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Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Liberty Global's first quarter 2026 investor call. This call and the associated webcast are the property of Liberty Global, and any redistribution, retransmission, or rebroadcast of this call or webcast in any form without the express written consent of Liberty Global is strictly prohibited. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. 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 its outlook and future growth prospects and other information and statements that are not historical fact. These forward-looking statements involve certain risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. These risks include those detailed in Liberty Global's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recently filed Forms 10-Q and 10-K as amended. Liberty Global disclaims any obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements to reflect any change in its expectation or in the conditions on which any such statement is based. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Mike Fries.

All right. Thanks, operator. Hello, everyone. Appreciate you joining the call today. As usual, Charlie and I will handle the prepared remarks and the presentation, and then I have my core leadership team on the call with me and on standby for Q&A as needed. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so I'm just gonna jump right in on the first slide, which provides some key takeaways from the quarter. To begin with, we delivered strong operational performance, and we'll go through it all in a moment. One big headline here, this was our fourth straight quarter of steady broadband improvement across each of our big three markets, with fixed to mobile ARPUs remaining largely stable. Charlie will walk through how this translates into our financial results, but the punchline is we will be confirming all of our 2026 guidance today.

There are lots of reasons for this commercial momentum, including our multi-brand strategies, our network investments, AI implementations around personalization and churn in call centers. We'll talk about all that a bit today, but really what we'll do on our second quarter call is do a deeper dive on our AI initiatives, so stay tuned for that. Equally important for this audience is the fact that we are making real progress on the value unlock initiatives announced this past February. The acquisition of Vodafone's 50% stake in our Dutch JV is on track to close this summer, and we see no obstacles to getting that deal done on time. That, of course, is just one of the main building blocks underlying our strategy to spin off our Benelux assets in the second half of next year.

I'll walk you through each of those building blocks in just a moment, as well as the value we could and should create for you all by spinning off the Ziggo Group. Quickly on Netomnia, that transaction in the U.K. is now officially in the regulatory process, and while the noise from one or 2 competitors has escalated recently, we're pretty confident this deal will be approved. It's a very positive development for the U.K. fiber market, which is in desperate need of rationalization, as you all know. It's a great outcome for VMO2, for all the reasons we reviewed on the last call. Finally, you won't be surprised to hear that we are highly focused on capital allocation at the corporate level. Over the last two years, we've brought our net corporate cost down by 75%.

We talked about that on the last call. We've articulated what we believe is a clear investment strategy around telecom and growth, and we've strengthened our balance sheet. After funding the EUR 1.2 billion needed to close the Vodafone transaction and executing on around EUR 700 million of asset sales from our growth portfolio, we should end the year with around EUR 1.5 billion of corporate cash. As noted here on the slide, through April, we generated around EUR 300 million in proceeds, so we're sort of on our way. Finally, just one quick remark on the broader telecom environment in Europe. As you would know, the sector has performed well in the last 12 months or so. That's driven in part by improved operational performance, reduced CapEx, and a general rotation out of software and into industrials.

You're all familiar with those trends. I would add to the list what appears to be an improving regulatory climate in Europe when it comes to telecom broadly and more specifically when it comes to consolidation. We await the formal release of the EU merger guidelines, for example, but these changes are expected to redefine the rules, and that's going to be a big positive together with an increasing commitment to sovereignty to our sector and the broader telecom industry. I am sure you're aware of that, but important to note. Moving on to the next slide. Let me start by saying that there will come a point in time when I don't need to put this chart in the deck.

For now, I think it's helpful to summarize our operating structure, specifically our three core pillars of value creation, Liberty Telecom, Liberty Growth, in the center, Liberty Global itself, and to highlight the strategies we're executing to create and deliver that value. Liberty Growth on the far right houses our portfolio of media infra and tech investments totaling EUR 3.4 billion today. Here we're focused on rotating capital, investing in high-growth sectors with scale and tailwinds. We'll try to spotlight a few of those in each quarter, today we'll lay out the thesis for the experience economy. In the center sits Liberty Global itself, with EUR 1.9 billion of cash and a team with decades of experience operating and investing in these businesses.

As we reported last quarter, we've restructured our operating model and reduced net corporate cost by 75% since 2024 to around EUR 50 million this year. These two asset pools alone, by the way, our cash and the market value of our growth investments exceed the current price of our stock by around 30%, which means, of course, that everything in our core Liberty Telecom business on the left, namely EUR 22 billion of revenue, EUR 8 billion of EBITDA, and 4 incredible converged telecom champions, are receiving no value at all in our stock. In fact, negative value if you give us credit for our substantial reduction in corporate cost. As we said over and over and over, our primary goal here in telecom is to drive commercial momentum and importantly, to unlock value for shareholders.

That was the impetus behind our Sunrise spin-off, which you all know about, and which we believe has worked extremely well for investors. That's why in the last call, we described the formation of the Ziggo Group, combination of our Benelux assets in Holland and Belgium, and our intention to spin off our interest tax-free to shareholders in the second half of 2027. Where are we on that specific initiative? I referenced earlier the building blocks that form the foundation of our expected value unlock with the Ziggo Group, and you can see the most significant ones outlined on the left-hand side of the next slide. Let me just say that each of these steps, each of these blocks if you will, are centered around strategic catalysts, free cash flow growth, and deleveraging. They each represent a foundational element of the value creation plan here.

This is the primary blueprint we've been executing, of course, with dozens of overlays and work streams, but it should give you greater confidence and awareness of our plans here. Let's start with Belgium. The first step was, of course, separating Telenet from its fixed network, which is now a 2/3, 1/3 JV called Wyre. This restructuring accomplishes or has accomplished four key things. First, it isolates a significant fiber CapEx and debt capital needed to upgrade the HFC network in Flanders into an off-balance sheet vehicle. Second, it precipitated a comprehensive network cooperation agreement between Wyre and Telenet on one hand, and Proximus and its fiber asset, Fiberklaar, on the other hand, which I'm pleased to say was just signed yesterday and will result in a single network, ours or theirs, in about 75% of Flanders. That's a great outcome.

It creates a cleaner, more consumer and B2B-focused Telenet ServCo with a significant free cash flow turnaround story supported by declining mobile CapEx and mostly AI-driven OpEx reductions. Fourth, it facilitates a reduction in Telenet's leverage from both the rebalancing of debt between Wyre and Telenet and the sale of a portion of our stake in Wyre at a premium, by the way, which will be used to repay debt at Telenet. Really critical steps to getting where we want to be. Moving to the Netherlands, for me, the first strategic catalyst here was bringing in a new management team, one that could set the tone for a return to growth and for winning results in the Dutch market. Steve and his team have delivered exactly that.

The second strategic catalyst was, of course, reaching an agreement with Vodafone to buy their 50% stake in our Dutch JV. This deal, as I just said, is scheduled to close in less than three months. Not only is that deal accretive from a financial point of view, but it strategically unlocks about EUR 1 billion in synergies we referenced and provides the structural elements necessary to complete a tax-free spin-off next year. Each of these steps accelerates our commitment to reducing leverage at VodafoneZiggo, which we'll accomplish through asset sales, a return to EBITDA free cash flow growth, and synergies. On the top right of this slide, you can see a side-by-side of Sunrise and the combined Ziggo Group. If you look at 2025, the Ziggo Group is bigger.

It's about 2 to 2.5x larger in revenue and EBITDA and a bit more profitable. Importantly, you'll see that in 2028, we're estimating free cash flow of around EUR 500 million and leverage of 4.5x, which, you know, presents a comparable financial profile to Sunrise when we spun it off in Q4 2024. On the chart on the bottom right provides an illustrative bridge to the EUR 500 million of free cash flow, which is estimated to be EUR 120 million this year. The biggest components of that, as you can see, are the non-recurring nature of some costs this year in Holland, combined synergies, Telenet's mobile CapEx reduction, and organic EBITDA growth. We think the Ziggo Group represents a compelling equity story, and it's anchored around four selling points.

Number 1, this is a strong regional business with two of Europe's most rational telecom markets that are best-in-class brands. Number two, we have clear network strategies here with declining CapEx as 5G investments subside and fiber costs are moved off balance sheet in Belgium and a cost-efficient DOCSIS 4 rollout in Holland. Declining CapEx and great visibility to the network strategies. Number three, rising free cash flow and declining leverage. That's supported by organic growth, synergies, and EUR 1.2 billion-EUR 1.4 billion of local asset sales I've already described, towers, property, et cetera. Number 4, a commitment to pay dividends from free cash flow as we've done with Sunrise. We have lots of work to do, but this plan and this path forward is clear for us, and we look forward to updating you each quarter on our progress.

What does it all add up to? I'm sure many of you are wondering, you know, what sort of value creation do we think is achievable here? The chart on the next slide is actually simpler than it looks, it moves left to right, it demonstrates how we have and how we intend to create value through this unlock strategy. Let's start on the far left. The day we announced our intention to spin off Sunrise in February 2024, our stock closed at $18. Of course, nine months later, we completed the spin-off and using Sunrise's current stock price, we feel we delivered a tax-free dividend that's valued today at $13 per Liberty share. Together with our $12 stock, you get to $25 or about a 40% value appreciation in the last 14 months or so.

Far so good. About two months ago, we announced the second step in our value unlock strategy with our intention to consolidate Benelux and spin off the Ziggo Group in the second half of next year. What might that be worth? These numbers are illustrative. Lawyers maybe say that, of course. If you move to the right to the third column, I think you'll see the answer. We believe a publicly listed Ziggo Group, if it were to trade at, let's say, the same implicit valuation of Sunrise today in essentially an 11.5% free cash flow yield, could be worth up to $14 per Liberty share based upon the 2028 free cash flow estimate of EUR 500 million that we just discussed. Without debating the point, we believe this could be conservative.

As you would know, many of our peers, KPN, Swisscom, Orange, Zegona, they trade at free cash flow yields of 5%-7%, albeit with different leverage profiles. Let's stick with the 11.5% free cash flow yield. The primary question is where will Liberty itself trade post-spin? Remember, we believe that the entire Liberty Telecom group has negative value in our stock today of around $4 per share, despite our announced intentions regarding Ziggo. With our cash and growth assets worth $16 and our stock at $12, that's the only conclusion we can reach. To arrive at $14 post the Ziggo Group spin, we simply added our pro forma cash balance after the Vodafone deal and asset sales together with the value of our remaining growth assets, including our residual stake in Wyre, and we get to $14.

By the way, these numbers assume that the market continues to assign no equity value. That's 0 equity value to our remaining telecom businesses in the U.K. and Ireland. Of course, we think there's substantial equity value in these businesses, but we don't need to agree on that to get to these numbers. To recap, if you follow the light blue boxes from February 24, the day we announced our plans to spin off Sunrise to today, we created $7 on what was an $18 stock. That's 40%. We believe for those who had held on to the Liberty stock and their Sunrise stock, that number gets to 41 with the Ziggo Group spin.

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

This next slide summarizes some of those initiatives and some of the progress beginning early last year when we repositioned broadband pricing, changed the operating model and rejuvenated our campaigns, even expanded our footprint through the deal with DELTA Fiber. As a result of that, we saw steady improvements right away in broadband, where we'd been losing over 30,000 subscribers every quarter. Those changes continued into 2026 when we rejuvenated the Ziggo brand with a new campaign, the Everything Network, that was supported by our UEFA rights, by the way, which we just extended. We also launched broadband into our no-frills flanker brand, bringing a simple and value-driven connectivity product to that critical segment. You can see at the bottom right, the broadband net adds have been moving in the right direction for 4 straight quarters.

In fact, our Q1 result was the best in three years, driven by all the initiatives I just referenced, pricing adjustments, new campaigns, product expansion, network improvements. By the way, we have the largest reach of 2 gig broadband services in the country. We just launched field trials with DOCSIS 4 in anticipation of launching 4 and 8 gig products later this year. Operationally, VodafoneZiggo is in great shape and improving exactly what you want to see as we plan for a public listing next year. The next 2 slides summarize Q1 operating performance across our four markets. I'm going to do this quickly since the CEOs are on the call and they can provide color if needed. I think the main headline here is that we continue to see good broadband trends pretty much across the board and stable fixed and mobile ARPUs.

Starting with VodafoneZiggo, like I just talked about, our broadband performance improved for the fourth consecutive quarter and postpaid mobile net adds also improved sequentially. We continue to invest in our fixed mobile markets in Holland with both the Vodafone and Ziggo networks receiving outstanding awards in the Umlaut test. With ARPUs of nearly EUR 57 in fixed and EUR 18 in mobile staying steady, it's been a good outcome. Turning to Belgium, Telenet delivered its highest quarterly broadband result in 10 years, driven by successful cross-sell campaigns and strong performance with our BASE, our flanker brand there. Postpaid mobile results remain subdued in Belgium as the market's pretty competitive. Here too, our BASE brand is outperforming, while both mobile ARPU at EUR 16 and fixed ARPU at EUR 63 remain largely stable ahead of upcoming price adjustments in Q2.

Now turning to the U.K. on the next slide, despite a market that remains highly competitive, Virgin Media O2 delivered a third straight quarter of broadband improvement with just 6,000 losses compared to 43,000 losses a year ago. This was supported by strong commercial and retention initiatives and of course, lower churn. Importantly, and despite pressure on the overall market pricing, here our fixed ARPU remained relatively stable at GBP 46.50, supported by more and more personalized and AI-driven pricing. With the Netomnia deal working its way through the regulatory process, we continue our fiber to the home expansion with 8.7 million fiber homes available today. In U.K. Mobile, we launched O2 Satellite. You might have seen that making us the first operator in the U.K. to switch on direct-to-device satellite connectivity.

In addition, our mobile network transformation is progressing with new RAN upgrade agreements and the transfer of the second tranche of spectrum from Vodafone Three. That's hugely important to us. O2 now has the largest 5G standalone footprint in the U.K. Net postpaid losses of 60,000 were materially better than last quarter as churn from the Q4 price adjustment, we've talked about that, subsided and ARPU of around GBP 17 was broadly stable. In Ireland, lastly, we continue to execute strategically with growth in wholesale and off-net traffic more than compensating for retail pressure on net.

