Vodacom reports rise in customer numbers in SA

VODACOM’s overall subscriber numbers declined 2.6% to 61.8-million in the June quarter from the matching period in 2015.

The drop was mainly due to a 28.8% plunge in subscriber numbers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to 8.5-million from the previous year’s 12-million following enforcement of tighter subscriber identification.
In Mozambique, subscriber numbers dropped 4.3% to 4.8-million from the previous year’s 5-million, Vodacom said in a quarterly update released on Thursday morning.
Despite the smaller customer base, Vodacom grew its total revenue by 5.8% to R19.9bn during the three months.
In its home market, Vodacom grew its active customers to 35-million, a 5.4% increase from the previous year and a 2.7% increase from the March quarter.
"One of the major highlights this quarter is the stellar number of customer additions in SA in both postpaid and prepaid, where we added almost one million customers," Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub said in the statement.
He attributed the rise in users to the group’s R2.7bn capital expenditure during the quarter.
Though customer numbers in SA grew, average revenue per user per month declined from the March quarter. For prepaid users, the average monthly spending on cellphones fell 3.2% to R60 and for contract users by 0.7% to R401 from the previous quarter.
But compared with the June quarter in 2015, the average monthly bill for contract users grew 5.2% from R381. Joosub said this growth over the year for contract users was due to growing demand for wireless data.
"We now have 14.9-million customers using bundles and we sold 329-million bundles in the first three months. We continue to improve our lead on net promoter score and we now lead by 16 points to our nearest competitor," he said in the statement.
Active contract customers increased by 51,000 in the quarter and churn improved to 5.3%, placing Vodacom’s customer satisfaction well ahead of its competitors, Joosub said.
Outside of SA, total active customers fell 11.5% to 26.7-million at the end of June.
Vodacom’s largest market outside of SA is Tanzania where it has 12-million active subscribers, followed by the DRC with 8.5-million, Mozambique with 4.8-million and Lesotho with 1.4-million.