Vodafone’s dismal Trumpian results statement gets at F

Even the group’s incomprehensible ‘alternative performance measures’ quoted in the wake of a £6.6bn loss and 40 per cent dividend cut weren’t up to much

Vodafone is in the red like the corporate colours but the company says customers should be excited about 5G (Reuters)

Amid all the asterisks, notes and small print in Vodafone’s Trumpian crazy results statement, there must somewhere be the accounting for a handsome payment to the Kellyanne Conway school of public relations.

How else to explain the company’s transparently terrible attempts to blow thick smoke at the reality of a multi-billion loss.

Voders didn’t quite stoop to the level of the “alternative facts” the presidential counsellor once referred to during an infamous TV appearance. It would be in deep doo doo if it had done so. By contrast to politicians and their shills, the rules governing what companies can and can’t say are rather strict.

But we were offered some “alternative performance measures” instead. There, we were told, are “non GAAP measures that are presented to provide readers with additional financial information”.

GAAP measures, for the record, are those that comply with “generally accepted accounting principles”.

You won’t be surprised to learn that the ones that don’t, looked rather more favourable to the company than the ones that do.

The trouble is, it seems the people who write Vodafone’s statements failed to pay sufficient attention when they were at Kellyanne school.

If such a place existed, it’s star lecturer would no doubt stress the importance of keeping it simple if you’re going to try and create an alternative narrative to the gloomy reality you face. The company’s results would get an F on that front were they to be submitted as coursework. The “alternative performance measures” included “group service revenue”, “adjusted EBTIDA” and “free cash flow pre-spectrum”.

We may have cut, sorry, “rebased” the dividend by 40 per cent in an attempt to reduce our debt mountain, gone into the red to the tune of £6.6bn chiefly as a result of selling off businesses at a loss, and watched sales declining, but just look at the adjusted EBITDA. Isn’t it pretty? Yowza!

Except that it wasn’t all that sparkly. Even that “alternative performance measure” was on the slide. But, hey, the free cash flow pre-spectrum grew a bit. So there’s that.

Voders has also launched 5G and it’s fab. It’s never a bad idea to have something that might generate at little positive coverage when you know the financial pages are going to have you reaching for the sick bag. At least the company got that right.

“The future is exciting. Ready?”

This is presumably part of what’s referred to as “deepening customer engagement”.

Maybe therein lies the key to the revival of this one-time titan that has been falling down the corporate pop charts for some time and is now out of a FTSE top ten that’s depressingly dominated by natural resources companies.

Maybe if it starts to climb back up it’ll find a way to talk about how it’s done it in something other than corporate gobbledygook that no one outside of a professor of obfuscation could make much sense of.

But I wouldn’t bank on it.

“We are executing our strategy at pace and have achieved our guidance for the year, with good growth in most markets but also increased competition in Spain and Italy and headwinds in South Africa,” said CEO Nick Read.

Five minutes reading through that sort of tosh and even the Donald’s dismal twitter feed suddenly starts to look appealing. Back to school with you, Mr Read.