Cell phone giant Vodafone Group Plc topped forecasts by netting 4.1 million new customers in its first quarter - its best growth in five years - which helped send its shares to new year highs on Monday. Including another six million customers from its acquisition of Czech and Romanian mobile groups, British-based Vodafone said its global subscriber base now exceeded 165 million. Analysts had forecast customer growth before acquisitions of 3.1 million.
Despite increasingly mature and competitive mobile phone markets, subscriber growth was 35 percent higher than in the same period last year. Mobile revenues grew by 8.6 percent - the top-end of the company's 6-9 percent full-year forecast.
"Given the customer results, the revenue results, product results, we are very pleased to give you full confidence that our full-year guidance is still in line with our expectations," Chief Executive Arun Sarin told a conference call.
PRAGMATIC ON JAPAN, KEEN ON POLAND: In Sarin's most pragmatic comments yet on his struggling business in Japan - third-ranked Vodafone K.K. - he noted that Vodafone was "not married" to any of its assets, although he said his priority remained to fix the Japanese unit.
While Japan remained a good market with significant innovation in areas such as mobile television or camera phones, Sarin said that if something changed in the future, he would "obviously be looking at this with an open mind". "We're doing and seeing things in Japan that are very advantageous to our position here in Europe," Sarin told the conference call. But he added, "We're not married to any asset."
Sarin reiterated he remained keen on clinching a majority stake in Poland's third-largest mobile phone company Polkomtel alone, despite a report in Polish daily Puls Biznesu that it had made a joint 8.7 billion zloty ($2.56 billion) bid to raise its 19.6 percent stake with Danish co-shareholder TDC.
Sarin said it was too soon to talk of any progress in talks, but Michal Stepniewski, an adviser to Poland's treasury, told Reuters in Warsaw that Vodafone and TDC had made a bid for a larger stake in Polkomtel, which is owned by state-controlled Polish firms. He declined to comment on the price.
Subscriber growth beat most forecasts in markets such as Germany, where the company added 497,000 customers, the United States, where its minority-owned business Verizon Wireless won 850,000 subscribers, in Spain, where it netted another 368,000 and in Britain, where Vodafone added 165,000. For the year to March 2006, the group has forecast free cashflow of 6.5 billion-7.0 billion pounds.
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