In a quarterly update released early this morning, Vodacom announced amongst that pretty much every metric it’s willing to state is up for the quarter ended December 2013.
The amount of money the Vodacom group made in the past quarter increased 10.5% (7.9% if you normalise the currency fluctuations) to R20 219 million, the amount of money the group made from services increased 6.4% to R16 248, up 3.4% on a normalised basis, Active customers across the group grew 12.3% to 56.0 million and both its South African and International revenue numbers increased, by 0.6% and 32.6% respectively.
During the past quarter the telco also managed to grow its active customer user base by 27.9% to 23.7 million.
Of particular interest to us however was the fact that Vodacom now has 7.2Million smartphones on its network (an increase of about 600 000 units in the past quarter) and that each of those smartphones consumes on average 254MB of data per month (an increase of 83.4% over the previous quarter).
With the smartphone numbers up, data usage numbers for those smartphones up and the addition of so many new data customers, it’s not surprising that Vodacom was able to report data revenue growth of 40.7% across the group.
Internationally, data revenue more than doubled with data traffic now three times higher than a year ago. When it comes to South Africa, Vodacom achieved a 23.3% increase in voice traffic and a 31.2% growth in data revenue.
That growth is not coming from higher prices though.
In fact, the contrary is true.
Shameel Joosub, Vodacom Group CEO says that the company made a concerted effort over the past quarter to drive the adoption of price plans that offer more value to customers and that this resulted on the prepaid average price per minute (voice) dropping by 25.3% to 56 cents and decreasing the average effective price per MB of data by 16.2%.
