DURBAN - Mobile network Vodacom has announced that they added 1,5 million new customers in South Africa.
The company has added 1 million more customers in their international operations taking their number of total customers to 76,5 million.
Vodacom's local customers grew to 43,1 million, that is a 9,5% increase due to 1,4 million prepaid customers and 75000 new contract additions.
The company said that prepaid customer growth at 5,5% was good. The growth was supported by the growth in customers, which was slightly balanced out by a decrease in ARPUs (average revenue per user) as the company attracts new customers with lower spend on average compared to the current base.
Contract customer revenue has grown from decreases in previous quarters and it has incraesed by 0,8%.
4G customers numbers also grew in the quarter with the company adding 739 000 4G customers to reach a number of 8,1 million customers.
Besides increases in customer numbers the company also saw an increase in the data revenue. Data revenue increased by 9,4% to R6,1 billion and it contributed 44,1 % of service revenue. The network said that they will continue to push data bundle engagement to ensure a worry-free experience for their users.
The success of the pricing plan makes data more affordable for their users and it culminated in a 32,2% increase in data bundles and a completely effective price per MB decrease of 17,1%.
Vodacom has extended their rural coverage and made advancements to improve the backhaul performance and capacity by expanding the size of self-provided high capacity sites from 90,1% to 92,4%.
Vodacom's Group CEO Shameel Joosub said that the strong momentum from their annual results carried the company into a pleasing quarter.
He added that they are focused on network investment as a key competitive differentiator as well as growing their 4G coverage.