Vodacom ups revenue by 8%
Vodacom on Monday (19 May 2014) reported an 8% rise in revenue to R75.7 billion for the year ended March 2014.
Service revenue lifted 4.7% to R62 billion from R59.3 billion in 2013, with operating profit up 7.9% to R20.4 billion.
Headline earnings per share of 896 cents was up 2.8%, while the group announced a final dividend per share of 430 cents, giving total dividend per share of 825 cents.
Group active customers increased 13.8% to 57.5 million, with 7.0 million net connections in the year.
Shameel Joosub, Vodacom Group CEO, said: “Vodacom again performed well this year with good results from our International operations and South Africa returning to growth.
“Demand for mobile data continues to be a key growth driver. Overall revenue grew 8.3% and we added 7.0 million customers in the year taking our total active customer base to 57.5 million.”
South Africa
Revenue increased 5.5% to R61.8 billion, driven by a 28.6% growth in equipment revenue which represents 20.3% (2013: 16.6%) of total revenue.
Service revenue grew 0.3% to R48.316 billion. Excluding the impact of lower MTRs, which resulted in a 21.7% decline in interconnect revenue, service revenue increased 3.0%.
Data revenue increased 23.6% to R10.974 billion and now represents 22.7% (2013: 18.4%) of service revenue.
“We achieved 11.9% growth in active data customers to 16.1 million customers and data traffic increased 80.4%,” Vodacom said.
Data revenue growth was further supported by a 23.5% increase in the number of active smartphones and tablets to 7.8 million devices.
The average monthly data usage on smartphones increased 81.7% to 253 MB per device and increased 25.2% to 743 MB on tablets.
Active prepaid customers grew 9.5% adding 2.3 million net connections, to 26.7 million customers, while active contract customer were flat at 4.8 million.
Contract customer ARPU declined 3.5% to R389 per month.
“Network investment is the key to continued sustainable reductions in the cost to communicate. In South Africa we invested R6.9 billion in our network, adding 1,081 new 3G sites,” Joosub said.
“Our 3G network now covers 91.9% of the population. We invested a further R3.9 billion in our International operations’ networks, increasing the number of 2G sites by 25.5% and 3G sites by more than 53.4%.”
“Looking forward, we intend to increase capital investment by around 20% to approximately R13 billion in the new financial year as part of our massive investment programme. This will be informed by the final outcome of the MTR process,” Joosub said.
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