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Digital products and services
We continue to identify new opportunities to monetise data and
grow usage by delivering content services. We are providing new
services in non-traditional areas such as mobile financial services,
insurance and IoT. We have established dedicated acceleration
units to drive further uptake in each of these areas, developing
specific product and service offerings for each of our targeted
customer segments.
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Digital content:
In addition to driving data uptake and revenue,
content services – such as TV and video, music streaming,
gaming, news and sport – provides the opportunity to grow
service revenue such as third-party billing and in-app purchases
to a customer’s account, as well as providing the infrastructure
to service providers in these areas to distribute their services.
As part of our reseller strategy, we have developed valuable
partnerships with content providers, and are working on
developing further partnerships in the year ahead. We are
pursuing a segment-based video/entertainment strategy that
will differentiate on product experience to drive increased data
growth, ARPU growth and customer retention.
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IoT:
Building on Vodafone’s global market leadership in IoT, we
see significant upside in developing product and service
offerings in areas such as home automation and security, pet
trackers, and personal accessories and wearables.
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Mobile financial services:
Our M-Pesa mobile money initiative
remains a strong growth driver in our International operations,
with customers up 40.1% to 12.9 million. We continue to
enhance our service and product eco-systems. In Tanzania,
1.2 million customers are using our successful M-Pawa
savings and loans product, developed in partnership with the
Commercial Bank of Africa. There has also been a further steady
uptake of our International Money Transfer (IMT) services.
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Insurance:
Our segmented insurance portfolio – covering life
and funeral insurance products, and various device insurance
offerings – has grown steadily, generating revenue this year of
approximately R589 million, an increase of 12.4% on last year.
Policies from our long-term insurance business grew 55.9% off a
small but fast-growing base, and there remain significant upside
in device insurance offerings.
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e-Commerce and related e-services:
We are also identifying
and delivering new data monetisation opportunities through
targeted partnerships in areas such as e-Commerce, e-education,
e-health and e-sport.
Each of these product and service offerings are being enabled by
recent developments in network and device technologies and
data analytics. Our investment in big data to analyse customer
needs, wants and behaviours, will enable us to taylor make
product offerings for all customers.
Enterprise
Vodacom Business has had another very good year. Our
investment in infrastructure and skills building over the past few
years has delivered valuable results. We continue to have a strong
market share in mobile, with significant growth opportunities in
the fixed voice and data market, as well as in the SME market in
all categories.
In South Africa, our fixed-line and business managed services
revenue increased 8.3% year-on-year to R1.8 billion, and now
comprise 14.3% of total enterprise service revenue. Revenue from
Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network (IPVPN) services grew
17.0% year-on-year, and 35.2% for our cloud-based services. We
have continued to expand our service proposition in the cloud and
hosting space, building on our extensive fixed and mobile
infrastructure, pan-African footprint, investment in data centre
infrastructure, and our collaboration with global partners such as
IBM and SAP HANA. The new clients we have secured in the large
enterprise segments show confidence in our ability to deliver to
their sophisticated requirements.
To retain our lead and to create differentiation in the market, we
are improving our operational and sales execution, including
specifically in customer on-boarding and billing; we are also
making improvements in pricing, product range and proposition
flexibility, and expanding our product range for SMEs. Enhancing
network capillarity remains a challenge.
In terms of managed and professional services, we are well
positioned to develop a meaningful market presence, leveraging
off our existing strong client base. We are exploring opportunities
to develop sector-specific propositions that differentiate us from
our peers, across a range of sectors, including retail, health,
agriculture, education, industrial and transportation.
To drive enterprise growth to 2020, we are focusing on three
strategic investment areas:
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Market leadership in IoT:
Our goal is to become the IoT
solutions partner of choice, building on Vodafone’s recognised
leadership in this area (the first global IoT mobile provider to
exceed 50 million connections), as well as its extensive
resources in Africa, such as its dedicated IoT platform,
automotive capabilities and remote monitoring and control
services platform. We are extending our IoT connectivity
leadership in all vertical markets to extract better value and
creating leading end-to-end IoT services in selected key markets.
In doing so, we are exploring opportunities in hardware (such as
IoT sensors and gateways), connectivity management (such as
smart meters, stock management, agri-sensing, mobile POS
devices, and cold chain management), developing and providing
services in areas such as big data analytics, application
enablement, and cloud and hosting. We have made meaningful
investments in such platforms through the acquisition of XLink
segmented
propositions
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continued
Vodacom Group Limited
Integrated report for the year ended 31 March 2017
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