A fixed retail ARPU of EUR 61 remained stable despite no price rise in 2025. Importantly, our fiber rollout, this is critical, remains on track to be substantially complete in 2026, with nearly 20% of the retail base now taking a fiber product, and that will also drive free cash flow in 2027 and beyond. Just one slide on our Liberty Growth portfolio, currently valued at $3.4 billion and centered around four key verticals you know and love, infrastructure and energy, technology and AI, services, and of course, media and sports. The strategy here has been consistent for some time. We are exiting positions that are no longer strategic and using that capital to both invest in new opportunities as they arise and as needed, provide capital for transactions that will unlock value in our telecom assets. That second point is really important.

Historically, we've divested investment positions totaling something like EUR 1.6 billion since 2019, and we've targeted another EUR 700 million in sale proceeds this year, of which, as I said, EUR 300 million is already accounted for. A few comments on sports and live events. We're already invested heavily here through Formula E, but we also believe there are significant structural tailwinds that warrant us evaluating additional opportunities, and we're doing that. These points are probably well known to all of you, I'm sure, but there's clearly a generational shift from physical goods to experiences. That's live events, sports, travel, entertainment, and many of these markets are fragmented and most are protected from AI disruption. It's an interesting space. It's also clear momentum in the sector, right? Just look at sports.

Global revenue in sports growing well in excess of GDP over the last 10 years, and by almost everybody's estimation, poised to increase and accelerate from here. What's our right to play, you might be asking? Well, we know how to consolidate a fragmented industry, both in telecom, but also we've been doing that for decades, and recently with All3Media before exiting at a premium. We've got strong relationships across these sectors. Really, the deal flow is the easy part. When you factor in our expertise in things like treasury operations and technology, it's a pretty strong combination. We have a good track record in sports, specifically with Formula E, the fastest growing motorsport globally, and one of only eight global sports leagues, which is a great segue to my last slide.

I always get excited when I talk about Formula E, sometimes too excited, but I think this moment is perhaps our biggest yet. Look, over the last 10 years, as you've been following this, we have constantly innovated, investing significant energy and time in the car, the technology, and the racing. Well, the wait is over. Last week at the Paul Ricard Circuit in France, Formula E unleashed the next generation race car, Gen4, we call it, and the motorsports world is still reverberating. First of all, you have to see it in person. Yes, it is a beast, but it's a beautiful race car. The step up in power and performance is incredible. 600 KW of power represents a 71% increase in base output over the current Gen3 Evo car. The acceleration is insane, 0 to 100 km in 1.8 seconds.

That's meaningfully faster than a F1 car. Top speeds in excess of 335 km an hour, nearly 210 mi per hour. We estimate, because it's an estimate at this point, that lap times will decrease 10 seconds on average from the current generation car. That's a lifetime in racing. It's also the first single-seater race car with active all-wheel drive all the time, which will provide incredible acceleration and torque out of the turns. Of course, it meets all of our expectations from a sustainability point of view. It's made from at least 20% recyclable materials. It's 98.5% recyclable itself. It allows us to continue claiming that our race-related carbon footprint for the entire championship would fit into one F1 team, by the way. Speaking of F1, yes, we might have taken a few shots at them since the Gen4 launch.

You know, it might be deserved also. You're obviously aware of the issues they're dealing with currently and that they're going through with the hybrid engine. It just reinforces our view that going halfway on anything does not make history. You know, we love the position that we're in technologically, competitively, from an entertainment and motorsports point of view. Hey, just don't take my word for it. In the next slide, you can see, go ahead and scan social media, the motorsports press. There is widespread consensus. I know I'm quoting. This Gen4 car is a quote-unquote monster. It's quote an ushering in the most extreme era of electric cars. It's expected to change perceptions of Formula E forever. Even Max gives it a thumbs up, as you can see on the bottom right.

Anyway, I'm super excited about Gen4 car and Formula E. With that, Charlie, I'll turn it over to you.

Thanks, Mike. My first slide sets out the Q1 financial results for our Benelux companies. As you can see on this slide, we are now presenting Wyre's financial performance for the first time separate to Telenet to give investors clarity on their respective financials before we complete the full separation of the two companies and their capital structures later this year. VodafoneZiggo reported a revenue decline of 1.8% in Q1, driven by a lower customer base and ongoing repricing impact. This was partially offset by the price indexation and higher revenue from Ziggo Sport. Adjusted EBITDA declined 6.4%, driven by higher marketing costs and some incremental investments in network resilience and service reliability, in line with our guidance in March.

At Telenet, revenue was broadly stable in Q1, reflecting our strategic decision not to renew Belgian football rights, which was partly offset by a strong broadband performance, which was driven by effective cross-selling into the video customer base. Adjusted EBITDA grew 8.9%, driven by lower content costs following the exit from the football broadcasting rights. At Wyre, revenue declined by 1%, impacted by the implementation of a new pricing model, which was partially offset by strength in wholesale growth. Adjusted EBITDA declined by 4.6%, and this was driven by an investment in build capability as we start to accelerate Wyre's fiber build-out capability. Turning to the U.K. and Ireland, Virgin Media O2 delivered a total service revenue decline of 3% on a guidance basis.

This was impacted by competitive pressure in the consumer fixed market and lower B2B revenue as the newly rebranded O2 business rationalizes its product portfolio to support its long-term growth in the mobile segment. This was partially offset by wholesale revenue growth, which was supported by growth in MVNO revenue and adjusted EBITDA declined by 3.4% as a result of the lower total service revenues and a non-cash provision for legal matters recorded in the quarter. This was partially offset by cost reduction initiatives. At Virgin Media Ireland, revenues declined by 1.4% in Q1, impacted by intense competition in the consumer fixed and mobile markets, as well as a decline in advertising revenues at VMTV. This was partially offset by a strong wholesale performance.

Meanwhile, adjusted EBITDA declined by 7.1%, driven by these top-line pressures, and was also impacted by a one-off benefit in Q1 last year. Turning to the next slide, we remain committed to our disciplined capital allocation model as we rotate capital into higher growth investments and strategic transactions. Starting in the top left, Telenet reported EUR 10 million of free cash flow during the quarter and is expected to deliver at least EUR 20 million of free cash flow for the full year. Additionally, Liberty Corporate delivered adjusted EBITDA of negative $2 million, putting us firmly on track to achieve our full-year 2026 guidance of negative $50 million.

Turning to the bottom left, CapEx has meaningfully stepped down at Telenet in Q1 on a guidance basis, driven by the 5G upgrade nearing completion at the end of 2025 and lower spend on digital platforms. Capital intensity remains elevated at the other opcos, reflecting investments in our fixed networks and also 5G upgrades. Moving to the Liberty Growth walk in the top right, the fair market value of our growth portfolio remained broadly stable versus 2025 year end at $3.4 billion.

This was driven by modest investments in AtlasEdge, egg Power, nexfibre, and EdgeConneX, offset by the partial disposals of our ITV and some of our EdgeConneX stake, as well as a positive fair market value adjustment at EdgeConneX, along with the recent decision to move Liberty Blume out of our Corporate and Services segment and into the growth portfolio. Turning to our cash walk on the bottom right, we ended the quarter with a consolidated cash balance of EUR 1.9 billion. Q1 distributable free cash flow was impacted by high CapEx levels related to the fiber to the home rollouts at Wyre and Virgin Media Ireland, in addition to working capital movements at Telenet.

It's worth noting, we continue to anticipate that Wyre will draw on its standalone facility following BCA approval and will fully repay the short-term funding provided by Liberty Global consolidated cash via Telenet. As a reminder, we are aiming to end 2026 with around $1.5 billion of corporate cash, despite the expected outflows associated with the incremental Vodafone stake and also, to a lesser extent, the Netomnia acquisition. Finally, turning to our full-year guidance targets for 2026, we are reconfirming all guidance metrics of VMO2, VodafoneZiggo, and Telenet, as well as our guidance for corporate costs. That concludes our prepared remarks for Q1, and I'd like to hand over to the operator for Q&A.

Thank you. We will now begin the Q&A session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to remove that question, please press star followed by two. Again, to ask a question, press star one. As a reminder, if you are using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking a question. We will pause here briefly as questions are registered. Our first question comes from the line of Carl Murdock-Smith with Citigroup. Carl, your line is now open.

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

Then secondly, I just wondered if you could expand slightly on the O2 Satellite news and your kind of level of excitement around that. How much customer interest are you anticipating? More broadly, just what is your view on the role of satellite in telecoms as a complement or competitor going forwards? Thank you.

Satellite question about you. Over to Lutz first. Let me just say that, you know, as we look at the satellite space, generally, we think, of course, satellite broadband, Starlink broadband has a role to play on the planet. There will be plenty of people who will utilize that broadband service and need that broadband service. We believe the direct-to-device mobile opportunity is far more limited by technology, by market access. We do like the idea of having a satellite service attached to our mobile network. We think it adds, you know, just another level of service and commitment to customers. Of course, the U.K. is the first market where we have done that. Lutz, I'll turn it over to you for satellite. Someone, Charlie, I guess, will answer the wholesale question. Lutz?

Hi, Carl. We are very satisfied with the launch of O2 Satellite. Not disclosing numbers, but the fact that we have at the moment not the iPhone available, we will have it available in a week from now, and we have already quite a high demand, is leading us to the assumption that this is really a reliable service, an interesting and attractive service for customers. Also in combination with our improved mobile network, our 5G standalone coverage, we are really creating the right perception for customers, which means we have the most reliable mobile network from everybody in terms of coverage and data speed. Therefore we are very happy with that.

Charlie, you wanna address the wholesale revenue?

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

I mean, I can give some color, right? I mean, I think Carl, you're right. It was not, we didn't account it the same way before. The reason for that was not to beef up our service revenue. As you see, right, we are coming currently more at the upper end than of the guidance. The reason for that is that will be a growing and a continuous service revenue stream. We will more and more connect customers either from other networks or from other ISPs. Therefore, when you look at that way, I think that makes change makes sense. As you said yourself, right, we are coming in at the upper end of our guidance. You could track that number a little bit.

It is 0.7% of it, if you want to accrue for it, but it won't change anything in the guidance. I mean, we wouldn't change it. It's only 1 quarter. So far we are happy with what we have.

Makes sense. That's great. Thanks very much.

Operator.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Polo Tang with UBS. Polo, your line is now open.

Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking the questions. I have 2. The first one is just on U.K. competitive dynamics for Lutz. Can you maybe talk through how the recent price rises in April have landed? Because the percentage increase is quite large, and I think it's double-digit for most subscribers. I'm just wondering if there's been any change in terms of churn. Separately, your postpaid mobile losses are continuing, how optimistic are you that this can stabilize through the year? Second question is just a broader question on use of cash going forward. You've talked a lot in this, the prepared remarks about ventures and the focus on sports and media. I think press reports suggested you were considering buying a European NBA franchise.

Are you pivoting the group more towards media and sports, or is the plan still to break up the group and return cash to shareholders? Any color on that would be great. Thanks.

Sure. I'll start with that, Polo. They're not mutually exclusive. That's point 1. Point 2 is our primary commitment, and I think it should be clear, but I'll repeat it here, is to create value for shareholders. We believe, as I've said a few different times, the biggest opportunity to do that is to highlight and find ways to, you know, illuminate value in our telecom business. That is our priority. That is number 1. As I mentioned a moment ago in my remarks, when we look at the use of capital, that factors in squarely to that to the strategy. As I said, we will use capital and rotate capital into growth opportunities should they be presented to us, but also into the telecom business if it helps to unlock value for shareholders.

I think I went on to say that second one is an important point. That's the first part of the answer. I'd say secondly, we are opportunistically looking at and being presented with sorts of opportunities. Sorry, somebody's ringing. With opportunities in that sports space and in the media space generally. There's a reason why the portfolio was EUR 3.4 billion large, because we have been very active as an investor. You know, maybe it's been quiet and we don't spend as much time on our earnings calls doing it, but it's, you know, it's arguably the biggest component of our stock price today are the investments that we've assembled strategically and purposely over the last, you know, let's say five to seven years.

You know, we're divesting ourselves of a huge chunk of those investments, and rightly so, 'cause we need cash to do the things we've been talking about today. Then we will opportunistically look at new investments if they make sense. Don't get me wrong, we are committed to the unlock strategy, and that is priority number 1. Lutz, you wanna talk about competitive nature of U.K.?

Yes. Good afternoon, Polo Tang. In mobile, you see in our numbers that we have been tracking in service revenue around 3%. This is before the price rise. Right, a reason for the net losses in Q1 was the higher price rise we decided for. We are seeing this landing very well. We have the first months now of the 2nd quarter behind us, Polo Tang. Our explanation for that is that those who didn't want to pay it left and for that has materialized. We don't see any spike in churn. Obviously we also have to wait for the May, our findings here are so far so good. On the fixed side, the competitive situation is also unchanged, I would say.

All nets are very aggressive as we are now. Other competitors have to follow. Here, remember I said at the last call, we have to optimize our prevention machine as we used to do it with the retention machine, which we have done now. Therefore, we are quite proud about the fact that we have almost managed to stabilize our fixed customer base in Q1, and we expect something like that in the future. Yes, it comes at the cost of some ARPU, which is 1.6%, but in the scheme of things that is a balanced approach.

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

Thanks, Lutz.

Thanku

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Robert Grindle with Deutsche Bank. Robert, your line is now open.

Yeah. Thank you. Afternoon, gents. I see the progress on the long-form agreement with Proximus, approval for the collaboration is still outstanding. What happens if you're delayed for another six to nine months? Do you progress the build as planned, or is the project pushed back? I think Charlie said the Wyre revenues were impacted by a new pricing model. Could the Wyre Telenet ServCo financials change from here? Should there be a change in the wholesale rates associated with any approval? Will this financial base you've given us now be effectively unchanged? Thanks.

Thanks, Robert. We got John Porter on the line, who's worked tirelessly on this Proximus transaction.

Which I must say marks an outstanding result. Outstanding result for Telenet and for us. Do you wanna speak to the regulatory process from here, John?

