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The acquisition of Vodafone Egypt in December last year has enabled the Vodacom Group to report a 37% growth in revenue to R35.7 billion in the quarter ended in June. Normalised and comparable revenue growth was 5.3%.
In South Africa, its largest market, Vodacom relied on post-paid contract customers and the provision of financial services to increase revenue by 5.6% to R21.4 billion.
Chief executive officer Shameel Joosub said in a statement:
Vodacom says it is confident that it will be able to sign an electricity wheeling agreement with electricity supplier Eskom, which will enable it to deliver into the power system from its own alternative sources to avoid downtime during load shedding.
Revenue from new services - primarily financial and digital service - now accounts for almost one-fifth of its total revenue. Financial services remain a "clear strategic priority", increasing its revenue by 46% to surpass the R3 billion mark in a quarter for the first time. Vodacom's mobile money platforms (including M-Pesa) processed $360.6 billion (R6.5 trillion) over the last twelve months, up 5.8%. M-Pesa now offers loans and services to merchants throughout its markets in east Africa.
The group is focused on getting more smartphones in the hands of its customers in markets such as Ethiopia, Tanzania, Lesotho, Egypt and Kenya. Smartphone penetration across these operations reached 33.2% in the quarter, with 23 million customers transacting on their digitally enabled phones.
The biggest opportunity for this lies in Safaricom Ethiopia, which has now reached 2.7 million customers since it started operations in October 2022.
Its share price gained almost a percent on Friday, but has lost 19% over the past year.
