[Non-English content] and welcome to our half yearly result announcements for FY 2021. I'm JB Rousselot, the CEO of Chorus, and I'm joined by David Collins, our CFO. As usual, we'll start the webcast by a quick overview of some of the numbers and the trends that we've experienced in the first six months. David will take us through the detailed financials, our guidance, and some latest updates on the regulatory framework that we're experiencing. Finally, I'll come back and talk more broadly about the broadband market, some of the initiatives that we have for the following six months, and also update you on some of our other strategic focus. Of course, we'll have time for Q&A. Let's start with the key numbers for the half. This has been another complex period for us as we start seeing some of the COVID-19 impact on our business. Fiber is performing well, with fiber connections up another 62,000 over the last six months, and fiber uptake in our UFB area reaching now 63%. We have seen a catch-up in copper line reductions following the very stable period that we experienced during the lockdown period late last year. These reductions were largely the continuous migration of customers on legacy copper products, especially in non-Chorus UFB areas. We're also seeing some impact from COVID-19 on overall migration and the impact on broadband demand, and also on price sensitivity, in particular in the business segment. Mobile network operators are also trying to reduce costs. As a result, they've been pushing inertia selling of fixed wireless. The combination of all these factors saw a reduction of about 46,000 fixed line connections during the six months, and about 23,000 of those were broadband lines. EBITDA for the six months was NZD 323 million, net profit after tax was NZD 24 million. David will give us a lot more details on those numbers, we'll also touch upon our ongoing effort on the cost line. Finally, we've confirmed a fully imputed interim dividend of NZD 0.105, up from NZD 0.10 for the same period last year. Now, the UFB rollout is at 92% completion. Uptake in our UFB area has grown from 60% to 63% in the six months. We now have 813,000 fibre connections. About one and a quarter million customers are now able to connect to fibre. 79% of our broadband connections in the half are now on fibre services with only 100,000 VDSL and 100,000 ADSL customers still on copper services. In the half, we completed 90,000 fibre installs, and we've managed to do this with an 8.2 customer satisfaction index, which is an increase to the 8.1 that we experienced last year. Finally, our field crews have increased back to levels that were reflective of pre-COVID activity, and as a result, we've also seen a reduction in the work in progress, given the activity that we're doing. We also continue to see strong fibre uptake growing right across the UFB1 footprint, and this is the footprint that we completed in November last year. We're now at 66% across that footprint. Invercargill is leading the way in terms of fibre uptake, but most importantly, Auckland, which is our largest market, continues to grow and reached 72% uptake in the last six months. As a proportion of our broadband connections in the Auckland area, now fibre represents 87% of our broadband connections. The strongest rates of growth were in areas such as Waiheke Island and Wellington at Kāpiti areas. In Waiheke, we think that we're seeing the increasing demand from consumers to adopt fibre services in a working from home type of environment. The encouraging thing for us with the Wellington Kāpiti area is this is an area that is also serviced by the HFC network, and to see strong fibre uptake in this area is really encouraging. Finally, we typically see in December a reduction in fibre connections linked to universities shutting down. You can see that playing out in the Dunedin numbers. We also know that in the next quarters, the students will be back, and we'll see those connections come back. Demand for the gigabit plans have continued to grow, and it now reaches 17% of our connections. During the six months, we added 21,000 1 Gb connections. To give you an illustration, over the last few weeks, about 30% of our net new fibre adds were 1 Gb products. The majority of the fibre connections continue to be on the 100 Mbps service, and that now represents just under 70% of our connections. The small business fibre plans that we introduced last year are also starting to gain momentum. Over the last six months, we've added 8,000 of those connections. From a pricing perspective, as part of our COVID-19 response, we delayed the CPI increase of fibre prices until October, and we even reduced the 1 Gb price in July. In the copper space, the annual regulated increase of our copper broadband services was applied in December with an increase of NZD 0.62 to just under NZD 43. As I mentioned earlier, we're seeing some ongoing effects of COVID-19 impacting the overall broadband market and our connections. This isn't particularly strong when you look at these Stats NZ data on net migration into New Zealand. What usually was about a 6,000 net migration per month has virtually been brought back to zero since the border closure in March. This means that we're no longer getting the same tailwind in demand that we were enjoying from population growth to help offset connection losses in non-Chorus fiber areas. Also, as we noted last year, COVID restrictions has affected the number of international students coming into the country and has an impact on broadband demand. It is unclear yet how many of those students will be able to come back in 2021. Despite the effect of migration, there is still something of a building boom given the current low interest rate environment that we face. We see this driving continued demand for new property development. As you can see from the Stats NZ data, much of that demand is happening in the Auckland area, with residential consents growing each year. Now, clearly, there is a lag between the consent being granted and the property being built. This is creating a very strong pipeline of activity for us. The trends that we're seeing are not as strong in the business segment. In the months since lockdown, business consumer are exhibiting some strong price sensitivity. Some of them have downgraded to more basic products. There is also a slowdown in the demand for premium products such as direct fiber. You can see the combinations of all of these trends playing out across each of our three areas. In the local fiber company areas, the LFC areas or the non-Chorus areas, the trends in the half are back to similar trends that we were experiencing pre-COVID-19. The same applies in our non-UFB areas, where fiber connections have grown from 20,000 to 24,000 over the period, partially offsetting some of the losses to fixed wireless competition. In our UFB area, copper voice reductions are consistent with pre-COVID trends, broadband has reduced in the half, part of that is triggered by the net migration impact, international student, and fixed wireless inertia selling that I've mentioned earlier. I'll talk more about some of these when I come back, but in the meantime, let's get David to take us through some of the detailed financials. Thank you, JB. Good morning, everybody. It's good to be with you today. Starting with our income statement. We are reporting EBITDA