Strategy

The mobile industry started less than 30 years ago with a single service – making and receiving calls. Today our customers enjoy a range of services including simple voice calls, text and picture messaging, and data services such as mobile internet browsing, social networking sites, downloading applications (‘apps’) and sending emails via smartphones.

Market context:

According to industry analysts, data is expected to be the fastest growing segment of the mobile industry. It is estimated that between the 2011 and 2016 calendar years worldwide mobile data revenue is set to grow by US$142 billion, compared to a US$27 billion decline in voice revenue over the same period¹.

Goals:

We aim to have the best mobile network in all of the markets in which we operate, supported by leading IT systems. This means giving our customers far-reaching coverage, a very reliable connection and increasing speeds and data capacity.

Strengths:

We have more than 238,000 base station sites transmitting wireless signals – making us one of the largest mobile operators in the world.

Actions:

We are investing around £6 billion a year to deliver a high quality mobile data experience for our customers.

Progress:

In 2012 nearly one trillion minutes of calls were carried and more than 216 petabytes of data were sent across our networks – in other words enough data for 2.8 trillion emails.

Emerging markets represent around 29% of our service revenue and the share is likely to grow over the medium to longer term driven by continued strong economic growth and the increase in mobile penetration towards mature market levels.

Market context:

Almost all of the 1.5 billion new mobile phone users over the next four years are expected to come from emerging markets¹.

Goals:

We are steadily increasing our exposure to emerging markets given the stronger growth prospects that they offer relative to developed markets.

Strengths:

We operate mobile networks in a number of emerging markets including India, Vodacom, Egypt, Turkey, Ghana, Qatar and Fiji – in which we hold either a number one or two revenue market share position.

Actions:

Our high quality networks combined with low cost devices and innovative services such as mobile payments and mobile health solutions help to support economic development in underdeveloped communities.

Progress:

Emerging markets represent our fastest growing geographies, delivering service revenue growth of 13.2%*, compared to a fall of 1.1%*, for our Europe region.

Our enterprise customers range from small-office-home-office (‘SoHo’) businesses and small-to medium-sized enterprises (‘SME’), through to large domestic and multi-national corporates (‘MNC’). Across the Group we have over 30 million mobile enterprise customers accounting for around 8% of all customers and around 23% of service revenue.

Market context:

Enterprises spend €86 billion in total in areas where Vodafone provides its services: mobile voice, messaging and data.¹

Goals:

We want to confidently connect businesses using our expertise in converged services, delivering unmatched customer experience and real value for money. We aim to continue to gain market share and exploit opportunities across our geographic footprint.

Strengths:

Our geographic footprint in Europe allows us to enhance efficiency and realise scale benefits, allowing us to offer customers both fixed and mobile converged solutions.

Actions:

Our Vodafone One Net proposition offers customers one number which can be answered on their desk phone or mobile phone and is the foundation of our unified communications strategy.

Progress:

40% of our enterprise customers now have a smartphone or tablet across Europe, pushing enterprise data revenue growth of 18.2%*.

People are using data more and more in their everyday lives driven by fast, reliable mobile data networks and continual improvements in devices such as handsets and tablets. We are also seeing increased interest from customers in new data-based services like mobile payments via handsets and mobile data devices for homes and cars.

Market context:

New services account for a small portion of our revenues today but the potential market opportunity is significant.

Goals:

We want to expand our presence in attractive new growth segments to capture the incremental opportunity and enhance customer service through the provision of new and useful services that add value to our customers’ lives.

Strengths:

Our global network reach, leading brand and strong service platforms make us well placed to become the partner of choice and capture the revenue growth opportunity.

Actions:

We are developing new services in partnership with leading companies from all relevant industries, including financial institutions, retailers, software producers and handset manufacturers.

Progress:

During the year we saw strong growth in the take up of new services, adding 3.2 million active M-Pesa customers and 2.5 million new M2M connections.