Andy Halford
Management
Good morning. It is Andy here. Good morning, welcome to Vodafone’s interim management statement call. I am joined by Vittorio and a number of our colleagues here. I will take you through the financial highlights for the quarter, before handing over to Vittorio to update you on strategic developments, and comment on the outlook before we move onto Q&A. So let me start on slide three, the highlights of the quarter. Group service revenue declined on an organic basis by 2.6% or by 0.4%, excluding MTRs. This growth is lower than the previous quarter, firstly due to 1.6 percentage points decline in Northern and Central Europe compared to the previous quarter driven in part by MTR cuts in Germany, and secondly a decline of 1.4 percentage points, compared to the previous quarter in our AMAP region, driven primarily by a slowdown in South Africa. Data grew by 12.8% across the group, driven by increase in smartphone penetration, which is now at 33% in Europe, up from 25% this time last year. Growth in emerging markets continued to be healthy with Turkey, India and Vodacom partially offsetting the macro and regulatory pressures in Europe. Vodafone Red is now being launched in five markets to strong customer demand with 2.2 million customers as of the end of January. In Verizon Wireless, service revenue grew by 8.7% during the quarter, and we received a GBP2.4 billion dividend of which we are returning GBP1.5 billion to our shareholders via a share buyback program, which commenced in December. Net debt fell to GBP23.3 billion, mainly as a result of the Verizon Wireless dividend. Following our performance for the quarter, we confirm our full-year adjusted operating profit and free cash flow guidance. So on to slide four. Here you can see our performance by region for…