today of NZD 323 million for the half. Calling out some of the key trends. Revenue continues to see the benefit of fibre connections growing and ARPU growth, but is also seeing an ongoing loss of copper voice lines and copper broadband lines in LFC areas. Our expenses line is reducing, and we would expect that to continue as we transition from build to operate. Looking at the depreciation line, depreciation is growing in line with the continued investment in our network, both in terms of communal build and installations CapEx. We would expect that to continue whilst those projects or programs are completed or start to taper off in the case of installations. Looking at interest expense, interest is falling in line with the refinancing program of our business. We refinanced the GBP bond in April of this year, and as a result of that, along with a couple of other initiatives during the year, our weighted average interest rate has fallen to around 4% for the half, which compares to 5.2% for full year 2020. Looking at income tax, our effective tax rate is about 35% for the half. It's higher than the corporate tax rate due to the treatment of Crown infrastructure interest and also amortization of Crown funding. It's also important to note that in half two full year 2020, there was a one-off benefit for the reintroduction of building depreciation. There was a benefit in half two 2020. Looking at revenue specifically, revenue has come in at NZD 473 million, so down NZD 10 million on the prior corresponding period. The key trends here are growth in fibre connections. We're up to 813,000 fibre connections across the business. Growth in ARPU, as you can see on the slide, driven by the 1 Gb product uptake, which is up to around 17% of our product mix, and also CPI changes during the half. Copper, on the other hand, we see a continuation of previous trends in terms of voice and copper broadband losses. Looking at a few of the other key revenue lines, field services revenue down a little bit due to copper chargeable maintenance starting to diminish. Greenfield revenues remain strong for our business. Looking at expenses. Expenses are flat versus the prior corresponding period. We would expect, looking forward, that our expenses in total would reduce for our business. A couple of key call-outs. Labor. Labor, we had an impact of redundancy costs in the period of about NZD 1 million. We have reduced our labor line, and looking forward, we would expect that to continue as we transition from build to operate. Whilst our total FTEs are actually slightly higher, most of those increases are capital in nature and are to support our managed migration and installation program. Network maintenance, I'll talk more about on the next slide. That have been impacted by weather during the period and the mix of work that we've undertaken. Other network costs, pretty much flat period against the prior corresponding period. Noting that half two full year 2020 had the impact of serco support payments, which we made to support our sercos. IT spend, we've called out some copper electronics decommissioning costs, in the exchange buildings, and consultant costs is more of a timing issue around regulatory costs. More specifically on to maintenance and looking at our reactive maintenance spend. Of our total maintenance bill of NZD 34 million, roughly NZD 31 million is reactive maintenance. This is the same slide that we show each period. Broadly, when you look at fibre, the trajectory continues with growth in fibre maintenance costs, albeit the half two the full year 2020 was impacted and depressed by the COVID impact in that period of time. With copper maintenance specifically, whilst copper volumes are diminishing, we did see the impact of inclement weather in the half, and also the mix of jobs that we completed were higher cost in nature, so the average cost per fault was higher. Overall, the trend in maintenance continues, and that is a fall in copper maintenance and a lift in fibre maintenance cost as our footprint expands and as the number of installations grows. Moving on to CapEx. We report gross CapEx of NZD 353 million for the half, of which about 85% is fibre in nature. The UFB2 communal spend was worth NZD 86 million in the period. We have accelerated that build in conjunction with our sercos and have brought forward some CapEx on UFB2 communal from future periods, which we think is a really positive move for us strategically. The bulk of our CapEx spend was, of course, on installations at some NZD 146 million, and that's supporting 90,000 or 70,000 installations in UFB1 and 20,000 in UFB2. Importantly, on the other fiber connections and growth line, included in that is the West Coast fibre build project, which as a reminder, is government-funded, or at least the majority of it is government-funded. Lastly, customer retention costs continue to grow, supporting our efforts in market to push fiber and grow our fiber footprint. Looking specifically at fiber connections and layer 2, the NZD 146 million spend on installations was mostly driven by 90,000 connections for SDUs, or single dwelling units. Cost per premises connected for both UFB1 and UFB2 was within our guidance range. We are seeing slightly lower volumes on premium business and backbone due to MDUs. Layer 2 spend is a little higher, which is mostly a timing impact as we've sought to bring forward some electronics expenditure to manage any potential COVID supply risk. Looking at copper and common CapEx, key thing to call out here is copper CapEx continues to fall, as it has been in prior periods. Common CapEx is relatively stable or flat across the periods. Sustaining CapEx is an important metric that we focus on each period. We define sustaining CapEx in accordance with our dividend policy in place from full year 2022. We report NZD 93 million of sustaining CapEx for the period, which is consistent with our overall message to the market in terms of the steady state sustaining CapEx of NZD 200 million per annum going forward for our business. Fiber, of course, will grow over time, and copper will diminish over time as connections fall. Moving on to guidance. Starting with EBITDA, we've reiterated our EBITDA guidance at NZD 640 million- NZD 660 million for the period. You will recall that we allowed, in setting that guidance range, an impact for COVID of NZD 10 million. We've seen an impact in the half in the range of NZD 6 million-NZD 7 million on the revenue line. The key drivers of that are, firstly, significantly lower net migration numbers into New Zealand, which has impacted our connection base or the growth rate in connections. We had a deferral of CPI for quarter one on revenue, and also the shutdowns in Auckland have had an impact on the number of connections we can physically do. As a result of that, we are guiding to the lower half of our EBITDA guidance range. Again, the total range at NZD 640 million-NZD 660 million. Looking at CapEx. CapEx, we are lifting our guidance in full year 2021 up to NZD 670 million-NZD 700 million. There are three key drivers of this. Firstly, UFB2 communal. As I mentioned earlier on, we have accelerated and are ahead of program. This represents merely a bring forward of CapEx and does not represent an increase in CapEx over the short to medium term. Secondly, new property developments or greenfield expenditure. We are seeing a significant