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.<\/p>\n
The operator\u00a0reported quarterly group revenue up to R21.22 billion<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n South Africa represented the bulk of this, with revenue accounting for R17.14 million<\/strong> (up 4.9% from 2016), and 690,000 additional customers. Vodacom now has 36.37 million customers in South Africa.<\/p>\n Notably,\u00a0group data revenue increased by a significant 18.4% to R6.53\u00a0billion, now representing 37.5% of all service revenue.<\/p>\n According to Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub,\u00a0the company’s performance was driven by strong customer growth in South Africa and strong data demand.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In its international operations, however, the CEO\u00a0said the effect of customer disconnections in the fourth quarter\u00a0of the prior year (2015) are still having an impact on group performance.<\/p>\n Active prepaid customers in South Africa increased 6.8% to 31.2 million, though prepaid ARPU was down at R64, Vodacom said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The group said that capital expenditure of R2.1 billion in the quarter allowed it\u00a0to expand 4G population coverage to 70.0%, up from 54.1% a year ago.<\/p>\n “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
\nthe newly built data network of Wireless Business Solution (WBS) for additional capacity,” it said.<\/p>\n
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