Liberty Global Ltd. (LBTYA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Liberty's Global Fourth Quarter 2022 Investor Call. This call and the associated webcast are the property of Liberty Global, and any redistribution, retransmission or rebroadcast of this call or webcast in any form without the express written consent, Liberty Global is strictly prohibited. [Operator Instructions] Today's formal presentation materials can be found under the Investor Relations section of Liberty Global's website at libertyglobal.com. After today's formal presentation, instructions will be given for a question-and-answer session. Page 2 of the slides details the company's safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking statements. Today's presentation may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including the company's expectations with respect to outlook and future growth prospects and other information and statements that are not historical fact. These forward-looking statements involve certain risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. The risks include those detailed in Liberty Global's filings with Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent filed forms 10-K and 10-Q as amended. Liberty Global disclaims any obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements to reflect any change in its expectations or in the conditions of which any such statement is based. I would now like to turn the call over to Mike Fries. You may now proceed.

Okay. Welcome, everyone, and thanks for joining our year-end results call. I hope you're all doing well. As usual, we have some prepared remarks that Charlie and I will manage and then we'll get right to your questions. And for that, I'll bring in my key leaders who will be ready to respond as needed. We're working off slides as we usually do, and they contain quite a bit of good information this time. So we'll assume you've got those in front of you or you'll access them at some point. Just a warning, this is our year-end call, so there's a bit more information than usual, but bear with us, we'll try to keep it crisp. I'll begin on Slide 3 with some highlights for the quarter and the full year. And I have to start by saying that I'm extremely proud of my team in each of our operating businesses for how they executed through a challenging year. And just when we thought things were getting better, Europe was hit with a war in Ukraine, rising energy costs, record inflation and cost of living crisis that impacted customers really across the region. But despite these headwinds, we hit or exceeded all 16 guidance metrics for our big FMC operating companies that we established a year ago, and we beat our forecast for distributable cash flow at the Liberty Global level by $100 million, and that's using guidance FX. So this is the third year in a row that we were faced with external uncertainty but still managed to deliver on our public targets. Second and perhaps not surprisingly, Q4 was a very strong quarter for us across the board. We delivered positive broadband and postpaid additions in every market, fueled by convergence offerings and Black Friday campaigns. And our largest operation, Virgin Media, O2 delivered their best financial result yet with a double-digit EBITDA growth figures supported by price adjustments, synergies and net adds. And then third, we continue to benefit from consistent and steady revenue growth in our 3 most important segments, which are B2B, broadband and mobile. And just as importantly, we're actively addressing headwinds in our B2C fixed businesses more broadly with smart network and product innovation, and I'll dig into both of these topics in a moment. And then fourth, we've maintained a clear and consistent approach to capital allocation. In 2022, we bought back 40% more stock than we guided to, a total of $1.7 billion or 14% of the shares outstanding. And we're on track for at least another 10% this year. And in a few slides, I'll expand a bit on how we see our capital allocation framework going forward. And then finally, I'll let Charlie cover the details of our guidance, but I'll just highlight upfront that despite continued investment in fiber, 5G and digital, this year, we expect to generate another $1.6 billion in distributable cash flow in 2023. So a strong year for us operationally and financially. And as we'll discuss in a moment, we're well positioned to drive value for shareholders moving forward. Slide 4 is our standard schedule showing connectivity trends for our 4 large FMC telcos over the last 5 quarters. One quick observation is that for the first time in over 5 years, every market experienced positive broadband and postpaid mobile ads in the fourth quarter. The top left shows VMO2 which has delivered 3 straight quarters of sequential growth in both broadband and postpaid net adds despite intense competition and the cost of living pressures in the U.K. Broadband speed upgrades together with strong momentum from our Volt bundle, drove our best broadband quarter of the year. By the way, we outperformed BT again, and we garnered an even higher share of national gross adds than we did a year ago. Q4 also saw strong pickup in postpaid net adds in what is always an important trading period for mobile. And the O2 brand continues to perform very well, especially at the top end of the market with sector-leading churn well below 1%. Now Sunrise in Switzerland also had a strong fourth quarter with 53,000 broadband and postpaid adds. Importantly, after 2 quarters of losses in Switzerland, we delivered positive broadband growth, helped by a strong Black Friday period, focus on 1 gigabit offers and a new Netflix bundle we put into the market. This was a particularly good performance given the continued higher churn we've experienced related to the UPC brand migration that we flagged really mid-year last year. Now in postpaid, Sunrise delivered another strong quarter, with 34,000 adds supported by the Sunrise brand refresh and interestingly, our SwissSki sponsorship, which is off to a great start, now that the ski season is fully underway. After 9 quarters of broadband losses, Vodafone Ziggo delivered 7,000 net adds in Q4, in part supported by its Ziggo Sprinter and Black Friday campaigns. Look the Dutch market remains highly competitive with price and quality of service now becoming more important than fiber when you look at customer churn. Incidentally, KPN lost broadband subs in the quarter. VodafoneZiggo's 26,000 postpaid adds were negatively impacted by the loss of some corporate accounts, but were still higher than KPN in the quarter. It's also interesting that T-Mobile took some pricing in January, up 9%. And then finally, Telenet added 13,000 broadband and postpaid ads which was largely consistent with prior periods, and postpaid mobile ads were steady, supported by their bundles and it's really strong performance from the base brand. So solid execution across all of our markets in broadband and mobile. And Slide 5 is also becoming a standard chart for us, showing revenue growth across the 4 main FMC Opcos and then broken down by revenue segment. So there's 5 key takeaways here. First, if you look at the total revenue growth for each FMC Opco, you'll see that revenue remained resilient with broadly stable to positive trends across the group. As you move down the chart, however, you'll see that consumer fixed revenue as a whole is consistently negative from negative 1% and negative 4%. And that's impacted by losses in video and voice RGUs, something you're well aware of as well as pressure on ARPUs and mix during this cost of living crisis. But interestingly, while we continue to lose video subs at a rate, 1/3 of what's happening in the U.S., video is now only about 15% of our revenue. I'll spend a moment on how we're addressing the headwinds in fixed on the next slide. Now embedded in this fixed B2C result are broadband revenues, which continue to grow, albeit modestly and will increasingly become a larger and larger part of the fixed consumer story in every market. And then third, revenue growth in consumer mobile is all green across the board, driven largely by service revenue, which is growing 2% to 4% across the group. This is a function of strong postpaid additions, of course, and price adjustments through the year. And then fourth, B2B remains a growth engine across all assets with revenue increasing 1.5% to 4% and significant upside as we expand our reach and market share. And then finally, as the pie charts at the bottom make clear, we have