Mike Fries - President & CEO Bernard Dvorak - Co-CFO Charlie Bracken - Co-CFO Balan Nair - CTO Diederik Karsten - EVP, European Operations Tom Mockridge - CEO, Virgin Media.

Michael Bishop - RBC Capital Markets Amy Yong - Macquarie Tim Boddy - Goldman Sachs Ben Swinburne - Morgan Stanley Frank Knowles - New Street Research Vijay Jayant - Evercore ISI Jeff Wlodarczak - Pivotal Research Group James Ratcliffe - Buckingham Research Group James Britton - Nomura Matthew Harrigan - Wunderlich Securities.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Liberty Global's First Quarter 2015 Results 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. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode.

Today's formal presentation materials can be found under the Investor Relations section of Liberty Global's website at www.libertyglobal.com. Following today's formal presentation, instructions will be given for a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, this investor call is being recorded on this date, May 8, 2015.

Page 2 of the slides details the company's Safe Harbor Statement regarding forward-looking statements.

Today's presentation materials 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 from time to time in Liberty Global's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recently filed Forms 10-K and 10-Q.

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, thanks, operator, and welcome everyone to our first quarter earnings call. I'm joined as usual by a number of folks on the management team, including Bernard Dvorak and Charlie Bracken, our Co-CFOs; Balan Nair, our Chief Technology Officer; Diederik Karsten, who is EVP of European Operations, and a few others you might hear from.

The agenda today for us is going to be very typical. I'm going to run through some highlights and then Bernie will take you through the financial numbers, and we'll get to your questions. We are talking from slides. So please hope you have them in front of you. And if you do, I'm starting on Slide 4, which runs through our first quarter highlights.

Well, we feel we had a lot of very positive developments on the strategic and operating front and, by the way, are confirming our full-year guidance today for 2015. Let's start with revenue.

Rebased revenue growth was 3% and all the way to $4.5 billion for the quarter and that's up from 2% growth last year in the same period and largely on pace with our internal phasing for the year. A few highlights on the revenue.

We saw year-over-year revenue growth improvement in five of our seven Western European markets, which helped drive ARPU per customer up 5%. We had another big quarter from Mobile and B2B, which grew revenue 16% and 6% respectively.

Rebased associate growth was only 1% in the quarter, but it's important to point out that this number was negatively impacted by non-recurring items in Q1 last year, which makes it a difficult quarter for comparison purposes.

And again, that result is not far off for only internal phasing for the full-year which is why we are confident in confirming our guidance of mid-single-digit OCF growth and $2.5 billion of free cash flow for 2015.

As I mentioned, we had good news across many of our key strategic initiatives and growth drivers that are laying the foundation for continued value creation not just this year but beyond. Project Lightning, our announced plan to build out another 4 million homes in the UK is off to a great start.

Early trial results are showing penetration levels in line with our expectation and actually ARPU is above what we had hoped to achieve, which is very encouraging as we start to hit our stride this summer. We are excited about the announced acquisition of BASE, something I'm sure you all heard about, the third largest mobile operator in Belgium.

I'll talk a bit more about it in a moment, but the deal we view as being financially accretive and completely consistent with the mobile strategy we've been articulating for some time now.

The long-awaited launch of LiLAC, our tracking stock, is set for early July on the heels of some very good results in Chile and Puerto Rico, and I'll talk about that in a second.

And about six months ago, we launched an internal project called Liberty 3.0, which is an initiative focused on accelerating the untapped revenue drivers and operating efficiencies that we know exist in our business and are going to allow us to continue our track record of value creation.

So far it's been very exciting, and I'll have a few more words on that in a moment. And then lastly, our balance sheet continues to go from strength to strength.

We were very active in the capital markets in Q1, refinancing approximately $6.5 billion of debt, reducing our average cost of debt to 5.4%, and pushing maturities out even farther so that today 90% of our debt is due 2020 and beyond.

And of course throughout the quarter we were busy buying stock, as we told we would be, about $500 million since the beginning of the year, with an additional $3.5 billion of stock buybacks planned between March 31 and the end of 2016. Turning to Slide 5, let me address right upfront our RGU results.

With 68,000 net adds this clearly was not our best quarter on the subscriber front, but it is explainable, and nothing about these results has changed our view on 2015. In fact, April was a big month for us, well ahead of last year, which of course gives us increased confidence.

You can see on the chart on the left hand side that broadband and voice additions in the quarter totaled 240,000, which means really video losses in the first few months drove most of that net add figure down. So what happened? Three things, principally.

For starters, in Germany, we experienced an impact on churn, which was largely anticipated after our recent rate increases, and we also lost an MDU contract representing about 20,000 RGUs.

