Vodafone springs to success

Despite decent top-line revenue growth, service revenue dipped 3 per cent. That reflected fierce competition, broad economic weakness in Europe and regulatory pressures. Vodafone's Spanish and Italian operations trailed the pack with service revenue down 9 per cent and 10 per cent, respectively.

More positively, Vodafone is putting the $130bn (£82bn) windfall from the disposal of Verizon Wireless to work in the shape of 'Project Spring', its £19bn network investment programme. The group has added 21,000 super-fast 4G sites since September last year, meaning its 4G network now covers 59 per cent of the European population, up from 32 per cent a year ago. Wider availability helped to drive a 77 per cent rise in data traffic, too. Yet only 6 per cent of Vodafone's 165m data customers use 4G, leaving plenty of room for growth.

Similar investments in Asia, the Middle East and Asia Pacific also paid off. Vodafone's regional customer base grew 11m to 313m, driving 9 per cent and 110 per cent growth in voice and data usage, respectively.

Vodafone continued to shift towards 'quad-play' as well - involving offering TV, broadband and both fixed-line and mobile telephony. For example, it acquired Spanish fixed-line cable group Ono this year, which brought 1.6m broadband customers into the fold, as well as Germany's Kabel Deutschland.

The more esoteric businesses also performed. Money transfer service M-Pesa increased its active customers by 16 per cent to 18.5m, for example. Sales rose 24 per cent at its machine-to-machine segment, too, helped by its acquisition of Cobra Automotive Technologies. The enterprise segment, meanwhile, landed contracts with British Gas and Aviva (AV.).

Vodafone raised its full-year cash profit guidance by about 3 per cent to £11.9bn, excluding Ono. JPMorgan Cazenove expects full-year pre-tax profit of £2.48bn, giving EPS of 5.67p (from 8.86p in 2014).