a highly diverse and arguably defensive revenue mix with mobile, both B2C and B2B, now representing almost half of our turnover and B2B itself comprising 20% to 25% of revenue. Slide 6 dives a bit deeper into our fixed consumer business and how we're addressing some of the headwinds today. I'll start by showing fixed ARPU trends on the top left, which as you can see, have been relatively stable in Belgium and Holland even slightly up with both markets bidding down price rise as well and dealing with limited front-book, back-book dynamics. In the U.K., in Switzerland, however, we've seen around a 3% decline in fixed ARPU related partly to the fact that we start with fairly higher ARPUs in each market, and then that's compounded in the U.K. by declining video, voice and cost of living pressures. And then Switzerland, as we discussed, we're managing through a migration from UPC to Sunrise, which has impacted ARPU. So what are we doing here? First of all, we're taking price increases on fixed. You know that, around 14% in the U.K. and mid-single digit in Belgium and Holland, and those are outlined on the bottom left, you can see what we've done. Secondly, we're implementing a number of commercial initiatives that are critical here. By far, the most important is our broad convergence strategy, which, as we've demonstrated, helps improve churn, NPS and cross-sell opportunities. We've talked about it before in Holland. FMC households have, on average, 20 points higher NPS and 50% less churn. These are real theoretical benefits to the fixed base as we converge. We've also invested significant effort into integrating streaming apps into our video platforms. Netflix, for example, is bundled in just about every market, and we're increasingly able to add these subscriptions to our bill. We're also focused on rolling out all IP and at first video devices across our markets. In the U.K., for example, we're now adding video subscribers, not losing video subscribers actually adding video subscribers in January as a result of our StreamTV launch. And then our investments in digital are reducing friction and cost in the fixed consumer business. The tools we're rolling out are driving more online sales, reducing call center interactions, improving self-install rates and driving cross-sell opportunities. And then finally, we're making good progress on new revenue streams. And these include things like home security or telehealth and energy. We've rolled out products just like this in most markets, and we intend to continue to take advantage of our customer relationships and digital platforms to widen our revenue lens and find new areas of growth. Certainly, a significant part of our plans to keep growing broadband and improving our fixed consumer business relates to our fixed network investment strategies in every market which we provide an update on in Slide 7. It's also important to remind folks that we are the broadband leader today in Europe with over 31 million gigabit homes ready for service. And just as importantly, we have a clear path to 10 gigabit speeds in every market with mostly creative structures, really creative structures that will ensure we're optimizing CapEx intensity. So the chart on the bottom left shows you that by 2028, we'll be 70% fiber to the home across what will then be a 36 million home footprint. Now that excludes whole buy arrangements in markets like Switzerland and Ireland that add another 4 million fiber homes takes us to 40 million and brings that fiber percentage to 75%. So we could be as many as 40 million homes by 2028. That's good organic greenfield growth. And our plans to get there are summarized on the right. You're familiar with our approach in the U.K. We added or upgraded 1 million fiber homes in 2022, and that will accelerate by at least 50% in 2023. Again, most of that CapEx, especially the new build CapEx is being invested through our JV with Telefónica and InfraVia so off balance sheet. In Belgium, we've announced the deal with Fluvius, you're aware of that to build fiber across Flanders in a Netco-Servco structure that you close this summer. And in the meantime, we've agreed a reciprocal wholesale access deal with Orange that ensures that Telenet is the undisputed leader in the North with 70% plus utilization and also capable of entering the South. We completed our 1 gig upgrade in Holland last year. And in Switzerland, as you know, we're going to use a hybrid approach with DOCSIS fiber and wholebuy. And then finally, Ireland will be our first market to launch wholesale services on our own fiber network in 2023 and that's after announcing a wholesale agreement with Vodafone. So we have a sound and we think efficient set of plans in every market to remain the speed and quality leader in fixed connectivity, and you should expect that we'll keep you posted on progress here every quarter. Now moving to Slide 8. We decided to hit the valuation question head on this quarter. So if you back off and squint your eyes a little bit, this might look like a complicated slide, but it's really quite simple. The purpose here is to help decipher the valuation gap in our stock a bit and focusing on our FMC Opco. So one way to look at our current market valuation is to break it down into 3 parts as we've done on the left side of the chart. So assuming full value for our cash balance and our ventures portfolio, the implied valuation of our FMC Opcos at the $21 price level is roughly 5.5x EBITDA and around 13x operating free cash flow using our actual and reported figures for 2022. By the way, cash is cash, and our venture investments are conservatively marked. They're held in very tax efficient structures and we've already returned over $500 million to the parent. Interestingly, the free cash flow yield at $21 once you reduce the market cap by ventures and cash is well over 30%. Now moving to the middle of the slide, the analyst community has an average price target on our stock of $30. That implies a 40% premium to our current market price of $21 to running the same math and attributing all of that premium to the FMC telcos resulted in an EBITDA multiple of around 6.5 and an operating free cash flow multiple of about 14.5. By the way, our peer group trades between 6.5 and 7.5 and some as high as 8.5x EBITDA. The free cash flow yield at $30, by the way, is still compelling at around 15%. So while our peers would be really mid- to high single digits. And the analysts correctly cite in our view, a handful of narratives to support their price targets, right? And this includes things like telco sector tailwinds in Europe where we can now have pricing power. Market rationalization and mobile revenue growth and regulatory relief, and we agree with that. But their arguments also typically include 3 other drivers like the benefits we're realizing from a sub base that is now 50% converged, or the expectation of continued and on-target synergy realization in the U.K. and Switzerland and the inherent free cash flow profile of our businesses, especially given that we believe we're in a peak CapEx period right now. So I guess the message is that $30 doesn't seem like a big stretch to us. One of the reasons is that we don't believe analysts have captured all of the drivers that, in our view, support a premium market valuation. We don't specifically quantify what a premium market price looks like. Our lawyers wouldn't let us do that but we do identify the key elements that should support values well above our stock price and perhaps even twice the analyst price target. And those are summarized on the right-hand side of the slide. To begin with, we have been on the receiving end, as most of you know, of 6 private market transactions in the last 6 years where EBITDA multiples were as high as 12 and OFCF multiples exceeded 20. Now admittedly, synergies did factor into some of those valuations, but these were subscale cable TV operations, not fully converged FMC champions. You can run your own numbers. But in today's environment, we believe 8 to 10x EBITDA and 18 to 20x operating free cash flow are not unrealistic multiples and are based -- if you look at historical transactions for high-quality FMC businesses in Europe. In addition, there are a handful of other value drivers that we believe would support a premium valuation that analysts don't cover. First, we've gone to great lengths to build true national champions that are shaping the market structure in every country we operate in. Secondly, we have embedded infrastructure upside in the form of towers as well as our