Vodacom says it will fully comply with the Competition Commission’s investigation into compliance on the National Treasury’s transversal contract for mobile communications services.
In March 2016, National Treasury issued a tender for the supply and delivery of mobile communication services to national and provincial government departments, in which Vodacom was selected as the preferred supplier.
The matter is now before the Competition Commission.
The mobile company released its interim results on Monday for the six months ending 30th September 2017.
The mobile company revenue grew by 4.6% to R42 billion.
Vodacom says it added 4.3 million new subscribers for the reported period, taking the network to 40 million subscribers.
This makes it the country’s largest network by subscriber numbers.
Prepaid customers increased by 2.8 million to almost 35 million. The company says it has grown its subscriber base as a result of better innovation, increased social media platforms, more personalised bundles and smart phones for the customers.
Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub says they saw an increase in data revenue fueled by strong demand for data services. It plans to increase its data network coverage.
“So far this year, we have spent R4.5 billion on expanding our network. South Africa continues to perform well, driven by good customer growth. Revenue growth was strong at 7.7% supported by increase of cell devices, mainly smart devices that will continue to augment our service data growth. Service revenue grew at 4.7 % with data revenue growing at 15% and is now contributing more than voice revenue.”
In October, Vodacom announced price decreases for data customers. This as government continues to urge mobile companies to decrease the cost of data. The network increased its data customers to 19 million up 9.6 % year-on year.
“We remain focused on data pricing in South Africa, and we have demonstrated this with our out of data rates. And we will continue to address data pricing by reducing these rates over the medium term, in a controlled way to manage the impact on growth and profitability. ”
“We now have 60% of customers using data bundles, and we will continue to accelerate this using education, bundle prepositions and customer journeys’. Data traffic has increased by 51% and price per megabyte reduced by 21% year by year. We are confident that we can continue doing this as there is enough elasticity of demand to bring data pricing down.”