strong market around new property. This is, of course, revenue generating for us. The CapEx we are seeing as strong and continuing to be so for us. Lastly, installations. We will talk a little more about our managed migration program a little later on. We have lifted our installation CapEx. Once again, similar to UFB2, we see that as a bring forward CapEx, not an increase over the short to medium term. West Coast fibre was worth some NZD 30 million in the period of CapEx. As I mentioned before, that is mostly government funded. Moving on to dividend. We are declaring a dividend of NZD 0.105, fully imputed, interim for full year 2021. The full year guidance is unchanged at NZD 0.25 per share. The dividend reinvestment plan will remain in place with a discount of 2% per annum. As we mentioned in previous presentations, we do expect looking forward, that due to our change in tax payment profile, our ability to fully impute, will remain only through until full year 2022. Expect from that point that we will be partially imputing the dividend profile for the company until over the short to medium term, we return to a tax paying situation. Looking at net debt to EBITDA. We do see slightly elevated gearing levels for the company, which are driven by mostly timing issues. We are at 4.37x on the S&P metric against a threshold of 4.25x. The key drivers are, as I mentioned before, the bring forward of UFB2 communal, the higher installation and greenfield capital expenditure, and lastly, just timing of RSP payments over the 31st of December period. Our commitment to our credit rating remains. The rating agencies, when they look at us, will look at the sustained metric over a period of time, and will look through timing-related issues, which is what we believe is driving our higher metric at present. We also reiterate that our view is that when we are in our new regulatory regime, we believe that a higher down driver threshold is appropriate to reflect the revised regime that we will be moving into from January of next year. Moody's in particular, have stated that they will revise our metric, when we have or when they have more clarity over our new regulatory regime. Looking at Crown financing. Crown financing, we've drawn just over NZD 1.1 billion out of a facility of NZD 1.3 billion. Looking at the chart on the right, that's our standard maturity profile. Key things to call out are firstly, we have an upcoming maturity in the first half of calendar 2021, which is our New Zealand dollar bond, NZD 400 million. We have cash on-hand at December of NZD 268 million, plus an undrawn revolving credit facility of NZD 350 million to finance that repayment. Moving on to Chorus's regulated fibre revenues. We've had questions from investors and analysts recently, around what our view is of our forecast regulated fibre revenues. With the completion of the input methodologies process, we're now able to provide a view of what we believe our historic and forecast regulated fibre revenues look like. The chart on the left-hand side reflects by calendar year our view of our forecast and historic actual regulated fiber revenue. More specifically for financial year 2020, we estimate that our regulated fiber revenue was NZD 480 million or NZD 470 million, I should say. For half one 2021, we estimate NZD 270 million. I'd like to make a few comments about the maximum allowable revenue or MAR. It's important to note that the Commerce Commission will set our MAR in the current calendar year, and that MAR will be measured against the actual revenues that the business generates or the actual fiber regulated revenues. What we represent there on the chart for the RP1 period, 2022 to 2024, is our best view based on our business plan that has been approved by our Board of what our forecast fiber revenues will be. From our perspective, it's important to note that in order to achieve a fair financial loss asset in our starting regulated asset base, and also to ensure a smooth transition into the new regulatory regime, our perspective is that the MAR should be above our forecast fibre revenues. When you look at the history of the UFB project, we are now at 63% uptake. When this project was commenced, the forecast was to be at 20% in full year 2020. We've been able to support data growth at significant and ongoing levels, and we've been able to meet customer expectations and meet customer demand. All of that has happened because we've had the incentive to do so. We've had the incentive to invest and the incentive to improve the customer experience. We believe it's critical that in the first regulatory period, that incentive remains. From our view, the ability to grow into our MAR gives us the incentive to do exactly that. If you look at most of our customers or end consumers at the moment, roughly 2/3 are on the 100 Mbps product. However, as we look forward, we're seeing growing demand for the 1 Gb product. We're seeing many more products and services come to market, and we're seeing a growing demand for higher speed products that require investment from Chorus. Our view is the regulatory regime needs to support this. A couple of other factors just to consider when we think about the MAR versus our regulated fibre forecasts. Firstly, we're currently 63% connected. When we look forward to RP1, we will be higher than 63%, but we will be well under 100%. It doesn't feel right that the MAR could be the same as our forecast when we're not even fully connected yet. Secondly, when I think about our financial loss asset, our starting RAB will include a significant financial loss asset. That asset will have built up over 10 years, from 2012 to 2022. It doesn't feel right that that could be fully absorbed or recouped in just three years. To summarize, we do believe that the MAR should be above our forecast fibre-regulated revenues. We do note that customers are protected no matter what the MAR is in terms of price outcomes due to the CPI cap that exists on our 100 Mbps product or anchor product. My last comment on this slide is, as we talk with the Commerce Commission in the coming months, the Commerce Commission does have the ability to profile depreciation within the regulatory model or to look at options for accelerating depreciation, otherwise known as depreciation tilting. This is an option that the Commerce Commission does have, and we will also consider as part of working through the MAR process with the Commerce Commission. Moving on to the input methodologies, key parameters. We've summarized on this slide, both for the period up to the start of RP1, being our loss asset period, and also for the RP1 period on the right-hand side, the key parameters that were set during the input methodologies process. Two brief comments to call out. Firstly, the risk-free rate for RP1 will be set in June of this calendar year. That will be based on a three-month average of the three-year risk-free rate. I also note that in the input methodologies, the commission did refer to their ability to reopen the WACC to reflect COVID impacts. That is a tool that the commission has within its toolkit also. Lastly, on to the regulatory timetable. As we look forward in the current calendar year, the commission have said that they will release a draft decision in May of this year on our RAB and on our MAR, and a final decision in September of this year. We will see over the