Massive smartphone data growth for Vodacom

Staff Writer

November 7, 2011

0 Comments

Staff Writer

MyBroadband’s Staff Writer is directly plugged into the South African Internet backbone, and spits out press releases and other news as he receives it. ...

The growth rate of smartphone data traffic is ten times higher than that of dongles and other modems

Vodacom released their interim results for the six months ended 30 September 2011 today (7 November 2011), revealing a 6% growth in service revenue and a 6.9% increase in headline earnings per share (HEPS).

Vodacom’s South African operations delivered a strong performance with service revenue growing 4.7% to R23,505 million.

Vodacom’s South African customers increased 21.1% year on year to 28.9 million, a net increase of 2.4 million in the six month period. “This was achieved despite the accelerated disconnection of approximately 537 000 SIMs that were locked at the RICA deadline,” Vodacom said.

Vodacom said that data revenue growth was again an important feature of the results, increasing 29.4% to R3,720 million. “Data revenue now represents 15.8% of service revenue,” Vodacom said.

Active data customers in South Africa grew 32.3% to 10.5 million, representing 36.2% of customers. “Customers regularly purchasing data bundles grew by 89.7% to 3.5 million,” said Vodacom CEO Pieter Uys.

“While mobile broadband devices still accounts for the majority of data traffic on our network, the growth rate of smartphone data traffic is ten times higher than that of dongles and other modems,” said Uys.

Uys said that the average smartphone user currently uses around 80MB per month, up 50% from last year.

“The appetite for smartphones amongst our customer base is very strong, with active smartphones on the network increasing by approximately 870 000 in the six months to 4.1 million.”

Vodacom said that capital expenditure increased 83.4% to R3 015 million as they made substantial investments to increase capacity and enhance quality.

“A large portion of capital spend was for transmission, where we made steady progress against our plan of self-providing transmission to our high data traffic sites,” said Uys.

“We expanded our 3G network with 352 new sites bringing the total to 4 642 sites. 68.4% of 3G sites have been activated with HSPA+ (21.6 mbps) software and of these around 30% have been migrated to high capacity IP transmission backhaul. Dual-carrier HSPA+ (43.2 mbps) is now active on 52.1% of our 3G sites,” said Uys.

Sphere: Related Content