Vodafone Group Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:VOD) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Vodafone Group Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:VOD) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript May 16, 2023

Margherita Della Valle: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining me for our Full Year Results. Our challenge today, as you see in our results is that three of our largest markets have declining revenue and our returns are still below our cost of capital. Our performance relative to major competitors has also not been good enough. This requires Vodafone to change. And by change, I mean a significant redesign of where we focus our efforts and how we organize ourselves. We need empowered and agile markets focused on our customers. We need to scale up Vodafone business, and we need to take out complexity and simplify how we operate. To support our transformation, we also need to focus our resources on a portfolio of products and geographies that is right-sized for growth.

I’ve set out my road map for Vodafone in a video presentation that I hope you will have time to watch. We will deliver our transformation by focusing on three priorities, customers, simplicity and growth. Starting with customers, our focus has to be on what customers actually want. The simple and reliable service they expect, doing the basics well. I developed commercial authority fully into the markets in January, so decisions can happen faster and accountability is clear with customer experience now a key element of our CEO incentive plans. On simplicity, we will undergo a redesign of our group operates by making a clear distinction between headquarter corporate services, which must be as lean as possible and shared operations, which we will operate on an arms-length basis on commercial terms.

As we simplify our group center, but also our market operations, we have planned the reduction of 11,000 roles over the next 3 years. You may have seen announcements in Germany, Italy and our HQ recently. This simplification will increase agility in our markets. The resources, it will free up will be reinvested in customer experience and in brands to support growth, which is my third priority. The turnaround of our operations in Germany, in particular, is essential to our growth. We have delivered a number of improvements to our commercial model over the last few months, but we have more work to do to restore competitiveness. To grow we’ll also scale up Vodafone business, where we have a strong position in a large and rapidly expanding market.

Our service revenue exit rate was around 3% in Q4, with all Europe markets growing in FY ’23, except pay [ph] We are already investing in deploying new SME customer journeys and enhancing our sales management with new incentives to drive penetration of digital services. Before handing over to questions, let me reiterate. Vodafone must change, and we will change the level of ambition, speed and sizes of execution. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you, Ms. Margherita. Our first question today comes from Andrew Lee from Goldman Sachs. Andrew, please unmute yourself and go ahead.

Operator: Our next question comes from Polo Tang at UBS. Polo, please go ahead.

Operator: Apologies. Our next question comes from Georgios at Citi. Georgios, please unmute yourself.

Operator: Our next question this morning comes from Nick Delfas at Redburn. Nick, please unmute yourself?

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Q&A Session

Operator: The next question this morning comes from James Ratzer at New Street. James, please unmute yourself and go ahead.

Operator: The next question this morning comes from Emmet Kelly at Morgan Stanley. Emmet, please go ahead.

Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Sam McHugh at Exane. Sam, please go ahead.

Operator: The next question comes from Carl Murdock-Smith at Berenberg. Carl, please go ahead. Carl, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Operator: Yes.

Operator: The next question this morning comes from Robert Grindle at Deutsche Bank. Robert, please unmute yourself. And Carl, if you could mute yourself and your video, please. Thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Maurice Patrick at Barclays. Maurice, please go ahead.

Operator: We have time for one last question this morning, and that question comes from David Wright at Bank of America. David, please unmute yourself and go ahead.

Operator: This concludes the Q&A session for this morning. And I would like to now hand back to Margherita for any closing remarks.

Margherita Della Valle: Thank you very much. Just wanted to say thank you for being with us today.