Results for the four quarter and year to March 05

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7 May 2015

BT GROUP PLC

RESULTS FOR THE FOURTH QUARTER AND YEAR

TO 31 MARCH 2015 BT Group plc (BT.L) today announced its results for the fourth quarter and year to 31 March 2015.

Gavin Patterson, Chief Executive, commenting on the results, said:

It's been a ground-breaking year for BT, in which we've made some key decisions and announced some major investments to underpin the future growth of the business. Profit before tax and free cash flow have both grown strongly and we have delivered or beaten the outlook we set at the start of the year.

Our superfast broadband network now passes more than three-quarters of the UK and we've announced plans to upgrade to ultrafast. This will be another multi-year investment by Openreach and is the right thing for both BT and the UK, providing even faster speeds in an already competitive market. We delivered our best ever performance for fibre connections in the fourth quarter with Openreach adding almost half a million premises to our network. Our retail business delivered a record-breaking 266,000 of these connections.

Shareholders approved our proposed £12.5 billion acquisition of EE last week. While we await regulatory approval, we have pushed ahead with our own mobility plans, launching our great value BT Mobile consumer service in March.

Our BT Sport TV channels are now in more than 5.2 million homes, with the customer base growing again in the quarter. We're pleased to have secured FA Premier League football rights for a further three years, and an extension with Aviva Premiership Rugby for four more years. With exclusive live football from the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League, we'll be showing even more top sporting action from this summer.

For our business customers, we launched a number of innovative services this year including BT Assure Threat Defence, BT One Phone and BT Cloud Voice. And while in the UK public sector trading remains tough, we continue to see good growth in Asia and the Middle East.

We will continue to deliver on our investments and improve the service we provide to our customers. This year we recruited 2,500 new engineers and more than 500 new agents into our UK contact centres, with over 500 new apprentices across the group. Each of our customer-facing lines of business made improvements in service this year. We have increased the speed of service delivery, repaired faults faster and fixed more customer issues first time. But we recognise we're not yet where we want to be and this will continue to be a priority for us.

We made further progress with transforming our costs, contributing to a 6% decline in operating costs4 in the fourth quarter. We've reorganised our business, increased productivity and streamlined our processes.

Our performance during the year is reflected in our full year dividend, which is up 14%. Our results and the investments we are making position us well for the future and enable us to increase our free cash flow outlook for the coming year.

1 Before specific items

2 Excludes specific items, foreign exchange movements and the effect of acquisitions and disposals

3 Before specific items, pension deficit payments and the cash tax benefit of pension deficit payments

4 Excludes specific items, transit costs, foreign exchange movements and the effect of acquisitions and disposals and is before depreciation and amortisation

LINK:	http://www.btplc.com/News/Articles/ShowArticle.cfm?ArticleID=B2EF0C4A-...
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