Sure. Well, we've been in lockstep with the competition authority and the BIPT over the last two years. They are right up to date on every aspect of the transaction between ourselves and Proximus. We have very positive inclination from them and belief that they will expedite the final review of the transaction. There is a necessary 30-day review at the European Commission. That is not an approval process. It's just a chance for them to reflect on the transaction and see if it has broader implications. You know, we are cautiously optimistic that we will complete this transaction over the next, say, six to eight weeks. It's a virtual impossibility that it would go longer than that because I think we'd all down tools.

The main critical path has been achieved between ourselves and Proximus, and everybody's ready to get going.

Let me just step in on the.

I don't know.

As we're separating the two companies.

Oh, go ahead, Charlie. Sorry.

I was going to say we're separating the two companies. There is a little bit of tweaking. For example, there is a bit of movement on the wholesale rate to Telenet, and there's also some management fees that are being reevaluated. I think we'll get a more stable view on the numbers in Q2, but I would say it's pretty good news for the ServCo. I'd also say on the financing side, just to, you know, real shout-out to my treasury team, the EUR 4.35 billion of underwritten financing that's clearly in place and we could draw, has now been fully syndicated, which is a great success. Very successfully syndicated.

With the completion of the BCA approval, we're drawing that down and indeed paying some of the money that we decided was more efficient to bridge from our balance sheet rather than draw revolvers to do so. I think it's all around good news for the eventual Ziggo Group spin, because I think the Telenet part of the equation is very much on track for the free cash flow target we set them in 2028.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Joshua Mills with BNP Paribas. Joshua, your line is now open.

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

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

Thanks, Joshua. Stephen will prepare our answers to the Dutch questions. On the asset sales, the EUR 1.2 billion-EUR 1.4 billion, those consist primarily of towers and technical facilities, et cetera. We're not really providing a breakdown of those numbers today 'cause we're in active, you know, sale process. We're not gonna provide, you know, expectations or estimates of where we think value is, but we think that's the range of total combined asset sales, which would be used to pay down debt. Charlie, you wanna address the pro forma leverage? It really depends on what point in time you look for that number and what's happened to the Wyre. Do you wanna address that, Charlie?

Yeah. I mean, it's actually a very complicated question because clearly the Belgian assets that are going to go into the Ziggo Group do not include, 'cause there will be a full separation of the Wyre assets. With the EUR 4.35 billion of underwritten and now syndicated debt, we will therefore be paying down debt at Telenet or Telenet ServCo, but Telenet will be what we'll call it going forward. It remains that because of the investment profile, VodafoneZiggo is relatively higher elevated. There's a lot of moving parts in answering that question. I would just reconfirm what Mike said, is we're very confident in a path to get down to the around 4.5 times by 2028.

It does depend on some asset sales, but we feel pretty good about those being delivered. With those asset sales and indeed, you know, continuing organic EBITDA growth, particularly in Holland, I think we should be there or thereabouts on target. Very happy to take it offline to go through some of these 'cause there's a lot of moving parts.

Yeah

It's in the low to mid fives.

Yeah. The combined group is going to be in the low to mid fives. Telenet itself will be in the mid fours. VodafoneZiggo will be higher. We'll start layering in the various de-leveraging steps, additional steps as well. There's a clear path. You know, perhaps next call, Joshua, we'll give you a little bit more detail. That is the general trend.

That's, that's great. Just to be clear, this isn't assuming any injection of cash. Sorry. There's no assumption of cash going in from Liberty Global into Telco.

The only other comment I'll make is actually, look, you know, clearly.

Yeah. Go ahead. Thanks.

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

Yeah. In terms of the operational performance of the broadband business.

Yeah. Can you hear me?

Yeah.

In terms of the operational performance of the broadband business over the last 12 months, if you follow the story, we've done a number of very clear interventions. The first is we got our pricing right for the broadband products that we're selling. We were mispriced in the marketplace. We fixed that a year ago. When we talk about the back book we're pricing, we're pleased with the progress we've made on that. You haven't seen that in the RP, so we've managed that, I think, pretty well. Second thing we've done is we've gotten on top of churn. We've been much more proactive in how we manage our customer base, which I think has had an effect on bringing churn down. We're now down 3 points year-on-year. We've invested more in marketing by repositioning the business.

The business was underspending on marketing and was out of sync with how, in my view, connectivity should be sold. We've invested, as you saw, in upgrading the speeds of the network. You've seen us launch. We're the only national 2 GB service, we've taken speed as a headwind off the table for us. More generally, I think we've done a pretty good job of just tightening how we take the business to market. You've seen that flow through sequentially each quarter as each of these initiatives have landed. We have a series of initiatives coming through the rest of 2026, which we anticipate to continue to help us with the momentum behind the story.

The [Odido question, Stephen

I'm sorry, I missed the Odido question. Can you repeat that?

The question was, what are you.

Yeah. It was.

Do you see any benefit from their cyber attack?

Yeah. It happened late in the quarter. It happened around week 10, so we saw some impact from that. We didn't see a lot of it in the quarter. Because of the size of their mobile base, we felt a bit more of it in the mobile base. nothing that I think is material in the Q1 results 'cause it only represented a handful of weeks.

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

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

Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of James Ratzer with New Street Research. James, your line is now open.

Yes. Good afternoon. Thank you for taking the question. I had two really both around Belgium. In Telenet, you obviously had a very good quarter in terms of broadband net adds. I'd love if you can just give a bit more color behind what's driving that. Is that now growth out of footprint in Wallonia? Is that coming on your kind of base brand within Flanders, or is it something else? I'd be interested to kind of get a just a bit more color on the drivers there of broadband subs growth. Then secondly, just going back to the point that was raised earlier about Wyre revenue growth, which was down year-on-year in Q1.

Is that a kind of 1-off for this quarter, Charlie, you were mentioning around pricing, and it goes back to growth in the following quarters? I'd just love to understand a bit more about the kind of dynamics there between kind of P and Q, because I've been thinking that with kind of pricing there, we should see Wyre as a top-line growth company. Thank you.

John, you wanna take the Belgium question?

Yeah, I can take it. On the first, on the broadband, the BAU has been strong, particularly in the BASE brand. Their growth is about 50/50 between the Telenet footprint and growth in the South. We are steadily growing, and that growth in the South is increasing incrementally. There is what will be a, you know, year-long enhancement of that growth as we migrate out of DVB-C and into full IP for our video distribution. We are the last operator in the market to have DVB-C where you don't require internet to get television, but we are shutting that down over the next year. You know, we're expecting to see continued strong growth.

As you can see, the quarter ending 25 and the first quarter of the year, very strong and those are the main drivers. On the Wyre revenue, there we implemented a wholesale deal, a new wholesale deal on the HFC, which is essentially structuring the higher speed tiers to be more accessible. The wholesale price is going down a little bit, and that's what you're seeing flowing through. That will be part of the overarching deal done with Proximus, and we'll be able to give you more detail on that down the road. The drop will not continue to drop, but it is the new HFC wholesale pricing.

Thank you, John. From those new prices, do prices then rise with inflation from this slightly lower level looking into 2027, 2028?

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

Great. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Matthew Harrigan with StoneX. Matthew, your line is now open.

Oh, thank you. This is very much a conjectural question rather than kind of blocking, tackling valuation anomalies. You made a quick reference to more benign, you know, regulatory environment in your markets. What's even more interesting on a macro basis is, you know, the emphasis on Europe's industrial base and defense. Clearly, you know, telecom is a vital, you know, pivot in defense. Is there any possibilities for your telecom business or I guess particularly your venture portfolio in that end? I'm sure, you know, Charlie and Lutz aren't gonna be manufacturing drones, but it still feels like something that could be an interesting, you know, tailwind, particularly since you're involved in so many areas and verticals. Thank you.

Hey, Matthew. Listen, the whole sovereignty debate, it's no longer a debate, it's a, it's a, you know, verifiable conviction, is net positive for us in the telecom space. Now we won't all benefit equally, but every telecom player will benefit from the European Union and countries within the European Union's focus with their own, you know, cybersecurity, their own data protection, their own data centers, their own AI infrastructure.

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

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

Right. Sure.

Does that answer your question, Matt?

You're not [audio inaudible]. Absolutely. Thanks, Mike.

No. You got it.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ulrich Rathe with Bernstein Societe Generale Group. Ulrich, your line is now open.

Yeah, thanks very much. Thanks very much. Two questions. First one is, Mike, you talked about the improving re-regulatory climate with regards to consolidation. Other management teams in the sector have flagged mixed signals they perceive to come out of Europe. Could you talk through what specifically you have in mind there? What insights or news you have to share on which you base this more positive assessment? The second question is on the EUR 1 billion synergies that you talk about in Ziggo, can you talk about the sort of rough makeup of that in terms of operational and other sources of synergies? Thank you.

Sure. On the synergies point, I don't know if we've been specific, so I'm gonna pause. You know, but it typically you wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's consisting of three or four key line items. There's a financial synergy, that's more of a, you know, more of, I would say, a free cash flow type synergy from, that we haven't. Well, from taxes, essentially. There's operating costs that we think are achievable and create more efficiencies around. There's procurement and CapEx type synergy. So it's not going to be. When we get closer to legal day 1, we'll clearly provide more detail to you. Right now, we're still in the midst of closing the deal.

You know, there's lots of things we can be doing and will be doing in those two operations and within and among them to create those synergies. If I had to put my team on the spot right now, they'd say that's probably a low number. On the regulatory side, we did just, you know, get the EU merger guidelines released, and they are quite positive, you know, and, you know, at least in comparison to the kind of posture and position that the European Union would take previously when it came to in-market consolidation, right? I mean, they're looking at a much more, I guess, modern and pragmatic approach and, you know, they're seeing that benefits could certainly accrue from mergers versus just always seeing the negative in those mergers.

There's always been a structural bias against scale, now they're seeing, well, actually scale could increase investment, could increase innovation. It's actually spelled out in the document that was released recently. That to us is, you know, when it's in writing. If it's just a speech, I don't give it much credit. When they put it in writing, as they have with these new EU merger guidelines, that is a positive step. It needs to be put to the test, there will be plenty of deals that will put it to the test soon, I imagine.

Never before have they written down in black and white the sort of statements that we're reading today in terms of, you know, which are consistent with the arguments we've been making, that consolidation in market is the first step to repair in the European Telecom space.

Very helpful. Thank you very much.

Yep.

Thank you. Our last question comes from the line of David Wright with Bank of America. David, your line is now open.

Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, last question. A couple please, guys. Just on the, I guess it's for Ziggo, DOCSIS 4.0. I think you may have said, Mike, that there are some trials ongoing. If we could just get some estimates of maybe the sort of trajectory of commercial launch for 4.0 in Holland. When do you expect the first sort of, you know, significant retail launch, et cetera? Is it something that you think you could even price a little as you move into the real sort of mega tiers of speed? Then the second question, maybe a little more conceptual.

You know, we're observing a lot of discussion around the kind of InfraCo, ServCo split, and you guys have obviously sort of embraced that. You know, there's obviously a clear sort of capital allocation justification and the ability to, you know, to separate the two businesses that are quite structurally different. I just wondered, does having a separate InfraCo make a more agile ServCo in terms of just day-to-day, you know, operations? Is the business just, you know, more able to respond and sort of change shape in the sort of digital age? It's a little more conceptual, Mike. If you've got anything to add on that, I'd appreciate it. Thank you.

Sure, sure. Steve Malcolm, jump in here if I get it wrong, I believe our 4 and 8 gig trials are the latter part of the year, maybe even late Q3, Q4. What we did was get a, you know, the field trials underway to demonstrate that it works, it works well, that the technology we're using is really state-of-the-art, even in relation to the U.S. operators. As we get closer to going public in the latter part of this year, we'll have more information. It's happening, and we think it's gonna be a big positive for the market and for our, for our business for sure. On the, on the ServCo side, look at, I mean, Belgium is the test.

What does it do when you end up taking the fixed network, you still own the mobile network, but taking the fixed network and putting it into a separate entity? I think, and John will agree, I'm sure, it forces you to be more efficient, more agile, and your margins change. All of a sudden, there's a wholesale fee in your P&L that you have to account for. In principle, Telenet will continue to be a very competitive brand and a very competitive B2C company and B2B company. It's with respect to its network, its fixed network, it will be renting instead of owning that network. The relationship it's developed with Wyre is highly integrated, highly, you know, with mutual benefits both directions.

On balance, I think, and this is the only place we've done it really is Belgium. I think on balance, and John can chime in, I think it does create a bit more energy in that ServCo, a bit more focus on margins and on competition with a little less to worry about and a slightly better, you know, CapEx profile. That CapEx profile frees up free cash. You know, Telenet will generate significant free cash here shortly as it has, and we'll have to figure out how to reinvest that free cash, whether it's in de-leveraging or in actually new products and services. Any, anything more to add to that, John?

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

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

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

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Liberty Global's Fourth Quarter 2025 Investor Call. This call and the associated webcast are the property of Liberty Global, and any redistribution, retransmission or rebroadcast of this call or webcast in any form without the expressed written consent of Liberty Global is strictly prohibited. [Operator Instructions] Today's formal presentation materials can be found under the Investor Relations section of Liberty Global's website at libertyglobal.com. 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 its outlook and future growth prospects and other information and statements that are not historical facts. These forward-looking statements involve certain risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. These risks include those detailed in Liberty Global's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recently filed Forms 10-Q and 10-K as amended. Liberty Global disclaims any obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements to reflect any change in its expectations or in the conditions on which any such statement is based. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Mike Fries.

Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. As you would have seen by now, in addition to our results, we announced 2 significant transactions earlier today, which, of course, we'll address in our prepared remarks. As a result, I think this call may run over 60 minutes. I hope you can stick with us because there's quite a bit to talk about here. We've broken this down into our typical quarterly results presentation, which Charlie and I will breeze through as we usually do, perhaps a little faster than normal, and then we'll move into more of a strategic update like we did 2 years ago at this time. I also think it might be a good call to follow the slides that we're broadcasting, especially in the second half. But let me jump right in on Slide 4. And certainly, by now, you are all familiar with how we organize and manage our business today. As illustrated here, everything falls into 1 of 3 operating verticals. Liberty Telecom comprises our 4 national FMC champions that generate $22 billion of revenue and $8 billion of EBITDA on an aggregate basis and where our primary goals are to drive commercial momentum and importantly, unlock equity value for shareholders. Much more on that in a moment. Liberty Growth on the far right houses our portfolio of media, infra and tech investments totaling $3.4 billion today. And here, we're focused on rotating capital, right, and investing in high-growth sectors with scale and tailwinds. And of course, in the center sits Liberty Global itself with $2.2 billion of cash and a team with decades of experience operating and investing in these businesses. Now I'll come back to this slide and the strategic update. But first, let me provide some highlights on each of these for 2025. So it has clearly been a busy year for us on all 3 fronts. And as Slide 5 points out, we feel like we've delivered on our core strategic priorities. There's a lot of detail here, so I'm just going to hit a few of the high points. We'll talk about our telecom operating results in the next couple of slides, but we're pleased with the momentum that our commercial and network strategies are delivering, especially in the second half of the year, supported in parts by the benefits we realized from AI, all of our 3 large OpCos hit their guidance targets last year. When it comes to unlocking value in telecom, a key goal for us, as you know, you've no doubt seen our announcements on the U.K. fiber transaction and our acquisition of Vodafone's interest in the Netherlands. We'll dig into both those deals shortly, but this is exactly what we said we would do on our call last year and the year before. At Liberty Global, we've totally reshaped our operating model, having reduced our net corporate spend by 75% in the last 12 months. Needless to say excited to see how this new guidance leads its way into analysts some of the parts calculations. And we continue to allocate capital to the highest return. As you know, we did reduce the buyback last year from 10% to 5% of shares partially, to be honest, in anticipation of some of these varied transactions. And so far this year, we're not actively in the market, but we always remain opportunistic on our stock and we'll keep you abreast of our plans throughout the course of the year versus guiding to them. And with respect to our cash balance, pro forma for the transactions announced today and for what we expect to realize in further asset sales, we should end the year with $1.5 billion of cash, and Charlie will get into that in a bit more detail in a moment. And then finally, our growth portfolio remains highly concentrated with 5 assets comprising 70% of the $3.4 billion in value. We couldn't be more excited about Formula E and the progress we're making on the Gen4 car, our racing calendar and of course, our sponsors. And we have renewed focus on the experience economy. I'm not going to get into much detail here. But by this, we mean live events, sports, et cetera. We probably looked at 100 deals in this space. We've done real work on about 40, and we've only closed a handful of very small transactions. So that should give you some comfort that while we're excited about this sector, we're staying very disciplined as we look to rotate capital. Now the next 2 slides summarize Q4 operating performance for our telecom businesses. In the U.K., Lutz and the team have implemented a number of things that helped improve broadband performance throughout the year, initiatives like bundling Netflix and being recognized as a top U.K. broadband provider. Those things drove a strong Q4 as well as stable ARPUs. Postpaid mobile results were impacted, however, by the increases that they took in October. Hopefully, we'll see improved performance in '26, especially as 5G coverage continues to grow and pricing pressure settles. In Ireland, a combination of fiber wholesale activations, improved network performance. Actually, they are also ranked the best provider in the market and off-net expansion, supported net growth in the fixed base with stable ARPUs. Mobile in Ireland continues to grow steadily. Remember, we're an MVNO there, helped in part by a EUR 15 offer launched in June. In the Netherlands, Vodafone Ziggo's How We Win plan is driving substantial improvements in the broadband base. Becoming the largest provider of 2 gigabit broadband speeds in the market and recent recognition as the best TV provider helped make Q4 the single best result in fixed services in nearly 3 years with steady improvement over the last 6 months carrying into 2026. Postpaid mobile growth in Holland continues to be supported by nearly universal 5G coverage and a strong flanker brand. And then finally, Telenet had its highest quarterly broadband results in 3 years, helped by fixed mobile convergence in the South and a strong Black Friday period. And similar to other markets we operate in, ARPUs were fixed and mobile are very stable. Now if it wasn't enough information for you, we will be discussing 3 out of these 4 markets in our strategic update later in the call, including a lot more commentary on their performance and outlook. So in the meantime, Charlie, over to you.

Thanks, Mike. Now turning to our Q4 financial highlights. Our operating companies in the U.K., the Netherlands and Belgium delivered on their full year guidance metrics despite challenging market conditions. VMO2 delivered a revenue decline of 5.9% on a reported basis, which was impacted by lower Nexfibre construction revenues due to a slowdown in the fiber build and also sustained competitive pressure in both the fixed and mobile market in the U.K. On a guidance basis, excluding Nexfibre construction and O2 Daisy, we delivered modest growth for the full year. Adjusted EBITDA declined by 2.4% on a reported basis, primarily driven by lower Nexfibre construction profitability. Excluding this, adjusted EBITDA fell by 1% in Q4, but we still achieved growth overall for the full year of positive 1%. Moving to VodafoneZiggo, we saw a revenue decline of 2.3% in Q4, driven by fixed churn and reduced low-margin IoT revenues. This was partially offset by the annual price adjustment and higher Ziggo Sport revenues. Adjusted EBITDA declined 3.4% in Q4, driven by this lower revenue and higher costs related to commercial initiatives. The full year figures were in line with the guidance in Q1 for the new How We Win strategy. At Telenet, we saw a revenue decline of 1.3%, driven by our strategic decision to not renew the Belgium football broadcasting rights and lower programming revenues. Adjusted EBITDA declined by 9.9%, driven by elevated labor and marketing costs as well as higher professional services and outsourced labor spend. Turning to our treasury update. We've been extremely proactive through 2025 and the early part of 2026 and extending our 2028 and 2029 maturities. And we successfully refinanced close to $15 billion across our credit silos. At both VMO2 and VodafoneZiggo, we have fully refinanced all 2028 maturities following successful term loan refinancings, senior secured note issuances and private taps within these credit silos. In Belgium, as we announced in Q3, we have EUR 4.35 billion of committed financing at Wyre, which is contingent on BCA regulatory approval of our fiber sharing agreement. A portion of the proceeds of around EUR 2.34 billion are allocated to repay the intercompany loan with Telenet and will be used to rebalance leverage at Telenet. We intend to further repay some of the 2028 debt at Telenet with the proceeds from our partial Wyre stake sale, which is expected to complete this year. All of this proactive refinancing activity has significantly reduced our 2028 maturities and maintained our average tenor of around 5 years at broadly comparable credit spreads to our historic levels. Turning to the next slide. We remain committed to our disciplined capital allocation model as we rotate capital into high-growth investments and strategic transactions. Starting on the top left, we successfully delivered against all free cash flow guidance metrics for the year across our OpCos and JVs. Additionally, following our corporate reshaping program, Liberty Services and Corporate closed 2025 ahead of guidance at negative $130 million of adjusted EBITDA, which is around $20 million better than our $150 million target. Moving to the Liberty Growth walk in the bottom left. The fair market value of our growth portfolio remained broadly stable versus Q3 at $3.4 billion. This was driven by modest investments in Nexfibre, AtlasEdge and EdgeConneX, offset by the partial disposal of our ITV stake and the full exit of our Enfabrica stake as well as positive fair market value adjustments at Formula E and UPC Slovakia, which has been held in the growth portfolio until the sale process completes later this year. Turning to our cash walk on the top right. We ended the year with a consolidated cash balance of $2.2 billion. During the quarter, we received $162 million of upstream cash and JV dividends and $140 million of net cash proceeds from disposals in our growth portfolio, including $180 million from the partial ITV stake sale. We spent $34 million on our buyback program during the quarter, repurchasing a total of 5% of our outstanding shares during the year. Moving to the bottom right, we are aiming to end 2026 with around $1.5 billion of corporate cash. After deducting for the cash outflows related to the M&A transactions Mike will touch on in a minute, we intend to replenish our corporate cash with a combination of dividends and cash upstream from our operating businesses as well as noncore asset disposals from our growth portfolio. Turning to Liberty Growth in Media and Sports. Our strategy remains to invest in live sports and entertainment platforms with growing global fan bases. Formula E is our lead example of this, and Season 12 has started strongly ahead of the launch of the Gen4 car. Our data center assets, EdgeConneX and AtlasEdge, continue to show strong top line revenue growth, supporting a $1 billion-plus year-end valuation. And our energy transition assets also made big steps forward in 2025. Egg Power secured GBP 400 million of senior debt to help fund over 400 megawatts equivalent of wind and solar power projects, and Believ, our destination charging business has now built 2,500 public charging sockets, which are averaging around GBP 1,500 of EBITDA per socket with a further 23,000 awarded to them by U.K. local authorities. And they're currently bidding on a large number of additional sockets, which are being awarded. In tech, the focus is on AI. We made a strategic investment in 11 labs, and we're also moving our in-house AI investments into the growth pillar, given their potential to sell services to third-party customers outside the Liberty family. We've also established a new services pillar and have transferred Liberty Blume into it from Jan 2026. Now Liberty Blume develops tech-enabled back-office solutions for Liberty Global companies as well as third parties. It delivered over 20% revenue growth in 2025, achieving over GBP 100 million of revenue with an order book of nearly GBP 400 million. The initial value has been set at GBP 100 million, and we've hired a new CEO to accelerate growth. Starting January 2026, we're also introducing an annual management fee of 1.5% of assets under management paid by Liberty Growth to Liberty Services. This fee will be funded by distributions from the growth portfolio, including disposals and will be used to fund direct and allocated operating costs such as treasury and related legal services, and these are all directly attributable to the growth portfolio. Turning to our guidance for 2026. We're providing guidance by operating company. For Virgin Media, O2 from Q1 2026, we will move to new disclosure, which better reflects the 3 key operating verticals following the creation of O2 Daisy. Now these are consumer, business and wholesale. There's a pro forma information in the stand-alone VMO2 release, which explains this further alongside updated KPI disclosures. On this basis, the VMO2 revenue guidance is now set on total service revenues, which we expect to decline by 3% to 5%. Now this is adjusted for the impact of the Daisy transaction, which is driven by continued promotional intensity as well as planned streamlining of the B2B product portfolio following the creation of O2 Daisy. Adjusted EBITDA is also expected to decline by 3% to 5%, also against the comparable period adjusted for the Daisy impact, driven by lower revenue and lower gross margin due to the changing customer mix. Stable property and equipment additions of GBP 2 billion to GBP 2.2 billion, excluding right-of-use additions due to continued investment in 5G and fiber-to-the-home and adjusted free cash flow of around GBP 200 million for the year, supporting cash distributions to shareholders of the same amount. For VodafoneZiggo, we expect stable to low single-digit decline in revenue, driven by a lower fixed base and the flow-through of the front book pricing impact, albeit with support from continued price indexation and fixed and mobile. Mid- to high single-digit decline in adjusted EBITDA, driven by OpEx investments into network resilience and service reliability. Property and equipment additions to revenue is expected to be around 23% to 25%, driven by continued 5G and DOCSIS 4.0 investments as well as the CapEx component of investments into network resilience and service reliability. Now to give more detail on this additional investment, we expect EUR 100 million of incremental investment of OpEx and CapEx into network resilience and service reliability during 2026. Now this will reduce to EUR 50 million OpEx impact in 2027, 2028. And we're expecting adjusted free cash flow to be around EUR 100 million with no shareholder distributions planned for the year. For Telenet, we're introducing new full year 2026 guidance based on IFRS financials, excluding Wyre. We expect stable revenue growth, reflecting a stable operating environment and the annual price indexation under Belgium regulations, low single-digit growth in adjusted EBITDAaL, supported by OpEx savings from significant digital and IT investments and continued lower programming costs. Property and equipment additions to revenue of around 20% as investments in 5G and digital upgrades step down and positive adjusted free cash flow of around EUR 20 million. And finally, for Liberty Corporate, we expect around $50 million negative adjusted EBITDA, driven by the annualization of the cost savings from the corporate reshaping that took place in 2025 and the implementation of the new 1.5% management fee from the growth portfolio.