fiber networks, that's not recognized. Third, we're only beginning to realize now the benefits from new revenue streams like security, gaming and telehealth, all of which we've launched. And finally, we are arguably at peak CapEx levels this year, which will result obviously in even greater long-term cash conversion. We add to this equation, our unique approach to value creation that relies on agile capital allocation, the leveraged but derisked balance sheet and the commitment to buybacks, you've got a winning combination. So building on that last point about our levered equity model, Slide 9 digs a bit deeper into our capital allocation framework, and we know this differentiates us from our peers. It all begins with shareholder remuneration, which we show graphically on the left-hand side of the slide. As you know, we've now retired over 50% of the shares in the last 6 years, averaging 11% per year. And in 2022, we exceeded our initial buyback authorization, as I mentioned, by 40%, buying 14% of the shares and returning all distributable cash flow, $1.7 billion to shareholders. Now for 2023, we remain committed to the 10% buyback floor again, and we are well underway there. On the right-hand side, we try to put the buyback into context. If you look at our overall capital allocation framework, we have 3 principal sources of cash, right? Of course, we start with our existing cash balance at the corporate level of $3.4 billion and the modest interest we earn on that before investments. Then you add the $1.6 billion of distributable cash flow that we receive from our operating companies that we just guided to, which includes recaps. And then finally, we expect cash proceeds. That's the bottom line from the sale of venture investments in noncore assets over time. Now we're clearly a cash-generative business. So where do we invest that capital? First, as you would expect, we do prioritize our networks. So our fiber and 5G investments are important to us at the company level. None of that PP&E is funded out of our cash balance since we generate free cash flow at the Opco level, but we mention it since it does impact the amount of distributable cash flow we receive and therefore, it is a capital allocation decision. And as I mentioned on the previous slide, we see ourselves right now at peak levels of capital intensity. By far, the largest use of cash is directed towards our buyback programs, where we've allocated over $12 billion since January '17, and we are committed to this strategy again this year. From time to time, we will allocate capital to our FMC opcos for strategic transactions that create value. A good example of this is the next fiber JV in the U.K. or even the acquisition of Sunrise. And then finally, we have been building a sizable portfolio of strategically aligned assets in tech, media and infrastructure. Now building on this last point of investing capital into strategically aligned assets, we thought it would make sense to provide a bit more background on our current portfolio of investments and how we intend to manage this part of our business going forward. If you look at the top of Slide 10, on the left-hand side of my last slide, you'll see a familiar chart that breaks down the $3.1 billion ventures portfolio into principally tech content and infrastructure and then a few notes beneath that on how that value moved modestly in the fourth quarter. As a reminder, we're not coming up with these values on our own. We use a Big 4 accounting firm to provide an independent assessment of value on an annual basis. Then in the 3 boxes on the top right, we highlight some really important updates that we thought you should be aware of. First, we have 60-plus investments in our tech portfolio. 5 of those investments, 5 companies today represent about 75% of the value. And we've listed them here for your reference. Three of these are companies that provide innovative cloud-based solutions, Plume you know well and Bitsight is a cybersecurity business. Our net investment in these 5 companies is about $100 million, and they are conservatively valued today at $700 million. Importantly, each of these companies is currently doing or planning to do business with our FMC opcos, and that's part of the flywheel we provide investee companies. And quite frankly, why our pipeline of deals is so robust. The bottom line is that our Tech Ventures team has an 8-year track record of making money in strategically aligned product service and technology companies and has already returned $500 million to the parent. Next, you'll also see our 3 largest infrastructure investments. AtlasEdge, our 50-50 JV with Digital Bridge, the Edge Connect data center business where we are a 5% shareholder with EQT. And the next 5 are the JV I have discussed already with Telefónica and InfraVia, that's going to build 5 million to 7 million fiber homes in the U.K. In each case here, we are using either existing opco assets or our strategic position in a market to create and benefit from these infrastructure platforms. It's also important to point out that these figures do not include our tower assets in markets like the U.K. and NL, which we own through joint ventures. And then on the far right, we've provided just a few bullets on the announced Vodafone investment. I'm not sure there's much to add to what we've said publicly. We do think the stock is undervalued, and there are a handful of near-term catalysts that should be beneficial. We've also put in place a very clever structure, which minimize the amount of equity we had to put up while protecting our downside. By the way, there is no scenario where we would have to invest further capital beyond the relatively low cost of borrowing, which is partially offset by dividends. We also intend to replenish that equity investment, as we said in the press release, with asset sales, and there are more than a handful that we're focused on presently. I suppose it's good to see that the Vodafone stock is up since our announcement. We don't take credit for that, but obviously, that's a positive. And then finally, on the bottom right, we provided a few points on how we see this part of our business evolving. And you'll see that the 3 main verticals, tech, content and infrastructure are targeting technology, services or platforms that are right up our alley as they say. We have expertise, history or unique synergies in each of these areas. We've added a fourth pillar that we simply call Financial, for lack of a better word, which captures existing and potential investments in the debt or equity of situations that we feel are strategic, distressed or provide a unique opportunity to put capital to work. Now, across the first 3 pillars, our investing principles are straightforward. We're looking for businesses that provide significant growth opportunities. This typically means businesses with scale, sector tailwinds and strategic benefits to both our opcos or perhaps other portfolio investments. We're also interested in companies built around new or disruptive innovation that either diversify or amplify our core businesses. And then lastly, we intend to be extremely disciplined here with exits and what we refer to as capital rotation. We've already begun to evaluate every position and believe there are more than a handful of assets that could be monetized both in the ventures group and outside the portfolio, like towers, for example. So those are the core building blocks of value creation. First, we're going to continue to drive growth and free cash flow in our FMC champions and optimize our ownership positions in these businesses over time. This may include capital investment in M&A or strategic growth in some of those markets. Also we'll be very flexible and agile about, as we've said in the past, listings or spins and things like that. Secondly, we're going to continue to put our capital to work in an efficient buyback program, as we've consistently done. And then third, we're going to remain opportunistic about investments that we feel are strategically aligned with our core mission and within our capability set. And this last one is not easy, right? But we've surely earned the credibility to work here, given our history of building, buying and exiting assets in our sector over time. I don't want to be on this call in 3 years' time, sitting on $3.5 billion of corporate cash and $6 billion of liquidity. I don't think you want that either. So we're focused on value creation first and foremost, and I think we're in a great position to do that. Charlie, over to you.