The good news in Germany is that we launched a new and powerful portfolio which includes Maxdome, our SVoD series with ProSiebenSat.1 along with more HD and DVR functionality for an additional €10. This should continue to drive ARPUs which were up 7% in the first quarter, our highest uplift in almost two years. In Holland, two things hurt us.

First, we saw an increase in disconnects in the former Ziggo footprint, which occurred around the time we harmonized our network and products, not entirely unexpected; and secondly, KPN continued relatively aggressive discounting at the same time that we had some customers rolling off promotions that Ziggo had offered a year ago.

The good news in Holland is that in April, as planned, we launched our unified, marketing, branding, and product portfolio. We ramped broadband speed to 200 megabits and, of course, we launched Horizon TV across the legacy Ziggo footprint.

Now all of Holland can get app like Horizon Go, Replay TV with an EPG going back seven days, and MyPrime, our SVoD service. The merger integration is going well and we expect much better financial performance in the second half from Ziggo in part due to those synergies kicking in.

Again, the good news is that April net adds were back on track and well ahead of our net adds last year, and we're confident we can generate over 1 million net new RGUs in the full year.

If you turn to Slide 6, you will see that our confidence is built in part on the success of our next-generation video platforms like Horizon, which continue to rollout new features, new apps, and new content every quarter.

All of the performance metrics in this part of our video business is good and are helping us generating higher ARPUs, lower churn, and happier customers. Today, 18 million of our 23 million video subs are able to access either a Horizon or TiVo platforms.

In the last 12 months, we added 1 million customers to that base which now totals 3.7 million subscribers. If you see at the bottom of the slide, penetration levels by country of our next-gen products against our existing enhanced to what we used to call digital subs led by the UK where 7 out of 10 homes have a next generation box.

We've also just launched Horizon in two new markets, the Czech Republic and Poland, where we're using the new cloud-based RDK software set and the point here I think is that Horizon is setting the new standard for video in Europe, which we always expected. Horizon Go app is now live in nine countries.

Typically, it offers up to 100 linear channels most of which are available out of home and access to on-demand and catch-up content including our SVoD services like MyPrime. This is way ahead of the competition in terms of the number of streamed linear channels and the amount of on-demand content.

So I need you to get in a point, Horizon we believe is exciting our customers and that investment is paying off. We estimate an average Horizon customer can raise 20% more ARPU and churn is 15% less in a traditional enhanced video customer.

And those economics only get better as we scale the platform and launch our new cloud-based set top box next year. Switching gears, it's worth spending a few moments on mobile, which we do on Slide 7.

In addition to our 16% revenue growth in the first quarter, the biggest news is our announced acquisition of BASE in Belgium, which we believe is a unique and very attractive opportunity for Telenet.

The purchase price of €1.3 billion is just 4.2 times estimated 2015 EBITDA including synergies and the relatively small BASE business will be integrated quickly and efficiently by Telenet. Even after a one-off investment of €240 million to upgrade the capacity and quality of BASE's network and integrate the asset, the multiple is still just around 5.

Importantly, deal secures long-term access to 4G wireless capacity in Belgium on very attractive terms. Despite this deal, our primary focus to drive wireless and quad-play growth remains on MVNOs, together with our rapidly expanding pan-European Wi-Fi network.

We are now offering quad-play services in nine countries and serving 4.6 million mobile subs, excluding BASE of course, with annualized total mobile revenue with €1.4 billion. And we expect to launch 4G across all of those markets and we will keep expanding our Wi-Fi network which should get 10 million Wi-Fi spots by year-end.

I mean the punch line here is we've never been more convinced; we have the right strategy to drive mobile penetration to our fixed base.

On Slide 8, we provide a quick update on some of our other strategic drivers, beginning with our B2B business, which is making steady progress, not just in the UK where we've seen an impressive turnaround, but also on the continent. B2B revenue was up 6% in the first quarter helped by our SoHo segment which grew 17%.

This strong growth was generated in markets like The Netherlands and Germany which now represent two-thirds of SoHo sales with ARPUs ranging from $60 to $200 in products that feature 500 megabits down and 40 megabits up in the broadband space.

As part of our business, along with the investment we’re making in new products and support systems to handle more sophisticated SME customers are the core drivers going forward. As I mentioned earlier, Project Lightning in the UK is off to a great start. A lot of the work today is being focused on scaling up the build program.

We do add 36,000 new homes past in the first six weeks since we announced the project and we expect to add an additional 150,000 homes past this year, before really ramping up in 2016 and beyond. We're seeing great results on the sales side so far with penetrations in line and ARPU is higher than we budgeted.

And on top of that with essentially no money spend on marketing yet, we're getting tens of thousands of registrations through our Cable My Street website. So we continue to be very excited about this project and are actually pretty confident that the same type of newbuild opportunity exists in many of our other European markets.