Thanks, Charlie. Great job. And now we're going to switch gears to what I think I hope is the most important part of today's call. And that, of course, is an update on the key transactions we've just announced and how they significantly advance our plans to deliver value to shareholders. I'll start by revisiting the first slide that I showed you today, and that's the 3 core pillars of our operating structure, Liberty Telecom, Liberty Growth and Liberty Global. I won't go back through the strategies for each of these. I think you've got them by now. But what I have done on this slide is present a very rudimentary sum of the parts valuation exercise for these 3 pillars at the bottom of the slide. It shows that the Liberty Growth portfolio today, accepting the fair market value that Deloitte has prepared is worth roughly $10 per Liberty Global share. Our corporate cash of $2.2 billion, even after a reasonable reduction of the value for the $50 million of corporate spend this year is roughly $6 per Liberty share, which means that with an $11 stock price today, there's at least $5 per share of negative value being ascribed to our Liberty Telecom businesses. And of course, there are multiple ways of arriving at these figures. Some people start by valuing Liberty Telecom and then applying discounts to cash and Liberty Growth and Corporate. But I like this approach. Cash is cash, and we believe the growth assets are valued fairly and appropriately. More importantly, we're rapidly turning those growth assets into cash. We've already exited something like $1.6 billion in the last 6 years. So whether it's negative 5 or 0, you can see why we have focused a lot of time and attention on creating and delivering value in our telecom portfolio. Of course, the Sunrise spin-off just 14 months ago was step 1. That transaction delivered what is today roughly $13 per share of value to Liberty Global Investors, far more than anyone expected at the time or what the implied value was for that business at the time. And that's why we can say our stock really on a combined basis is up meaningfully over the last 2 years. Now moving to the next slide, here's another thing that gives us some confidence in the value of our telecom business. The European telecom sector has been experiencing a broad-based rally this year with the Euro Telco Index up 16% year-to-date and just about every major incumbent telco, and you know all the names, up even more than that, 20%, 25%. So what's happening here? We see 3 key tailwinds impacting the sector. First, of course, is an improving regulatory environment. This is not to say that we're totally satisfied with where things stand. You know us better than that. But if you look at the U.K. and the changes they've made to the CMA or if you look at the recently published draft of the EU's Digital Networks Act, we believe there's a good chance regulators continue to loosen rules around consolidation and spectrum policies, especially in the age of AI, where telecom continues to be perceived rightly as critical infrastructure for consumers, for businesses and for governments. Secondly, just as we are seeing in our own operations like Telenet, where 5G CapEx is largely behind us now or Ireland, where our fiber build is coming to an end, there is light at the end of the CapEx tunnel. And when you combine declining CapEx intensity with Telecom's high margins and stable revenues, you've got a strong recipe for improving free cash flow. And then finally, there is the AI thesis. It's hard to find an industry more ready to benefit from AI-driven efficiencies, customer improvements, network automation than the telecom sector. In addition, as AI permeates every aspect of our lives, our role, telco's role as foundational connectivity and data transport providers, I think, continues to increase. And then lastly, there appears to be -- and this is an area you're experts in more than me, but there appears to be a rotation going on here. Investors growing a bit sour on how capital-light software-driven industries and rotating capital into more infrastructure-based or defensive sectors where AI is a net-net positive and quite frankly, unlikely to be as disruptive over time. I think the impact of AI, if you ask me on our industry, will be positively transformational. I recently asked the CEO of one of the big tech companies, look, how do I go from spending $14 billion a year on OpEx to $7 billion? That's what I want to do. He said, bring me your P&L, and we'll go through it. The point is we're just scratching the surface today. I think the upside for us from AI is massive, and it's massive for our entire industry. Now so with that as background, on this call, last year and the year before, we laid out 2 very specific goals related to our telecom businesses, and they're summarized here on Slide 16. The first was to prepare each of our Benelux operating companies, this was last year, for the next phase of value creation. And I'd say we achieved that goal. Bringing in Stephen van Rooyen as CEO, has been a game changer for VodafoneZiggo. And of course, today, we're announcing the acquisition of Vodafone's 50% stake in VodafoneZiggo in order to advance our plans to spin off a new company that combines our Dutch and Belgian operations. More on that, of course, in a second. And in the U.K., we committed last year to advance our plans to monetize our fixed network infrastructure for both financial and strategic reasons. And early last year, we pivoted away from a pure NetCo, as you know. But together with Telefonica, we continue to evaluate accretive ways to grow and finance fiber infrastructure in the U.K. Today, of course, we announced the acquisition of U.K.'s second largest AltNet, creating what will ultimately be an 8 million home fiber platform with the opportunity to further consolidate a fragmented market. So let's get into these deals, beginning with the Vodafone acquisition on Slide 17, after what can only be described as a very successful, and I mean -- seriously mean rewarding partnership with Vodafone in the Netherlands, we're pleased to announce an agreement to acquire their 50% stake in exchange for EUR 1 billion of cash plus a 10% equity interest in a new company called Ziggo Group, which will own 100% of VodafoneZiggo and 100% of Telenet in Belgium. Now there's 3 primary reasons we're doing this, 3 primary benefits from this deal. To begin with, we believe the net present value of both operational synergies and incremental service revenues from this transaction and combination total about EUR 1 billion alone. And of course, pretty much all that accrues to us. Second, we think the combination of Holland and Belgium is a financial winner. As the chart on the right shows together, the 2 operations serve 7 million mobile subs and over 5 million broadband subs with total revenue of EUR 6.6 billion and over EUR 2.5 billion of EBITDA. The combination also creates a clear road map to reduce leverage to what we're estimating will be about 4.5x through a combination of synergies and improving operational performance. In fact, we think we'll generate $500 million of free cash flow by 2028. And then third and perhaps most importantly, we are announcing today our intention to list Ziggo on the Euronext exchange in 2027 and to simultaneously spin off our 90% interest to Liberty Global shareholders as we did in Switzerland. Interestingly, similar to Sunrise, there is a strong equity story here. Belgium and Holland are rational markets just like Switzerland. We have a clear network strategy in each country like we have in Switzerland. Our plans to reduce leverage are front and center and actionable like they were and are in Switzerland. And the financial profile should support both free cash flow and dividends in the future. Interestingly, this is more anecdotal, just as Sunrise was once a very successful public company that we took private and then relisted. Ziggo was also a very successful public company that we took private. So we will be reintroducing Ziggo to the public markets as we did with Sunrise. Now just a quick update on Slide 18 of VodafoneZiggo's recent performance. There's no question that Stephen's How We Win plan is driving clear operational turnaround. The combination of OpEx savings, repositioned broadband pricing, speed upgrades and a multi-brand strategy are delivering materially lower churn. And you can see that on the bottom right of this slide, where Q4 '25 was the best broadband performance, I think, in 10 quarters, and things continue to look good into 2026. We've also provided a medium-term outlook for VodafoneZiggo on Slide 19. And while 2025 EBITDA was in line with our plan, 2026 guidance, as Charlie indicated, shows a decline impacted in part by our largely one-off investment we're making in network resilience and service reliability. In 2028, however, we expect EBITDA growth to rebound. We're not giving you actual numbers here, but we are confident in that trajectory. That EBITDA growth, combined with a very stable CapEx envelope should generate the meaningful free cash flow I just referenced. And as Charlie indicated, leverage will peak in 2026, but should decline thereafter, both organically, that's, of course, from EBITDA growth and through asset sales like our tower portfolio, the proceeds of which we intend to use to reduce debt. And then a quick strategic update on Telenet on Slide 20. We can't underestimate the importance of the steps we've taken over the last 24 months in Belgium to both rationalize the market structure and create a clear operating road map for both of our businesses there. As you know, this is the first time we've completely carved out a fixed NetCo, which we call Wyre, and have even gone one step further by entering into a network sharing arrangement with the incumbent telco Proximus that will create arguably the most attractive fiber wholesale market in Europe. And to facilitate the carve-out, we secured EUR 4.35 billion of new capital to both fund the Wyre build and reduce leverage at Telenet. And as we've discussed, we're in the process of selling a stake in Wyre with the proceeds earmarked for further deleveraging in Telenet. The goal here is to bring Telenet's midterm leverage down to the 4.5x level. And Telenet, as part of the new Ziggo Group, I think, represents a very strong equity story itself with outstanding retail brands, significant B2B growth, an upgraded 5G network and long-term access to fiber. Perhaps even more importantly, though, with CapEx declining significantly this year, Telenet's free cash flow is at that inflection point and poised for continued growth. Now let's switch gears to the U.K. and our announcement today to use our fiber JV, Nexfibre to acquire Substantial Group, which consists of the Netomnia fiber network and a 500,000 subscriber broadband customer base for a total enterprise value of GBP 2 billion and a net payment of GBP 1.1 billion at closing. Now I'll walk through the various transaction steps on the next slide, but the goal here is simple. The first goal is to create the second largest fiber network after BT Openreach. When you combine Netomnia's 3.4 million fiber homes with Nextfibre's existing 2.6 million fiber homes and then you add 2.1 million VMO2 homes that will be made available to Nextfibre for upgrade, the platform will ultimately reach 8 million fiber homes by 2027. As I'll outline in a moment, there are significant benefits to VMO2 stakeholders here. This is a fantastic outcome for VMO2. It's also a strong vote of confidence in the U.K. generally. We want the U.K. government to know that we, together with our partners, are willing to commit significant capital to the U.K. based upon their pro-growth policies. And this next slide is one that you'll probably want to print out and tuck away somewhere. As I said, this is a complicated transaction, they often are, and this is an attempt to simplify it as best we can. On the left-hand side, you'll see the money and asset flows. The green numbers, when you take a look at the slide, if you're aren't looking at it now, the green numbers simply show the cash and how it moves from and to the various parties here. Approximately GBP 1 billion of equity will be injected into Nexfibre, the acquisition vehicle, and that's our 50-50 JV with InfraVia, of course. And this will consist of GBP 850 million of cash from InfraVia and GBP 150 million from Liberty and Telefonica. So the first point to make is that Liberty Global directly will be responsible for GBP 75 million of cash in order to complete this transaction. The GBP 1 billion together with a new debt facility, I think it's about GBP 2.7 billion will fully fund both this transaction and the longer-term strategic plans for Nexfibre 2.0. Now once capitalized, Nexfibre distributes a little over GBP 2 billion of cash, GBP 950 million to Substantial Group for the Netomnia fiber assets, and GBP 1.1 billion to VMO2. Of course, VMO2 will use that capital to both acquire the broadband subscribers for GBP 150 million and reduce leverage. The vast majority of the GBP 1.1 billion going to VMO2 is in exchange for a significant commitment to utilize the Nexfibre network on a wholesale basis. That's how these deals work. Specifically, VMO2 will provide access to 2.1 million of its own homes and we will agree to pay Nextfibre wholesale access fee on those homes once they're upgraded to fiber. And additionally, VMO2 will pay wholesale access fees day 1 on another 2.5 million homes that overlap Nextfibre's footprint. So there's substantial value being contributed to the Nexfibre 2.0 plan by VMO2, and that's why it's being paid. Now as I mentioned, the benefits to VMO2 are substantial. To begin with VMO2 gets cash to reduce leverage. This is necessary, of course, given the increased wholesale fees paid out to Nexfibre. Second, it will end up with 500,000 additional broadband customers. Third, there will be substantial CapEx avoidance here, both in terms of the cost to build and the cost to connect millions of premises that will no longer be the responsibility of VMO2. We think the NPV of that is around GBP 800 million. Fourth, VMO2 will be able to continue providing construction and managed services to Nexfibre in exchange for revenue and positive EBITDA margin. The NPV of that contract, we think, is around GBP 400 million. And then finally, in addition to having access to the second largest fiber footprint in the U.K., VMO2 will also receive a direct stake in Nexfibre 2.0. Now looking ahead, I think this transaction also opens up the market for further consolidation, something that we have talked about for a long time and may just be on the horizon. One quick slide here providing additional context on VMO2's operational outlook, as I promised. On the left-hand side of Slide 23, we make the point that despite a highly competitive market, VMO2 has delivered pretty good financial results, especially in comparison to its peers. While revenue has been largely flat over the last 4 fiscal years, and you know that, EBITDA has grown annually at around 1.5%. During the same time frame, VMO2 has generated GBP 2.6 billion of cumulative free cash flow and distributed GBP 5.2 billion to Liberty and Telefonica in the form of dividends. We are happy shareholders here. That's clear. Now the rest of the slide identifies the main drivers of growth moving forward and why we're confident in the VMO2 story, including 3 powerful brands, Virgin Media, O2 and Giffgaff, that reach every segment and help drive fixed mobile convergence. There's also synergies and B2B growth from the recently completed O2 Daisy merger, strong wholesale position as the #1 MVNO provider and now a key partner in the second largest fiber footprint. I mean, Lutz and the team, we believe we have a pretty good head start in AI-driven innovation and efficiency as well. And on top of that, there's the opportunity to drive growth off-net to the 10 million homes we don't reach today. So a lot of really good things happening in the U.K. market for us. Finally, this is the key takeaways here on the final slide, what we'd like you to bring home, if you will, from the second half of this call, right? Number one, we think the telecom sector broadly and equity values in Europe more specifically are poised for continued appreciation in the eyes of investors. Tailwinds from consolidation, stable cash flows and what appears to be a rotation into stocks that will be net beneficiaries of AI as opposed to roadkill are drivers here. Hopefully, by now, you're convinced that we are serious about delivering value to shareholders. The Sunrise spin-off was always step 1. We told you that. And the transactions we announced today, in particular, the Vodafone stake acquisition and our intention to list and spin off the new Ziggo Group will be step 2. In the meantime, we worked extremely hard to reshape our corporate operating model. This is not just a cost-saving exercise, even though it did save considerable costs. We believe that our structure today is fit for purpose, both to continue operating and investing in the TMT sector as we've done for the last 20-plus years, but also to provide our unique form of expertise to existing and future affiliates. Now while we were only marginally successful in convincing analysts to look at our corporate costs differently, we have been spectacularly successful at reducing those net corporate costs, as I said, by 75%. That is going to accrue to the benefit of our stock price. And we're excited about our growth platform. We have a great track record here, and we're focused on the right sectors where we have a clear right to play as they say, and where there are tailwinds and scale-based opportunities that I think we're uniquely qualified to pursue. So stay tuned to see what we do there. And then finally, in our world, capital allocation is everything. Now where you choose to invest your capital, especially in a capital-intensive business, has never mattered more. We've always run our telecom businesses as if we're going to own them forever. And even in that context, they generally have not required any cash from us to achieve their strategic and operating objectives. We will invest in a telecom business when it unlocks value for shareholders. We've said that many times, like we did with Sunrise, delevering the company pre-spin and like we're doing with the acquisition of Vodafone stake in Holland. We have been significant buyers of our own stock. $15 billion over the last 9 years to be exact, reducing the number of shares outstanding by 63% and ensuring that those who stuck around with us end up with a bigger piece of the pie. If you owned 1% of our company in 2017, you ended up with over 2.5% of Sunrise, for example. And finally, we do believe there will be opportunities in tech, infrastructure, energy, media, sports and live entertainment. These are areas where we have significant deal flow, great partnerships lined up, $10 per share of value and importantly, strategic flexibility to deliver that value to shareholders. So hopefully, that update was helpful for you, especially on the recent announcements of the 2 deals this morning. So with that, operator, we'll get to questions.

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

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

I'll take a crack at it, Robert. Thanks for the question. And Lutz or others -- Andrea can chime in here. But the 8 million will be achieved relatively quickly end of '27 probably. So that's a good fiber number for Nexfibre 2.0 both, as you say, from the 3 -- the contribution of the 3 entities. And VMO2 will be a significant wholebuy partner for that 8 million home footprint. And remember that Lutz and VMO2 continue to upgrade their network. So there'll be another 12 million homes on the VMO2 network that continue to be upgraded. So we believe you're looking at what is effectively a 20 million home footprint in the end, the vast majority of which will be fiber. So obviously, first order of business is to grow and manage our own customer base on that 20 million home network, but also very much so to provide a wholesale opportunity for the market, which is much needed for reasons that you understand very well. Does that answer your question?

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

Well, I don't know if we've disclosed that time line. Lutz, if you want to reference that, let me know if we disclose that or not.

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

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

Maybe I'll take my questions on the VodafoneZiggo transaction. I think you're still talking about a stable CapEx envelope over the guidance period. But now that you're creating this new Ziggo group with more scale, does it change your appetite or opportunity to invest more on the cable to the fiber upgrade strategy? Is there any synergies there you can take from your learnings in the Telenet business and bring them over to the Netherlands, it would be very helpful. And then secondly, I think on Slide 17, where you talk about the clear road map of bringing Ziggo Group leverage to 4.5x. Is that all organic deleveraging? Or would you be willing to inject cash into this business prior to the spin-off as you did with Sunrise.

