Vodafone India, the Indian arm of Vodafone Plc today announced its financial results for the first half period of fiscal 2018 and posted revenues of Rs 19,002 crore, a drop of 15.8% over the same period a year ago.
The company has attributed this decline to multiple factors that included a new operator – Reliance Jio -, incumbent operators -Bharti airtel, Idea Cellular, seasonality as well as GST.
By the end of the period, Vodafone India’s operating cash flow was at Rs 1543 crore and the company’s capex investment stood at Rs 2915 crore.
For the period till 30 September 2017, the company’s total subscriber base reached 207 million, a growth of 3% over previous year, with rural subscriber base of 114 million. The company has a total of 140,000 telecom sites out of which, it claims to have 128,000 3G and 4G sites.
Despite the stiff competition, Vodafone claims to have increassed its revenue market share by 0.6% over the same period a year ago, to touch 23.1%.
The company’s ARPU (average revenue per user) stood at Rs 146.
Vodafone Business Services, the enterprise services arm of Vodafone India, is contributing 19% of the company’s total revenue or Rs 3610 crore approximately.
By the end of the half year, the company had a total of 67.7 million data users of which close to 45 million consume more than 1 MB data per day. The company said it added 10 million new broadband users during the peiod and completed the acquisition of You Broadband, a fixed line broadband operator.
M-Pesa, Vodafone India’s digital wallet, has reached a customer base of 13.58 million by the end of this reported period.
Vodafone India and Idea Cellular, the Number 2 and Number 3 operators in India respectively, have already announced their merger and the companies are expecting a closure by the end of March 2018.
The company said it has already received approvals from CCI, SEBI and Stock Exchanges and the merger is ‘on track’.
To quicken this merger and to create a better synergy, both the companies last week announced to sell off their individual tower assets to American Tower for $1.3 billion.
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