Vodacom on Wednesday (4 February) reported a 3.8% decline in active South African subscribers in a quarterly update for the period ended December 2014, along with\u00a0a 3.1% decline in revenue for its South African unit to R15.99 billion.<\/p>\n
Group revenue decreased 1.1% to R19.99 billion with service revenue down 2.7% to R15.8 billion.<\/p>\n
The group said that, excluding the impact of the 50% cut in mobile termination rates (MTRs) in South Africa, group revenue increased 1.5% and service revenue increased 0.6%.<\/p>\n
Service revenue in SA declined 5.8% due to MTRs in April 2014 and by increased competition and weaker consumer spending, the group said.<\/p>\n
Excluding the impact of MTRs service revenue declined 1.7%, Vodacom said.<\/p>\n
The company said it reduced its blended price per minute by 21.3% to 63 cents (Q3 2014: 80 cents) and grew outgoing voice traffic by 10.1%.<\/p>\n
“We have migrated 74.2% of our contract customers to integrated plans,” Vodacom said.<\/p>\n
The group reported a decline in active customers in South Africa to 31.379 million at the end of December 2014, from 32.613 million at the end of September.<\/p>\n
However, the group’s overall subscriber base increased by 5.1 million users to 61.1 million.<\/p>\n
Active contract customers in SA increased 1.2% to 4.9 million to grow mobile contract customer revenue 1.5% to R5.418 billion after four successive quarters of declines, the group said.<\/p>\n
The number of prepaid customers in SA using bundles grew 18.8% to 6.2 million, with over 50 million prepaid bundles sold per month in the quarter.<\/p>\n
Active local prepaid customers increased marginally year on year to 26.5 million.<\/p>\n
“We took actions to decrease flow of starter packs to the market to reduce rotation of sim cards. This reduced our number of gross connections resulting in a reduction of our prepaid base of 1.3 million customers in the quarter,” Vodacom said.<\/p>\n
Locally, data revenue grew 18.8% to R3.526 billion, against strong data growth in Q3 last year, to make up 29.7% of service revenue. Data traffic increased 62.2% and active data customers increased to 16.8 million or 53.4% of Vodacom’s active customers.<\/p>\n
“The number of active smartphones and tablets on our network grew 23.6% to 9.5 million devices. Average monthly data usage was up 41.1% to 358 MB on smartphones,” Vodacom said.<\/p>\n
The group said it was progressing well with an accelerated capital investment programme. It doubled the number of LTE sites to 2,194 and increased 3G sites by 22.4% to 8,407.<\/p>\n
“Our LTE network now covers 34% of the population and our 3G network covers 94% of the population. 77.8% of our sites are now connected to our self-provided high capacity transmission network. We also launched our fibre to the business (FTTB) on a limited basis in September 2014,” Vodacom said.<\/p>\n
Shameel Joosub, Vodacom Group CEO, said: “We added 5.1 million customers in comparison to last year, taking our total customer base to 61.1 million. Despite this increase in customers, it’s still been a challenging quarter with group revenue down 1.1%.<\/p>\n
Commenting on the pending multi billion rand deal with Neotel, Joosub said: “We’re continuing to work through the approvals process for the acquisition of Neotel. South Africa’s fixed broadband penetration level is 1\/10th of that seen in developed economies, which impacts our competitiveness as a nation.<\/p>\n
“If the transaction goes through, our ambition is to add at least one million fibre connections to homes and businesses to address this shortfall.”<\/p>\n
Government eyes Vodacom sale, MTN mulls Telkom buy: report<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Neotel deal to make life tougher for Telkom: Vodacom CEO<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n