Thanks, Mike. On the next page, we've provided a summary of the revenue profile in our 4 key markets. 2022 saw stable revenues in 3 of our 4 markets and slight growth in Belgium despite the challenging macroeconomic environment. Fixed consumer revenue pressures across our markets were suffered by sensible price adjustments in Benelux and in the U.K., and we saw strong mobile and B2B growth across our portfolio. Virgin Media O2 delivered stable revenues in Q4 and across 2022 with continued pressures on fixed consumer ARPU and challenges in B2B being offset by strong mobile subscription revenue growth. Switzerland saw Q4 revenue growth decline as continued strong mobile growth was offset by weaker B2B wholesale revenues and continued pressure on the consumer ARPU mix as the business resets the pricing of its UPC customers in the migration to the Sunrise brand. In the Netherlands, despite a strong net outperformance, we saw a slight decline in revenue growth due to weakness in the consumer fixed business, partially offset by price adjustments, which we implemented in July. We delivered mobile service revenue growth of 6.3% in Q4, which was supported by a mobile price adjustment in October. Belgium delivered Q4 revenue growth of 1.7% and 1.5% across 2022 as the mid-June price adjustment continue to support top line fixed ARPU growth in the second half of the year. The next slide sets out our adjusted EBITDA performance in the quarter. The standout performance in Q4 was delivered by Virgin Media O2, posting full year adjusted EBITDA growth of 6%. In Q4, Virgin Media O2 delivered accelerated EBITDA growth of 10%, driven by synergies from the merger and the continued impact of price rises earlier in the year. This was despite $40 million of cost to capture, which hit the OpEx line this quarter versus the exceptional EBITDA growth in Q4, we do expect Q1 growth to be much more muted and this is impacted by the phasing of a delayed fixed price rise and tougher synergy comparative versus the prior year. Sunrise saw an EBITDA decline of 8.1% in Q4 as tailwinds from the MVNO synergies faded combined with a continued weaker fixed ARPU mix. This continues to be as a result of the rotational churn challenge associated with the UPC migration to the Sunrise brand. We expect headwinds from this migration to continue to impact EBITDA trends in 2023 and in particular, impact the Q1 numbers. Vodafone Ziggo saw a slight decline in EBITDA growth in Q4 driven by cost inflation headwinds, which offset the impact of price adjustments. We expect cost inflation headwinds, in particular, in energy to impact our 2023 outlook with an estimated EBITDA hit of over EUR 100 million from energy and wages. Telenet reported EBITDA growth at around 5% for the second consecutive quarter, driven by price adjustments. The business anticipates ongoing headwinds from energy inflation as well as manage wage increases of 11%, which will hit from the start of 2023. The next slide provides a more detailed update on our energy costs. Before the Ukraine invasion, energy typically accounted for a low single-digit percentage of operating costs. And historically, our policy was to hedge those costs forward on a rolling 12-month basis. This hedging policy helped soften the impact of rising energy costs in our 2022 results and we were able to absorb the impact of the unhedged costs and still meet our EBITDA guidance in our opcos. However, in 2023, you will see a full impact of the increased energy costs resulting from the invasion. And as you can see from these slides, we have broadly hedged the energy costs in each of our markets for 2023, but this has been at significantly higher rates than 2021 and 2022. We've highlighted the impact on each of our markets. But if you were to add them all up and use today's dollar exchange rates, broadly, our 2021 energy cost of around $280 million increased to around $410 million in 2022 and will be around $600 million in 2023 representing a hit to free cash flow across our portfolio of around $330 million as a result of the invasion. So like everyone else, we don't know where energy prices will settle out. But in the meantime, we continue to execute our rolling 12-month hedging program and it starts over 2024 hedges, which thanks to recent price declines are at lower prices than we have locked in for 2023. We're also investigating longer-term fixed rate deals through PPA agreements. The next slide gives an update on our progress on the U.K. and Swiss synergies resulting from the O2 merger and Sunrise acquisition. We remain on track in both the U.K. and Switzerland with our overall synergy targets with a very strong finish to the year in the U.K. Now just to remind you, at Virgin Media O2, we expect to deliver GBP 6.2 billion of NPV synergies or an annualized run rate target of GBP 540 million from the O2 merger. In 2022, we comfortably delivered over 30% of our synergies in the first 18 months of the combined business and are on track to deliver the 50% by the end of 2023. Meanwhile, cost to capture peaked in 2022 with over GBP 300 million recorded out of the total GBP 700 million cost to capture envelope. Cost to capture are expected to roughly halve in 2023, falling to around GBP 150 million as investment in mobile capacity to support the MVNO migration took place in 2022. In 2023, trends are expected to benefit from the continued flow-through of MVNO synergies, along with the unlocking of further synergy streams, including labor and commercial. Moving to Switzerland. We reaffirm our target to deliver CHF 3.7 billion NPV of synergies and incur CHF 400 million of overall cost to capture. 2022 represents a peak year for cost to capture as approximately CHF 140 million of cost to capture supported the business and achieving nearly 50% of our synergy run rate target, including the early benefit of MVNO synergies supporting half 1 trends in 2022. The business aims to deliver around 60% of the synergy run rate target by the end of 2023 with key focus areas being the buildup of the DSL migration and headcount synergies and delivery of these synergy projects will be supported by an expected CHF 50 million of cost to capture spend in 2023. Turning to capital allocation. Q4 saw a step up in capital intensity across our key operations as we expected and was consistent with our full year capital intensity guidance for the group. Moving to distributable cash flow. We achieved our distributable cash flow guidance for the year, delivering over $1.7 billion of full company distributable cash flow in 2022 based on the FX rates at the time of our 2022 guidance. On a reported basis, for the full year, distributable cash flow was around $1.6 billion, including $455 million of dividends from Virgin Media O2 along with $478 million coming from our share of the recapitalization of that company and $321 million from VodafoneZiggo. Finally, our outlook for 2023. Now I appreciate there's a lot on this slide, but to help you understand our current view and the 2023 key financial drivers and ultimately, the free cash flow and cash flow distributions of our key assets, we've added our view on some of the drivers behind those assumptions. Starting with VMO2. On an IFRS basis, we expect to achieve revenue growth, mid-single-digit adjusted EBITDA growth supported by synergy execution and inflation-linked price rise adjustments with headwinds from inflationary pressures impacting our cost base, including energy. Now these numbers are excluding cost of capture for the year, where we expect OpEx and CapEx cost to capture of around GBP 150 million which is still within our multiyear expectation of GBP 700 million. We also guide to property and equipment additions of around GBP 2 billion benefited from Project lightly moving off balance sheet, but this is offset somewhat by the fiber upgrade accelerating and the 5G mobile investments. On cash distributions to shareholders, Virgin Media O2 is guiding to around GBP 1.8 billion to GBP 2 billion versus GBP 1.6 billion distributed in 2022. Turning to Sunrise. We expect low single-digit revenue decline for the year, along with low to mid-single-digit adjusted EBITDA decline, including cost to capture. As the business continues to navigate the impact of the UPC brand migration and lower tailwinds from the synergies in 2023. We guide some property and equipment additions as a percentage of sales to be around 15% to 17%, also including cost to capture. Cost to capture spend will drop this year, falling to around CHF 50 million, of which CHF 10 million is expected to be attributed to OpEx. VodafoneZiggo is guiding to an improved revenue profile supported by pricing actions and low to mid-single-digit adjusted EBITDA decline as the business will be impacted by cost inflation headwinds of around EUR 100 million from energy and wages. Property and equipment additions as a percentage of sales is expected to be 21% to 23%. The Dutch JV is guiding to shareholder distributions of EUR 300 million to EUR 400 million of cash, which is impacted by higher cash taxes and a tougher EBITDA outlook. This is versus cash distributions of EUR 602 million in 2022. And finally, on an IFRS basis, Telenet are guiding to revenue growth of 1% to 2%, supported by price adjustments and broadly stable adjusted EBITDA impacted by wage and energy inflation headwinds. Property and equipment additions as a proportion of sales are expected to be around 26% with an adjusted free cash flow outlook of EUR 250 million for the year. This is lower versus the EUR 409 million delivered in 2022 as free cash flow will be impacted by higher CapEx on 5G fiber build. And finally, on group distributable cash flow guidance, regarding to $1.6 billion of distributable cash flow in 2023 at guidance FX rates. We reiterate our commitment to buy back 10% of our shares outstanding in 2023. And with that, operator, let's turn to questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Sam McHugh with Exane.

