Vodacom, South Africa’s biggest mobile phone operator, has added 3 million new customers in its home market and is making more than R20 billion in data revenues in the year ended March 2017.
The telco, which is owned by British mobile phone giant, reported an 8.7% rise in customers in South Africa to 37.1 million in the year to end-March 2017, with 3 million new customers.
The firm also generated R20 billion in data revenue in South Africa, reflecting a 19.7% rise compared to the same period last year.
The company also saw the number of data customers increase to 19.5 million, showing an 8.3% rise and data traffic was up 43.2% in the period.
“This was enabled through growing our data network coverage and capacity as well as focussing our device strategy on increasing 3G and 4G device uptake. 4G customers on our network increased 86.7% to 5.1 million, while the average monthly data usage on smartphones increased 25.0% to 560MB,” the company informed investors on Monday.
“Our data bundles sales grew by 44.8% to 495 million resulting in the reduction in the effective price per MB by 16.0% thereby continuing to give more value to our
customers. Our focus in the year ahead will be to transform data pricing to the benefit of customers, by reducing customer exposure to higher out of bundle rates.”
In the year to end-March, Vodacom’s capital expenditure was sitting at R8 .5 billion that enable the firm to widen its 3G and 4G data coverage, improve voice quality and increase data speeds.
4G coverage increased to 75.8% of the population, up from 58.2% a year ago reaching over 7 900 sites. “We also entered into a commercial agreement with WBS that will enable us to roam on their 4G and 4G plus network,” said Vodacom.
