Vodafone celebrates 200 million customer milestone

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Vodafone today announced that it added an extra 8.7 million customers to its books in the last three months of 2006, helping its overall customer base to swell to more than 200 million users.

In addition, the company boasted that, despite operating in a market populated by fickle consumers and dwindling loyalty, renewed customer retention activities have enabled it to reduce contract customer churn in most European countries.

Reporting year-on-year revenue growth of 5.1 per cent, the mobile giant confirmed that its cost-cutting regime is still on target with outsourcing, supply chain management, network sharing and data centre consolidation programmes successfully executed.

Vodafone also used today as an opportunity to outline other key performance indicators (KPIs) it used to measure its success for the quarter ending December 31 last year.

The operator's voice revenue shot up by 2.6 per cent organically, while total voice usage increased by more than 20 per cent on an organic basis during the period.

Data revenues have grown organically by 34.2 per cent year on year, attributed mainly to business services growth and greater penetration of 3G devices - Vodafone added some 2.5 million 3G devices during the quarter, bringing the total 3G device base to 13.6 million.

Overall organic messaging revenue shot up by 3.7 per cent, with the UK seeing a year-on-year increase of almost 14 per cent. Messaging and non-messaging data services in the UK now account for just under a quarter (23.2 per cent) of the total UK services revenue, according to the quarter's statistics.

Average revenue per user (ARPU) each month for contract customers in the UK was reported as being £43.70.

"These KPIs are very much in line with expectations and show that we are continuing to make progress in executing our strategy," said Arun Sarin, the mobile giant's chief executive.

"I am also pleased to announce today that we now have 200 million proportionate

customers globally and we are grateful for their confidence in us. This is both an important milestone for Vodafone and a great achievement by our people."

The network operator also confirmed today that it expects to sign more network-sharing deals with rival operators to help increase service coverage while bringing down costs.

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