Vodacom, SA's largest cellular operator, added 2.2 million customers to its subscriber base in the third quarter of the current financial year.
The company this afternoon released an update on its performance for the three months to December. It said group revenue grew to R16.03 billion, a gain of 5.6%, excluding the impact of currency fluctuations. Adjusting for currency fluctuations, revenue grew 3.9%.
Vodacom now has 41.6 million customers, having gained 2.2 million customers in the last quarter, of which 1.4 million were South African connections. Vodacom added 784 000 customers in its international operations in the quarter, taking the total number of international subscribers to 16.3 million.
The cellular company has operations in five countries: SA, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Lesotho and Mozambique. It said conditions in the DRC were “challenging”.
Service revenue grew 4.8%, excluding the impact of currency changes. In SA, this figure grew 3.7% while international service revenue grew 13.2%. CEO Pieter Uys says international operations responded well to management actions.
Data use in SA continued to grow faster than voice, leaping 33.8%, to R1.7 billion, on the back of a 54.6% increase in the use of data. Some 36.2% of Vodacom's local customer base - or 8.7 million customers - are data users.
“In SA, the data business was a star performer, with growth in mobile connect cards and smartphones driving a 33.8% increase in overall data revenue,” notes Uys.
In SA, total average revenue per user increased 17.9% year-on-year, to R165. This was partly the result of a change in the disconnection rule, which saw Vodacom trim the amount of time a call-forward SIM is active on the network from 13 to seven months in the quarter to June 2010.
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