I'll finish this page with a quick snapshot of Liberty 3.0, which I referenced earlier. Over the last few years, what we kind of call Liberty 2.0 we scaled the business dramatically and we achieve what we believe was industry-leading growth and value creation.

On the back of that success, we felt that there is really no better time to think about transformation as long range opportunity and from a position of strength, which means now.

Together with senior leadership, I've been working on revenue, cost, capital and organizational opportunities that will drive this next phase of growth for us, and we don't expect to announce anything concrete until late summer, but so far the results are exciting.

Our ability to realize further efficiencies across our internal/external cost base, our opportunities to drive top-line growth, and our continued focus on the Lean and entrepreneurial management structure, we think should materially enhance what are already great growth prospects.

And then, finally, talking about growth opportunities, I'll close my remarks today on Slide 9, with an update on Latin America and the upcoming LiLAC tracking stock. From an operating point of view, VTR and Puerto Rico delivered great results in the first quarter with a combined 36,000 new RGUs, 5% rebased revenue growth, and 6% OCF growth.

That’s a good start to the year especially in light of adverse FX in the quarter. We expect the tracking stock to be in trading early July. In the next few weeks, we'll announce the record and distribution dates. I'm excited about offering our investors the opportunity to own a pure-play cable platform in LatAm though really isn't anything like it.

And we know we're well-positioned to explain M&A opportunities given the fact that we've had 20 years plus of experience in the region and pretty good track record in Europe.

Before launching the tracker, we expect to close the Choice transaction in Puerto Rico at a synergy adjusted multiple of around six times, and that will give us of course an island wide footprint to drive scale efficiency there. And on the side note, we're sorry to see Mauricio Ramos move on. Many of you I'm sure are aware of that.

But I'll just point; we have tremendous talent across our footprint of 52 million homes past and 38,000 employees. So without a doubt, we won't miss a beat here.

To wrap it up, we feel much better about the underlying fundamentals of our business and perhaps these key what headline number suggest, we had a lot of issues arise all at once between January and March, but we're off to a great start to second quarter and feel really good about the full-year. So I'll now turn over to Bernie.

Bernie?.

our leverage ratios, share repurchases, and our historical borrowing cost. We ended Q1 2015 with total debt of $44.1 billion, down $2.1 billion from Q4 primarily due to the depreciation of our borrowing currencies again the U.S. dollar, partially offset by over $600 million of additional net borrowings.

At the end of the quarter, our gross and net leverage ratios stood at 4.9 times and 4.8 times respectively so within our four to five times targeted leverage.

We continue to take advantage of the attractive capital markets and refinance around $6.5 billion of debt in Q1 2015 including refinancing activity associated with the restructuring of certain of our credit pools to create regional focus to financing vehicles.

As a result of these financing transactions, our tenure and class of borrowing continued to improve as we now have an average tenure of nearly eight years while our fully swapped borrowing costs decreased 60 basis points from year-end and now sits at a record low of 5.4%.

As indicated in the graph on the far right, we've been able to improve our fully swapped borrowing cost significantly over the last four years from almost 8% in Q1 2011 to its current level.

In terms of share repurchases, we repurchased nearly $500 million of our equity in Q1 leaving approximately $3.5 billion to repurchase through the rest of 2015 and 2016. In summary, we are reconfirming our guidance targets for 2015.

The prices increases we put through in Q1, together with improved RGU performance, are expected to support our growth during the rest of 2015. We've made good progress on the innovation front and are expanding our next-gen services to more markets.

We're seeing encouraging results from our Project Lightning trials and are looking forward to the ramping of network construction in the second half of 2015. Additionally, we are excited about the coming launch of our LiLAC tracking stock in July and we remain committed to driving continued shareholder value.

With that, I will hand it back to the operator to take any questions. Thanks..

[Operator Instructions]. And we'll take our first question from Michael Bishop with RBC Capital Markets..

Hi there, it's Michael Bishop from RBC. Just a question on the $1 million RGU target.

Given the trends in the first quarter on what you've seen in April, how should we expect the mix of RGU growth to trend throughout the year? Do you expect a good improvement in the video losses or should we continue to expect the broadband and telephony to remain at these levels or slightly pickup? And can you just walk us through which markets you expect a strong turnaround and to hit the $1 million.

Thank you very much..

Well generally we don’t give that kind of detailed guidance of course on our net adds but it wouldn’t be crazy to look back on our historical growth and which markets have historically driven that growth, principally in markets like Germany, and a turnaround to some extent in Holland in the second half of the year, all those things would be a typical approach, if you were looking it for one.

