South African telecoms giant Vodacom Group has reported revenues of ZAR36.69 billion (USD3.55 billion) for the six months ended 30 September 2013, up 6.6% from ZAR34.43 billion in the corresponding year-earlier period. EBITDA for April-September increased 9.6% to ZAR13.22 billion, while operating profit grew 11.5% to ZAR9.99 billion. CAPEX for the six-month period climbed 2.9% to ZAR4.85 billion. In operational terms, Vodacom’s consolidated user base rose 9.7% to 53.8 million. Growth was spearheaded by the company’s international subsidiaries, which saw their collective subscriber numbers increase 22.4% y-o-y to 23.7 million.
Shameel Joosub, Vodacom Group CEO, commented: ‘A cornerstone of our strategy is sustained investment in network capacity. With increased capacity, we are able to offer better value and support higher usage without impacting quality. In South Africa, we invested ZAR3.1 billion in the network during the period and increased 3G coverage to 88.9% of the population … Driven by lower handset prices and reduced data costs, smartphone adoption is growing rapidly across all of our operations. In South Africa, average data usage per smartphone increased 79% and for the Group, data traffic is more than 80% higher than a year ago’.