Telecom operator Vodafone India has posted revenues of €5,853 million (–5 percent) in fiscal ended March 31, 2017.
The free voice and data services from Reliance Jio Infocomm has impacted the revenue growth of Vodafone India.
Vodafone India said it achieved EBITDA of €1,596 million (–12.1 percent) with EBITDA margin of 27.3 percent, adjusted operating profit of €480 million (–10.9 percent) and operating loss of €4,171 million in fiscal 2017.
Vodafone posted an impairment of €6.4 billion (€5 billion net of tax) in H1 fiscal 2017, relating to its Indian business — driven by lower projected cash flows within its business plan due to Jio.
Following the announcement of the merger of Vodafone India with Idea Cellular, the impairment charge was reduced to €4.5 billion (€3.7 billion net of tax) for the year.
Vodafone India said service revenue declined 4.9 percent against –1.9 percent in Q3, –11.5 percent in Q4 due to the presence of Reliance Jio.
“The slowdown in Q4 was due to the ongoing impact of free services, which dragged on data and voice pricing, compounded by the leap year benefit in the prior period. We grew our overall customer base during the year and retained our high value customers,” said Vodafone Group in a statement.
Vodafone Group posts net loss of €6.1 bn due to India business
Vodafone has reported net loss of €6.1 billion including a net of tax impairment of India of €3.7 billion in the financial year 2017.
Revenue of Vodafone Group was €47.63 billion (–4.4 percent) in fiscal 2017. EBITDA was stable at €14.15 billion, while EBIT was €3.9 billion (+5.3 percent).
Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao said: “Investment in network quality has provided the platform to offer more generous plans to our mobile customers in Europe, stabilising contract ARPU, and has allowed us to capture strong data growth in our emerging markets operations.”
Vodafone India
Data revenue fell 16 percent in Q4 compared to +0.6 percent in Q3.
Vodafone India’s data customer base increased to 66.9 million in Q4 from 65 million in Q3, mainly reflecting an addition of 2.7 million 3G / 4G customers base. The total number of 3G / 4G user base of Vodafone was 37.7 million. Vodafone India added 10 million 3G / 4G mobile customers in the year.
Data prices fell 38 percent year-on-year against –11 percent in Q3. Growth in monthly data usage per 3G/4G customer was 40 percent to 636MB.
Voice revenue dipped 13 percent in Q4 against –3.0 percent drop in Q3 due to higher incoming volumes and a larger customer base. It noted 22 percent year-on-year decline in voice prices as the market moved to unlimited voice plans.
Mobile customer base of Vodafone India increased 4.4 million to total customer base of 209 million.