Clearly the video loss figure in the first quarter was something we had not experienced in the past. So that is a focus area and we're used -- we're hoping to get back to more regular volumes in voice and broadband. So I'm really not giving anything specific because I can't.

But I would tell you that it's not going to be materially different than our past trends. And if you were to look at those either by geography or product I think you'd get pretty close..

Can I speak up really quickly on the newbuild point that you mentioned as well around other opportunities outside of the UK. Do you have any sense of the scale of the opportunities and which countries would be the easiest given the days points around Virgin with the new homes being so close to the network.

Is there any obvious country that would be next? Thanks very much..

I got to be careful because we're still doing the work. Certainly Germany, looks like a market where there are interesting and very affordable build opportunities. I wouldn’t want to quantify for you but it should be potentially could be as big or potentially even much bigger than the sort of numbers we're looking at in the UK but it's premature.

You can imagine after seeing the returns that we saw and expect to see in the UK on a project of that scale it forced us to look at other parts of the footprint. And I think the punch line is we do feel there's going to be opportunity there and when we have more specifics, you'll bet, we'll tell you about them..

We'll take our next question from Amy Yong with Macquarie..

Thanks. Questions on the Dutch market a little bit, and just drilling down on some of the growth opportunities there, potential competitive growth. Can you talk a little bit about what you see from Vodafone and their potential entrance back in the Dutch market and potentially KPN and Belgacom coming together and what that could mean? Thank you..

I'll let Diederik comment on the first one. We don't see, well we don't know anything about KPN and Belgacom coming together; you may know something we don't know. I will say that Belgacom is fairly rationale competitor for the most part and has demonstrated a certain amount of comfort in a doable environment.

So quite frankly we'll see -- I don't know who is going to own KPN in the future but we're not worried about that. We think that their behavior in during the last two to three quarters reflected relatively aggressive and probably unsustainable approach to unit growth or market share growth, in the expense of economics.

I mean adjusting for their one-off assuming there might be a negative revenue, a negative EBITDA again. So they're buying share and that's one approach. It's certainly not in our view the right approach or a sustainable approach. So who will net asset down the road, who knows, but it doesn't concern us to be honest with you.

And on the Vodafone front, do you have any details on that Diederik?.

Okay. Well, I guess with regards to Vodafone's position in residential fix, they are a, what we would say small player. I'm heavily supporting this move but relatively small and not showing I would say dramatic growth where it would be up to them to response to that. But it's a small base and that is less than 60,000 in total if that was the question..

Great. Thank you.

And how do we think about the synergies in the back half for Ziggo?.

I think the synergy; we haven't given detailed synergy estimates. But it's certainly safe to say that a €250 million, which is our reported synergy budget, 15%, 20% of that you might get in the first year. Most of that will be kicking in 2016 and 2017 and you can probably do the math on that..

And we'll take our next question from Tim Boddy with Goldman Sachs..

do you think that you may have taken too much price in some of these markets too quickly in the first part of the year compared to in the past where I think you've been a bit more cautious? Thanks again..

Yes. Good question. And on the price point, we are -- we work on that all the time and we do feel that the price increases were reasonable. And we do see competitors in some case is taking price increases not necessarily as high in all cases but taking them as well.

And we've said very clearly to you that we believe there is pricing power in these markets, but it's not a science. So we will take a 10% increase in Germany across a very large broadband base and see what happens. And then work with the data that we're given.

So it's other than the UK, which is not a science but certainly more predictable where we're able to take 5% to 7% rate increases with pretty good certainty and pretty good forecast surrounded what might happen. In other markets, it's a bit of voyage and we are learning as we go.

Having said that, we did take prices increase in 12 of our 14 markets in and around the turn of the year and in the first quarter. And so not completely unexpected to see some and we did expect by the way, some impact on churn and sales.

What's happening in April is you're seeing those rate increases bed down; you're seeing of course whatever blips may have existed taper off. And we are in a case of Germany and Holland, which represent vast majority of that number for us this quarter.

We -- as I articulated, we're seeing -- we're actually just now launching or have recently launched sort of new products. And Holland did the nationwide rebranding and launch only happened in mid-April.

So we're hopeful there that our -- in nationwide Ziggo brand with better products, with Horizon will ultimately have the impact and effect that we want. And in Germany, we continue to raise speeds and drive share and do the things that have worked in the past.

So if it is not just simply discounting and promotions, it's what we think is the longer-term product strategy bidding down and of course may be a little of that blip if there was one, tapering off..

So just to clarify you're not having to invest more to get the KPIs back on track?.

That is not the strategy. I mean we're investing what we anticipated investing. Not --.

Frank --.

Than necessarily in every case to try to drive unit. We were about profitable growth.

