Liberty Global announces Q4 and Full Year 2023 results
Mike Fries, Liberty Global CEO, stated: “In 2023 we managed through a challenging environment, including cost of living and inflationary pressures and an increasingly competitive landscape for broadband, mobile and video services.
Despite that, we delivered strong Q4 and full year results with continued postpaid momentum and an improved performance in broadband across most markets. We successfully executed price adjustments throughout the year, which supported stable to growing revenues across our FMC markets in 2023, and achieved our operating company guidance metrics for the full year as
updated at Q3. Our Full Company Distributable Cash Flow result was impacted by a U.S. litigationrelated cash tax payment of $315 million which was not anticipated in 2023, but excluding this item we exceeded our Distributable Cash Flow guidance of $1.6 billion for the year. After repurchasing 18.5% of our stock through January 2024, our share count has been reduced to 378 million shares outstanding and, with over $4 billion in cash and liquid securities, our balance sheet remains in great shape.
In Q4 we delivered postpaid growth across all of our core FMC operations and over 80,000 aggregate net adds. Our flanker brand strategies supported growth at VMO2 and Sunrise, and VodafoneZiggo delivered strong postpaid growth despite the price rise in October. At Telenet, overall results continued to be modestly impacted by the IT platform migration issues, but the return to postpaid growth in Q4 was driven by renewed FMC campaigns and targeted hardware offers. The sequential improvement in our broadband performance across most markets in the face of continued competition was positively impacted by our speed differentiation and commercial initiatives and, despite headwinds in fixed, the pricing actions taken during the year supported stable to growing ARPUs across the group in Q4. On the financial front, we reported quarterly revenue growth at VodafoneZiggo, Telenet and Sunrise, as well as stable or improved sequential Adjusted EBITDA performance across all of our core FMC operations.
We made significant progress on our fixed network strategies in 2023. With almost 32 million aggregate homes capable of delivering gigabit speeds, including those on the nexfibre network, we’re investing heavily to further expand our reach to 38 million homes3 by 2026 through new build and wholebuy structures. At the end of 2023, VMO2 passed over 4 million FTTH homes, including those on the nexfibre network, and is targeting the addition of approximately 2 million FTTH homes in 2024, with nexfibre planning to invest £1 billion over the year. In Belgium, 2023 marked the launch of Telenet’s Wyre NetCo partnership with Fluvius, which will ramp up its fiber rollout in 2024, and we’re excited to launch our FMC offerings in Wallonia later this year. We look forward to providing a strategic update on how we plan to crystallize and deliver value over time as part of tomorrow’s extended fourth quarter and full-year results call.”
