Vodafone India Q1 revenue declines 31.1%
MUMBAI: Vodafone India’s revenue for the June quarter declined 31.1% to €959 million due to the ongoing tariff war and cuts in interconnect usage charges for both domestic and international calls, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
Out of overall revenue from its India business, services revenue (from mobile services) stood at €955 million, down from €1,385 million in the year-ago period.
Vodafone India, along with Kumar Mangalam Birla-owned Idea Cellular, settled government dues worth ₹7,200 crore earlier this week to get the final approval for their merger from the department of telecommunications.
“In India, where competition remains intense, we have now received conditional approval from the Department of Telecom for the merger of Vodafone India and Idea Cellular, which we aim to close before the end of August, allowing us to unlock substantial synergies,” said Vodafone Plc’s group chief executive Vittorio Colao.
“The group’s overall performance provides us with the confidence to reiterate our outlook for the year,” Colao said, adding it had made good progress in reducing absolute operating costs for the third year running.
During an analyst presentation, the company said that the “revenue declines (are) moderating and the merger is on-track to close shortly” as it seeks to close the India joint venture and begin to capture synergies quickly for both Idea-vodafone as well as Indus-infratel merger.
It added that the India unit continued to retain its high-value customers, albeit at lower price levels, with the contract average revenue per user (ARPU) declining 20%, and prepaid ARPU by 28% in the quarter.
“Our total customer base declined by 3.0 million quarteron-quarter, reflecting the ‘SIM consolidation’ trend across the market, and now totals 219.7 million.” “The number of data users has continued to increase. We now have 77 million data users of which 30.9 million are 4G.” The telco further said that it managed to keep off the impact of the tariff war as its subscribers preferred spending on a single SIM, following the increase in ‘unlimited’ offers.
“Our network investments have created a strong platform to capture this data demand, and we continue to have the leading or co-leading network NPS scores in 14 out of 20 markets, including India,” it said in the statement.