course of the calendar year the establishment of Chorus' regulated asset base and MAR for RP1. Just a few weeks ago, the Commerce Commission published our regulatory expenditure proposal or Price-Quality Path proposal from December. A couple of caveats on this. It does, of course, a proposal. It is just that. The Commerce Commission will review it and form its own view. Specifically with regard to the cost allocation assumptions within that proposal, they will ultimately need to reflect the allocation assumptions within the starting regulated asset base. As we referenced in the December presentation, we will need to reflect the final cost allocation between fiber and copper based on the initial asset value or RAB process. My last comment before handing back to JB, just repeating some of the conversation we had in December when we released our Price-Quality expenditure proposal. It does include over the RP1 period, approximately NZD 500 million of sustaining capital over three years. That's consistent with our overall guidance to market of NZD 200 million per annum sustaining CapEx or a little under for those mathematically minded. It also includes NZD 500 million of growth CapEx. That is consistent with our internal business plans. It's consistent with our capital management policy and the comments that we've made to market previously. We do expect that growth CapEx over time will taper down. What we are doing in the current year is bringing forward CapEx in a couple of key areas. I'll stop there and hand back to JB. Thank you very much, David. As David was saying, in the expenditure proposal that we've submitted to the Commission and to the industry late last year, we talked about New Zealand's gigabit headstart. If you think about it, the UFB has given New Zealand a world-class network. COVID-19 has really highlighted the fact that we need to continuously invest in capacity on that network and to introduce new services to meet growing consumer demand. We believe that the pace of change is only gonna continue to accelerate, especially when you look at what's happening around the world. Today, about 20%, just under 20% of our connections are on services with speeds of more than 100 Mbps. In other countries, such as Korea, 60% of connections are on services that are 500 Mbps and above. There's still a lot of room to grow. As countries close on 1 Gb as kind of a benchmark, fiber technology continues to increase. In November, we extended the coverage of our 2 Gb and 4 Gb Hyperfibre services to all of the UFB1 footprint. We now have several hundred Hyperfibre customers, despite the fact that those services are currently only being provided by a number of nimble, smaller ISPs, and 2/3 of those services are on the 4 Gb service. It's still early days for those Hyperfibre products, but we're very encouraged by the growth that we're seeing in them. We're already trialing 8 Gbps. When you look at the roadmap of equipment vendors, you already see 25 Gb on the horizon. As speed increases, so does data consumption. The average monthly usage was 390 GB per month in December, for fibre, that number was 460 GB per month, almost double the same consumption on copper. Telstra CEO made the observation just a few weeks ago, that this ongoing growth in data demand means that 5G will remain complementary to fixed line services, not replace them. As he said, 5G simply can't carry the same amount of data, but it will help develop new Internet of Things type of services that aren't suited to a fixed connection. The Commerce Commission latest broadband monitoring report also supports that view. The report continues to highlight the reliability and high performance that consumers are enjoying when they're on a fibre technology compared to any other technology, including fixed wireless. Fibre is simply unmatched when it comes to performance measures like high-quality video streaming and low latency. We continue to be strong advocates of clear and transparent reporting of relative network performance in the New Zealand market. As I said at our annual meeting in November, we're concerned by how some mobile networks operators promote fixed wireless services, despite the fact that independent monitoring shows that even VDSL is outperforming fixed wireless for average download speed and for latency. The commission itself has noted the confusion that consumers face when comparing communication services and pricing. We continue to see consumers posting online saying that they've been subject to inertia selling with fixed wireless modems pitched to them as upgrade. Their copper service is then migrating unless they object. Many consumers don't seem to realize that they've been switched to a wireless technology, and many of them also report difficulties trying to have their copper service restored. Chorus clearly advertise the performance of its fixed network and continues to invest to make sure they are not congested. Why should it be different for fixed wireless? Other countries do not allow inertia selling. In Europe, there is an industry push to have the type of network technology, fiber, copper, wireless, clearly advertised for the benefit of consumers. In Australia, wireless providers are compelled to clearly explain to customers the type of speed performance that they should expect during peak hour time. We continue to believe that urgent action is needed to ensure that consumers in New Zealand can make the same educated choice. Last year, we launched a simplified strategic framework highlighting four key pillars, and the good news is that we're making strong progress on all of them. In winning in our core fibre business, our active wholesaler approach, and in particular, our focus on managed migration, continues to deliver. Of the 90,000 fibre installs that we did over the last six months, 30,000 of those were the results of our managed migration program. This chart shows the evolution of the intensity of that program, in addition to the normal RSP incentive and campaigns that we do. You will see in H1, we more than doubled the number of installs that we were doing through managed migration, and close to 15,000 consumers activated an already existing fibre connection. On average, we continue to see about half of our managed migration installations activate a service within six months. In the first six weeks of 2021, for example, we had almost 3,000 of those connections being activated, which represent about twice as much what we saw for the same period last year. At the same time, we're also seeing good growth in the number of activations that are coming from off-net consumers, and those are premises that would typically have been serviced through fixed wireless technology or HFC technology. The next slide shows the degree to which our open access network and incentives continue to support retail competition and differentiation. The 90+ retailers outside the largest three have seen their overall market share in fiber grow by 4 percentage points over the last year. As we've noted previously, electricity providers have played a key role in this growing trend for diversification. What's more impressive is the degree to which those smaller ISPs are capturing an even bigger slice of the growing 1 Gb market. They now hold 36% of our gigabit connections, compared to 27% of overall connections. These players are truly bringing the full benefits of our fiber network with 1 Gb products to the entire nation. Product differentiation is also entering a new phase. Sky TV's entry into the broadband market will take the bundling of broadband with content to a next level, given the very large consumer base that they have in pay TV. Flip has recently introduced an entry-level fiber plan that gives budget-conscious customers a NZD 15 per week entry price for fiber broadband. 