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On Tuesday, 10 June 2025, Liberty Global (NASDAQ:LBTYA) presented its strategic initiatives at the Bank of America C-Suite TMT Conference. CEO Mike Fries outlined efforts to enhance shareholder value, highlighting successes like the Sunrise spin-off, while addressing challenges such as market competition and operational hurdles. The presentation balanced optimism with a candid acknowledgment of ongoing industry difficulties.
Key Takeaways
- Liberty Global’s Sunrise spin-off boosted stock value by 20% in the last year.
- The company is focusing on network upgrades in the Netherlands using cost-effective DOCSIS technology.
- A substantial £700 million investment aims to improve VMO2’s mobile network in the UK.
- Liberty Global is considering UK market consolidation opportunities, including potential deals with altnets.
- The ventures portfolio holds significant value, with strategic investments across various sectors.
Financial Results
- Sunrise Spin-off: Liberty Global reported a 20% increase in stock price over the past year, including dividends, following the Sunrise spin-off. The Swiss company trades at 8x multiples with an 8% dividend yield.
- VodafoneZiggo: An anticipated tower sale could yield 600 million to 700 million euros, aiding in leverage reduction. EBITDA has been adjusted due to pricing changes.
- VMO2: The company noted four consecutive quarters of ARPU growth in its fixed business, with a 1%-2% increase. A significant £700 million investment is underway to enhance the mobile network.
Operational Updates
- VodafoneZiggo (Netherlands): Liberty Global is committed to upgrading its network with DOCSIS technology, aiming for 8-gigabit speeds across 7 million homes by 2026 at a fraction of fiber deployment costs.
- Telenet (Belgium): Potential collaboration with Proximus aims to prevent fiber network overbuilding, creating a Netco with full market share of wholesale.
- VMO2 (UK): AI is being leveraged for customer retention and recontracting, while the NextFibre rollout is paused pending Telefonica’s strategic review.
Future Outlook
- Liberty Global is exploring consolidation opportunities in the UK market and aims to leverage AI for operational efficiency and customer experience improvements. The company is also considering ways to better communicate the value of its ventures portfolio.
Q&A Highlights
- Discussions included VodafoneZiggo’s dividend policy and leverage, the long-term viability of the joint venture, and potential UK market consolidation scenarios. Liberty Global’s ventures portfolio and potential monetization strategies were also examined.
For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.
Full transcript - Bank of America C-Suite TMT Conference:
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: Thank you all for attending. I think I know mostly everyone here, but for those who don’t, my name is David Wright. I’m with the telecom franchise here at Bank of America. Delighted to have with me Liberty Global, of course, my pre CEO, Always delighted to introduce Mike, who’s an ex competitor of mine. Always welcome.
Michael, come here. Never a problem. Is it have we graduated to Michael in I’m glad to find two. Mike, thanks so much for coming. If you don’t mind, I’ll wind you back.
It’s not far off eighteen months since the full year results and the strategy reset we might have called it at the time. And you identified the five things at the time that you were planning to do. One of them has been undoubtedly successful, which is the Sunrise spin. We’re not far off the same share price as we were before but with a handsome dividend paid to investors. You can probably leave that one where it is.
I guess you’d regard that as a success.
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: Oh, come on. Give me a shot here. I got to take a victory
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: lap. Well, listen, let’s
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: why don’t we start with
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: that one? Think it was a very successful spin. I guess at the share price, it’s not far off where
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: it was. GARY We’re up 20% last twelve months if you add those two together. But I assume people know what we’re talking about. If not, I’ll spend a minute. And you’re referencing our year end call a year ago.
Yeah. Right? Where I think we, the main message was enough is enough. Sense of urgency here on my part, John’s part, try to unlock value for shareholders. And the thing we did or committed to do, and it took us seven months to do it, was to spin off our Swiss subsidiary, which we did on a tax free basis.
In our stock, Sunrise was probably trading at the same multiples, everything else 5.5 times as the Swiss company is trading at eight times, with a roughly 8% dividend yield, tax free to Swiss shareholders. The dividend yield is tax, the dividend is tax free. And you add that stock price into the Liberty stock price, we’re up about 20% over the last twelve months. But that’s not the end game. That’s just one, as you pointed out, one of four or five things we identified as critical tactical steps to try to unlock value.
But I think it’s worked. One thing we did, is important to point out is in addition to just saying we’re going to spin it off, and let me add that what sets us apart from other telcos, I don’t know who you’re talking to this week, probably everybody, is we have the ability to do that all day long. We can spin stuff off tax free everywhere. So that might seem like, well, everybody can do that. Not necessarily.
