Vodafone has released its trading update for the quarter ended on June 30th. According to it, the company’s service revenue in India has increased 6.9 percent, but the growth rate has slowed down due to impact of regulation while including an MTR cut (Mobile Termination Rate). Excluding MTRs, the service revenue has grown by 10.6 percent.
The data revenue of the company too has shown a surge, with 65 percent growth. It had added 3.1 million new data customers, reaching the total to 66.8 million. The total number of 3G customers for Vodafone now is 22 million, which was 10 million a year ago. Vodafone’s total mobile customers has increased 1.6 million and resulted in a customer base of 185.4 million.
In the quarter, Vodafone India has added 1000 2G sites and 1100 3G sites. Due to the addition of new 3G sites, the outdoor population coverage of the operator in targeted urban areas has increased to 91 percent. 4G services are available on selected areas. M-pesa service of Vodafone is expanding and now have 501,000 active customers supported by 94,000 agents.
The group’s total revenue for the quarter was £10.1 billion and its service revenue was £9.2 billion. “We have made a good start to the year. Our emerging markets have maintained their strong momentum and more of our European businesses are returning to growth, as customer demand for 4G and data takes off. We continue to hit our Project Spring build milestones and customers are beginning to value the improvement in service that is resulting: contract churn in Europe is now falling and mobile ARPU trends are stabilizing in a number of key markets,” commented Vittorio Colao, Group Chief Executive, Vodafone.
“Our other key growth areas – unified communications and enterprise – are performing strongly, benefiting from the increased capabilities and footprint that our higher levels of investment are delivering. However, our markets are, as always, highly competitive and we therefore have to remain very focused on efficiency, cost control, and excellent value and service to customers, while continuing to deliver a good return for shareholders,” he said.
