Excellent. Hey, thanks Ian and good morning everyone. It's great to be back here at the CEO Connect conference. I'll just start by saying I'm joining you from the land of the Wurundjeri and the Burrung peoples of the Kulin nation. I pay my respects to their elders past and present. Telstra does have one of the largest shareholder registers in the country, and we really value opportunities to engage. A massive thank you to everyone for their continued support. In May, we announced our new Connected Future 30 strategy, and in August, we shared our financial results for the year ending 30 June 2025. I'll provide a bit of an overview of that. Before I do, just briefly on the disclaimer slide, which is very, very small font, but I'll assume that you can read that.
I just thought it would be worthwhile giving a bit of an overview of the company. Always, always useful. We operate the best, largest, and most reliable mobile network, with almost 25 million retail mobile services and around 265 stores across Australia, which we own. Outside of Australia, we're in over 30 countries and territories, and we're one of the largest subsea players for subsea cables, intra-Asia. We're a leader in digital infrastructure with our optical fiber network across Australia, equivalent to around seven times the distance between Melbourne and Sydney and London return. We're building the new inner city fiber network right now, which will support low latency, high capacity connectivity in the country as the country prepares for the needs of the AI era.
We're a big believer that there is no version of the future that doesn't rely on connectivity that we and others provide, and with our leading mobile and digital services. We've continued to invest in our mobile network, digital infrastructure, and in bringing the latest technology to our customers. I'll call out a few of the highlights. In FY25, we reached 3 million square kilometers of mobile coverage, reaching 99.7% of Australia's population. We also expanded our 5G network to cover 95% of the population. Over the past seven years, we have invested $12.4 billion in mobiles nationally, with $4.7 billion of this invested in regional areas. We've committed an additional $800 million over four years within our business as usual CapEx to extend our network leadership and deliver Australia's most advanced and resilient and reliable 5G experience. At the same time, we're optimizing how we use spectrum.
This included the closure of our 3G network in the year so that we could redeploy that spectrum to further improve 5G services with flow-on benefits to 4G. We continue to progress on our inner city fiber network build with more than 4,400 kilometers of fiber in the ground. In June, we switched on our first route, Sydney to Canberra coastal, and more routes will be progressively switched on over the next 12 months. Also, in June, we launched Australia's first satellite-to-mobile text messaging product. This is an important step forward for remote areas, and we're seeing around 90,000 devices connect to our satellite-to-mobile service on average per day. We're excited to explore how we can bring further services to our customer as this technology evolves. We announced a joint venture with Accenture to help accelerate our data and AI roadmap.
We recognize that to remain a leader in connectivity, we need to be a leader in AI, and we're focused on reaching our customer experience and network ambitions even faster. We're also investing in the resilience of our assets from power failures. We upgraded more than 800 sites across the country with batteries, solar generators, and improved monitoring and security, meaning customers can stay connected for longer when the power goes out. For customers, while there's always more to do to improve the experience for them, I'm pleased to say we have achieved a 15-point improvement in our episode NPS over the last four years. Digitization has been a big contributor to improved customer experience and to cutting customer complaints by more than 70% since FY21.
To that end, we've almost completed the migration of our consumer customers to the new digital stack, with the remaining 150,000 customers to be migrated in this half. We have also increased the price of some of our products and services so that we can continue to improve our network and deliver for customers. We're committed to offering our customers a range of options at different price points and flexibility to choose what's best for them. We also provided assistance for those who need it. Over the last four years, we've helped keep, on average, more than 1 million customers connected in vulnerable circumstances each year. We know cybersecurity remains a concern for our customers, and scammers are evolving fast. We're evolving to invest in technology and partnerships to help protect our customers and make the digital world safer.
This includes expanding our scam indicator partnership with Commonwealth Bank to include fraud indicator, the introduction of a Scam Protect alert to alert mobile customers to suspicious incoming calls, and our Cleaner Pipes network, which continues to block millions of scam calls, texts, and emails from reaching our customers. This is a constantly evolving space, and we know we can't block every single scam call or text. We want to help our customers and their families stay safe from scammers as well as stay online. I encourage everyone to visit the online safety and wellbeing hub on our website for resources to help protect you and your family from harmful online content and scams. Everyone has a role to play, and we do need to work together to make sure we can create an even more secure and trustworthy environment.
As we look to the future, there's a lot that gives us confidence. We're excited about the opportunities as demand for connectivity continues to grow. Our core connectivity business is strong with a unique set of competitive advantages that mean we are well placed to lead through this next period of change. Our ambition is to be the number one choice for connectivity in Australia, and to do this, we know we need to work hard to deliver even better products and services to our customers every single day, and that is our commitment. Finally, our financial guidance for FY26. This guidance reflects new cash earnings metrics that we introduced as part of our Connected Future 30 strategy. Underlying EBITDA has been replaced by underlying EBITDA after lease amortization or EBITDAL, reflecting a broader measure of costs.