It’s not simple stuff. And having successfully done that, I think gives us credibility for other things we might decide to do. But we put $1,000,000,000 into the asset to delever it pre spin. That was also a form of a dividend really because that was cash on our balance sheet, which we handed to shareholders by reducing the debt and increasing the equity value of that dividend. So I think it’s worked.
That is an example, just one example of how we intend to continue to unlock value here. I looked at your questions ahead of time. One of them, what’s the future global? Fair question, but I’ll tell you something. If it’s $12.4 which is your price target, I’m going be really disappointed.
And that’s up 30% by the way, and you still have this as underperform. I don’t know why. Because are committed and I think we have the flexibility, will to do things that a lot of telcos don’t do. We sold those assets to Vodafone 12 times. Some people would never sell assets.
We spun off Switzerland. That’s like descaling. Who would do that? So I think we’re in a position, whether it’s Liberty Telecom, Liberty Growth, Liberty Services, we’re talking about all three, I imagine, to try to unlock value for shareholders. That’s the main narrative.
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: What I thought I might do is if we think about and you’ve kind of given an indication of the ability to spin assets, etcetera, but I guess with the Sunrise asset, it was kind of in a nice shape. It had a fairly defined strategy. I went to the CMD. It was very comprehensive. I think if we think about some of the other core assets, whether that be Holland, whether that be The UK or whether that be Belgium, they’re more work in progress.
I think we could probably agree on that to begin with. And I guess one of the most recent presentations that your management has given is on the let’s call it a reset as well at VodafoneZigger. Right. Right? You’ve revitalized the strategy there or reset the strategy a little.
I wonder if you could talk to us a little about the genesis of that, what you felt maybe wasn’t working and the measures you’re taking to put in place.
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: Yes. So this is our joint venture with Vodafone in Holland, relatively big business, roughly equal in size to KPN and everything except B2B. So we don’t have the same enterprise business they do, but roughly if you look to the side by side, we’re equivalent businesses on consumer, fixed to mobile. And for seven years we’ve been in this joint venture. And John likes to say I had two Catholic marriages.
That’s one of them. We talk about separately what that might mean or down the road. But I think it became clear that while we had done pretty well, competed effectively, that we were at an inflection point. And we brought Stephen in, Stephen Van Royen, who you may know, ran Sky for was at Sky for seventeen years. I basically said to him, clean sheet of paper here.
You tell us what you think about the asset, the market, the opportunity. How do we go out and win? How do we stop coasting here? And I think he came back with four recommendations, all of which are spot on. Number one, our prices are too high.
If you look at our overall ARPU in that market, we’re higher than KPN. And so the front book needs to start matching the market. And we’ve started that already. We’re seeing already benefits in churn. Secondly, the way we were working as an organization, not to get into the operating model issues, it was not a winning culture.
It was a little bit stagnant in terms of how we were making decisions, etcetera, etcetera. So I think he’s really opened people’s eyes to how a competitive market ought to be managed and run. He’s committed, I think correctly, and we’ll debate this happily, to DOCSIS in that marketplace, which is the right answer. I only have to give you one stat. We can get to eight gig across 7,000,000 homes for 90% less than it costs to do fiber.
Just write that down. It’s all you need to know. 90% less than it costs to get to, let’s say, eight to 10 gig on fiber. We can get there on DOCSIS in Holland by 2026, at least launching the eight gig product by 2026. So, you know, we were Vodafone, we were sort of spinning around that subject.
We’re really saying it’s good. And he said, look, the Dutch market, people care about speed and price. They don’t care about technology. We’re already twice as fast as the average we already have a customer. Our average customer has twice the speed as the average Dutch customer today.
That includes our numbers in it. So we’re already the best network, highest quality network, fastest network. And we can go from one to two by the end of this year, almost two gig everywhere to four to eight in a relatively quick period of time for 90% less. Let’s repeat that, make sure you get it. And it costs to build fiber.
So €1,000 to €100 or less. And once we commit to that and we stop, dillydallying around a little bit with M and A and these sorts of things. And then lastly, we have some really strong things here. The brands are strong. We have a strong flagship brand.
We have a very strong premium brand in mobile and fixed. We have sports, a fantastic sports business there that we don’t have anywhere else. We’re massively converged. We need to benefit and take advantage of that. So there’s, and we have great loyalty programs with the Zigodome and stuff.
So we really had all the bits and pieces to drive the more commercial side of things. And we’re letting go. What that means, and
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: I think we said it
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: on the call, is that means VodafoneZiggo instead of doing, it’s going to do one of these. And so this year we had to reset guidance because when you start to reset prices and things of that nature, there are impacts. But we’re in it to win it over the long term. I say this all the time, we run these businesses as if we’ll own them forever. And so you got to make decisions that you think are the best for the business over the long term.