We are -- the reason we don't generally give RGU guidance and we have in this instance to hopefully provide some comfort is, because we're really all about profitable growth and looking at the longer-term prospect of -- in particular, operating cash flow and free cash flow growth.

So we're planning and managing the business on a slightly different horizon and quarterly results might indicate from time-to-time. And in that instance, we're not going to overspend in any particular period to compensate just because we might have had what we just experienced during the first quarter. That's not the way we normally run this company..

That's great to hear. Thanks again..

We'll take our next question from Ben Swinburne with Morgan Stanley..

Thank you. I have two questions. Mike, just thinking about 3.0 -- I don't know how much you are willing to go into detail. I realize you've got more coming later this year, but when I think about your Company your margins are already quite high, higher than anyone in the U.S.

I'm sure on procurement you've done a lot to make sure you are getting the best prices, and you've identified some new growth opportunities around mobile and B2B and newbuild.

So is 3.0 incremental stuff on top of all that? And should we be thinking about things along the line of accelerating revenue and sort of margin expansion? Any more color you can add about sort of putting that in context for us?.

Sure. I mean, I guess, I'd say to begin with, while we have been quite successful in merger integration and great we think building scale. Business in the last since three plus years, we have added a large amount of cash flow and customers into the group.

So even though we are proud of the work we've done in our merger, integration, and synergies, and we more or less either exceeded or hit every number we've articulated. We do know that there are smarter and more efficient ways to do the things that we do.

And I would say you've identified some of those areas for sure where thinks like procurement, supply chain management, network management, there are number of things we know we can do even more efficiently than we're doing them today. And we do have the people and we do think we've got the organizational resources and will to make that happen.

So it's a -- it's really a -- it's a pretty rigorous process Ben, it's not just staying back and saying that what we like to do.

We're looking at every single line item, every single internal/external spend item, benchmarking ourselves, trying to understand where the gaps might exist, why they exist, looking at processes, management processes, business processes, and putting in place what we think will be a realizable and achievable goal for -- with three or five year timeframe.

On the revenue side, if you were to have a look at our current LRP, we do not have many of the things you articulated in that current LRP because they're new. I mean Project Lightening is last thing we layered into our view of the next three to five years and it was certainly accretive.

But we haven't layered in a more aggressive approach to B2B and SoHo. We haven't layered in a more aggressive approach to mobile. We haven't layered in additional newbuild opportunity. So it's about looking at both the top-line and how we run and manage and operate our business.

Putting those together, overlaying those on top of what already think is a very attractive three to five year timeframe. I mean when I say very attractive, meaning, as good or better than we're giving you guidance this year, just because we know the rhythm and pace of our business and we feel very good about that as we look out three to five years.

So looking at that and overlaying on that the things that I've described in a really rigorous way. I don't mean to say that this is stuff we're just penciling out.

Its stuff we are working with external resources on identifying line item by line item and it's a very healthy process for us as a management team and as a company, something I think we're going to be very proud of and we also think would be accretive..

That's great. And actually, I did want to come back to the guidance for this year. I think everyone was expecting or is expecting a robust 2015 given the synergies and some of the momentum you have, particularly at Virgin where the numbers are really strong.

But you have had some things out of your control like the VAT come in and hit the numbers a bit, particularly in the UK.

Should we be thinking given Q1 that may be the lower end of mid-single is the right way to think about 2015 on rebased revenue and OCF? Or is it too early to sort of be that fine about it?.

I wouldn't want to give you, I think it's too early and I don't know if we would very much like to would give you that sort of visibility anyway. But it is definitely early I mean from us in the books..

Okay. Thank you..

We'll take our next question from Frank Knowles with New Street Research..

Yes, I had a main question on the UK and an additional one on tax efforts. Just on the UK you reported good churn but actually net adds were slightly slower both in customers and RGUs than the equivalent period last year.

So is it fair to say that the gross add environment is getting a bit tougher in the UK? And also, is that something you would expect to get more fiercer competition in the rest of the year as BT starts to move into mobile and gets to Champions League rights and spends to support that? And then the second question just on tax.

Obviously, there was sort of a reasonably big cash tax outflow in the first quarter, which I presume was mainly Telenet. Just wondered, aside from that, whether the outlook for cash taxes has sort of changed this year and may be into next? Thank you..

Sure.

Tom, you want to address the UK point?.

Yes, thanks, Mike. Particularly for us in Q1, the real issue we had was in January and to some extent in February when one of our major competitors went out with a free broadband offer that we chose not to match and that's something that in general we've never done offer free as a price point.

But I think what it meant we had particularly in January, and flowing through into February, is lower gross adds than we otherwise would have expected.

That offer since been withdrawn and the market is, was always competitive and of course we offer reasonable discounts but certainly not at that level and we've seen a correction through the second part of the quarter and into this beginning of Q2.

