Vodafone Group Public Limited Company

Now, Telstra is the first, and I'm expecting now that Telstra has done it.

This is going to kind of put light a flame underneath Optus and Vodafone, and hopefully they'll run out their own respective RCS rollouts as well.

Telstra is going to roll out RCS for Android customers on November 16th.

iOS customers, these are Telstra customers, will be able to use RCS after the December iOS release.

So by the end of this year, Telstra customers will have RCS in place.

So whether you're texting or receiving from Android to iPhone, there's going to be messaging equality.

And as I said, Optus and Vodafone, let's get the party started and get this happening as well.

So I think probably the security is the part that is of most interest to me and the fact that you can now receive your images in the full freight of what you've sent and also the security, as I mentioned already, security, the file size, all of that, I think that's going to be a win for customers.

you one example

as to what attracted me to join Vodafone as my last employer so this is the company I spent eight years working for and I left them just over four years ago so when I was having and by the way I was not looking for a role funnily enough when they approached me and we had this conversation with the group CHRO at the time Ronald Skelligan he wasn't looking to hire and I wasn't looking to to join and so it was just a conversation among senior HR leaders.

And what really emerged as part of our conversation was obviously doing a bit of homework to learn more about Vodafone because I knew nothing about the company.

All I knew is that he was interested in this project that I had led when I was working for Roche at the time.

So he wanted to learn more about the project and the findings and all that.

So He, you know, and I had this very nice conversation.

They flew me to London from Basel and he and I spent an hour and a half just talking about the project and this and that.

Then he said, and you know, let me take five minutes or so to introduce Vodafone to you.

you one example

as to what attracted me to join Vodafone as my last employer so this is the company I spent eight years working for and I left them just over four years ago so when I was having and by the way I was not looking for a role funnily enough when they approached me and we had this conversation with the group CHRO at the time Ronald Skelligan he wasn't looking to hire and I wasn't looking to to join and so it was just a conversation among senior HR leaders.

And what really emerged as part of our conversation, I was obviously doing a bit of homework to learn more about Vodafone because I knew nothing about the company.

All I knew is that he was interested in this project that I had led when I was working for Roche at the time.

So he wanted to learn more about the project and the findings and all that.

So He, you know, and I had this very nice conversation.

They flew me to London from Basel and he and I spent an hour and a half just talking about the project and this and that.

Then he said, and you know, let me take five minutes or so to introduce Vodafone to you.

That was my first experience working overseas, working in Asia, and at the time was becoming China-focused.

I was also fortunate to have the opportunity to work at SoftBank when they did the Vodafone acquisition in 2006, which was my first real experience in Asia.

After that, I moved to Barclays Global Investors to be a deal lawyer.

They found that they were doing a lot of transactions.

So they were purchasing a mutual fund in Mexico or selling a trust bank in Japan, which is not the bread and butter of an investment management lawyer.

I got to take my seven years of corporate deal practice and bring it in-house at value without the hours of the law firm required.

How does that translate? Before you're doing Vodafone and these corporate deals, doing acquisition of fund complexes, how analogous is that?

It's the mindset of a deal lawyer where you've got a project, it's got to get done on time for various reasons.

Ever.

Like, you know, there's sometimes we, like, I remember doing Paddy Power, when it was Vodafone at the time.

And he'd go, oh, something's been said.

I want to do a joke.

And, you know, there was this presentation, if I just start on that, there was a panel discussion hosted by Gabriel Brown about, it was called Shaping the 6G Era for Vision to Sustainable Networks.

So involved the big European operators and NGNM as well, who you all know, so Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telus, Vodafone.

And they were talking about the, they're having to now, by the end of November, nail down migration path to 6G.

That's supposedly a big discussion.

So owning a share within a company.

So whether that be Amazon, Google, Tesco, Vodafone, whoever it may be, without you having to go and choose what you're doing within your tax wrapper.

whether he has a pension and all the others, is handing them over to a fund that is looked after by a or multiple fund managers whose sole job it is to, within your tolerance of risk, grow that money.

They'll have a team of analysts that sit there all day, every day, just analysing different stocks.

We're a B2B, B2C and a wholesale company.

We wholesale partner with people like Vodafone and TalkTalk, who are the bigger brands in the UK.

And we are growing incredibly quickly.

So I joined the company back around about five years ago, coming up to five years ago now.

Question number three.

A Queensland Vodafone customer logged a massive 106-hour single phone call that spanned four and a half days, setting a new network record.

Who were they talking to? I have no idea.

We'll find out more on that.