And that’s what we’re doing in that market.
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: So if I was Oh, it’s
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: a highly rational market. I don’t know. See somebody wrote down Altnets who was in here before me. We don’t have that shit. Sorry.
We’re not broadcasting right. We don’t have that stuff in Holland. There’s KPN and then there’s two private equity led groups that don’t even overbuild each other. One of whom has 800,000 homes in areas where we don’t have network when we’ve signed a wholesale deal with them. Highly rational.
They’re really a duopoly marketplace, which you don’t see in many other places, this country included. So a lot of positive characteristics. Someone amusingly, you do have all that in The UK and
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: it was BTC over Ah, okay. Just about that little
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: It says alt nets suck not anymore. Okay.
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: Back We’ll come say If I was to challenge you a little on the VodafoneZiggo strategy, what it does have is quite a lot of leverage. Yes. And when you have price down, price down comes with a high margin, high operational leverage, which drops through quite heavily to the free cash flow line. I accept that four point zero is, I don’t know, we saying €100 instead of €1,000 for five Yes, including connection costs.
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: Give or take. That’s within our existing CapEx envelope.
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: Is it the right thing for VodafoneZiggo to be paying a dividend?
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: Well, that’s a complicated question because it’s we must have people from the credit side in here as well. That’s historically what we’ve done. We’ve taken free cash and we’ve dividended out to shareholders. If we don’t I mean, it gets caught up in some governance issues. If we don’t agree on that, it goes back to last year.
So we are at an interesting inflection point on leverage. Don’t disagree with you. With the reset on EBITDA, the leverage is higher than we’d like it. And so we have to be thoughtful about how we maintain. We did announce on the call, which I think maybe many of you might have listened to, that we have already hired somebody to sell the towers.
Yep, that’ll be 600 €700,000,000 We intend to reduce leverage with that, those proceeds because we’ve never sold the towers there. There are property assets that could be worth something that could be monetized. So I think and we and Vodafone agree on that. So I think we both recognize, hey, we
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: have to start being thoughtful about leverage in this context. I’ve always thought about when I’ve thought about VodafoneZiggo, I mean, I remember being the Ziggo IPO, it always seems to me there’s a lot more Liberty DNA in that market than maybe Vodafone DNA. Do you need to resolve governance? Or is it we’ve seen the odd headline. I don’t expect you to obviously comment on that.
What is the joint venture the realistic option for this asset in the long term?
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: No, no. And probably not for this market either. And these were just like Vodafone will realize in this country with its recently completed deal, these are not great long term situations. So in the case of VodafoneZiggo, we we passed through the IPO. There’s a soft put right.
There are things we could do as partners. We have a good relationship. We talk about these things all the time. But longer term, I think they would agree as well. Something has to give you.
Okay. And they can’t buy us because, well, I don’t think they can. Would have to make your own conclusion on that. They can’t absorb the leverage, see how they could without impacting potentially their, well, it’s small enough they wouldn’t care. I don’t know.
You would know better than me.
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: Sorry, but I guess it’s a segue into one of your other strategic proposals, which is the creation of the Beneluxco. And we can obviously talk about Telnet as a separate standalone business. But I think one of the theories we always had, and I think I even spoke to Charlie about this on stage a couple of years ago, is that bringing the two assets together under the Benelux co could even derive some synergy, specifically fiscal synergy. Is am I thinking about the right Sure.
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: Yes. Well, I think we said that on that conference call you referenced, which was fifteen, sixteen months ago, we said that was one of our strategies. Why? Two countries contiguous, similar languages, at least Flanders and The Netherlands, rational markets. I think over $3,000,000,000 of EBITDA would make us bigger than KVA.
It would be there are synergies market to market and it could be an interesting opportunity. So for sure we put that out there and it may still be an interesting opportunity, but to achieve that, certain other things have to happen. Like I can’t if I could convince Vodafone to roll their equity into that, that’d be great. I can do it. Yeah, listen, I mean, based on what
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: may or may not
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: happen in Spain, maybe she’ll do that. I don’t think that’s a great outcome for them in Spain when they sell something for 500,000,000 and it gets bought at 7,000,000,000 or whatever the number is going to be. You know what I mean? Whereas we could give them, so who knows? But look, they’ll make their own decisions and I’m not foreshadowing anything here because I can promise you there’s nothing to foreshadow at this point.
But just theoretically, that would be something they should consider. So that is an option. That’s an option. I wouldn’t paint my head on it, but it’s an option.