We're also guiding on cash EBIT in FY26, which is made up of underlying EBITDAL, business as usual CapEx, and spectrum amortization, and it drives a focus across all these costs in our business. Our FY26 cash EBIT guidance range of $4.55 billion to $4.75 billion implies growth of 5.5% to 10% on FY25, demonstrating the cash generation of our operating business. BAU CapEx of $3.2 billion to $3.5 billion demonstrates our disciplined approach to CapEx, and strategic investment of $0.3 billion to $0.5 billion reflects the continued rollout of our inner city fiber network. Under Connected 30, we will drive long-term shareholder value in three ways. First, and most importantly, the growth of core business cash flow. Secondly, through disciplined portfolio and investment management to optimize returns.
Three, capital management as we maintain balance sheet strength and flexibility to deliver a growing dividend and buybacks and reduce shares on issue via credit buybacks. With that, I'm happy to hand it back to Ian for some Q&A. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. Great insight to Telstra as always. Early on, we had a couple of questions come through around about the buyback, and you sort of finished up on your capital management strategies and what have you. The questions are, if you're buying back capital, don't you need it? I can't just see the opportunities to invest it elsewhere to get a reasonable return. Yeah.
That's a great question. That's how we think about our capital management strategy when we sit down each half and go through dividend and capital management with the board. We will start with what is the outlook on the investment horizon and where do we see those opportunities and what are the returns. We then look at our liquidity, and we do have a strong balance sheet. Our EBITDA to net debt for this year was 1.9, well within our range of 1.75 to 2.25. That gives us considerable capacity and flexibility to trade off between the opportunities for investment versus a buyback. We absolutely look at that, and we have the capacity to do both, but we will be very disciplined on ensuring that the investments we make, we are confident that we can get those returns.
We will prioritize keeping the balance sheet ABAN rated and that balance sheet strength and flexibility. We recently just raised some more debt over the last week or placed some more debt over the last week, and we got a lot of confidence from that. It's absolutely a trade-off. We do see opportunities for investment, and we will continue to invest, but we'll be very disciplined on those returns.
Over time, this should have a positive effect on share price. I'm imagining fewer shares on issue, greater demand for those.
Yep. Sorry.
There's a couple of questions around share price, but in terms of benchmarking your performance, what sort of organization would you benchmark Telstra against? Is it an IT business? Is it purely a telco business, or is it media and other communications?
Yeah, no, we tend to benchmark ourselves against the telecommunications peers around the world. I mean, I think a very important part of our Connected Future 30 strategy is we see ourselves as a telco. In those sort of three layers, we see ourselves as a big investor in underlying digital infrastructure that supports not just us, but many others across the industry, including telcos, but also hyperscalers and others. We very much benchmark ourselves against telcos both here and around the world.
You put a lot of time into this talking about scams and protection and all the methods you're putting in place to prevent this happening. There's a couple of questions about that, which I think you've answered during your presentation. Here's one, here's a real outsider one. Have you any idea where these are coming from? We don't believe they're coming from within Australia, I guess is the real question.
Yeah, I mean, they're coming. There is some very, look, I think there's a few things. It's definitely a global, let me call it a business, the business of scamming people, and it's a global business. Many of the scammers are incredibly organized and run that scam activity like a business. We are, and I'll use the word competing, combating, with very smart, organized, and well-resourced adversaries coming from all around the world. Australia and other wealthy economies are targets. Yeah, absolutely, they're coming from everywhere. Our experience is that they're often very organized, very well-resourced, and it's why all of us need to make sure that our industries are sustainable so that we can continue to invest to keep up with those well-resourced adversaries.
There's one last question if we can finish on this one, Michael. I'll be an opportunity to round about short-term goals for the financial year. You talked about D25, which I think we heard from Andy Penn way back and Vicki Brady when she became CEO as well. You've now transitioned into Connected Future 30. Are you looking at things in a step-by-step way within Future 30?
No, we absolutely are. We wanted to set some longer-term goals this time. It's a slightly longer-term strategy than we had in T25. We have very specific guidance out for FY26, and we have those broad ambitions out to FY30. We're absolutely thinking through those steps towards how we get to FY30. We are a telecommunications industry with a telecommunications business with a very strong digital infrastructure base and a strong annuity business across many parts of our portfolio. That's how we think about the business. It's steady growth, steady improvement, steady delivery over that period towards those longer-term goals in for CF30 and FY30.
Great. Thank you for joining us today and giving us that insight. There have been a few more questions coming late in the piece, which we'll get across to you as well for a little bit later.
Thank you so much, Iain. Thank you, everyone.