So we are confident that we can restore a more normal net growth trajectory and in fact we'll build on that with lightning as we move forward and will contribute significantly in the UK to the net target of the group over this full 12 months..

Okay. Charlie, you want to hit the tax point..

Yes you’re right frankly the key driver was the Telenet tax payments. So I think hopefully it's not a surprise to anyone. And we would expect that there will be some obviously shield created through the BASE acquisition.

But they will remain relatively material tax payers of this quantum over the next few years, although as I say, BASE will certainly help. We do start to see ourselves paying tax in countries like Germany, to some extent Switzerland, and in BTR.

But I think you can see the tax, as we see it going forward, will be manageable and is definitely consistent with the free cash flow targets that we've given the investors. So the tax burden will increase slightly but I wouldn't say it will be a material drag on our abilities over the free cash flow mid-teens growth that we've been targeting..

That's really helpful. Thanks.

If I could just come back on the UK just to comment may be on the second half of the year, if BT starts spending heavily on promotion around mobile and Champions League?.

We are very confident that we've got the breakthrough proposition to compete very effectively against BT. We're in a position in this industry where due to the number porting you can keep a close eye on the shifting between the operators that are also offering the home telephony.

And we consistently have a good net position vis-à-vis against vis-à-vis BT. Now in terms of them going forward it’s a long time until the deal was -- will close. So we don't see that as an issue this year. And going forward, we expect BT to continue to be the rationale operator as they have been in the past..

That’s really helpful. Thank you..

We’ll take our next question from Vijay Jayant with Evercore ISI..

Thanks.

Mike, just wanted to get your perspective on the EU's mandate of trying to get a single market for both digital and telecom? Any implications or opportunities you see broadly for Liberty Global? And second, I just wanted to -- given that you are starting to identify additional newbuild opportunities in the rest of Europe, can you sort of talk about can you do many of them at the same time, how the buyback is sacrosanct or not if you do a lot of these and sort of impact CapEx? Any color on that would be appreciated.

Thanks..

Sure, on the newbuild I think as we've demonstrated or I believe we articulated to you in the Project Lightning case. These things are somewhat self-financing meaning that the expenditure of capital is in our view there is a gap between when you spend it and as you, and when you start to generate cash flow.

But that gap is more of a working capital or bridge gap and over time the additional cash flow you’re generating from these newbuild the customers start to finance the project.

So remember what we said specifically may be Charlie or Tom can remind me, but I think we more or less indicated that Project Lightning is somewhat self-financing on its own balance sheet so to speak and does not impact certainly, I know we said this, will not impact, it does not impact the buyback as we currently forecasted it.

I would imagine that almost any newbuild opportunity we identify and chose to pursue outside of the UK would be of a similar nature, and would not materially impact our ability to maintain our approach to the capital structure.

So it's a general statement I appreciate that but I do think that if we can pull it off in a market like the UK with that kind of number and that kind of scale, we surely can do it in other instances which are likely to be smaller, individually smaller, and less material to those operations on a relative basis.

In terms of the EU regulatory framework, they're looking at certainly a single market from telecom, a telecom perspective, and a digital perspective, what does that mean? I think it means mostly good things for us.

It means that the EU is trying to look at Europe as a single market which usually indicates they're focused on level playing fields, they're focused on reducing barriers to entry across markets, they’re focused on limiting the friction that might exist when people do think that protect markets and we like that trend.

If you think about how its manifested itself for us consolidation is clearly viewed as a positive and we are one of only three or four really important European consolidators in the telecom media space, you might put the Deutsche Telekom in that position, you might put Vodafone in that position may be one or two others.

But when the dust settles there's only going to be a few of us who are going to take advantage of the single market and are going to realize the benefits and the synergies and scale opportunities that a single market provide. I do think it means in principle a slightly lighter regulatory touch which I think is a positive.

For the most part national regulators where the tension often exist between Brussels and other regulators are going to want to be thoughtful of how this is implemented and things like net neutrality are certainly flashpoints.

But on balance, the European regulatory framework is much more sensible, much more, I think economically driven, when it comes to those hot buttons if you will. And we feel very lucky at this point to be in that marketplace and I guess you read the press I’ve said enough about what's happened here.

But the point is that we do believe European regulators both at the national level and the parliament level or the Brussels level are focused on encouraging infrastructure competition, encouraging investment, and encouraging innovation in a way that's a win-win for consumers and business as opposed to one that is not balanced and clearly focused on very popular or populist type policies with no basis, the economics of the business or the strategic direction of the businesses.

Long answer but one I think should help you conclude that we feel pretty good about it and a single market focus is good for us..