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: Let’s now let’s drop it therefore into Telenet. Again, another asset that I remember IPO ing, showing my age as well in this particular thing. Great asset. It’s quite curious what you guys are potentially doing with Proximus. Can you talk a little bit more and maybe a bit of education?
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: This is curious and it’s also highly encouraging people who, God forbid, spend time thinking about regulators around here. But I’ll just lead into it for a minute. I mean, I’ve been operating in this part of the world for thirty plus years and regulators have been on our throats almost that entire time, certainly the last fifteen years. And for the time in a very long time, maybe ever, they’re slowly starting to step off. Regulars will not get in the way of growth and they’re acting on that, which is super.
I think Europe is doing the same thing, trying to create industrial policy, hopefully righting the wrongs of regulation in the telecom space, which I’m not going to rehearse because you all know it too well. One example David’s referencing in the Belgium market, compete with Proximus. It’s pretty much a duopoly there. And we had committed to building fiber across 70% of Flanders, 4,000,000 homes, and we were going. We’re done.
We’re moving. We’ve created Netco. We’ve separated the businesses. And they had a fiber JV with EQT that was falling apart. And with the government owning half their equity, not surprisingly, got phone calls saying, hey, maybe we shouldn’t overbuild each other.
Maybe what we should do is just have one fiber network. Well, you can kind of see this in France a little bit too. So we will continue to, the deal we have, we hope to announce shortly, will see us essentially using each other’s networks. We’ll still build quite a bit of fiber. They’ll build quite a bit of fiber, but we won’t overbuild each other except in one section of the country where we’re largely already there.
But for the vast majority of the country, we won’t overbuild each other. We use each other’s networks, which obviously has the benefit of giving this entity we call WIRE, our netco there, it’s basically 100% market share of wholesale. Orange is the really primary wholesale customer and they’re ours exclusively. That’s kind of what was the final straw when we announced that Orange was going to exclusively use our fiber network because they’re already on our HFC network as a wholesaler full buyer. I think Proximus realized, okay, there’s nowhere for us to go.
So if we get it done, then it passes market tests and it’ll be a highly rational Netco, one of the most attractive infrastructure assets in Europe, which we’ve already separated out. So that would be an interesting value creation opportunity. Right. Was going
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: to say that’s one potential derivative of this particular transaction is that you’ve isolated a much, much higher value opportunity. Yes.
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: I that’s right. I know that’s right. Yes. Interesting.
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: I guess UK possibly a little bit the most contentious with quite a few moving parts. Operationally, we’ve obviously seen some pressure on ARPU. I think that’s a sense of this has been down from the TV customer base. It hasn’t changed the EBITDA as much. But still, that’s compromised your ability to maybe take price or at least realize some of the price that’s been taken in the high inflation period of The U.
K. Market. How would you categorize the sort of wider performance of two, BM two?
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: Yes. Well, on the ARPU point, of all, it’s not apples to apples, which I think you’ve kind of indicated there a little bit. Our ARPU includes video on 50% of our broadband base. So our broadband base is paying us more than other broadband bases. At least Sky would be more comparable.
You can’t compare us to others really. And that by the way, having 50% of our broadband based take video is a great thing. Even though we’re obviously slowly losing them, they’re sticky and some will never lease. They really like the innovation that we’re delivering in terms of the entertainment platform and they want a provider that has all the apps on it, etcetera, etcetera. So I think that’s a positive thing.
The other thing I’d remind you of is our average broadband speed today is 400 megabytes. The market sits at 200 megabytes. So our customers are getting more for more. They are getting more for more. And in that context, we have seen four consecutive quarters of ARPU increases in the fixed business, which is great.
1%, 2%, not huge, but we’ve been taking ARPU up. Reason is we did take some price in April ’50. And secondly, we’ve got tools that are really working well to retain customers when they call and when so these hyper personalized tools, the AI based tools that are starting to work extremely well. So I think the ARPU picture looks good for us. The volume picture, not as good, right?
Because altnets are slightly desperate and they’re pricing their products to drive whatever little bit of penetration they can get. And I’m not saying it’s the last gas, but it’s close to it. And so we have to suffer that. We’re not going to chase them down. So volume might be different.
You’re not going to see us chase AltNet pricing. Would imagine ET would say the same thing. Voto would say the same thing. Well, Voto’s already pretty cheap, but we’re not going to chase alt net pricing down. We’re going to start to use that same AI platform for proactive recontracting, which I think is also going to be a positive.