Great questions. Listen, I think on the network strategy for Holland and Belgium, those plans are set. So we have made a definitive assessment of the CapEx strategy and network strategy for a fixed business in VodafoneZiggo's market, and we are going with DOCSIS 4. The team has already done a great job of getting 2 gig rolled out nationwide with the largest 2 gig provider, and they'll be at 4-gig and 8-gig right around the corner. So there is no strategy or plan to build fiber in the Netherlands, and we don't believe it's necessary either from a commercial and certainly not attractive from a capital point of view. So the CapEx profile does not change as a result of this or any announcements that we're making today. On the leverage, I think that as we mentioned, there's 2 very clear sources of deleveraging. One is organic growth. the second -- or 3, I guess, the second is free cash flow and paying down debt as we're doing in Sunrise. And then three is asset sales. So in the case of Holland, we have PropCo and TowerCo. In the case of Belgium, we have the Wyre stake. So there will be asset sales. With those proceeds used to delever, there will be growth in EBITDA organic, and there will be free cash to organically delever. And that is the plan. At this stage, we don't anticipate putting any capital or cash into the Ziggo Group to get the plans launched in 2027. And Charlie, do you want to add anything to that?

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

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

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

Yes. Look, I'll address that generally, and I'll ask Enrique to step in and provide a bit more color. But 3 things are really driving for any telco driving the benefits from AI, right? Beginning with customer acquisition and retention, which we're all seeing marginal improvements from the investment in our call centers and things like that. The second is fraud, credit, things like that, that can really drive down OpEx and inefficiencies. And then as you mentioned, the network and operations. And I don't know, roughly, those are each going to contribute about 1/3, let's say, of the demonstrable benefits we expect to see in the next let's say, 1 to 3 years. And they're not small numbers. There will be real benefits. And I think the nice thing that I'm seeing in the space is that whereas a year ago on this call, I would have said that we're inventing a lot of these applications. Right now, we're getting bombarded with start-ups and third-parties and Silicon Valley companies that are doing a much better job in many instances of creating these solutions for us. And so the pace of integration and implementation, I think, is speeding up, and it's real. So as I said in my remarks, I don't think there's an industry better positioned to benefit from marginal improvement in CapEx, OpEx and revenue from AI. But I would emphasize the word marginal there. That's really all we're doing at this stage as an industry is finding marginal benefits. I think the real home run is to think more broadly and bigger about how we kind of disrupt our own supply chain, our own software stacks, our own operating models and to do that could be material. I'll let Enrique chime in if you want, if you're on, Enrique.

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

Mike, can I just have a quick plug. Sorry, I was going to say can I have a quick plug at sort of Liberty Blume. Look, the other aspect of this is back-office services, which is not as big as what Mike and Enrique said in the front office and middle office, but the back office still is material for telco, and it's about $1 billion, $1.5 billion by some definitions of spend for us. And what Blume is finding out is there's lots of tech enablement with AI tools to significantly reduce their accounting, their payments, their procurement of these financial products, et cetera, et cetera. And we're finding actually these are opportunities where we're getting massive savings by reducing heads, but we're able to scale our existing heads to grow revenues. And that's really what's driving that 20% revenue growth that we see in Blume. And actually, we see that continuing for many years.

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

It's really about VMO2 guidance. It was weaker than expected with a minus 3% to minus 5% decline in EBITDA. I think consensus on the same basis was probably getting for about minus 1%. Can you help us understand how much of the decline relates to the rationalization in B2B that may be specific to VMO2? And separately, how much of the decline reflects weakness in the broader U.K. markets? And can you maybe just give us some color in terms of what you're seeing in terms of U.K. competitive dynamics in both mobile and broadband. And I also have a quick clarification in terms of the Netomnia Nexfibre deal because VMO2 is receiving in GBP 1.1 billion of cash from Nexfibre. But can you clarify what VMO2 is giving up? So specifically, what is the minimum commitment on the 4.6 million fiber footprint? And can you give some sense in terms of what the wholesale rate is per subscriber?

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

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

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

We're going to have to amend it.

Yes.

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

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

Polo, I think there were 3 questions there. One was, are we giving any sort of -- is there any sort of minimum penetration commitments. No, there's an adjustment at closing depending upon how many subs get transferred over, but that's very manageable. But going forward, there's no minimum commitments. There's also no migration commitments. The transaction has been designed to give Lutz full flexibility in terms of managing the migration from HFC to fiber, which we obviously thought was very important in the overall market context. I think the second question was just a clarification on what VMO2 is getting. And I think if you break it down, VMO2 is getting $1.1 billion in cash and is getting a -- is getting a 15% stake in Nexfibre. In return for that, it's going to spend GBP 150 million to buy approximately 500,000 subscribers at closings, we think is the estimate that the Substantial Group will have. And it's also committing its traffic on 4.6 million homes. 2.4 million are in the overlapping Netomnia area and then 2.1 million are in these new homes that we're contributing into the Nexfibre 2.0, which have been carefully selected to make it a contiguous complete network. So it's not going to be a sort of Swiss cheese. And I think what was -- there was a third point, I'm sorry, I'm just...

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

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

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

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

Charlie?

Yes. Let me just comment on the Telenet refinancing. I think we felt that the market fully understood the number of steps we were taking in Belgium, which we essentially were to pay down debt to 4.5x on Telenet through the Wyre sale and the fact that we docked in the refinancing to separate out Wyre at the EUR 4.35 billion, we thought have been well understood. I think it probably was in hindsight, too much for the credit market to digest in one go. And that's fine. I mean it was an opportunistic transaction as we always do. We thought that by halving the amount of available Belgium debt, there'll be a lot more demand than we felt, and it was a pretty choppy market. And you may recall, it was a softer market that we had a few weeks ago. So I think the discretion is the better part of [ ballard ]. Nick and I felt that the right thing to do is take a pause. We will let these transactions settle. We'll prove out the various steps. And at the right time, we'll go away and do what we usually do, which is in the $500 million to $1 billion tranches refinanced. But we still have plenty of time. I think as we tried to show in the results call, we actually don't have any material debt maturities, if you include our revolver until 2029 in Telenet, but we're very confident, and hopefully the credit markets will support this, that as these steps unfold, we can essentially reprice the debt and extend the maturity. And it's interesting, actually, the debt still trades at a very tight level despite this transaction last week, which perhaps is a bit bewildering. Look, I think in terms of the synergies, I think I slightly disagree that I think there are cross-border synergies. Enrique has proved that with the incredible work he's been doing on technology. I mean there's an awful lot of scale benefits and national technology doesn't really have a difference market to market. And I think also, as you rightly point out, the ability to drive financial synergies will come because we are able to use the platform that we will create in VodafoneZiggo and Telenet to really drive the technology across the broader footprint, which obviously has some benefits to us. So I think we feel pretty good about the synergies. And actually, to be honest with you, we might have undercooked them because we were obviously operating on a clean team basis in this transaction. So stay tuned. Let's see what we can come up with.

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

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

They are included.

They are included, yes.

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

Again, so much to absorb here. I guess when we're thinking about the Ziggo spin, Mike, it's a strong equity story similar to Sunrise, but that does ignore what I think you flagged at the time, which was Sunrise was a very clear and strong dividend payer, obviously, in a very low rate market. And we've seen that dividend growth just today in the Sunrise share price work so well. There's no dividend story here in Ziggo. And I guess my other question is, what's the sort of run rate of synergy you guys sort of need to hit in the short term to really commit to the spin. Is that date really in stone there? And I guess my sort of associated question is, I think the VodZiggo guidance was also quite a lot weaker than most of us had forecast alongside VMO2. I'm just wondering, is there a sense as you sort of restack this business that you're -- I don't want to use the phrase kitchen sinking, but you are guiding to find a level you can absolutely deliver on and maybe put a little bit more investment into 2026 to grow from.

Yes, David, that's a lot of good questions there. So I'll try to address and Stephen can jump in here as well. With respect to timing, I mean, we were purposely general about timing. We believe 2027, as we especially get into the second half of that -- of next year, we are going to be able to see or forecast the kind of storyline here that the market will want to see. That does reflect and has comparisons to Sunrise, namely a deleveraging story from free cash flow, EBITDA growth and asset sales. Secondly, the ability to project or forecast a free cash flow number. We gave you a number today, EUR 500 million. That's 50% more free cash flow than Sunrise generates. It's not coming this year or next year, but we're going to be -- we believe we'll be able to forecast that kind of free cash flow story when it's time to get to the market. And I think the growth -- we've talked quite a bit about How We Win plan and how it -- we even showed you some visuals on the slides about how '26 is an investment year for 2027 and 2028, we start to see a rebound. So it's our view that all those things when they come together, will tell a compelling equity story. But here's the other thing to point out, which is unlike, say, Oddo, we're not listing this company through an initial public offering. We're not waiting to build a book. We're not looking for a minimum price. We're not going to raise primary capital. So those -- we don't have any of those strikes against us. We're listing the shares and spinning them off to shareholders exactly as we did with Sunrise and the market will find a value, we believe, a healthy good value well above the negative $5 we're getting in our stock today. That's all you got to believe. That's it. You've got to believe that there's good equity value in this story that in the hands of our shareholders, that equity value will trade well on a Euronext exchange with a compelling operating and brand-driven storyline, and it will be less than 0. It will be more than 0. That's all you got to believe. And so I think we have lots of flexibility here, tons of freedom to plan how and when and what we do, which is -- which to me is very exciting. Stephen, do you want to add anything to that on the Vodafone side?

Well, I think the only component I'd add to it is that, as you said -- can you hear me, Mike?

Got you.

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

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

So I was interested in following up on the slide you had to discuss the kind of Netomnia Virgin transaction in a bit more detail on Slide 22. So you've got a very kind of helpful chart there showing all the cash movements. Could you just run me through also what the debt movements are because Netomnia, I think, will have around maybe a bit over GBP 1 billion of debt on closing. Does that all go to Nexfibre? Or does some of it go to VMO2? And then of the subscribers or the homes, sorry, you've got the 2.5 million homes where VMO2 is going to pay committed wholesale fees on closing. How many subscribers does VMO2 have in that footprint, please? And then secondly, on the 2.1 million homes that then Nexfibre will be upgrading, what's VMO2's customer volume in that footprint? And to give us an idea of kind of Lutz's incentive to migrate customers over to FTTH, can you let us know, please, how many customers today within VMO2 have been upgraded from HFC to FTTH, where VMO2 has done that upgrade itself as a result of the overlay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sure. Thanks for sticking with us, guys. Sorry, we went a little bit over. We had a lot, as you said, to disclose. I just want to say quickly, thank you to everybody on the call today from my team because this has been a Herculean effort and just about everybody on this call was involved in these transactions and of course, delivering these results. So thank you to each of you for the great work and terrific, terrific outcomes. And look at the deals we think were announced today, I'm excited about. I think they unlock both value, but also give us a tactical runway to control our destiny here, specifically in the Benelux region, but also, I think, increasingly in the U.K. market. So they're the right kind of deals. That's exactly what we told you we would do a year ago. I think you can trust us when we tell you where we're focused, what we're focused on and how we intend to create value. So I appreciate you joining us. I know there'll be a lot of questions and follow-up, you know where to find us. So thank you, everybody.

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

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Liberty Global's Third Quarter 2025 Investor Call. This call and the associated webcast are the property of Liberty Global, and any redistribution, retransmission or rebroadcast of this call or webcast in any form without the express written consent of Liberty Global is strictly prohibited. [Operator Instructions] Today's formal presentation materials can be found under the Investor Relations section of Liberty Global's website at libertyglobal.com. [Operator Instructions] Page 2 of the slides details the company's safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking statements. Today's presentation may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including the company's expectations with respect to its outlook and future growth prospects and other information and statements that are not historical fact. These forward-looking statements involve certain risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. These risks include those detailed in Liberty Global's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recently filed Forms 10-Q and 10-K as amended. Liberty Global disclaims any obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements to reflect any change in its expectations or in the conditions on which any such statement is based. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Mike Fries.