2degrees has recognized the importance of reliability for the emerging working from home segment with the launch of a symmetrical 100 Mbps service, upload and download, that is bundled with web filtering and with a high-spec modem. Vodafone has tackled one of the biggest consumer issues, home Wi-Fi, with a new Wi-Fi guarantee that uses the latest WiFi 6 devices. Although the market is diversifying, there is still a high concentration of market power amongst the vertically integrated retailers. This makes the in-market incentives and education campaigns that we support across all retailer all the more important. We're continuing to refine our active wholesaler focus and have some new initiatives planned in the next few months to keep driving uptake. We're continuing to provide credits for copper late adopters of NZD 300, and we're upgrading credits to the win-back of off-net customers to the 1 Gb service to NZD 600. Linked to these, our marketing campaign and migration activities will be concentrated on the UFB1 areas that have lower levels of uptake. We've also announced a new incentive for retailers that have a standalone price point of NZD 60 or less on the entry-level 50 Mb plan. These will receive NZD 104 credit for a new fiber connection, which will support them in promoting fiber to price-conscious customers. Finally, we've seen good changes in government to the tenancy law, which means that we'll also be able to help connect rental properties where tenants had previously been frustrated by landlords making blanket oppositions to fiber connections. On our second strategic pillar of growing revenue, we also continue to make progress with the launch of our new services. I've already talked about the progress that we're making in selling 2 Gb and 4 Gb Hyperfibre product. Our WiFi ONT is now in market, with some smaller ISPs having already begun using it after a soft launch late last year. Fiber connections to Smart Locations such as CCTVs and traffic lights continue to grow, although we do believe that COVID-19 will have an impact in potentially reducing this market as a number of the organizations that typically purchase these services face different challenges. The biggest area of development has been in the backhaul space. Our new mobile access service is starting to grow as rural towers are being built by the RCG group, and we've also seen good interest in urban areas. We've soft launched our peering service in conjunction with the New Zealand Internet Exchange to enable ISPs to peer via our Mount Eden exchange. If ISPs don't have connectivity to that exchange, they can use our new EdgeConnect service to connect their traffic from elsewhere. We've had a lot of interest in this service, and we believe that it will significantly improve the interconnectivity between service providers in New Zealand. At the same time, the 14 rack spaces in our original Mount Eden EdgeC entre space are now full. We don't intend to compete with fully fledged data centers, but we continue to believe that there is a strong opportunity for us to use our exchange space to support the growing shift in cloud computing services to network edges. We're also expanding our backhaul networks to third-party data centers. Our new service will connect data centers to our exchange and to other data centers. We see this as an area of growing interest. Our third strategic pillar is to optimize our non-fiber asset. There is a lot happening in there, too. In late December, the Commerce Commission published the final Copper Withdrawal Code. It now enables us to start small trials of this between now and the end of 2021. We are required to give customers six months notice of our intention. We'll be starting trials focused on a small sample of 30 cabinets with just above 250 copper customers on them. None of those cabinets will be turned off before September of 2021. As we said previously, copper withdrawal is not going to be an overnight shutdown. It will be a street-by-street, very progressive process that we'll be going through. Once we have the result of the initial trial, we'll consider extending the trial to another 400 cabinets between now and the end of 2021. This will only affect less than 1% of the close to 500,000 customers that we still have on copper. We'll also continue to reduce ongoing maintenance costs. Over the last six months, we've disposed of another seven non-essential sites. These were typically old radio sites or surplus exchange sites. We have a team dedicated to this program, and they have a strong pipeline of future opportunities to go through. We also have a program to reduce, rationalize the legacy network equipments that we have in Spark exchanges. Finally, we're doing a lot to work on moving towards our future operating model. As the chart shows, the UFB rollout is really nearing completion, and the number of premises to be passed is rapidly decreasing. Installations are now our biggest volume activity, but they will also inevitably reduce given that we're nearing two-thirds uptake. There are already many changes underway within our structure to reflect these changes. Our investment in systems to automate fiber fault handling is starting to provide real benefits as larger ISPs connect to our systems to automate these. About 85% of fiber faults are now fully automated on our systems. Our people are also embracing technology, with employees averaging two to three days of remote working. The number of employees that are working remotely has more than doubled since pre-COVID-19. Our technology teams and other key business units are also increasingly adopting Agile practices. Given the impact of all these changes on our business, we expect to continue to adjust our operating model to simplify our processes and system, as a result, to reduce our total number of employees. As a first step, our Executive team was reduced from nine to seven to allow streamlining and simplification of accountabilities. We also have a net recruitment freeze that limits replacements to only critical roles. All of these are really big changes, we're navigating them through a rapidly changing environment. It's increasingly difficult to do so when we do so with a missing piece of the puzzle, the missing piece of the puzzle is the regulatory outcomes from the Commission's ongoing process that David mentioned earlier. As we said in November, the level of return provided by the Commission's final input methodology determination did not reflect our commercial reality and the risks that we took rolling out the UFB network. As a result, investors have given us very direct feedback that we shouldn't provide any further investments in network expansion beyond our current UFB commitment. In their view, commitments to a fair return at the beginning of the rollout have not been met in retrospect. That makes the outcome of the current expenditure process all the more important. The Commission's upcoming decisions will shape