South Africa’s leading operator Vodacom has released its results for the first quarter of 2014-2015 financial year, revealing 4.3 per cent year-on-year growth in group revenues, reaching ZAR18.28 billion (US$1.74 billion).
While group revenues showed solid growth, the operator said growth was spurred in particular by its international operations with South African revenue growth less impressive and hampered significantly by mobile termination rate (MTR) cuts.
With international consumer bases growing 21.7 per cent, Vodacom said international revenues were up 17.2 per cent as compared to the corresponding period last year, hitting ZAR3.59 billion (US$342.6 million).
South African revenues grew only 1.7 per cent, although still accounting for the majority of overall group revenues, bringing in ZAR14.79 billion (US$1.4 billion).
“In the past year we’ve added more than eight million new customers, taking our active customer base to just shy of 60 million. Group revenue for the quarter was ZAR18.3 billion, an increase of 4.3 per cent over last year,” said Shameel Joosub, group chief executive officer (CEO) of Vodacom.
“Data and the international businesses have once again been the largest contributors to growth, and the entire business is seeing the benefit of our sustained investment programme.
“In South Africa we executed well operationally and grew our customer base by 11.0 per cent, but revenue was impacted by the dramatic decrease in MTRs.”
Vodacom said it has made progress in bringing down the effective cost per minute to ZAR0.68 (US$0.06), representing a 25.3 per cent cut to prices, which the operator claimed resulted in 26.1 per cent growth in outgoing voice traffic.
Similarly, Vodacom said it has reduced average effective per megabyte data prices by 30.3 per cent, prompting a 70.1 per cent increase in data traffic; with the number of active data customers also rising 69.5 per cent.
“Supporting this increase in traffic in South Africa, we added another 473 LTE sites in the quarter, an increase of more than 50%. On top of this we added another 293 3G sites, and 74.5 per cent of our sites are now connected using our own self-provided high capacity transmission,” Joosub said.
“This increase in capacity has the dual benefit of giving us the best possible platform from which to grow the South African business as well as the ability to reduce prices on a sustainable basis.
“The additional capacity means that we are able to maintain superior network performance even as traffic increases in response to lower prices.”
