Vodacom South Africa pumps R11.1 billion into its network – MyBroadband

Vodacom’s annual results for the 2023/24 financial year revealed that the network operator invested R11.1 billion in its South African network between 1 April 2023 and 31 March 2024.

The company has been consistent in its network capital expenditure over the past three financial years. It pumped R11.17 billion into its network during the 2022/23 financial year and R11.15 billion the year before.

Its R11.1 billion capital expenditure in 2023/24 represents a 0.5% decline compared to the previous year.

Vodacom said the investment aimed to support network resilience, leverage its new spectrum assets, and enhance its IT platforms.

“From an infrastructure investment perspective, we spent R11.1 billion to support network resilience, leverage our new spectrum assets and enhance our IT platforms to maintain our competitive edge and remain South Africa’s most reliable network,” said Vodacom Group CEO Shameel Joosub.

In previous years, the company highlighted the need to spend significant amounts of money on backup power solutions and running costs for its towers. It refers to this as its network resilience investment.

The network operator significantly expanded its South African customer base over the past twelve months, adding 125,000 contract customers and 7.3 million prepaid users.

This brings its total contract customers to 6.8 million and its prepaid customer base to 44.9 million. It also significantly expanded its fixed services, including fibre.

Shameel Joosub, Vodacom Group CEO

Vodacom saw a big increase in data traffic on its network over the twelve months, attributed to greater smartphone penetration and network availability.

Data traffic increased by 36.2%, with Vodacom’s data customer base reaching 28.8 million. It added that 4G and 5G devices on its network had increased by 15.2% to 24.4 million.

Vodacom’s fixed service revenue increased significantly by 18.4% over the period, supported by good customer adoption of fibre.

“Our homes and businesses connected reached 190,000, while our own fibre passed almost 166,000 homes and businesses,” it added.

Vodacom’s annual results for its 2023/24 financial year also revealed that its service revenue increased modestly over the period while its operational profit declined slightly.

Overall revenue increased by 4.2% from R84.7 billion to R88.3 billion, while service revenue increased by 2.6% from R60 billion to R61.6 billion.

Operating profit declined by 3.6% to R20.1 billion from R20.8 billion. Vodacom attributed its profit declines to higher depreciation and amortisation.

Meanwhile, the company said the revenue growth was supported by new services, the consumer contract segment, and prepaid mobile data.

“New services such as financial and digital services, fixed and IoT were up 11.2% and contributed R10.2 billion, or 16.6% of South Africa’s service revenue,” it said.

“Mobile prepaid data growth of 11.6% was supported by network resilience coupled with big data-led personalised offers.”