I'm just trying to wrap my head around Slide 21 and the central cost update. It's kind of a 2-part question. The first bit is just, I see that there are some changes happening with the P&E allocations. Just to confirm, that's already captured in the opco guidance that you gave separately, for example, like the Switzerland OpEx charge shift, that's already in the Swiss guidance? And then secondly, how should we think about the cash burn in Central in 2023 relative to what looks like maybe EUR 200 million loss in 2022.

Charlie?

Yes. Yes, I confirm just everyone understands what goes on, we do it sort of our joint venture as well as our wholly owned companies. We have what we call technical service agreements to really support the tech spend, which has been coming consistently down actually over the years. And so that's baked in at the opco level, we've actually got a renegotiation with one of them pending, but broadly speaking, it's all fully baked in. And then at the center, as you know, we've been running around this EUR 200 million time number. There is gives and takes on that, depending a little bit on how much money we spend on development and new areas, but I think you should assume it's going to be broadly consistent around that number for the upcoming years.

The next question comes from the line of James Ratcliffe with Evercore.

Two, if I could, one sort of big picture and one more specific. You talked about you're seeing for converged customers, higher NPS scores, lower churn, et cetera. What's the comparison to that? Because I certainly imagine that somebody isn't happy with their broadband service, they're probably not going to add the mobile service as well. So can you talk about what sort of the comparison set for specific customers who do add on broadband, what you're seeing versus customers who don't know the convergence route. And second, just on the Vodafone investment. You're now a meaningful holder of a core partner of yours. Can you talk about anything that, that would facilitate or anything you would make more difficult or limit in terms of your relationships around the JVs in particular?

Listen, on the convergence figures, [ Jeroen ] is on the call, I can let him chime in a little bit, too. But in the case of Holland, which we cite regularly, I think we're simply comparing FMC converged customers to nonconverged customers. Now fair point, if that's one you're making, there could be some sort of self-selection there. If you are happy with us, then you're likely to buy more products, which means you become happier, whereas people who are not happy with us generally may not buy more products, in which case you might say, well, clearly, they're not having customers. At the same time, there's no other way to do it. I mean, you're either converged or you're not. And when you can drive 20 points of NPS and have your churn, that's a big enough gap, so to speak, to support the premise that convergence works. Now we can maybe endeavor to provide a bit more color and detail around that going forward, but that is the basic set of statistics. On the Vodafone stakes, we are good partners with Vodafone. We do business together, quite frankly, in 3 countries. We own a power network together through this Beacon arrangement in the U.K. We've just signed a wholesale deal to provide them fiber access in Ireland. And of course, we're partners in Holland. So our touch points with Vodafone are many. This may or may not change that dialogue. We'll see. It's certainly not the reason we did it -- direct reason we did it, but I think it doesn't hurt to have to ensure that our conversations with them going forward about all of these business arrangements are open and direct. That's really all I would say there.