So I feel pretty good about fixed business overall. I think Lutz and the team have really got this secret sauce sorted out. It’s not just a retention tool, but also potentially a proactive recontracting tool. And that’ll serve us really well as we continue through this rough patch of broadband volatility. But the ARPU continues to inch up, and that’s a Now
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: on the mobile side, there’s obviously this quite exciting dynamic, which is the spectrum you’ve taken for from the Vodafone and Butch merger. Obviously, Vodafone and Butch have presented themselves very much as this creates the best network in The UK. I’m sure O2 and E don’t just stand back and watch. Right. You’ve obviously taken some spectrum from them.
How
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: should we be thinking maybe a
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: little bit about the CapEx curve? Or what can you do, do you think, to sort of defend a business move?
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: Well, I mean, the spectrum is a big one. I think it brings us to roughly 30%, which is great in this new environment we’re in. I think we’ve said publicly we’ve £700,000,000 we’ve put into the mobile network. So we have been investing for the last couple of years really over indexing on the network quality. And it has nothing to do with the fact that when I moved here two years ago, my O2 service wasn’t very good because I wasn’t the only customer.
It’s still room to improve. Yeah, that’s my point. It’s a beloved brand. We have a great customer base, loyal, but we have to deliver. And that message has been given to them, I’m sure, loud and clear and they’ve invested a ton, not just in network, but also in products and innovation, right?
GiftCath now has a broadband product so we can tackle that sector of the market really effectively. So there’s lots of offers that we’re going to invest meaningfully in the O2 brand. You’ll see that coming out. O2 is a great brand and we want to get that brand better positioned than it has been the last few years. So the MVNOs have done what AltNets have done, right?
They’re taking all the share because it’s low cost. And but consumers in the end, I think, remain relatively loyal to great brand and great quality service and quality of network. That’s what we’ll focus on. And big mergers have often during integration stage,
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: there does tend to be a bit of a churn pool out there. Is there an opportunity to go
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: and maybe Yeah. I mean, I think I’m sure they’ve had eighteen months to work on that. Long time. Not having that happen, but let’s see.
You’re right. That can be an issue.
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: They’ve had a long time. Okay. So now on to the network infrastructure in The UK. We’ve obviously got the coax network and the plans to build fiber then. We’ve then got NextFibre.
And NextFibre more recently guided down a little bit on the ambition or maybe just slowed the ambition. You talk about why that was the case? Well,
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: I think we’ve been quite straight up about the fact that our partner has decided to revisit some of the strategic decisions of the prior leadership team, which is their prerogative, by the way. Think I said on the call, if the tables were turned, I would ask for the same thing. Every new management team needs a shot at rethinking what’s happened. So we’ll give them that time and we’ll react when they come back with what their position is. But clearly, one of the things that they were reacting to was the Netco conversations we were having, the NextFiber structure, all these things.
So we have agreed to pause that, which I think in this room, I would say is highly unfortunate, but I understand it and we’ll support it because not only was Nova going to help delever BMO2, help create a currency for consolidation, but it was going to raise capital at really accretive prices. You had some good interest. To accelerate fiber rollout and get us into wholesale. So it was like five things, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But we’ll wait to see what they think long term about this market, number one, and about the asset, number two.
So we’re kind of on hold. And in that context, NextFiber is a pretty significant commitment of capital. We are happy to make that investment. We just wrote a big check. They’ve got two, will happen in the year 02/2002, 2,300,000 homes and VMO2 is penetrating those homes.
These are greenfield homes. So the VMO2 network reaches, let’s say seventeen, sixteen, 17,000,000 homes today with HFC and some fiber through the upgrade. And then these 2,200,000 homes that NextFibre has been building with our French partner. And we need in just in the last six months, they’ve really started to accelerate the penetration of that greenfield territory, which I think is helpful, but it’s been a little slower than we thought. Also important to remember that VMO2 takes quite a bit of, well, providing quite a bit of services and value to NextFiber in the form of construction services, IT, etcetera.
So NextFiber is a super asset light platform. And so the decision to put capital is easier for us when money is coming both directions, not as easy for our French partners. So we’re at an inflection point here, but I think we’re good through the year end, and we’ll see how the bigger questions I just addressed with Telefonica sort themselves out.
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: I mean, I think what confused me a little, and I cover Telefonica is I agree with what you’ve said, Ned, that the Netco concept had so many obvious advantages. What I don’t quite understand is why they would want to pause that. I think it look at I mean, this isn’t Chatham House rules,
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: I imagine, so but you know, I can, let me surmise it, I’ll give you my sense of it. I think there’s a couple of things at play there. Number one is the guy who took Ankle’s role, who’s the number two now in the company. His CEO comes from the defense industry, brand new to the telecom sector, but it’s not rocket science. He’ll figure it out.