We’ll take our next question from Jeff Wlodarczak with Pivotal Research Group..

Good morning, guys. Two questions -- back of the envelope I'm calculating ex one-offs sort of 4% rebased revenue and 4% rebased EBITDA growth.

Does that seem like it's in the ballpark?.

Good work, Jeff. The goody accounts and the lawyers want to encourage us not to quarter-to-quarter quantify these things for folks, because it becomes a slippery slope. But it sounds like you've got data that you’re using and that I can't comment on more than that..

Fair enough. And I guess on Telenet, the acquisition of BASE, historically you all were somewhat skeptical of owning wireless, especially if you didn't control the entire cable footprint throughout the country.

Can you talk about what changed your thinking and how that applies to potentially other large markets that you are in?.

Yes, it’s a good question.

And I do think we’ve always said and I know I’ve always said that there will be instances where our scale in the market, the size of our mobile operation, and the size of the mobile candidates, if there are acquisition candidates, all of those things combined would be important factors in determining whether we would ever own a network versus just rent a network.

And in this instance, given Telenet strong position in the Flemish market, given the fact that BASE is a relatively small business with a reasonably good network.

Given the fact that we have immediate synergies from rolling getting what is getting close to a million mobile subs on to our new network, which would be our network and the synergies associated with paying ourselves of rental fees, if you will, there are some pretty compelling economics. It’s not a strategy that we intend to deploy in every market.

I think we're clear about that. It’s not a strategy we think is necessary in every market. I'm not entirely sure what's absolutely necessary in Telenet’s case.

But when you’re presented with these opportunities and the economics and the pricing, and the overall strategic opportunity looks good when you add it all up, and we’re going to take advantage of that. And I think you’ll see that this will end up being a very, very good deal for us.

And one that fit those three criteria outlined in other market’s TBD, too soon to tell. But this one fit the bill..

We’ll take our next question from James Ratcliffe with Buckingham Research Group..

Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Two, if I could. First of all on Ziggo, you mentioned part of the subscriber pressure was lapping some pretty aggressive pricing packages from 1Q, 2014.

Does that pressure continue through the year? Were similar packages offered to customers over the course of 2014? Or does it start to taper off after 1Q? And secondly, how low can fully swapped borrowing costs go? I think Charlie said at one point if you could refi everything you would be at sort of 4.8 or something like that.

Is that level kind of still doable? And what sort of timeframe can we think about for bringing down the cost of some of the existing higher cost debt? Thanks..

On the Ziggo question I'm not aware myself of other issues or other promotions that they may have launched, Diederik, if you do know that, feel free to chime in, but while you’re thinking about that, Charlie, why don't you address the borrowing cost?.

Yes. We’ve been borrowing in the low 4s in our transaction. As you know we borrowed just on the $10 billion equivalent in Q1 through our 11 transactions. And this combination of senior and subordinated debt but the market, as you know, have been very strong and we've been achieving rates in the low 4s.

If you think that we're in the mid-5 today that still gives you pretty substantial upside. And you’re right to highlight that. The key is how quickly we can execute against that. There is two factors, one is certainly market capacity, because you can only do so much at the time and we do have the call protection on much of our debt.

So I guess all I could say is rest assure that we're highly focused on trying to give our shareholders the benefit of the reprising of our debt.

But we are obviously looking at the return on capital in relation to these call protections and as they witnessed by the issuance in Q1, we're very, very actively hitting windows as they’ve available in the market. But all things being equal, you’re right. It’s a low 4s cost of debt plays mid 5s today..

Diederik, are you on?.

Yes, I'm on, Mike. We’re not aware of methods roll-offs of further 2014 promotions. And this phenomenon is new to us and I’d say that the new portfolio, I think we're in a better position than we were in Q1 to keep these customers attracted. If they are attracted to anything else we can give them better packages.

For example, with regards to Ziggo it would be the Horizon-focused triple play. And that’s something which we were not able to do in Q1. So in Q1 we didn’t have that safety net, like we alluded to before..

We’ll take our next question from James Britton with Nomura..

Thanks. Just a question on the mobile strategy, please. I think you mentioned in the presentations that you are getting ready now to launch 4G services. So I just wondered if you still see scope of 30% plus margins on a SIM-only MVNO model in the 4G world.

Or are you happy to settle for lower margin; given it is so CapEx light? And given your confidence in the strategy, when can we really expect a big push forward on mobile growth? Thanks..

Yes. I think the, in some instances the economics of our 4G deals are visible and transparent and in others they are less transparent, even to us as we work through them.

You are right in suggesting that when a product -- when a 4G product is launched, typically there is an increase in consumption and our pricing of that 4G bandwidth is clearly critical in determining margin.

Having said that, there is a lot of moving parts in determining margin, there is price, there is bundle, there is churn, there is a whole number of things that impact our margin in mobile and it impact on our overall business.

I mean one of the reasons why we believe in the quad-play is we've proven in a place like the UK a quad-play customer churns 75% less than a regular customer. So we do know that there are benefits to the entire business, not simply the mobile margin so to speak, when you are able to offer consumers a quad-play product.

So we think Europe is a quad-play market. We do look at individual economics as you suggest. And I'm not going to walk through every market and describe that to you.

But I will say that we also look at the broader impact on our existing customer and future customer base in -- with respect to churn and retention, which is a critical component of any business like ours. And in terms of the mobile pace of growth I think now, we are just now getting going, if you will, in the other markets.

Belgium and UK are clearly our biggest markets and have been and will continue to be. But with recent launches across our consolidated mobile platform happening across several other markets now nine total, you should expect that we will be pushing those products more aggressively.

So I think starting now over the next 18, 24 months you're going to see the mobile piece certainly become a bigger part of our growth..

Are you able to say where you are going to be offering 4G in 2015?.

Well, we had -- I'm not Balan, if you're on Balan?.

Yes. I'm on. Well, we'll certainly come out in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium and in the UK we now just looking at the right time effect..

Great. Thanks very much..

And we'll take our final question from Matthew Harrigan with Wunderlich Securities..

Well thank you. Two questions -- one, Balan, on the CTO panel at INTX, really talked to how amicable and win-win the relationships are for the broadcasters now on catch up, doing a lot of unicast and random-access programming. I'm sure curious going forward, I mean, if you do more of that, you get 4K coming along which probably won't be simulcast.

Are you pretty comfortable that you have the latitude to manage your capital budget? These ROIs in the UK on Project Lightning and all that are wonderful but do you think there could be some wildcards on the CapEx side? And secondly, in the U.S.

now everybody is really excited about the set-top box measurement and advertising insertion -- targeted advertising. I mean you've pretty much been nil in that area on the advertising side.

But if your network, being among the best in the world, it seems like back to be a really nice high-margin layer to add on over a period of time?.

Hi Matt. Yes, good questions. On the advanced advertising side, funny enough, we -- well, I think we're four months into a project with the dedicated team now based in Amsterdam, focused on big data and events advertising for us. Looking at what's happening everywhere in the world, particularly in the U.S.

but also some markets we have launched a couple of markets and are -- we do generate a small amount of advertising revenue.

But I will tell you that over the -- this is another example of a slice of our business that is you indicate has been unexploited, where we know feel with really a modest amount of resource we can start to take advantage of the 50 billion hours of television data we have and the billions and billions of DNS clicks every day to do in an appropriate and consumer friendly way, start to generate some revenue with partners, particularly advertisers who are looking to improve the performance of their traditional add businesses.

So answer is yes, we are on it. I could not have said that six months ago or even four months ago. But we are on it today and we think there is some interesting opportunity there and we intend to take advantage of it. Balan, do you want to speak to the CapEx point.

It sounds like the question that is, with 4K, with -- or intense use of the broadband infrastructure, will -- are we specked property, do we have the --.

Yes..

Bandwidth "over the next three to five years" I ask that question pretty much every month. And the answer I get is fairly positive, because we are thinking way ahead, we're not thinking about next quarter. But go ahead Balan, if you want to add any color to that..

Sure. Yes. Over the next five years LRP, we've put in a plan to mange against the capacity growth that we see as the holistic trend that we've seen over the last couple three years, which is pretty aggressive. But we are doing some work for Mike on looking at -- what if it gets even more aggressive than that.

Even with more traffic going on demand -- both from cloud because of your PVR as well as increased DOD usage. We think we’ve got that covered as well through a whole bunch of different ways, not just throwing capital at the problem.

And finally on 4K, when we launched 4K, we would use an encoding called HEVC which would drop the actual bit rate for 4K back to the same levels of HD. So we think yes, there will be some incremental capital for increased usage if it goes way beyond where we are. But as of now we're pretty comfortable where the numbers are..

Everyone enjoyed your FCC comments by the way Mike, thanks again..

Okay. I’m doing my small part. Anyway, listen that sounds like our last question, so I’m glad we set aside a bit more time than usual to get to your questions, they are all very good and we’re happy to answer them.

We are focused on the full year as you’d expect us to be and we think there are lot of really good things happening in our business strategically, operationally, and financially, and as usual and as always appreciate your support and we’ll talk to you soon particularly on our second quarter. Thanks everybody, have a great day..

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes Liberty Global's first quarter 2005 results investor call. As a reminder, a replay of the call will be available in Investor Relations section of Liberty Global's website at www.libertyglobal.com. There you can also find a copy of today's presentation material..