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

Yes, if I could ask a question on the U.K. ARPU trends. I think the U.K. ARPU the fixed ARPU was down about 3% or so this quarter despite the 6.5% price increase you put through early in the year. Just curious to your thoughts in terms of how the next pricing increase lens. Obviously, you've communicated the increase. I wondered how much of that you thought would flow through into better ARPU and therefore, what's baked into your guidance would be helpful. And just linked to, if I can, be curious to know your thoughts around front book and back book pricing in the U.K., clearly, a lot of back book pricing increases, but the front book is still very promotional. Where do you think that's set to narrow?

I'll take the first one, Lutz, you take the second one. I think on the pricing, I will say is that we anticipate our mobile and fixed pricing to behave -- the impact of that pricing to be similar to prior years. And we said in the past, I think, what we believe generally happens in fixed pricing, where we get roughly half of that, if not more, and mobile pricing a larger percentage. And so for sure, we expect to either do as good or better, it's a larger increase, that's certain, in which case you might argue, hey, it's going to be harder. On the other hand, we have a lot more tools in place to manage customers in this particular go around. And as you would have read in the -- going forward, we have put into the Ts and Cs of contracts in the fixed side of our business in RPI plus 3.9% moving forward. So now you'll know next year what that price rise is based on January's RPI. It won't be something we're making. It won't be a decision we're making on a discretionary basis, it will look like BTs. Lutz, do you want to handle the front book, back book question?

Yes. Maybe the only thing I would add on the pricing is right, Mike said it, we have much more tools in place. So we are a month into it. And we know exactly how many customers of which cohorts have reacted in whatever way of form. And we also, therefore, understand exactly how much of the retained revenue we got. And we -- I won't disclose any number, but so far, we are fully on plan, right? The last year, you referred to that, there are 2 things, right? One thing is you do a general price increase and you get a certain reaction. And then second, during the entire year, customers have been optimizing their bill irrespective price rise because they don't want to keep using their landline or they want to get rid of mid-tier video content to simply optimize their bill. And therefore, you're right, last year, the net of the part have been negative. Now we are not giving a guidance for this year, but we are guiding an overall revenue growth and so we are much more confident on this piece of it as well. Front book, back book. So in general, you are right. This is the strategic challenge, right? So you see price increases now across most of the operators, but you still see high competition in the acquisition market. Now the way we are dealing with it in a positive way is twofold. One, we are not offering promotions on broadband. We're not following promotions of broadband around GBP 21, GBP 22 so we are staying more closer to GBP 30, leveraging our speed advantage. So the promotions you've seen from us the last 3 months are selling [indiscernible]. And therefore, we have less of a back book, front book issue. And the second thing is we are also -- with our digital capabilities, we now can test different ways of selling. So instead of an end of a promotion step-up, we are also offering within the minimum contract length that customers are paying half of it. But in the minimum contract length then they pay a higher price, so there's less of a churn. So there's a lot of optimization going on and stay tuned.

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

On the U.K. cable upgrade and new fiber JV 1.5 million new fiber homes for the combination in 2023 doesn't appear massive versus 1 million achieved in full year '22. Are you being cautious here? Perhaps it takes a while to get to run rate, and perhaps related to the question is the press as you're looking at out net acquisitions? Are you tilting away from build to buy? And how quickly can VMO2 sell off the new build once it's happened?

Yes. There's a handful of good questions there. And I think on the speed point, I would simply say that we've got until 2028. So this is not -- we've never given numbers or time frames that we believe would imply this is going to happen overnight. So we think it does take a bit of time to get the machine moving and the 50% uptick is reasonable, but could be exceeded. Let's see. It's a -- I'm not saying it's a marathon, but it's not a sprint either. We're hoping to have 80% of homes covered by fiber here by 2028. We think that is the right long-term strategy, but it's a long-term strategy. So we'll do it at the pace that makes sense for us. And as Lutz would say, we sit today with a 1 gig network that reaches 16 million homes, offering an average speed of 300 meg, which is 5 or 6x faster than the average British households received from other providers. So we're in a great position even while we build out. It's not as if we have to convert a network from copper to fiber or in some sort of other foot rates. Quite frankly, we are already leading the race, and so we're just fortifying the long-term position. Lutz, do you want to take the second part?

Yes. Can you repeat the question, Robert. So what was it again?

How long does it take VMO2 to sell off the new JV once homes are passed? And are you tilting more to buy than build in the JV homes?

Okay. So I mean the first one, we are, as you know, very experienced to get to the penetration on the Lightning network. With now nexfibre, there's no change there, right? Because Virgin Media O2 is building the network for nexfibre and Virgin Media is also the anchor tenant of it. So we are selling into it. And so you know that we are getting to a far higher penetration than any altnet got to. And you know also how quickly we ramp up. So don't expect any changes here in the future. So we plan exactly with the same. And then obviously, Virgin Media O2 is not a shareholder of nexfibre. So this is more Liberty Global, Telefónica and InfraVia. But altnets are getting under stress. This is our perception. The reason is they don't get to the penetration, they need to. So according to our numbers, there is 7.6 million fiber homes in the U.K. from altnets, and the penetration is around 15%. And from a pure wholesale perspective, we all know you need 40% and cost of capitals are increasing. So opportunistically, we will look at it, and we will take the opportunities then as they come.

The next question comes from the line of Luis Sanchez-Lecaroz with Crédit Suisse.

I wanted to follow up on the previous question and specifically, looking a little bit deeper on the 1.5 million for next year? And can you give us the split between upgrade and greenfield rollout. And then looking into the U.K. guidance, can you let us know if you are factoring in the construction revenues from the new fiber JV and the retail business that you would get from greenfield areas.

Yes. I mean I think, Luis, we've said the split is roughly 50-50. But I don't know -- and Charlie, this is a question for you, whether we identified the revenues from nexfibre or call them out, but there will be revenue, modest revenues, not material revenues.

