Fixed, IoT & Enterprise Give Vodafone Hope For Strong Year

Vodafone has followed up several weeks of good news with a set of positive results that add strength to the argument that the Newbury-based operator’s difficult few years are at an end.

Intense competition, difficult regulatory environments and falling legacy revenue had led to difficulties – particularly in Europe – but a multi-billion pound network upgrade programme, huge investments in fixed broadband and a focus on IoT have helped turn things round.

And over the past few weeks, the company has announced a major rebrand, a new range of consumer IoT products and services, and plans to bring fibre to the premise (FTTP) broadband to five million homes in the UK with CityFibre.

Vodafone results

Vodafone’s broadband reach is now 99 million premises across Europe, 36 million of which are on its own infrastructure, and it has 15.4 million customers, of which 8.8 million have superfast broadband.

Those figures increase to 18.6 million and 12 million when the VodafoneZiggo joint-venture in the Netherlands is factored in, and fixed now represents a quarter of all revenue.

There is also renewed hope for the enterprise market with the belief that IoT, cloud and next generation networking services will generate growth.

“In the first half of the year we have maintained good commercial momentum. Revenue grew organically in the majority of our markets driven by mobile data and our continued success as Europe’s fastest growing broadband provider,” declared Vodafone Group CEO Vittorio Colao.

“Enterprise revenues continue to grow, led by our Internet of Things (‘IoT’), Cloud and Fixed services, and for the second year running we achieved an absolute reduction in our operating costs. As a result, we are able to report a strong financial performance,

Revenues for the first half of the year fell 4.1 percent to €23.1 billion, although this was blamed on deconsolidation in the Netherlands and foreign exchange movements, but operating profit jumped by 32.5 percent to €2.1 billion.

For investors, the most important piece of news will the financial outlook for the full year has increased from 4-8 percent to 10 percent.

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