Vodafone Romania recorded a net quarter-on-quarter decrease of 60,000 mobile customers in the third quarter of 2014, although it reported improvements in mobile ARPU – up by 4.7% q-o-q to EUR6.2 (USD7.7) – and post-paid percentage, with post-paid subscribers representing 42.2% of its customer base at end-September 2014, up by 0.6 percentage points q-o-q and 1.9 percentage points year-on-year. Service revenues of Vodafone fell in Q3 2014 by 5.3% y-o-y to EUR167.58 million, attributed to reduced wholesale mobile network termination rates (MTRs, cut by 69% on 1 April 2014), while the company pointed out that if excluding the impact of falling MTRs, organic service revenue increased 8% y-o-y. Furthermore, mobile data consumption increased by 63% in the quarter ended 30 September 2014 compared with the same period last year, and the smartphone penetration rate in Vodafone Romania’s total mobile user base grew by 6.2 percentage points over the same timeframe.
Vodafone Romania’s CEO Ravinder Takkar was cited by Romanian business news site ZF.ro as saying: ‘We continue to focus on mobile data adoption and to offer our users the best network experience. Our 4G coverage increased to 81% of the urban population and as a result, we almost doubled the number of users of 4G subscriptions across the customer base in the last quarter … smartphone data traffic increased significantly, by 150% compared to the same quarter last year.’