He’s a very smart guy. But he brought in as his number two, the individual who was running Spain, who kind of oversaw this fragmentation and complication in the Spanish market and longs to control and become again the leading player in that market. So control, clarity, consolidation, these are things that he thinks about. And perhaps looking at this market and seeing Nova and AltNets, he just said, maybe we need to hang on to this stuff, keep more control over it. It’s not a well thought out position.
I don’t know if that’s the ending position. That’s that’s what I suspect. And then the thing is, and this is not speaking out of school because I do think many European telcos, not me, think this way, which is this is a big moment for Europe. I don’t know how many of you are American or English or European. It’s It’s a big moment for Europe where telecom may just be an important player in not just data sovereignty, AI Gigafactories, but defense.
And I think therefore when you look at each of the markets that changes how you financially engineer things. If your industrial bias is control and maybe industrial military, I I don’t think I’m speaking out of school because I think that’s just where it is. Then you have a different lens on things. And I think that could be also part of what’s happening. And so who knows?
Look, thankfully they’re going through a review. They think they’ve hired Bain or BCG. And they’re doing the work and we’ll all wait and find out what it has to say.
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: I guess the challenge is though, it’s difficult for other polity to exit.
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: Well, we have the IPO right, not clear. Next summer we have the soft put. Right. But I would be surprised. Surprised is too strong a word.
But I would say in the next twenty four months, you know, we have to decide if we’re each in this together the way we used to be or we’re doing something different. And I think you would say the same thing if you were sitting here and say, yeah, we need to get clarity on this point, right?
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: So same in The UK market right now, we’ve got a, know, cloud was here before, I don’t know how many alt nets there are, let’s call it somewhere between 9,100. There’s a couple of big ones out there. Now, of course, what you have and if I understand this right with VMO two is you have a much easier route to fiber because the quality of ducting is very good. And I think you previously quoted £100 give us 100 Right.
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: It’s for upgrade, yes.
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: So that’s a very credible economic route to building fiber and all the benefits begins. But of course, there is an opportunity, and I think you’ve addressed this with Netco even as the vehicle to maybe consider consolidating the market to some extent. The small guys are all fine and good. I think it’s a lot of hard work to do that. There are a couple of big guys.
Now Citi Fibre is out there right now. The refinancing is still maybe not quite over the line. I think Greg has given a slightly different message recently on why that might be the case.
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: You’ve got a lot
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: of customers, they’ve got a lot of network. Is that ever something that we can think about?
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: You should assume in typical Liberty fashion, we are whiteboarding everything. There isn’t a transaction, a combination, an opportunity that we are not thinking about, including that one. We have to be, right? Because with or without our partners, we have to be thinking about all of these options because it’s a really important moment for this market. This is a market shaping moment.
This next twelve to twenty four months will be market shaping and critical, slightly shy of existential, but really important. And so we want to be part of that conversation thinking about those things. And we had, there’s not a transaction, not a large alt net that we either don’t have an ongoing conversation with or haven’t already been talking to, don’t know what will happen, if anything will happen. Here’s the good news though from our point of view, which is what I care about most, is we have the biggest network in this market. We control 19,000,000 homes.
40% of them are already fiber. And the rest can be fiber pretty So over the long haul, we’re going nowhere, 6,000,000 broadband subs. We are here to stay and we have all the tools we need to penetrate, grow, ARPU, converge customers that CD Fiber doesn’t. These guys, Natamia, love those guys. Community Fiber, terrific, but they don’t have they will never scale, right?
And they’re not really hoping to scale. They’re hoping to survive and make money, which some of them will. So we’re not going anywhere. Just a question of what role do we play in this consolidation and rationalization. And I’ll tell you, I think, again, don’t publish this, but I was on the phone with Johnny Reynolds, Secretary of Commerce Trade just the other day and they get it.
Government gets it. Not a good moment for The UK right now if fiber customers lose service, if fiber investors lose money. So they’re anxious to see us and others get involved here. And we will. We will.
Okay. Interesting.
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: Let’s go back to the top co and some of the strategy. You’ve got this ventures portfolio, and I think it’s tricky from our side. You talked about POs and valuations, and I very simply take the number that you put on the spreadsheet.
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: Yes. But it’s not our numbers. Deloitte’s number. Right.
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: But it’s interesting to understand the businesses. Now each of them has got their own, I guess, timeline to some kind of monetization potential, whatever that might be. Is there a better play on ventures? Could you do something different with ventures?