our future focus and will determine the degree to which New Zealand can truly leverage its gigabit advantage. Our expenditure proposal aims to unlock the potential of the network that we've already built. We need to keep investing in capacity and in new services to meet growing consumer demand. We need to keep supporting the evolution and efficiency of our industry partners by streamlining our systems and our processes. We need to continue to drive fibre uptake so that the costs are shared across a larger number of consumers, and to maintain the sustainability of the fibre network going forward. Because of our market structure, we need to continue to invest in incentives and in customer education to ensure that more diverse and effective retail competition can flourish. This is going to be a truly big second half for us as we work very closely with the Commission, with the industry, and with our people, to write the next chapter of our fibre journey. The fundamentals of the business remain strong as we continue to grow the fiber footprint, as growing demand for data and for speed continues to push customers to adopt fiber high-speed broadband. We continue to roll out the UFB2 footprint, it brings the benefit of this great network to smaller and smaller communities around New Zealand, like Fox Glacier on these pictures. On that note, I'm going to conclude this presentation and turn over to questions. Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll now begin the question- and- answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please [audio distortion] press zero followed by one on your telephone keypad. Zero followed by one on your telephone keypad. Thank you. Your first question is from the line of Arie Dekker from Jarden. Please go ahead. Thank you. Oh, good morning, guys. Yeah, just a few questions from me. Starting firstly with the net debt, which you've obviously talked to that, the credit metrics sort of ticking up a little and the temporary nature. Can you just confirm, in terms of the outlook for the next 12 months, I guess, in particular, that on your forecasts, that's going to track back down to sort of 4.25x or below while maintaining the dividend at its current levels? Sure, Arie, thanks for the question. The key drivers of the metric being where it is are mostly timing. We do expect it to track back down again, to around about 4.25x, or thereabouts at year-end. It's always subject to timing issues. The agencies will look through an exceedance for one or even two periods, as long as the trajectory is going in the right direction, which clearly for us, when you look forward, it is. In terms of specifically on full year 2022 dividend, whilst we've given no guidance yet, I don't expect that would be impacted by the level of the S&P metric. Sure. Great. Just in terms of the managed migration project, which has been a great success. Is my interpretation of that chart correct? That you have about a base now of 30,000 installs that are active. And if that is correct, can you just sort of talk to what you've sort of seen, say, take first half 2019 as an example, where there's sort of 50% uptake in that period. What have you sort of seen over the two years since in terms of those that didn't take it up within the first six months of those that didn't take it then in terms of the lagging profile? Yeah, Arie, thanks very much for that question. It's JB here. We really are very encouraged by what we're seeing with the managed migration program. The incentive that we put in place earlier this year was to really double up on the volume of installations that we were doing. The risk was that this could have translated into a reduction in how many of those were actually translating into activations within a short period of time. What we've clearly seen is despite almost doubling the number of installations that are going through this managed migration program, the ratio of those that convert into a live connection within six months has continued to be roughly about 50%. Clearly, beyond that six months, some of the consumers are also migrating to fibre. For us, the real focus is on how quickly we see, within the first six months, some of those managed migration installs translating to a live connection. What you've seen in the last six months is 30,000 connections being built. That means that we now have a really strong pipeline of premises that have a non-active ONT that will come to that six months timeframe and ultimately convert to a live service. We'll continue that effort on managed migrations because we see it as a really strong way for us to make sure that more consumers have the opportunity to place an order easily, and we actually see it translate directly into growth in connections. In terms of that incentive that you've introduced or emphasizing for price-sensitive customers, is that directed at some of these customers that haven't signed up yet in the managed migration program? No, it's probably more a reflection of the trends that we see in the market. Clearly with the impact of COVID-19 playing up, there is a segment of the market that is becoming increasingly price-conscious. We wanted to make sure that we were providing an opportunity for ISPs to create products that could address that potential demand. It's really encouraging for us to see the likes of the Flip offer being in market, because it's really something that can satisfy consumers that have concerns about long-term, high expensive commitments and give them a really good entry level into fibre experience. Yeah. Obviously, I'm just focusing on the other side, and clearly you're making really good progress still with fibre connections and also this migration program's working well. Just in terms of also that gap, say, between the 79% broadband penetration you've got in your area versus your overall penetration, what sort of strategies are you thinking about for dealing with closing that gap and those customers that aren't on a broadband connection, but where you have fibre passing? Yeah. Listen, clearly for us, this is the ongoing challenge, is to make sure that while we can celebrate 63% overall take-up rate in our UFB product, the way I'll look at it is continue to say that 37% that haven't yet placed an order. We really believe that the managed migration is one way for us to incentivize people to consider the uptake of fibre. We're not in direct conversation with consumers because that's what the ISP roles are doing. We are a wholesale provider. Managed migration is a way for us to incentivize those customers to really accelerate their consideration of fibre. Doubling up on some of the incentives that we have in place so that ISPs that do want to grow their market share in fixed fibre connection can do so, is really the things that we're pushing for the next six months and beyond that. Final one from me. I think if I interpreted it correctly there at the end, you were talking about investor feedback, not to take on any new investment commitments under this regime. I'm just keen to reconcile that with the bring forward of CapEx that you're doing at the moment and also the fact that you're clearly very active in greenfields investment. What's Chorus' approach still to investing in the growth of its asset base over that feedback? I think I'd echo what David was saying, which is a lot of this is purely more of a bring