South Africa’s mobile network Cell C has published its financial results for the twelve months to end-December 2016, reporting an 11% year-on-year increase in revenues to ZAR14.6 billion (USD1.1 billion), while service revenues increased by 8% to ZAR11.8 billion over the same period. Cell C attributed the strong revenue growth in 2016 to ‘a focused strategy of innovation, exceptional value in product offerings and a customer-centric approach to how Cell C services its customers’, with service revenues growth driven by increase in data volumes, which surged by 67% in the reporting year. The company has posted profit of ZAR540 million in 2016, while EBITDA also increased significantly, by 59% y-o-y, to ZAR3.1 billion.
In operational terms, the South African cellco had a total active subscriber base of 15.3 million at end-2016, up from 12.8 million reported in 2015; of these, 12.5 million were active data subscribers. During the period under review, Cell C invested approximately ZAR3.4 billion in its network and other fixed and intangible assets, by mainly rolling out LTE and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) technologies, with a total of 5,000 sites in service at end-2016, of which 2,500 were LTE-enabled and 2,000 (LTE-A).