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: Yes. But I will remind you, and again, just to make it taking people back to their level set here, it’s 3,300,000,000 of assets that we’ve accumulated in tech, media content, sports infrastructure. Six deals, not even seven, six investments represent 70% of that. Six, not 65, of which there are probably 65 different than if I had to say, here’s the whole portfolio, Delay would have it, there’s 65 things. Six account for 70%.
So when I get the, oh, it’s too complex. I don’t know how to do the work. Six, which I think you can do the work on. Three of them in infrastructure. NextFiber, you’ve already referenced, pretty easy to model that, understand that.
We own 5% of a company called EdgeConnects, which is a massive global data center business that EQT and others own, that we’re happy to own the 5%. We’d like to get out of the 5%, but we’re in it and it’s growing. And we have this business called Atlas Edge, which we own with Digital Bridge, which is another infrastructure partner that’s building acquiring and growing data center across Europe. Those three assets, billion 2,000,000,000, three in value. The other billion 2,000,000,000, billion 3 is three content assets.
Our stake in ITV, which is highly liquid, and let’s see what we do with that. Our stake in Televisa Univision, which we put 100,000,000 in, we market $350,000,000 which is the largest Spanish language content creator and platform on the planet based out of Mexico City and Miami, and our stake in Formula E, which I think could return the fund if we do keep doing it right. One deal. So I appreciate that there’s a lot of stuff in there. The tech portfolio, 400,000,000.
Sure, I wouldn’t spend one minute thinking about all these little deals we’ve done, AI, cyber, cloud. It’s complicated. Some of them actually help us out quite a bit in our operating companies. But yeah, there maybe we bring a partner in. Maybe we think about, hey, do we really need to be doing $5.10000000 investments in these B round?
Maybe not. It served a purpose. It made us smarter, gave us access to technologies and stuff we didn’t have. Maybe that’s something we could and then the infrastructure stuff is really those three assets since we’re some early stage renewable energy and we’re building, heck we have 10, I don’t know, 20,000 already scoped to build charging stations across The UK where we have infrastructure, right? We have power, we have everything.
So that’s a business we think could be a pretty interesting business. So infrastructure media content, 70% of it in these six deals, which there’s a story there. Maybe we need to make that story clearer for people, which I appreciate. But is it even a sort of
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: spin story? Does that make it clear? Yeah, some
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: of these assets. Some of these assets, spinning is not simple. You have to have what they call an active trader business and you have to have certain other tax elements of it. But yes, Formula E could be spun with something, be sold, could be merged, could be we have 400 plus million in that business. We own 70% of it.
It’s not Formula One. I’m not going to want anyone to walk out of here saying Formula E and Formula One are the same, but they’re trading $22,000,000,000 That don’t need to be the same. I just need to be a little better. And what I will tell you is that this champion, it’s not easy to own a global championship. There are not very many of them.
And we have a fifteen year exclusive on electric racing and we’re to extend that. And the three things that make me excited about that, number one I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a race, but this Gen three Evo car racing this year is faster than an F1 car zero to 30% faster, one point eight seconds, and is incredibly quick around the track. In Monaco, we had 190 overtakes in one race. I think Formula One had two.
One had three. On a good day. So it’s incredibly exciting racing and we have a new car coming out after next season, so eighteen months from now, the Gen four car, which will double power. I mean, there’s just nowhere to go but up with the technology of these cars, look, the feel, even the sound. So the racing is becoming incredibly exciting and we have 400,000,000 fans racing in all the great cities in the world.
It’s really to me a great ground floor opportunity that I’m excited to own. And I think rising tides, right? Yeah, sure. Mike, I’m
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: going to return to my, I guess, sort of question with my final question. And it is what is the future of Liberty Global, right? So we’ve talked about there was the spin of Sunrise. We’ve talked about assets, you’ve outlined essentially routes to strategic have a strategic reset in Holland. We’ve obviously got this opportunity in Belgium and there’s the potential to realize value there.
The UK feels a little bit on hold right now. But are we in a situation where we could be looking two to three years down the line at all assets spin off and you go home? Is that what
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: we I
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: mean, what’s the
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: Well, I don’t know because I don’t control those outcomes in those two big cases. But I think you could map scenarios like that. I mean, why is Sunrise trading so well? Because there’s nothing I love Sunrise. I’m a big shareholder.
Trust me. I chair the company. So I have great respect for the business and Andre, but it’s not a high growth business, right? I mean, if any
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: of you
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: are investors who are following it, it’s a modest growth with nice free cash flow profile and slightly delevered into the mid fours or something like that, low fours, and generating nice free cash, of which 70% we hand to shareholders. And in Switzerland, that seems to be, and in Europe, that seems to be a winning formula. It doesn’t strike me as a difficult formula to replicate necessarily Now, we might have been on that path, but it was but Steven has opened our eyes to the fact that if you want to be on that path long term, you need to allow me to reset here. It’ll be back to that path. It’s generating free cash this year.
