Business

Vodacom sees jump in revenue as subscriber base grows

Staff Writer

 ·1 Feb 2017

South Africa’s biggest mobile operator Vodacom has posted a 1.2% growth in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2016, while adding 1.6 million new subscribers – 690,000 of which are in South Africa.

The operator reported quarterly group revenue up to R21.22 billion for the quarter ended December 2016, representing a 1.2% change from the year prior, with the addition of 1.6 million group active customers.

South Africa represented the bulk of this, with revenue accounting for R17.14 million (up 4.9% from 2016), and 690,000 additional customers. Vodacom now has 36.37 million customers in South Africa.

Notably, group data revenue increased by a significant 18.4% to R6.53 billion, now representing 37.5% of all service revenue.

According to Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub, the company’s performance was driven by strong customer growth in South Africa and strong data demand.

“Strong growth in data demand outstripped declining voice revenues with service revenue growth of 5.5% to R13.4 billion in South Africa,” he said.

Strong demand for data continues with traffic growth of 44.8% in South Africa and 61.7% across our International operations. Data now comprises 40.8% (from 35.3% a year ago) of service revenue in South Africa and 25.2% (from 22.5% a year ago) in the International operations, Joosub said.

In its international operations, however, the CEO said the effect of customer disconnections in the fourth quarter of the prior year (2015) are still having an impact on group performance.

Active prepaid customers in South Africa increased 6.8% to 31.2 million, though prepaid ARPU was down at R64, Vodacom said.

Active contract customers increased by 143,000 in the quarter to 5.2 million with contract ARPU up 1.2% to R414. Overall ARPU is R114.

The group said that capital expenditure of R2.1 billion in the quarter allowed it to expand 4G population coverage to 70.0%, up from 54.1% a year ago.

“We extended our high-speed transmission to 91.4% of our sites. As data demand continues to grow exponentially we entered into a commercial agreement to roam on
the newly built data network of Wireless Business Solution (WBS) for additional capacity,” it said.

Read: Vodacom eyes sale of a R15-billion stake in the company – report