Virgin Mobile price increases

The BBC has been doing more with less since at least 2010. Since then, licence fee income has fallen faster in real terms (28%) than its cost cutting (15%) can keep up with.

The funding base underlying the BBC must be widened, both to ensure sustainable funding levels, and to ensure the true universality of that structure in the face of changing consumption habits.

Maintaining the status quo would guarantee a meaningfully smaller BBC, with more cuts to content and services each year that goes by—to the detriment of the UK public and the wider media sector. Waiting another ten years is not an option.

With Xavier Niel becoming Vodafone’s largest shareholder, the company will be pleased to be able to demonstrate a solid set of Q1 results.

EBITDA upside is coming from Rest of World and appears largely attributable to the consolidation of Safaricom, but is nonetheless reassuring of the prospect of hard-currency growth.

We continue to have reservations about Vodafone’s value over volume strategy, with the upside of price increases often short-lived, and loss of scale a difficult place to come back from.

BT’s revenue and EBITDA growth suffered a dip in Q1, but entirely due to one-off/seasonal factors, with underlying metrics strong across the board.

Ofcom has curtailed Openreach’s ability to compete with altnets, while allowing it to compete with VMO2, a much more established and long-term competitor.

The deconsolidation of International makes the potential for a return to sustainable revenue growth much more apparent, with multiple drags (altnets, voice, price mechanics) now firmly on the wane.