Vodacom said in a trading statement on Thursday that it added 2.5 million customers for the quarter ended June 2017, including 2.3 million in South Africa, to reach almost 70 million customers across the group.<\/p>\n
Group revenue, it said, grew 3.9% to R20.7 billion, while group service revenue grew 1.7% to R17.1 billion. Revenue growth in SA, meanwhile, accelerated to 7.8% aided by stronger device sales, while service revenue improved 5.6% to R13.1 billion for the quarter.<\/p>\n
Vodacom said that the sale of smartphones grew by 29.0%, comprising 57.4% of total device sales.<\/p>\n
It said that group data revenue increased 15.1%, representing 39.0% of service revenue the operator said.<\/p>\n
Shameel Joosub, Vodacom Group CEO, said: “The solid performance the group delivered in FY2017, continued into the first quarter of the current financial year. In South Africa, revenue growth accelerated to 7.8%, aided by increased smartphone device sales.<\/p>\n
“We sustained South African service revenue growth of 5.6%, underpinned by the consistent and significant investment in our network infrastructure and IT systems, aimed at further enhancing the customer experience.”<\/p>\n
The chief executive said that a 9.1% and 18.9% decline in effective voice and data prices respectively over the quarter reflects the groups position to drive down the cost to communicate.<\/p>\n
“As I have stated previously, there is more work to be done on this front, and we will be introducing additional measures this year to give greater control to customers by improving our out-of-bundle pricing.”<\/p>\n
Looking ahead, Joosub said: “We remain cognisant of the weaker economic conditions that prevail in South Africa as well as some of our larger markets and have put measures in place should these conditions deteriorate materially in these markets.”<\/p>\n
During the quarter, Vodacom sold 553 million prepaid and contract bundles, up 68.3%, with the number of bundle users increasing by 25.7% to 17.8 million. Prepaid customers increased by 2.2 million to 34.2 million, however, prepaid ARPU was down 3.3%.<\/p>\n
Contract customers increased by two thousand in the quarter, to 5.1 million.<\/p>\n
“Migration to our new ‘more data’ contracts, which have a larger data allocation, accelerated during this period, as customer demand for data continued to increase. Contract ARPU declined by 2.0% to R393, due to a higher rollover of unused bundle allocations, as customers grow into fully utilising these larger bundles,” Joosub said.<\/p>\n
SA data revenue grew 18.1% to R5.5 billion, contributing 42.2% (2017: 37.8%) of service revenue. “We added 463 thousand 4G customers in the quarter, reaching a total of 5.5 million customers as devices became more affordable as a result of improvements in exchange rates.”<\/p>\n
Active smart devices on the network increased by 18.4% to 16.6 million, with the average monthly data used on these devices increasing to 734MB per device.<\/p>\n
“We have continued to introduce new initiatives to reduce the out-of-bundle-data spend by our customers and to give customers more control, resulting in an improved customer experience. Together with our successful data pricing strategy of making data more affordable, this has resulted in a 56.1% increase in data bundle sales and an 18.9% reduction in the overall effective price per MB,” the chief executive said.<\/p>\n
Vodacom said its capital expenditure of R1.8 billion was focused on maintaining our network lead, as well as enhancing its IT systems. “Our continued investment in infrastructure resulted in 75.9% 4G and 99.2% 3G population coverage,” it said.<\/p>\n