Voda revenue dips 22%, to seal Idea merger by Aug

Vodafone, the country's second-largest telecom firm, on Wednesday reported a 22.3 per cent decline in June quarter revenue at 959 million euro on intense competition and cuts in termination rates.

The London-headquartered company had posted revenues of 1.387 billion euro under the IAS18 accounting standards for the same period last year.

Having bagged the DoT nod for its merger with Idea Cellular, the company exuded confidence of completing the transaction by next month. The telecom company said the service revenues, excluding the impact of the mobile termination rate cuts, declined by 9.6 per cent for the reporting quarter. When compared to the preceding March quarter, the service revenues declined 0.2 per cent, the company said, stating that this was due to prepaid prices being stable during the three months. The company said it was able to retain the high value customers at lower price levels and the crucial average revenue per user declined by 20 per cent for the post-paid connections and 28 per cent for the prepaid connections.

A move away to 'single SIM' ownership due to unlimited plans saw the number of customers decline by three million during the quarter to 219.7 million and mitigated the pricing pressures, it said.

The company said Idea has paid 0.5 billion euro in spectrum liberalisation fees and also provided a bank guarantee to cover certain disputed demands which are the subject of ongoing court cases.

"In India, where competition remains intense, we have now received conditional approval from the Department of Telecoms 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," its group CEO Vittorio Colao said.