forward rather than any increase in that spend. UFB2 commitment is one that we have made. It is significantly funded by the CIP funding. Accelerating it for us brings the benefit of bringing fibre networks and potential connectivities forward, which is something that we think is a good strategy. On the new property development, again, those typically turn into revenue that we can recognize relatively quickly. We do see this as a CapEx program that is very quickly turning into increased revenues. On both of those, we continue to see that increased investment compared to our previous guidance as something that is a good story and one that will translate into revenues. David, do you want to add anything? Sure, JB. What I would add, Arie, just in terms of installations, CapEx is the third driver of the higher CapEx. That's actually a form of bring forward CapEx as well on the assumption that we would have made those connections in the future. We see it as growing the fibre penetration on our existing footprint, not growth of the footprint itself, which is more what JB was referring to in terms of our future investment expectations. Just to be clear, we shouldn't expect to see you guys pulling out of greenfields investment, for example, excluding your current commitments. No. Greenfield continues to be something that turns into real revenue very quickly, so we will continue to support that. Quantum-wise, Arie, that was NZD 12 million in a half. It's higher than what we expected, but it's not material in the overall context. Sure. Thanks. Thank you very much. Your next question is from the line of Phil Campbell from UBS. Please go ahead. Thank you. Yeah, morning, guys. Just a few questions from me. I suppose I was just interested in, obviously, for the first time, we've got the forecast of the fibre revenues. Obviously, I think your expectation is that the fibre MAR will be higher than that based on your estimates of RAB. I suppose the anchor product is still very high. At the moment, I think it's 69% or just under 70% of overall connections. I suppose going back last year was kind of around 71%. Even if I said there was a 3% change in mix over the next three years, we'd still end up with over 50% of your base on the anchor product, which is obviously capped at CPI. I suppose the first question was just kind of trying to figure out how you can close that gap between the fibre revenues and the MAR, even if you were tilting depreciation, just because you've got such a high percentage of anchor products. That was the first question. The second one was just on the UFB2 kind of acceleration. I thought my understanding was that you couldn't do that in the past because there was a lot of serco constraints, but I was just wondering if that's obviously must have changed. You are able now to kind of bring forward some of that CapEx. The last question was just on the CutlerMerz independent verification report. I just noticed in that report there was quite a big change between the draft report and the final report. I just wanted to see if, David, you could give us a bit of color on what was the reason for that in terms of some of the allocations. Okay. Let me tackle the first two. On the percentage of customers that will be on the anchor product or even on the entry-level products there, the 50 Mbps. The encouraging thing for us is really this continuous growth in data demand. When you look at the numbers, during COVID, it went up very significantly. It flattened up a little bit for a couple of months, now it has restarted to grow in the kind of consolidated average growth rate that we had experienced for a number of years. When you put that into perspective, ultimately people will have to grow from the 100 Mbps service to higher speed plans if they want to continue to navigate on that growth path. That's kind of the underlying fundamental of the business that we get a benefit from now. How quickly we go up that demand curve is a bit difficult to forecast. I mentioned earlier that other countries are significantly at higher speed plan. I think I mentioned South Korea, 60% were at speeds of 500 Mbps and above. How quickly New Zealand goes onto that growth path is the thing that is uncertain. We believe that the trend is there and ultimately, the anchor product will play a reducing role in our ARPU going forward. Your second question on the UFB acceleration. It is true that as we get to smaller and smaller UFB footprint to be built, the existing serco resources that we had that were geared to build a bigger footprint can now be refocused on the remaining footprint that we need to build, and that has enabled us to bring it forward. That indeed has been one of the possibilities that has been open to us as we get to the tail end of the UFB2 build. We have more serco resources that rather than continue to extend for a long time, we've decided to bring forward the build so that they can keep being used and leveraged. I'll pass on to David for the- Good. Good. Thanks, JB. Phil, just to add one more thing on your first question. The slide that we have on forecast regulated fibre revenue, which is slide 24. That represents our assumption or our Board-approved business plan on both volumes and prices. Those prices reflect an assumption on the anchor product, which we believe is a key protection for consumers. That has the effect of depressing our forecast revenues, but should not depress the MAR itself. The issue of depreciation profiling would become particularly relevant if the MAR was below our forecast revenues. It would work in the way of bringing forward depreciation in that particular building block so as to lift the MAR back to where our forecast revenues are or where the actual revenues will be. Again, to repeat, we believe our MAR should be above our forecast or actual fibre revenues. In terms of the CutlerMerz report and the independent verifier. This was part of the process of building our expenditure submission last year. We did have CutlerMerz review our submission in phases over a 12-month period. I would describe the difference between their draft and final report as a reflection of our natural evolution growing into our first regulatory submission. We improved, after the draft report, our internal systems. We further developed our thinking on allocations between fibre and copper. I'd also note on allocations, that journey is not yet done because ultimately it is the starting RAB view on allocations which will determine the basis of the expenditure submission allocations. It's more of a journey or an evolution, Phil or a maturity level for us as a business as we built up to lodging our submission in December of last year. Okay, great. Thanks, guys. Sorry, just one quick follow-on. You did talk a little bit about price sensitivity in the business segment. Is there any kind of signs of that in the consumer space as well? No, at this stage, we really haven't seen it. As evidenced by the fact that we still migrated 62,000 more customers to fibre, that the 1 Gb speed plan continues to perform well, and to a certain extent, that the 2 Gb and 4 Gb plans are also starting to show some good signs of growth. It's primarily in the business segments, and you would expect that given the current economic environment. Again, how quickly the economy recovers will really drive this going forward. Great. