Vodafone Tops 876,000 UK Broadband Customers as Mobile Shrinks

UK ISP and mobile giant Vodafone have today published their latest results to the end of 2020 (financial Q3 FY21), which saw their fixed broadband base grow to 876,000 customers (up by +38k in the quarter vs +45K in Q2 FY21), while their mobile base slowed its decline to total 17,337,000 (down by -43k vs -200k in Q2 FY21).

Generally, the last quarter has been fairly eventful. The period saw Vodafone set a new target to reduce their total global carbon emissions to ‘net zero’ by 2040 (here), unveil a hefty price hike (here), extend free 4G data SIMs to 350,000 school children (here) and make some key changes to their Pay As You Go 1 tariff (here). Furthermore, they added SMS support to WiFi calling (here) and signed a deal to help share 222 rural mobile masts (here).

In addition, in December 2020, it was announced that the CEO of Vodafone UK, Nick Jeffery, would leave in February 2021. The operator confirmed that Ahmed Essam had now become the new CEO of Vodafone UK, effective 1st February, and will remain on the Vodafone Group Executive Committee.

On top of that they’ve been busy discounting their FTTC based “Superfast Broadband” and FTTP (Cityfibre / Openreach) based “Gigafast Broadband” packages, which tends to fuel good take-up of the service, but we’re surprised that their growth seemed to slow down a bit over the last quarter (Black Friday usually has a bigger impact).

Nevertheless, they do seem likely to pass 1 million customers by the end of 2021, assuming their rate of growth doesn’t fall away. Admittedly, this is still a long way behind BT’s consumer broadband base of 9 million, as well as Sky Broadband’s 6m, Virgin Media’s 5.4m and TalkTalk’s 4.2m, but it does help to cement Vodafone as the UK’s fifth largest provider of consumer internet packages. Not an easy thing to do in an aggressively competitive market like this, particularly as they only re-joined it back 2015 (here).

Otherwise, it’s noted that, out of Vodafone UK’s fixed broadband customer base of 876,000, some 450,000 of those are “converged” (i.e. they take a mobile plan from the same operator). Speaking of mobile, the operator’s Pay Monthly base continues to grow, thus pretty much all of this quarter’s decline can be traced back to their pre-paid (PAYG) base.

Finally, it’s noted that mobile data (mobile broadband) traffic across their network increased to a total of 254,465 TeraBytes (TB) during the quarter, which is up from 236,939 TB in the previous quarter.

Nick Read, Group CEO, said:

“I am pleased the Group returned to service revenue growth in Q3 as a result of the continued commercial momentum across our business, including our largest market Germany. Our good trading performance underscores our confidence in the outlook for the full year. We have made further progress on our strategic priorities, including the IPO of Vantage Towers in early 2021, which remains firmly on track and will now include our 50% shareholding in the UK towers joint venture with Telefonica.

Our networks have successfully delivered another quarter of record data traffic as many countries continue to endure COVID-19 lockdowns and customers depend on our services. We have achieved this while further reducing our carbon footprint and we are making fast progress towards our important target of having our European networks wholly powered by renewable electricity by July this year.

I continue to be proud of the hard work of my colleagues, and that of the industry more broadly, who have kept societies connected and supported key sectors such as education and healthcare. Vodafone has now contributed over €150 million since the start of the pandemic, through direct contributions and in-kind services to those in need, and we will continue to help society recover and build back stronger.”

Overall, the operator saw their quarterly UK service revenue increased to €1,216m (up/down from €1,208m in the previous quarter). The full report is here (PDF).