It’s free cash flow generating. This market still generates lots of free cash. It could be more free cash once we get through the mobile build, once we finish the fiber build. So if free cash is your metric, and I think it is the right metric for this sector, It’s something we are absolutely focusing on that perhaps some of these businesses will be more highly valued if they were isolated into different investor groups. My shareholders and many of you are here, hope, I think I understand the challenge.
We’re a complex story. Just look at the things we’ve talked about today. It’s not simple. We’re trying to simplify it with this Liberty Telecom, Liberty Group, Liberty Services, which is another hidden asset. But within the Liberty Telecom bit, which is $22,000,000,000 of revenue, 8,000,000,000 of EBITDA, it’s still a lot of work to do and drive commercial momentum.
We’re going to deal with all the things we’ve talked about today around churn and pricing. And then we have to find ways to unlock value. And that is the goal.
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: One last little question. We’re asking it to all the telcos we have here, which is and I had this conversation with you once where you talked about how US broadband is what, $70 $80 Yes. Right now. If you want 500 meg fiber these days, you’re paying $80.90 dollars right? In Europe, you’re paying $20 to $30 The industry has not I don’t think has done a great job at valuing itself to the consumer.
I’m talking primarily B2C here. There is still so much of the consumer market that looks at the industry as a priced utility essentially. And I think COVID was a great opportunity for the industry to go out to the consumer and say, hey, here we are. Look, we’ve kept you working, we’ve kept you educated, connectivity to your family, etcetera. And I think the industry dropped the ball.
I don’t disagree.
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: I mean, I think keeping the love was I remember saying something, how do we bottle this magic? Yeah. Because there was some magic in COVID. Difficult to do when you have in this market alt nets selling fiber for £15 in Belgium where Digi rocks up and sells mobile for five It’s typical to do when regulators have coming back to them have created an environment where all that matters is consumer price. Now it seems they’re moving off that pivot, that pedestal a little bit, but that has been the nature of it.
So when you have that kind of dynamic, that pricing dynamic, that competitive dynamic, stuff falls through the cracks, you can’t invest as much as you want, your innovation slows down, but it makes it more difficult to hold on to that. Now, what we’re investing in with AI, we can talk about, but we can’t. What we’re investing in with our networks, if you get it right, you can win the day because these alt nets aren’t going to win the day. They’re not going to have the same capabilities that we have. And that’s what we’re doing.
We’re investing in consumer brand, consumer loyalty, consumer experience, which you hear from all the telcos, but we’re all doing it. And AI is going to be a game changer for our industry. I mean, will say, if you’re an automotive analyst or if you’re a no matter what industry you follow, I’m sure everyone’s saying the same thing. And why wouldn’t they? But in our case, in the telecom industry, it is so easy.
You get 1%, 23% of OpEx. So easy. We’re finding it already. I was with Telenet yesterday. I can give you this stat.
Don’t publish it. With what they’re doing on their consumer facing, mostly acquisition but also retention tools, they expect that they will reduce human interactions by 50% in thirty six months in shops and on phones, 50%, which means maybe 50% fewer humans, I don’t know. Power consumption, optimizing network build and design, proactive maintenance, call centers, these are small numbers multiplied by big numbers that equal big numbers. And I think it’s going to be a game changer for our industry. And we’re not even to the cool stuff yet.
I mean, the interesting stuff, so hyper personalization and agentic AI.
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: I mean, all this stuff you read about, we’re not even talking about that stuff. I think we’re going
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: to look back on this period where I say, hey, good news, 300,000,000 of savings. We’re going to say, wow, that was so rudimentary. That was so early days. Remember those days when we were thinking about that? I think it’s got nowhere to go but up.
And I really feel like it’s been a game changer for our industry in particular. And by the way, we’re also building the digital railways that make it work, which I tell every regulator when I see them, don’t forget, none of it works without really fast, low latency connectivity, whether it’s mobile or fixed. And so there’s this virtuous circle that I think politicians and regulators are starting to see that they just didn’t think about. And again, whether it’s Trump and data and AI sovereignty and military self sufficiency, or whether it’s just growth and the need for growth and the lack of productivity or Europe feeling isolated, which you ought to feel isolated in some ways, from an economic point of view. All these things are kind of conspiring together to hopefully give us a moment here.
David Wright, Bank of America, Bank of America: Great time, everyone. Thank you very much.
Mike Fries, CEO, Liberty Global: Thank you, Mike. Thank Good to see you all.
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