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much. Your next question is from the line of Brian Han from Morningstar. Please go ahead. Thank you. JB, when it comes to competition from fixed wireless on your business, is it mostly having impact on your fiber and the 50 Mbps segment, or is it starting to have on your 100 Mb market? Thanks, Brian, for the question. What we really see is, fixed wireless as a substitution is really something that potentially is affecting people that are currently on lower speed copper services. The churn, once people are on fiber, is very low. Once you've experienced fiber, you stay with it because of the quality, reliability, and speed performance that you're getting. What we're seeing is that fixed wireless, and in particular the inertia campaigns, are targeted towards consumers that are currently on ADSL or slow performing VDSL because they're very far from the exchange or the cabinets. We do not see it yet being something that's directly directed towards our high performing services. When you look at the comparative performance monitoring that the Commerce Commission is publishing on a regular basis now, you can see why that is the case. The average speeds that you get on a fixed wireless services does not compete with 100 Mbps service. That's where we see most of it being directed to. Okay. While you're there, medium term, in the 13 odd% of the population where there won't be fibre, can you talk about how much diseconomies of scale Chorus may suffer in those areas being subject to the old legacy copper regime? Yeah. Listen, Rest of New Zealand, as we call this particular area, is one where we will need to be very focused in terms of cost efficiency. I mentioned already that we are rationalizing a number of our sites. As you see some trends in those markets, we'll continue to shape our network as much as we can, to limit the cost and the impact on these. One of the questions that we're starting to be asked is, how do we view things like low earth orbit satellite solutions? In some ways, we think that this might actually be a very complementary offering to service some of the more rural and remote areas of New Zealand, rather than continue to try to do that with what will become costly copper services. Thanks, JB. Thank you very much. Your next question is from the line of Ian Martin from New Street Research. Please go ahead. Thank you. Thanks. I just have a few questions around the idea you floated that there should be no new investment under the current regulatory regime. I just wonder, how substantial you've made that decision. Is that something now that's in the business planning? That was the last question. So- Does it affect the revenue you projected in that initial regulatory period, for instance? Thirdly, at the full year result, you talked about Smart Locations as a potential area of new revenue growth. Presumably, there's not much of anything in that initial regulatory period from Smart Locations. I just wonder, given the potential implication of that, whether there's an opportunity to come to a new arrangement with government where you know what your potential outcomes are before you make that commitment, rather than leave it in the hands of the regulatory gods. Okay. Let me handle the first part of the question regarding the commitments to further network expansion or capital expenditure. Let me be clear. What we're saying is that growing the fibre footprint in terms of UFB3, UFB4, growing further fibre rollout outside of our current regions is what we're saying we're not going to be doing given the current setup that we're seeing. We're continuing to invest in capacity in the network. We're continuing to invest in new property development. To the extent that we can, we will continue to roll out fibre. It's the idea of potentially targeting completely new virgin areas and investing further capital to do that we're saying we are not going to be able to do in the foreseeable future. To your second question, Sorry, what was the second one? Sure. Ian, in terms of would that position impact the forecast fiber revenues. That we've shown on slide 24? No. We haven't, in our existing Board-approved business plans, included significant footprint expansion or expansion in growth other than the usual level of greenfields expenditure, the completion of the communal build and our installation CapEx program. There would not be a significant impact on those revenue forecasts. Thirdly was on the question of whether there's an opportunity to go back to the government and negotiate a clearer understanding about risk and so on before you make any subsequent investments. Is that something that's a possibility, for instance, for Smart Locations or UFB3 or UFB4? Yeah. I'll disconnect UFB 3 or UFB4 from Smart Locations, because Smart Locations is basically an extension within our existing footprint of new locations to be connected. So far, the programs that we've supported recently, we did one with the Auckland Transport in the Auckland area, have been a profitable investment. We could justify building that additional network given the revenue that we were getting as extension of the existing fibre network. Are they covered in the MAR, those Smart Locations? Has the Commerce Commission made a decision on whether they're included in the MAR at this point? Yeah, we believe that they will be. We would expect, yes. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Okay. The opportunity to go back to government for any footprint expansion and just know where you stand [audio distortion], is it? Anything beyond the UFB2 footprint would have to be negotiated with the government, would need an increased investment from government, because as we get into more and more remote location, it gets harder and harder to justify the investment. We clearly remain open to conversation, but it's not something that is part of the current regulatory submissions. It would be something that would be outside of that. Ian. Okay. Example of that is- Thank you. Is the West Coast fibre build, which is mostly government-funded. Whilst not technically a footprint expansion, it is an example of a government-supported project. Yeah. Great. Thanks, David. Thanks, JB. Sorry, Mr. Martin, does that answer your question, sir? Yes. Thank you. Yes. Thank you very much. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, that is zero followed by one on your telephone keypad to queue for questions. That is zero followed by one on your telephone keypad. Thank you. There are no further questions at this point, gentlemen? Please continue. Thank you. Okay. Well, thank you again for joining us today for this half yearly update. As we said at the beginning, this is a complex period that we're navigating and the industry as a whole is trying to really understand the overall impact that COVID-19 will have on the industry. The fundamentals of the business remain very strong. We're still building more fibre footprint. The demand in speed and data continues to fuel more and more customers wanting to migrate to a stable, high-speed fibre product. The fact that we've added 62,000 of those in the half-year is really encouraging. The fact that 1 Gb continues to grow is very encouraging, and we look forward to updating you again at the quarter on connections update and at the full year. Thanks again for your interest and for attending this webcast today.