Stuart Corner
Friday, 01 February 2008 00:42
IT Industry -
Strategy
Page 1 of 2
6Vodafone Australia has reported its best ever Christmas quarter, adding more than 141,000 net customers to take the total to 3,572,000, excluding MVNO customers. The new additions are three times those in the immediately prior quarter.
Service revenue was up 6.4 percent compared to the same quarter last year, but average revenue per user (ARPU) fell by 1.5 percent for Q3 07/08 compared to Q3 06/07 as a result of two successive reductions in mobile termination rates during the year which lowered incoming revenues.
Vodafone's contract customer base grew by 17.6 percent for Q3 07/08 compared to Q3 06/07. Total network usage for Q3 07/08 was 2,422 million minutes a growth of 8.2 percent year-on-year. Vodafone closed Q3 07/08 with more than 780,000 3G devices on its network (cellphones and data modems), a 71.9 percent increase on December 2006.
CEO Russell Hewitt said that phone retailer Crazy John's, which switched its allegiance from Telstra to Vodafone on 1 July 2007, had "exceeded forecast performance, contributing significantly to our retail customer acquisition figures and building strong growth into our customer base." Crazy John's, however has
just announced that it is becoming an MVNO on the Vodafone network so some of its future sales would not be counted in Vodafone's non-MVNO numbers. However it has not indicated that it will cease retailing Vodafone services.
Hewitt added: "During Q3, Vodafone signed a three-year extension to our MVNO agreement with Macquarie Telecom, which is a fantastic result that speaks volumes for the relationship we've established over many years. The MVNO agreement with AAPT is also performing very well and both Macquarie Telecom and AAPT continue to deliver a good proportion of high-ARPU customers in the business market."
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