This is not a massive number, but there is some modest revenue baked into our numbers.

Yes. Yes. So I mean, nexfibre, right, we are building the network for that we are getting paid. On the other hand side, we are selling the network. And for that, we are now paying wholesale revenue, right? So this is the changes in the P&L, I think we haven't disclosed any numbers, the split between expansion and upgrade. So -- and I think we don't want to do that. The only thing I'm saying is these are 2 completely different activities. Expanding, obviously, is much more heavy lifting, takes more work. And I think what we have said is that in '22, we have expanded faster than in '21. And in '23, we have the ambition to expand faster than in '22. And on the upgrade, right, what we have to do, just to remind everybody is we have to pull fiber through our existing duct. This is much less of heavy lifting. We have also guided that we will -- we are spending around GBP 100 per homes passed. So which also explains that the work is significantly less. And I want to simply reiterate the point Mike has made earlier, right we first leverage our [ 4x ] network as much as we can. And selling fiber to early doesn't have really a commercial benefit for us at that point in time. So we have time.

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

I have 2. The first one is on Switzerland. So a question for André. Can you talk through the competitive dynamics in the Swiss market? And maybe talk in a bit more detail about the issues that you're facing with the retirement of the UPC brand? And going forward, should we expect maybe a relatively stable broadband performance in terms of net adds for Switzerland, but maybe it's just a case of repricing taking its time to work its way through. Alternatively, where are the other moving parts that are driving the Swiss EBITDA declines in 2023? And the second question is really just about fiber wholesale in the U.K. So I appreciate that you're still in the process of upgrading your cable network to fiber but have you had any discussions with other communication providers about wholesaling on the VMO2 network. And do you think that this could be a meaningful revenue stream going forward? Alternatively, is the Equinox 2 pricing from Openreach now an unstoppable train meaning you have no chance.

Well, let me take the second one first, and Andre, you can work up an answer to the first one. As I just mentioned, Polo, we're building a network, we think we'll reach 80% of the market. It's going to happen over an extended period of time. It's not happening tomorrow. And what any investor in a telecom market requires or would like to see some long-term certainty and a level playing field. Equinox 2, from our point of view, is unlikely to make a long-term impact on our plans. But in the short term, feels to us to be a bit desperate and premature by BT, reflecting, I would say, an overreaction to the market more broadly for whatever reason they felt that was necessary. On the other hand, we think Ofcom gets the larger picture here and is likely to look at Equinox 2 in a -- hopefully, a comprehensive way, and we look forward to the consultation process. But from our point of view, whether we are providing wholesale services tomorrow or next year or the year after, remember that in the upgrade of our fiber homes, which we announced some time ago, upgraded to 16 million homes. We did not say at that point in time that, that decision to spend GBP 100 per home was based upon the need to realize wholesale revenue. In fact, we said the exact opposite, which was we believe this makes sense relative to DOCSIS 4 regardless of wholesale revenue. That doesn't mean we don't have ambition. It just means to say that our economics are sound either way. Now the nexfibre JV clearly would love to expand wholesale revenue beyond Virgin Media O2 as its anchor tenant. And in that instance, that particular joint venture will make the argument it needs to make and pursue the strategic ambition it needs to pursue. So hopefully, that puts a little bit of context around how we see the market. This is a long-term process here. This isn't something that any 1 move by any 1 operator is going to derail in our opinion, and we remain committed. André?

Yes. In regards to competitive dynamics, I would say Q4 has seen a lot of liquidity in the market. Also seasonally, Black Friday was probably the biggest sales event in the last year. As such, we have also seen a very high level of promotional activity. We were benefiting from that from a customer perspective. As you've seen and not only us, but also competitors gained quite a lot of new customers in the market, but the pricing levels or the discount levels on those promotions are not really sustainable and are also causing some of the pressure that we have with the migrations at customers that are looking at the front book prices and are migrated at back book prices, that is, of course, attention that is not making our life easy with all of the customers that we want to migrate over to the new Sunrise portfolio. As a result of that, we have started already in Q1 to reduce our promotional aggressiveness mainly on the main brand. Our Flanker brand will not be addressed by that mainly because the Flanker brand has a different role and needs to play also the role of being more price aggressive. But on the main brand, we want to protect the back book better with lower promotional aggressiveness in particular, with promotions that do no longer offer a discount over the first contract term, but at maximum only half of the first contract terms so that customers get, again, used to actually pay the normal list price. Now in terms of dynamics for next year, Clearly, the main driver for next year is those right pricing of the mainly fixed customers coming from UPC, that is roughly less than 1/3 of our total customers and not all of those customers will be necessarily a drag to ARPU and a drag to our revenues. But some of those are, if you think about it, I mean there are, of course, certain customers that are sitting on 1 or 2 products where we still have good opportunity to cross and upsell products provide more for same for example, or more for more, while there is a certain segment of customers that has already maxed out the product range and is sitting on an outpriced price point that no longer exists on the new front book. And in order to maintain those customer relations healthy and to continue working with them, we are doing this right pricing exercise. That's the main drag, I would say, also on the top line for next year. On top of that, I would say on the EBITDA guidance, we, of course, continue to actually prep the business to capture growth going forward. So we continue to actually do OpEx investments on the digital side. We also do have some increase in OpEx that is coming from cloudification, things moving from CapEx to OpEx. And we have a number of other, I would say, marketing activities that for the first time, will hit full year range like, for example, the SwissSki sponsorship, which we only started in '22, but we'll see for the full extent only in '23. But the major driver, I would say, of the headache is really this right pricing in that relatively small fixed customer segment. All other growth engines. If you look at mobile, if you look at B2B, if you look at Flanker brand, maintain healthy but we are accelerating this exercise now to actually create a growth platform that we can start from going forward.

I'll just add that I have confidence in André and the team to manage through this. There is deep knowledge and understanding of the market, and this is a blip, not a change in direction. On the other hand, I would also point out that Charlie skipped over in his guidance slide the fact that Switzerland is guiding to $320 million to $350 million of free cash flow in 2023, which I'm going to guess here, André, I think it's up 30% to 40% over 2022. So despite the challenge is that André is working through at the revenue and customer level, which I'm sure we will get through, the business is generating significant free cash flow and on pace for the kinds of free cash flow results we had initially anticipated when we made the acquisition.

