JANE WARDELL
Vodafone Group, the world's largest mobile phone company by revenues, reported a 7.5% rise in first-quarter revenue yesterday, bolstered by strong performances from recently-acquired businesses in India and Turkey.
Vodafone said in a trading update that it posted revenue of £8.3bn for the three months ended June 30. Organic growth, stripping out disposals and acquisitions, was 4%.
The focus on emerging markets such as India and Turkey has boosted profit amid tough trading in traditional markets like Germany and Italy.
"We have made a good start to the financial year, with a strong performance from the EMAPA (Eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia-Pacific and Affiliates) region, offsetting continued challenging markets in Europe," said chief executive Arun Sarin.
Vodafone unveiled a new organisational structure last year to counter slowing growth in mature markets and boosting growth in emerging markets. It included plans to break into key telecoms services that combine both fixed and mobile networks to open up revenue streams not available to the company under its previous wireless-only strategy.
It closed the deal on the purchase of Turkey's Telsim Mobil Telekomunikasyon Hizmetleri for $4.55bn last year and bought a stake in India's Hutchison Essar for $10.7bn earlier this year.
The company said those additions helped increase the number of its net subscribers over the quarter by 9.1 million, or 4.1%.
"Vodafone's steady progress continues to please, as its diversification strategy strengthens apace," said Richard Hunter, analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.
"Apart from Turkey and the recently acquired controlling stake in Hutchison Essar of India, the firm's previous decision to stick with its US stake in Verizon has confounded the doubters," he added.
Some analysts believe that Vodafone should abandon its minority stake in Verizon Wireless to better drive growth in Europe and Asia as markets become more competitive and pressure grows to generate extra revenues from each customer.
Vodafone shares closed 2.75p firmer at 162p. - AP
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article