All right. Welcome, everyone, and thanks for dialing in to our Q3 results call today. After Charlie and I run through our prepared remarks, we'll open it up for what we hope is a lively Q&A. And as usual, I've got my core leadership team on the call with me. And before I jump into the presentation, I just want to acknowledge and be sure that everybody has seen the press release we put out yesterday regarding John Malone, who has decided to step off the Board and move to a Chairman Emeritus role at the end of the year. Of course, he's making a similar move at Liberty Media. I won't repeat all the key messages that we put in the public statement, you can read that, and I encourage you to do that, except perhaps to emphasize how important, impactful and enjoyable my relationship with John has been over the last 25 to 30 years and how pleased I am that as he implies in the release, he intends to stay very engaged with me and the Board as we execute our strategic plans. And knowing John as I do, he will surely do just that. Of course, I'm happy to take any questions on this as well at the end. Now getting back to our results, let me kick it off with some key highlights from the quarter. If you're going to breeze through these slides later, these first 2 are perhaps the most critical in my opinion. I believe everyone is familiar with how we're organized today in order to create greater transparency around strategy, capital allocation and value creation, everything we do falls into 1 of 3 core platforms at Liberty Global. These include, of course, Liberty Telecom, where we're focused on driving commercial momentum in our broadband and mobile businesses and most importantly, finding ways to unlock the intrinsic value of these companies for the benefit of shareholders, and I'll get into that a bit more in the next slide. Of course, that starts with operating performance. And as you'll see, despite intense competition, we had a strong third quarter with sequential improvement in broadband net adds across all 4 markets, for example. Importantly, our networks are proving to be critical sources of both competitive differentiation like our 5G expansion in the U.K. that's being fueled by the recent spectrum purchases and value creation, like our agreement with Proximus to rationalize fixed networks in Belgium, which I'll cover off in just a moment. Now a theme you will hear a few times today is lowering leverage and strengthening our balance sheet at Liberty Telecom. And Charlie and his team have worked tirelessly this year to strengthen the balance sheet, beginning with refinancing over $9 billion of 2028 maturities, particularly in the U.K. and NL at very reasonable credit spreads. And that includes the debt financing we just announced that funds the fiber rollout in Belgium while deleveraging Telenet, our serveco in the market, and Charlie will dig into that. Now turning to Liberty Growth, which includes our investments in media, infrastructure and tech that today totaled $3.4 billion and by the way, provide a source of capital to drive future value creation. This is a highly concentrated portfolio where the top 6 investments comprise over 80% of the value. We're still targeting $500 million to $750 million of noncore asset sales from the portfolio. And as I mentioned on our last call, we're not going to rush this and price bad deals in the process, but we have generated proceeds of $300 million year-to-date when you include the partial sale of our ITV stake last week. So we are well on our way. Of course, one of the bigger portfolio companies is Formula E, which heads into season 12 in December with significant tailwinds, including double-digit growth in revenue, fans and viewers last year, a knockout calendar of 18 races and the public reveal of the Gen 4 car, which debuts a year from now and doubles the max power of what is rapidly becoming the coolest car in racing. And we'll highlight in just a few slides our data center investments. With the boom in AI infrastructure, we believe we have a tiger by the tail, as I say, with over $1 billion in assets today and growing. And finally, the quarter brought some great progress at Liberty Services, where we manage large and profitable tech and financial platforms and at our corporate level, where we are in the midst of reshaping the operating model. I think the big news here is that we are improving for the second time this year our guidance for net corporate costs in 2025. We started the year forecasting around $200 million of net corporate cost. In the second quarter, we improved that to $175 million, and now we're improving it further to $150 million for this year. Perhaps even more importantly, we see visibility in 2026 to just $100 million of net corporate costs. Now this is a hot button for us as most analysts reduced their target price for our stock by, I think, $8 to $10 per share, just related to that $200 million net corporate spend. These announcements today should dramatically improve our valuation narrative, and you can bet we'll be pounding the table on it starting right after this call. I think Charlie will also address it. Lastly, on this slide, we note that we're forecasting $2.2 billion of cash at the holding company at year-end, assuming just the $300 million of asset sales year-to-date. Now the next slide provides an update on our strategic plan to unlock value for shareholders. And I guess this is the key takeaway today. First, let me reiterate what we laid out on our second quarter call back in August. Following the continued success of the Sunrise spin-off about a year ago, we remain committed to pursuing similar transactions that would further unlock value for shareholders. This may include the separation of one or a combination of core operating businesses you see on this slide actually through a spin-off, tracking stock, listing or similar equity capital markets transaction. I imagine many of you still own or follow Sunrise. The stock has performed well and trades around 8x EBITDA with an 8% dividend yield today. And looking back on that deal, I think 4 key factors laid the groundwork for its success. Number one, Switzerland is a largely rational telecom market. Number two, Sunrise had a less levered balance sheet, thanks to our capital contribution at around 4.5x on the date of the spin-off. Number three, Sunrise has a clear network strategy and CapEx profile. And number four, Sunrise has a solid free cash flow story that supports a progressive dividend policy. That was the formula. Strong balance sheet, a rational market and a predictable path to stable or growing free cash flow. I won't surprise you to learn that this looks a lot like the things we are working on in the Benelux. For example, at VodafoneZiggo, we've installed a new team with a winning plan that is built around generating long-term free cash flow in a largely 3-player market. We have now refinanced something like 80% of the 2028 maturities with the remainder targeted for this quarter or early next year. In Belgium, we are even further along. Our recently announced agreement with Proximus, which is currently being market tested by the regulator, rationalizes the build-out and wholesale monetization of fiber in a large part of Flanders with really only one network in 65% of the market. On the back of this, we just announced a EUR 4.35 billion financing for our netco there, which we call Wyre, which fully funds the build-out of fiber and allows us to reduce leverage at the Telenet servco, including all 2028 maturities. Even more exciting, we're in the early marketing stages of selling a significant stake in Wyre. This is an increasingly common value creation strategy in Europe, as you know, with the proceeds used to further deleverage our Telenet servco to about 4.5x. That's going to take a quarter or 2 to finalize all of these steps, but we're feeling more and more encouraged about the possibilities in this region for a value unlock in the time frame that we articulated. Now of course, we continue to work on other ideas, which we'll update you on in time. And as I said last quarter, all of the operating businesses or assets you see on this slide and some that aren't even shown can be singled out or combined with one another to achieve a value unlock transaction. So stay tuned. Now as I said, a key enabler of that strategic road map is ensuring that our operating companies are driving commercial momentum in what are increasingly competitive markets, right? And the long-term goal here is generating meaningful free cash flow. Now towards that end, each OpCo has been implementing a series of commercial initiatives and network improvements that are starting to impact results positively. This next slide summarizes a handful of those initiatives, which provide important context for the results that follow. Starting in the U.K., where Lutz and the team have been busy across a number of fronts, including the recent rollout of our new pay TV and broadband bundles, which now include Netflix for free that further differentiates us from the competition, in particular, AltNets. VMO2 is also redefining the flanker brand segment with the introduction of Giffgaff broadband services that complement Giffgaff mobile leadership. And we're rapidly transforming the O2 mobile network using the recently acquired spectrum to launch our first 5G gigabyte, plus we announced the U.K.'s first direct-to-cell satellite service with Starlink for what we call rural hotspot. So a lot happening in the U.K. Stephen and the VodafoneZiggo team have completely reversed trend in the Dutch market, delivering the lowest broadband churn we've seen since early 2023 and positive mobile net adds in the quarter. Lots of things are working right here, including being the first to roll out 2 gigabit speeds nationwide with upgrades underway for a DOCSIS 4.8 gig launch next year. We're also investing in the Vodafone brand on the back of the iPhone 17 launch. So the how we will win plan that Stephen has developed is quickly becoming the why we are winning plan, which is exactly what we needed in this otherwise rational telecom market. John Porter and the Telenet team have gone from strength to strength in Belgium in the last 3 quarters, supported by doubling of broadband speeds for nearly 1 million customers, their rollout in the South and a multi-brand strategy in mobile. And the fiber upgrade in Ireland is proceeding at pace with over 650,000 premises built now, and Tony and the Virgin team are ramping up our wholesale business with Vodafone and Sky and expanding their own reach to new off-footprint territories with fiber. And just to put a marker out there, with CapEx set to fall by 50% in the coming 2 years, we're planning for significant free cash flow out of the Irish business as well. Now the results on the following slide illustrate this improvement. Don't get me wrong, we are in a dog fight everywhere, but we are fighting right back and differentiating our products and services, attacking vulnerable competitors and driving better results each quarter. In fact, 3 out of our 4 markets, we've demonstrated improved sequential fixed and mobile subscriber results throughout the year and in Holland over the last 2 quarters. Again, at VMO2, our fixed churn initiatives, things like proactive management of the base and one-touch switching activity are gaining traction and improving broadband performance in a very competitive market. Meanwhile, postpaid mobile subscriber performance has consistently improved quarter-after-quarter this year, including ARPU growth supported by pre to postpaid migrations and our loyalty plans. VodafoneZiggo reported its third straight quarterly improvement in broadband losses with another strong ARPU result and postpaid mobile adds were positive again, driven by the initiative described just a moment ago. Telenet maintained positive broadband net add momentum for the second quarter running, driven by successful cross-sell campaigns, including back-to-school, while fixed ARPU growth was supported by price adjustments that they implemented during the second quarter. Postpaid net adds in Belgium were negative despite a strong performance on the base brand, while mobile postpaid ARPU continues to show pressure from the competitive environment. And in Ireland, Virgin Media's broadband base was largely flat with aggressive fiber offers in the market driving higher churn and impacting fixed ARPU. Postpaid net adds on the other hand, remained strong, and that's supported by a EUR 15 for life offer launched in May, boosting gross adds. So Charlie will walk through our financial results that are tied to these numbers in just a moment. Let me first turn to Liberty Growth. And by now, you're hopefully more familiar with the components of our portfolio, which, as I mentioned, increased in value to $3.4 billion at Q3. That's around $10 per share. As you can see here, 45% of the value or about $1.5 billion consists of premium media, sports and live events businesses, which we and most everyone else these days see as great long-term investment strategies. Another 40% is in digital infrastructure, which I'll dig into a bit more on the next slide. And then most of the balance resides in our tech portfolio, which consists largely of venture capital investments in companies, many that are leading the way in AI, cloud and cybersecurity. Now while it might appear like a complicated and diversified mix of investments from the outside, as I said earlier, it's important to remember that 6 of these deals comprise over 80% of the portfolio's value today. You can see them listed at the bottom of the page. Things like a controlling interest in Formula E, which I spoke about, and our remaining 5% of ITV, for example, and the 2 largest assets in our digital infrastructure vertical, which I'm going to highlight on the next slide. Now both of these infrastructure investments are substantial, adding up to over $1 billion of value for us today, and they performed extremely well, especially in the current environment where the development of AI infrastructure seems to have exploded. We're thrilled to own a minority interest in Edgeconnex. It's a global data center platform controlled by EQT and focused on hyperscalers across over 60 Tier 1 markets in 20 countries around the world. And we first invested in this company back in 2015. It was much smaller, and we have a net $150 million invested today. And the good news is that we've already taken $50 million off the table and our residual stake is conservatively valued at over $500 million. That equates to a 30% IRR over the last decade. On the right, you'll see our 50-50 JV called AtlasEdge, which is a regional data center provider focused on Tier 2 markets. The company has strong positions in Germany, Austria and Iberia and is seeking to expand capacity to 180 megawatts. We have a net investment here of about $345 million, and we've had our interest valued by third parties at around $600 million today. Again, both of these companies find themselves in the middle of multiple AI infrastructure and data sovereignty projects, and we are focused on driving continued growth right now in what is an increasingly hot space. So I look forward to your questions on all of this, but let me first turn it over to Charlie to walk through Liberty Services and our numbers. Charlie?

Thanks, Mike. Turning now to Liberty Services and Corporate. On the left-hand side of the slide is an overview of our central services, which focus on 3 core activities: our corporate group provides strategic management and advisory services in operating and managing financial and human capital as well as technology strategies and investment. Liberty Tech focuses on the delivery of scaled tech solutions, particularly in entertainment and connectivity platforms as well as cybersecurity for our telecoms companies. And Liberty Blume develops and provides tech-enabled back-office solutions, not just to companies within the Liberty Global family, but also increasingly to third parties. We are reinvesting these tech-enabled efficiencies within Liberty Blume to drive 20% plus organic revenue growth in 2025. During the third quarter, we undertook a significant reshaping exercise around both Liberty Corporate and Liberty Tech to drive cost efficiencies going forward and make both organizations more agile and well positioned for the future. Starting with Liberty Corporate, we undertook both voluntary and involuntary redundancy schemes, which have reduced headcount by around 40%, with 90% of those leaving by year-end. And in Liberty Tech, we can continue to leverage our successful Infosys partnership with 4 years of proven track record to help secure additional efficiencies and simplification savings. We expect both the corporate and Liberty Tech initiatives to drive around $100 million of annualized cost savings. Bringing all this together, you will recall that we began the year guiding to less than $200 million of negative adjusted EBITDA, and we've already upgraded this to around $175 million of EBITDA at Q2. Now we're pleased to reduce this further for 2025 to around $150 million of negative adjusted EBITDA, supported by the in-year benefits of our corporate reshaping programs. Now perhaps more importantly, turning to the fully annualized impact. Once we see the benefits of this reshaping annualized from 2026, we expect our corporate adjusted EBITDA to broadly halve to around $100 million. And from there, we still see scope for further improvement as we evolve our operating model through additional third-party revenues, advisory fees and management services agreements alongside the scope for further cost optimization. So to put this in context, at the beginning of the year and the average analyst sum of the parts valuation, there was around $10 per share negative impact based on the capitalization of these corporate costs, which was typically at around 12x to 14x enterprise value to operating free cash flow. We now expect the run rate of negative corporate costs to essentially halve versus the start of the year going forward, which would drive a significant reduction around half of this discount in our analyst valuation. And we would also argue that an EBITDA multiple more in line with the telco comparables, which is much lower, is the right way to value these costs, which would further reduce the impact. Moving to the treasury slide. We've been extremely proactive year-to-date and through Q3 in dealing with our 2028 maturities in what has been a favorable overall high-yield market, in particular in the bond market. Overall, we've successfully refinanced close to $6 billion across our credit silos year-to-date, and this actually increases to $9 billion if you include the underwritten Wyre financing that Mike has already discussed. At Virgin Media O2, using existing benchmark financings, we were able to complete mainly private tap transactions amounting to $1.4 billion, bringing to total refinancing year-to-date at Virgin Media O2 to over $3 billion, which leaves us only with around $100 million of outstanding 2028 maturities. VodafoneZiggo, we issued just under $1 billion of senior secured notes during Q3, leaving us with around $500 million of outstanding 2028 maturities. And at Telenet, we've already completed $600 million of financings year-to-date and have recently secured a EUR 4.35 billion underwritten facility for Wyre. Now this will allow us to significantly refinance Telenet overall and formally separate the Wyre and Telenet servco capital structures and in the process, repay all the 2028 maturities. Now all of this proactive refinancing activity has significantly reduced our 2028 maturities and has actually maintained our average life of our debt at close to 5 years and broadly comparable credit spreads versus our historic levels. Turning to the next slide. We remain committed to our capital allocation model and strategy to both replenish our cash balance while also rotating capital into higher growth investments and strategic transactions. Starting with cash generation, we continue to see free cash flow in line with our expectations as set out for the year across our opcos and JVs. As has been the case in previous years, we expect the JV dividends to be largely paid in Q4 given the free cash flow phasing of Virgin Media O2 and VodafoneZiggo. Across all the OpCos, CapEx remains elevated, primarily driven by extensive 5G rollouts in the U.K., Belgium and Holland. And also fiber investment is ramping in Belgium, and we continue to invest in Virgin Media O2's fiber up and Virgin Media Islands fiber-to-the-home program. And this is along with our DOCSIS upgrade path in Holland. Turning to our cash walk on the bottom right. Our consolidated cash balance was $1.8 billion at the end of Q3 with an additional $180 million received since then with a partial ITV stake disposal in October. During Q3, we saw modest investments into Liberty Growth of $77 million, which was primarily Formula E and AtlasEdge and spent $56 million on our buyback program. We're currently tracking towards a buyback of around 5% of shares outstanding for 2025. Moving to the Liberty Growth walk. The fair market value of our Liberty Growth portfolio remained stable versus Q2 at $3.4 billion. This was primarily driven by the investments in Formula E and AtlasEdge, offset by the partial disposal of our Airalo stake and a small fair market value reduction in our Liberty Tech portfolio. Turning to the key financials on the next slide. Virgin Media O2 delivered a modest revenue decline of 1%, excluding the impact of handset sales, nexfibre construction revenues and 2 months of Daisy contribution. This was driven by declines in our B2B revenues, which were offset by growth in our consumer businesses. Adjusted EBITDA at Virgin Media O2 continued to grow at 2.7%, supported by cost discipline and lower cost to capture year-on-year. Moving to VodafoneZiggo. We saw a revenue decline of 4%, largely driven by the decline in ongoing repricing of our fixed customer base. Adjusted EBITDA was impacted by the revenue declines and commercial initiatives supporting the new strategic plan. Telenet revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth were both impacted by a positive deferred revenue benefit in the prior year of $18 million. In addition, revenue growth was also impacted by the decision not to renew Belgium sports rights, which was more than offset by associated lower programming costs. Turning to our guidance slide. We're updating 2 items of guidance. Firstly, Virgin Media O2 revenue guidance, where we are confirming growth in the consumer and wholesale revenues. But given the Daisy transaction, which completed during the third quarter and the creation of O2 Daisy, we're currently reviewing the impact of Daisy on B2B reporting, but can confirm our previous guided M&A impact from Daisy of around GBP 125 million of revenue in 2025. And secondly, as discussed previously, we're improving our Liberty Global Services and Corporate adjusted EBITDA guide to $150 million in 2025. All other OpCo guidance remains unchanged. Now that concludes our prepared remarks for Q3, and I'd like to hand over to the operator for the questions and answers.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Maurice Patrick with Barclays.

