Vodacom reports data usage increase in its interim results

The average volume of data that is consumed per smartphone on Vodacom’s network has jumped by 55.4 % to 336 MB/month year on year in six month period ended 30 September 2014.

That figure comes from the mobile operator’s interim financial results published on Monday.

“More than half of our customer base now actively uses data and data traffic increased 75.2% in comparison to last year,” the company said.

The numbers show that average monthly consumption on tablets in South Africa increased by 28.9 % to 879MB. The number of active smartphones and tablets increased by 22.3% to 8.6-million. The rise in numbers can be attributed to Vodacom the increased offerings Vodacom’s launched in the past few months as it looks to lure in new users. As much is evident in its launch of cheap smartphones and tablets, including the Vodacom Kicka — a low-cost Android smartphone — and the Vodacom Smart Tab 3G, its latest low-cost Android tablet.

Shameel Aziz Joosub, Vodacom Group CEO, commented that:

“Our commercial strategy centres on offering better value to customers in each market segment. In the prepaid market our low-cost bundles have proven extremely popular with more than 40 million sold per month. The postpaid approach has been to offer integrated packages covering all voice, data and SMS needs at a fixed price, allowing customers to more effectively manage their spend. This strategy has enabled us to reduce our blended average effective price per minute by 19.0%, this resulted in a 17.6% increase in total outgoing traffic”.

Vodacom invested R4.1-billion in the network in South Africa and added over 1 000 new LTE base stations and 745 new 3G sites. An expenditure that the company says has enabled it to support the 18% increase in outgoing voice traffic and 75% increase in data traffic.

However, in the past 12 months, though Vodacom has not revealed the average effective price per megabyte, the numbers show that its fallen by 30.4%.

It has also emerged that Vodacom’s 3G network now covers 94% of South African population and its 4G/LTE network covers 30% of the South African population.

Data revenue grew by 21.6% to R6.2-billion. Data now makes up 26.4% of revenue, from 21.5% a year ago.

What has also shown growth is in Vodacom’s data customers which grew by 17.4% to 16.7-million.