SA's largest cellular operator, Vodacom, saw a 25% increase in subscribers over the three months to December, driving its customer base to 32 million locally.
More than nine billion voice minutes were carried over the three-month period, says Vodacom CEO Pieter Uys, who attributes the growth to the operator's summer campaigns, targeted promotions and handset deals - particularly in the rural areas.
“This was a good quarter for Vodacom, with a record increase in customers [overall] of five million, pushing us past the 50 million customers milestone. Overall group revenue increased 12%, to R18 billion.”
International operations accounted for more than 40% of the increase in total customers.
Revenue for the group's South African operations increased 7.6%, while service revenue is up 5.6%.
Data demand
data remains high, but following data price cuts in the previous quarter, data revenue growth slowed to 19.3% year-on-year, to R1 929 million. “Active data customers increased 31.5%, to 11.4 million, with a third of these customers now buying data bundles compared to a quarter a year ago.”
Group data revenue grew 23.8% and there was a 41.2% increase in group active data customers, to 13.8 million.
Data revenue in Vodacom's international operations increased by 135.4%, “as the appetite for data and mobile financial services continues to grow”, says Uys.
“While we are encouraged by the strong revenue growth in the quarter, we remain focused on tackling the increased competition in all our geographies and also remain alert to fragile global economic conditions. Therefore, our medium-term service revenue guidance of 'low single-digit' remains unchanged,” concludes Uys.
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