VOD - Vodafone Group Public Limited Company (VOD) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-05-14 09:19:08 ET
Vodafone Group Public Limited Company (VOD)
Q4 2024 Earnings Conference Call
May 14, 2024 05:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Margherita Della Valle - Group Chief Executive
Luka Mucic - Group Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Emmet Kelly - Morgan Stanley
Polo Tang - UBS
Carl Murdock-Smith - Berenberg
Akhil Dattani - JPMorgan
Stephen Malcolm - Redburn
James Ratzer - New Street
Robert Grindle - Deutsche Numis
Jakob Bluestone - Exane BNP Paribas
Maurice Patrick - Barclays
David Wright - Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Ottavio Adorisio - Bernstein
Georgios Ierodiaconou - Citigroup
Andrew Lee - Goldman Sachs
Presentation
Margherita Della Valle
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. A year ago, we set out our plans to fundamentally transform Vodafone for growth. Since then, I'm pleased with the pace of response and speed of execution from everyone at Vodafone. We have moved quickly to reshape our European footprint having announced sales of Spain and Italy as well as our merger in the U.K. Our new portfolio shape will enable us to focus on growing markets with strong positions and good local scale. And as the results and guidance we share today demonstrate, we are in a much stronger position to deliver more sustainable and predictable growth and drive improved returns.
Whilst we have made good progress in changing the shape of Vodafone, our operational transformation focused on customer simplicity and growth is driving deeper fundamental changes. We are changing where we invest our time and resources towards our customers. While there is clearly more to do, we are already seeing improved results. We have reduced the number of customer detractors across our markets this year through a systematic effort to remove customer pain points, and we now have a leading or co leading NPS position in five out of nine of our European markets.
We are also changing how we organize ourselves to be simpler and more efficient and have made good progress against our productivity targets. We have established a new commercialized model for our shared operations that will allow us to better serve our markets and telco partners and scale up or down our cost base in response to changes in demand. And on growth, all segments are now growing as you have seen. And our performance in business was particularly strong with service revenue growth accelerating to 5% this year.
Beyond our progress on our strategic priorities, I am pleased with the financial results we have delivered, having slightly exceeded our guidance for the year. Our service revenue growth has been accelerating throughout the year, and EBITDA grew by 2% in a year with significant inflationary headwinds, especially energy prices, as well as significant reinvestments we have made to improve our customer experience.
But looking ahead to next year, much more still needs to be done. We have clear areas of focus for FY '25 to drive operational excellence across the group. We will once more step up investments in our customer experience and focus on improving our underlying performance in Germany, which includes a broad range of actions across our fixed and mobile propositions, our channel strategy, the MDU transition, and the utilization and quality of our networks....
Vodafone Group Public Limited Company (VOD) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript