Bouygues EN
Q4 2012 Earnings Call Transcript

Vincent Maulay - Oddo Securities: Vincent Maulay, Oddo. I have two questions on the Telecom's business. First, on the network sharing. Vivendi seems to be open to the concept. What would stand in the way of an agreement with the Bouygues Telecom? What about the guidance for a stable EBITDA? What are the assumptions underlying that target? That seems a bit ambitious in view of the significant price cuts you'll have to have this year?

Unidentified Company Speaker: On network sharing, let me remind you that in the autumn, the French government asked the Competition Authority to rule on two issues, roaming and network sharing. The competition authority and I would like to salute the very important ruling of the competition authority on the net against France Telecom and that's an essential issue for us. So the competition authority has investigated this issue, has held hearings of all the operators and all the stakeholders including the telecoms operators over the past few days and will be handing down its ruling in the next two weeks. Clearly, that ruling is going to be absolutely fundamental for the development of the mobile telephony markets in France. That ruling, as I said, is going to be decisive in the future of the market. Therefore, we are, of course, very attentive to what's going to be said. They were going to be giving a ruling on roaming and on network sharing as I said earlier on. On network sharing, I think things have to be very clear. Networks can only be shared if that means that price is going to cut for consumers. But it has to be done so that new economic imbalances are created of the type we've had in the past. In other words, this can only be done between operators that have similar networks in terms of size, otherwise we would return to the imbalances that we are suffering from at the moment. So that's what I can say at the moment. To say that we are (impermeable) to all that is wrong. We are open, yes, why not, but as long as the rules of the game are clear, they have to be sound and they can't create economic imbalances between the operators. I think we've suffered enough from those in the past and it's time that that comes to an end, but things have to be done in the future more rationally, more objectively ,the aim is not to favor this or that operator. The aim is to ensure that consumers, all consumers of all operators benefit, but what we also want to do of course is we need to secure operators and networks. There are several parallel networks and we can't forget that issue either. To answer your question on EBITDA stability, what we have said is that we have a 2013 plan for Bouygues Telecom that we are working on. I can't say any more about that today. We said we would implement a plan in 2012. We did exactly as we said it would and trust us to do the same in 2013. We believe that we're on the right track. Bouygues Telecom, let me remind you has completely re-engineered itself at the beginning of 2012, so we lost no time in tackling these issues very decisively at that time and that has few advantages. Olivier did you want to add something? Just a few figures because I think this will be of interest to the analysts, just to give you some very simple figures, you will see that fall in revenue that we are announcing EUR376 million in that fall. There is a share of the fall in core termination rates of EUR170 million with no impact on EBITDA, that leaves us EUR188 million. We secured EUR300 million in full year, so that's EUR188 million minus EUR149 million, so if you subtract that as well, we do have a work – we have work of transformation that we are continuing and which is underway. Next question please?