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

And I'll go for 1.5 questions, 1 in the U.K., just a quick follow-up to an earlier question. First, just going back to the U.K. and the price moves look that you're enacting at the moment. I guess if I look at 2022, looking from the outside in, my perception would be that the fixed line price rises didn't learn probably quite as well as you'd hoped, and the mobile price rise maybe landed a bit better. I don't know if that's right wrong but that's my impression. As you go into 2023, Lutz, you said you've got more tools at your disposal, but obviously, it's a very, very big price rise. So I guess the instinctive reaction would be that you're going to see more churn you're going to some more promotional activity. But could you just elaborate maybe on those actions that you can take to prevent that and give us sort of a bit more confidence that we don't see the ARPU reactions that we saw following the price rise last year, that would be great. And then just coming back to the point on Vodafone. Mike, you said the reason for the investment was not to sort of create more touch points of Vodafone was it exactly? Was it just because you thought the shares were cheap. And if that is the case, can you maybe give us some sort of guidelines as to what is sort of in and out your scope? Is it just sort of contiguous sector, telco, media, anything that you think is sort of opportunistic. Or does there have to be some kind of existing relationship for you to invest shareholders' money in stocks like Vodafone?

Lutz, do you want to start with that?

So I mean, your high-level observation is right for last year, but I think the reasons are a bit different. So if you park the price rise for a second, right? On the fixed side, customers are optimizing their bill because simply, right, the average ARPU is GBP 50. So if you want to optimize household spend, you look more at the fixed side at the mobile side. And so irrespective of price rise, customers are canceling their landline because they use their mobile and customers are optimizing and picking more of the video content they really need. This is what we have been seeing. On the mobile side, you don't see that. What you see on the mobile side, and that is they keep using their old phone for longer, right? So if you -- these are developments, there would have been happening with price drives or without price rise due to the cost and living crisis. Now price rise itself, and this is then the question, how do you define that? Last year, and I think this is what Mike said earlier on, if you would say, well, everything you take into account 2 months after customers have seen the first bill. Then you can say that also on the fixed side, we landed something like 50% of the price rise. And on the mobile side, because it's only on airtime, not on hardware, the overall number of the price rise is much lower and it is embedded in the Ts and Cs. So you see barely very little, barely 0 or very little reaction to it. Now what does this mean for this year, right? And we are not guiding on fixed ARPU, but we have been -- we are doing a lot of things different. Number one, we are sending out the letters to customers over a period of 2 months and in a staggered approach. This is number one. That has 2 benefits. One, we always can ensure we have enough agents dealing with it, which weren't the case, 100% last year. And second, we have really real-time data, so we can see how many customers are calling and what is the best possible retention for them in terms of customer and ARPU. And then we see within 24 hours delay, what is actually happening. And when you take this all into account, there's a lot of room for optimization. We can leverage convergence of fixed customers, we can sell mobile. We can sell in interesting content. We can sell in hardware. And I'm not disclosing anything, but so far, as I said early on, we are on plan with a fixed price rise. And on the mobile side, we have landed it also now, right? So it is communicated and out. And the reaction so far we have been seeing are not higher than a year ago. Hope that helps.

Yes, Vodafone, people -- we say publicly, yes, the stock seems undervalued to us. There's a lot of undervalued stocks out there, by the way. Ours included. And that's why we spent $1.7 billion last year buying it. But certainly, this one also looks undervalued with some near-term catalysts that should play out here, we think, in a positive way. And it was a relatively small investment if you look at the -- if you see through how we financed the position. Now we have a lot of touch points with Vodafone as I just mentioned, and I look forward to a very constructive dialogue with the current and future CEO, whoever that will be around all of those particular issues and if necessary, with the Board. So as I mentioned, we're not an activist here, but we certainly hope to be engaged in understanding of what their strategy is and to perhaps even influence that if it makes sense. But we're not doing this to create tension or stress. We're not trying to rattle the cages here. We thought it was an opportunistic transaction that was financed. We thought very effectively with relatively small amounts of capital we could put to risk in a stock that was at or near a 25-year low. So that's really the way to think about it. Are we going to do 10 more of these? No. No. But we will always be opportunistic in situations that we think are strategically and financially aligned. Go ahead.

Sorry, I was just -- when you say catalyst, I mean, can you elaborate on what they may be.

I can't give you anything that hasn't been talked about 100 times publicly, U.K. mobile consolidation, rationalization, Spain and Italy, pending Vantage deal, towers in the U.K. and NL, a German strategy evolution, et cetera. I mean there's Africa, you just have to read the press. There's a handful for you right there. Rick, I don't know if we have time for 1 more or 6 minutes past. Shall I close it all.

let's take one more Mike and then shut it down.

All right. Thanks for hanging in. We'll take one more.

We'll take the last question from Carl Murdock-Smith with Berenberg.

Taking time for one last one. So I'll just ask one. I think Slide 9 is a very powerful one on the long-term buyback commitments over time. Obviously, you've committed to a floor of 10% of buyback this year. That commitment was first actually made 2.5 years ago at the Q2 2021 results and kind of I think that long-term commitment as also shown on Slide 9 is very, very important. Did you at all think about giving a longer-term buyback commitment rather than just committing to the 2023 buyback? And how should we be thinking about your ongoing commitments in future years?

Yes. That's good question, Carl. I appreciate you asking that. We're not today providing any additional long-term guidance, but you don't have to do much reading between the lines to conclude based on everything I said in my remarks that we're committed to shareholder remuneration. So you should expect, over time, we'll continue to provide updates on that long-term strategy. And I think past is prologue. Hope that helps. You got it. Thanks, everybody, for hanging in. I appreciate you enduring the long remarks. If you're still on, we had a lot of info and a lot of talk about and a very strong '22, and I think all the building blocks in place for a strong '23 and most importantly, for value creation. So I appreciate your support, and we're always around for questions if you have any as a follow-up. Thanks, everyone.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes Liberty Global's Fourth Quarter 2022 Investor Call. As a reminder, a replay of the call will be available in the Investor Relations section of Liberty Global's website. There, you can also find a copy of today's presentation material. Have a good day.