had a very quick one building on the questions around competition that we've already had because I think that's really the key area. I mean, you've said you want to take market share pretty much across the different areas of the business. Are you willing to compete on price?
Robert Shuter
executiveWhen I joined BT, I got some competition law training, where I was told by the regulatory people that you can't talk about price and all manner of trouble you'll get into. I think what I would say is the significant areas of, let's call it, self-help, where we can be more agile and more competitive, the things we rely on to index up in this market share. I don't think the center of gravity is around price. It's around segmentation, distribution, campaigns, the decisioning engines, next best advice, base management. I think it's -- the center of gravity is much more around the commercial execution and the customization around the customer. Of course, it's a competitive market, so there's always going to be some competition around the edges. But that's -- Damien, anything you want to -- yes. Okay.
Adam Rumley
analystSorry, if I may just follow up briefly? When you survey your customers, when you talk to them, where would you say price sits on hierarchy of that decision-making?
Robert Shuter
executiveI think it's different across the different segments. I mean, as part of my onboarding, I've been doing focus groups, customer visits. I mean, most of it on Zoom, of course. My experience is it's quite far down the hierarchy. Customers are talking about, does the service work? I mean, particularly post-pandemic, working at home, customers are not wanting to experience buffering, they're looking for high speed. They're looking for reliance. They're looking for a service that's easy to get. So they're pointing sometimes to how long or short it took to get the service to work. They point to issues around the service experience when things go wrong. Our large enterprise customers are pointing to the importance of flexibility and the importance of us helping them with their own challenges around modernization. We did an exercise recently on the drivers of trust of the brand, 4 drivers. First one was ability. So the second one was integrity, integrity around the experience, what you see is what you get. So at a high level, it's -- people are more focused. This is now a mission-critical service. I need it to run my daily life. I need it for my kid's education. I need it to stay active. I need it to work and it needs to work and it needs to be easy to use. And I think that's one of the benefits of COVID. And as Philip always says, the cost of a great broadband line in the U.K. is like a latte a day. So this is really a pretty competitive market, I think, in terms of pricing. Right. Then we have our last question. Let's hope it's a good one.
Operator
operatorOur last question comes from Maurice Patrick representing Barclays.
Maurice Patrick
analystWell, hopefully, I won't let you down. Yes, Maurice here. So question really relates to the management of your supply chain supplier. When you talk about you want to manage that supply chain to give the best service to your end customers, are you fully reliant on Openreach to provide services to end customers. Would you consider using competitors to Openreach. There are many other things to build alternative infrastructure in many areas where you supply and service your customers? So would you only use Openreach because it's part of BT? Or would you consider to do alternatives if it could help you better service your end customers?
Robert Shuter
executiveI'll ask Ashish to talk a bit about the reliance on Openreach. But I mean, I think high level in the enterprise market because of the depth and breadth of the BT infrastructure, both in the core network that Howard explained and what Openreach is rolling out in the FTTP rollout -- the default position always for us is let's keep the business in the family and various infrastructure there from Openreach or the core network would be crazy not to use it. We do come up in certain instances now where we are participating in an RFP for, let's say, a big local council account. And there are parts of the service where there isn't Openreach infrastructure. And then we do consume alt nets as part of that bid. But I would say it's more keep it within the family until you don't have to. And then, of course, we do consume alt nets where we need to. And Ashish, on the dependency on Openreach or the experience for customer supply chain?
Ashish Gupta
executive[indiscernible] in addition to using alt nets for some specific deals, I mean, the first question is in our volume business, with our systems and tools, it's really difficult to integrate with a whole host of different access network providers. Because as you can imagine, we have a complex system to state as it is, which is integrated in with Openreach as a sort of national infrastructure provider that gives us national coverage. We look at options elsewhere, but it's on a deal-specific basis. And in addition to what you said, Rob, about using alternatives, we actually have the alternatives to actually build enterprise fiber. So we can blow our own fiber in certain instances where it makes sense for us. So all options are available to us, and we are constantly looking at what is the best access infrastructure that makes most sense for the enterprise business. And in most cases, today, given the capillarity and the national coverage, Openreach still is the best bet for us as it is for a lot of other B2B providers, to be fair. But as Rob said, we are not obliged by any means to only use Openreach. It just makes more sense for us. And where it makes sense not to, we have considered and, in some instances, used other providers.
Robert Shuter
executiveThank you, Ashish. I think that concludes the Q&A. I guess, just last message from -- 2 last messages, firstly, just to thank my team for all the hard work and preparation; and Tara for you and the support team who've put everything together. And also, of course, to thank all of you for attending today. We hope to be back soon with some good news on our execution. Thanks.
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