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

Sure. And we're not sure what Telefonica will be addressing next week, obviously. We'll all find out. But I think we've been consistent on the fiber point, at least through the course of this year, which is that we'll continue to upgrade our own fiber, and we're now reaching Lutz and his team have access to 8 million fiber homes through a combination of our own upgrade of the Virgin Media network and, of course, the next fiber footprint. So we continue to, at least with our own homes at the Virgin Media side, continue to upgrade fiber and increase the footprint and the reach of that technology. That's point one. Point two is we've always stated and if you -- we are actually now deal down with the up deal we did about a year or so ago, we've always stated that the market requires rationalization that AltNets, most of them will find it difficult to continue doing what they're doing in the manner in which they're doing it, and we're supportive of opportunities to consolidate and rationalize the fixed network environment, period. So I'm not commenting, as you suggested, on any particular deal. I would simply say, if you look at our history, where we used nexfibre in the case of up to begin the process of rationalizing, we're open-minded and open for business, if you will, for opportunities that would achieve just that. So I think it's still a bit of a moving target everywhere, but we're hopeful that in the next 6 months, things will start to settle, and we may or may not be part of those transactions that precipitate that settling.

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

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

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

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

Yes.

Yes, can you hear me? So I think 3 questions. So first is stabilizing broadband adds. We see the market is pretty competitive, although rational. We've set out a plan, which we've spoken to you about at length over the last 12 months, which is working. The heart of the plan is to get us back to broadband growth. That will take us, I think, the balance of next year, but that's what we're pushing towards. It's an uncertain journey because we can't predict what the competition will do, but certainly, we are pushing our plan forward. The heart of that plan is bringing down churn. You'll have seen and we are pleased with how much we've been able to deal with the churn in our base, and we'll continue to push on with that through the next year. In mobile, I think it actually was. I think there's a lot of activity like most European markets in the value segment. We're well positioned there with hollandsnieuwe, which has done pretty well for us. We think that there's more we can do in that space, and we'll continue to pursue that through 2026. And then on fixed wireless, look, I think it's a variable in the marketplace. It's probably a question more for Odido than for us. We're focusing on our plan, reducing our broadband losses, getting our broadband back to growth, and we've accommodated for that within our plan. So I don't really have much to say about what's happening on fixed wireless there.

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

My question is on the U.K. market and the competitiveness we're seeing. So wondering if you could give us a bit more color on what you're seeing on the ground. I note that the ARPU development this quarter for fixed line was negative, which may be expected, but perhaps disappointing following the 7.5% price increase in April. And then on B2B, I understand that there's some moving parts with the Daisy acquisition. But could you just give us an idea of what the underlying B2B growth would have been this quarter and whether that's running ahead, below, in line with expectations, that would be great.

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

Yes. I mean the market is -- the broadband market is very competitive as we speak. On one hand side, you see offers already around GBP 20 for 1 gig from AltNets in the market per month. And then Openreach came with 2 promotions. I don't know if you're aware, but for copper to fiber migrated customer, you are paying to Openreach for the next 24 months, GBP 16 for 1 gig. So this one promotion, the other one is you don't pay anything when you migrate a fixed wireless access customer onto the fiber network of Openreach, which leads to the fact that you see a very price-driven market. You see in the affiliate market, which is the most price-sensitive market prices from Sky also in Vodafone around GBP 21 for 1 gig. How are we doing in this? I think we are doing pretty well here because as you all know, we have the highest ARPU in the market. We have the customers who have the demand for the highest speed in the market. And yes, on one hand side, to now lower churn of our customers, we have offered prevention offers with some dip on ARPU. And also, obviously, we have to get our fair share of acquisition, which leads to lower ARPU. But in the scheme of things, losing only 28,000 customers and having only a dip of 1% of ARPU, we personally think it's pretty good outcome within a pretty competitive market. But let's wait for the announcements of our competitors.

Charlie, do you want to address the B2B.

Yes. So look, as you know, we closed those O2 Daisy in the quarter, we've got a lot of work to do to try and reconcile accounting policies, the revised plans because things like a clean room. So what we've been trying to do is say, look, the businesses that remain outside that perimeter, we still expect to see growth and have had growth year-to-date. The business that we've actually contributed into O2 Daisy, which is our fixed and mobile B2B connectivity business, that has declined this year. You're right. We haven't actually broken that out and how we take that offline. But I think what we need to do is now we've got this not a joint venture, but a partnership. But in the Q4 results, we'll give you the separate financials and obviously explain how the impact of that business is and how we think it's going to grow in the future as we finalize the integration plans.

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

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

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

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

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

Sure. Yes, I think we're -- we want to trend towards a Sunrise type framework everywhere we operate. And I think there is a pathway to do that everywhere we operate. We seem to be making and are making meaningful progress in the Benelux for all kinds of reasons, both Dutch market and the Belgian market are highly rational markets, closer to Switzerland than anything else, I would say. They have their own unique peculiarities around competition, but largely rational 3-player markets. We've been able to attack the balance sheet, specifically in Belgium, where we've successfully created a netco and the servco there and have done the -- are in the process of executing the classic move of putting more debt on the netco as it builds out. It's a higher quality credit. I'm not allowed to tell you what the credit rating is of this EUR 4.35 billion financing, but it's the first time we've ever seen one. I can promise you that. And using the proceeds and the financing capabilities of a netco to delever the servco, which is the remaining core commercial business. And those combination of steps have been in the works for quite some time. And now we did and have attempted to do similar things in the U.K. as somebody mentioned just a moment ago and not suggesting we can't get to the same place in the U.K. at some point. But it does appear like, in particular, in Belgium, we are on our way to executing on those 4 key measures. And so that, to us, is worthy of highlighting and letting you know we're busy, very busy in this part of the platform and the portfolio and that if we made a commitment to make some decisions around these things, and I think more likely than not, we'll be making some decisions around this part of our business in the relatively near term, certainly within the time frame that we've outlined. We hope in all of these markets. Ireland, I mentioned, is going to have a massive reduction in CapEx. It's going to start generating free cash, but it's small. But certainly, Virgin Media Ireland looks and will tick the box on many of these particular metrics. The U.K. is -- look at a trophy business for us, certainly something we are committed to for the long term and is an increasingly important investment. And we are by no means suggesting that we can't achieve similar results or benefits in the U.K. We're simply saying there, we have a partner, and we have to align with our partner on the best next move. We have a market that's a bit fragmented today. And as we discussed a moment ago, it's going to require some form of rationalization. And so these are things that we work on with our partner. So I'm not suggesting for a second, we can't achieve similar things in the other assets or markets identified on that slide. I'm simply saying we're making good progress here. We'd like you to know about it.

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

Congratulations, Mike, on the new role. It's obviously quite a significant event to see John stepping away after such a significant impact on the industry. A couple of questions, please. And the first is just on the U.K. guidance and maybe my colleagues are better at this than me, but I'm trying to understand whether there seems to be a change in perimeter here. And I'm looking at the numbers, I'm inclined to think that the same perimeter with the shift in B2B could have forced you to possibly push the revenue guidance lower. This is like-for-like without Daisy. It does feel like you could have had to push the revenue guidance lower. I'm just wondering if that's the case. I'm just struggling to reconcile that. And then the second question I had, it's just your language you used before, Mike, which I just found a little surprising, which was you sort of said we'll have to see what Telefonica wants to do. Now I might have expected you to sort of say we'll announce our plans jointly next week. Does Telefonica have any sort of strategic rights or priority around the U.K. business in the shareholder agreement? Maybe I've just read this incorrectly, that might be the case. I appreciate that.

No, David, I'm glad you asked that question. Yes. I appreciate that second question because as I spoke those words, I occurred to me those probably didn't come out very clearly. No, first of all, no, this is a 50-50 joint venture. We make decisions jointly, and I have a very good dialogue and working relationship with Mark, we are 100% aligned on everything that's happening in the U.K. So that is not what I intended to say. There was a reference to their Capital Markets Day and I'm just pointing out that we're not part of that. They have a lot of things to talk about to the market, and they will surely talk about those. But we don't expect any surprises, if you will, around the U.K. market. We're aligned and talk every week about what we're going to do together. So thank you for asking that. I'm glad I could clarify that. On the guidance, listen, I'll let Charlie dig into it. The way I see it is we're providing greater transparency at a time where it's probably needed for analysts to understand what's growing and what's not and what are we getting our arms around. So Charlie, do you want to address that?

Yes. So look, I'm sorry if it's confusing. And you're right. The difficulty is that we've now got this company called O2 Daisy, and we own 70% of it. 30% of it we don't own. And therefore, at some point, hopefully very soon at the end of Q4, we're going to give you the key financials of that. And as we align that company, it is tricky because there's different accounting policies, as I'm sure you'd d and blah blah. So we're trying to do is confirm what we can't tell you. So we can tell you that the businesses, excluding the ones that went in there are growing and we expect to grow. And we have told you that to date, the B2B connectivity business, mobile and fixed that we have put into O2 Daisy is in decline. Now if that means you would interpret that as the combination of O2 Daisy would have meant that the business would have not been growing, maybe that's right. But it's somewhat academic because we've got to work through what the O2 Daisy combination is going to develop. And the whole idea was the 2 companies are very synergistic and not just in costs, there's a material cost saving there but also with some revenue growth. So I mean, I apologize if that's not clear enough and having to take it offline, but certainly how we see it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. To be honest, I don't think we've changed our policies. The bonds, we've all swapped at our fixed rate at the rate we issued at, which in some cases is actually higher. So just to confirm the 2 questions. One is all currencies are matched. So everything in the U.K. is sterling. We're not taking dollar or euro risk. So that's a tick on all the policies. On the interest rates, all bonds are fixed by nature. And on any bank debt, we haven't done a ton of bank debt because the bond market has been so strong, to be honest. We have maintained the swaps. Remember, the swaps are independent of the original bank financings. So we are monetizing or riding those low interest rates until '28, '29, '30. But thereafter, we would have to come in at higher rates, and we are gradually pushing out those hedges. So we are maintaining a pretty good 3-, 4-, 5-year sort of fixed profile depending on which market it is. I hope that sort of answers the question.

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

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

James, that was a little hard to hear. I want to be sure we got the question right. I think you're asking about leverage expectations at VMO2 staying within the 4x to 5x range. And I think that is our objective, and I think that is achieved in a number of ways. But one you didn't mention, which is organic EBITDA growth, which Lutz and the team have been able to deliver consistently. So organically, the business should delever over time. I don't think we're in a position today to talk about dividends or asset sales or things of that nature, although we do have tower -- residual tower interests that could be used in that regard, and we're always open-minded about it. But getting within the range that we've maintained historically is always our underlying goal. Charlie, I don't think there's much to add to that, but go ahead if you think there is.

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

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

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

Matt, you're asking -- that's a big question, politics in Europe vis-a-vis our business. I mean, I'll step back a minute to say that I think we are approaching -- hopefully approaching a bit of an inflection point here where our industry, for example, the mobile industry just put a letter out to Von der Leyen, I think, 2 days ago, 3 days ago, making it clear to her that change is critical, necessary, needed if Europe is to maintain any sort of path to leadership in digital, industrially, really any category productivity. So we continue to make our case as an industry, as a sector that we're not just critical infrastructure. We are necessary for pretty much every aspect of growth and productivity that regulators and politicians are searching for. So maybe get off our throats. And that is, I think, being received positively. In the U.K., in particular, I think the government has had a growth initiative, a growth-minded approach to regulation. Recent changes at the CMA, for example, the Competition Commission there are positive in that they seem to be reflecting a much more growth-minded approach to M&A and to industry consolidation. So I think there's green shoots across the markets we operate in. There are still pain points, broadband taxes and things of this nature that are unnecessary, and we continue to fight those on a regular basis. But I think more broadly, I would say it's more of a tailwind these days than not. And whether it's sovereignty, where governments are realizing that their -- the critical infrastructure of telco is part of the solution for broader sovereignty and independence or whether it's just good economics that you need healthy telecom infrastructure to compete in the global marketplace. All of those things, I think, are coming together a bit, and I'm more encouraged now than I've been in a long time.

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

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

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