Vodacom's international operations continued to gain momentum, as service revenue grew 13.3% in the first six months of the financial year.
Vodacom battled with its African entities for a year-and-a-half before starting to see an improvement in the first half of last year. The economic recession slowed growth, while a competitive market resulted in tariffs falling dramatically.
This morning, the company reported that service revenue from its international operations gained 13.3%, to R4.39 billion, in the six months to September, as it gained two million customers and macro environments stabilised.
The cellular company has operations in Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho and Mozambique.
Data boom
CEO Pieter Uys says international operations have continued to gain momentum. He explains the competitive environment is now more stable, and the company has gained subscribers as a result of “smarter” price offerings.
Although still a relatively small portion of overall revenue, data revenue gained 71.4% as more customers used data and mobile financial services. Uys says data is “starting to kick in”.
Active data customers increased 82.4%, to 1.9 million, as Vodacom expanded network coverage and introduced more affordable data offerings. However, operating profit was negatively impacted by a R318 million impairment loss at Gateway.
Shuter explains that companies are still asking too much on the back of the high-value Bharti buyout of Zain. He says reasonable valuations have not yet worked through the system.
Uys previously said the operator wants to generate more than the current sixth of its revenue outside of SA, especially considering more than half of its subscribers are based in other African countries.
Vodacom invested R444 million in its network and expects this to gain pace in the second half of the year to expand voice and data coverage.
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