Vodafone India, the country’s second largest telecom operator, on Wednesday reported a 31% year-on-year (y-o-y) decline in its total revenues at Rs 8,682 crore (£959 million) for the April-June quarter of FY19, impacted by intense competition and reduction in domestic and international mobile termination rates (MTR).
Vodafone’s services revenue from India fell 10% y-o-y to Rs 8,880 crore in April-June, while on a sequential basis the decline was less that 1% as the company focused on investments in key circles, offered unlimited voice and data bundled tariff plans and ramped up its network.
The company lost revenues worth Rs 1,250 crore during Q1FY19 on account of reduction in domestic and international MTR, which is on the higher side compared with losses in the previous two quarters. During Q4FY18, Vodafone’s MTR losses stood at Rs 1,160 crore, while in October-December FY18, it was `930 crore.
“We continued to retain our high-value customers albeit at lower price levels, with contract (postpaid) Arpu declining 20% and prepaid by 28% in the quarter. This pricing pressure was mitigated as customers consolidated spending onto a single-SIM following the increased penetration of unlimited offers, which have now been adopted by 29% of our prepaid customer base,” Vodafone said. Its total subscriber base declined by 3 million sequentially, reflecting the SIM consolidation trend across the market, and now totals 219.7 million.
The operator said its data traffic quadrupled following a steep drop in data prices with data consumption per subscriber per month rising to 4.5GB during Q1FY19 compared to 3. 5GB in January-March of FY18. The number of data users also continued to increase. It now has 77 million data users of which 30.9 million are 4G subscribers. It added 4,900 4G sites during the quarter.
On the merger with Idea Cellular, Vodafone Group CEO Vittorio Colao said: “In India, where competition remains intense, we have now received conditional approval from the Department of Telecommunications for the merger, which we aim to close before the end of August, allowing us to unlock substantial synergies”.
