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Strategic big bet
Scaling financial services in South Africa
We see significant potential in providing compelling offerings in
the following areas:
Insure
Our existing segmented insurance portfolio, covering life, funeral
and various short-term insurance offerings has grown steadily over
the past year, generating revenue of approximately R625 million
from 950 000 policies. With insurance remaining largely
underpenetrated in South Africa, we see a substantial opportunity
in growing and digitising our insurance offerings, building on the
advantages we enjoy as a telco.
•
We have a sizeable existing customer base, and a wealth of
customers insights that will be leveraged for lead generation
and conversion, and for developing highly-personalised
product offerings.
•
We have a strong direct billing relationship with customers, and
multiple channels available for engaging with customers, with
digital being the biggest and most efficient.
•
Insurance is a sector particularly open to digital disruption,
presenting exciting opportunities for digital players in terms of
product innovation, underwriting, pricing and customer
journey digitisation.
Enabled by our growing Big Data capabilities, we are exploring
opportunities to develop products for both our existing and new
customer base across our markets.
Pay
We currently have 290 000 customers utilising the Vodacom
Express Recharge platform for direct recharges which has seen
direct voucher sales increasing by 43.2% to R631 million. Growing
direct voucher purchases through our express recharge platform
will have a positive impact on cash flow, as well as margin
improvement for Vodacom. We are also in the process of
developing our own digital payment products, which will not only
improve operating margins but also create new revenue streams
in the future. In addition to the Consumer proposition, we are
simultaneously developing Business to Business (B2B) payments
processing capability that will be offered to our Enterprise
customers.
Advance
Our Airtime Advance product achieved substantial growth in the
past year by leveraging sophisticated AI capabilities. Total value of
airtime advanced through this product increased from R1.8 billion
to R2.7 billion, representing 43.8% growth for the year. We have
expanded the Advance options to also include data bundles.
Strategic big bet
Consumer digital services and fibre
leadership
We have established dedicated acceleration units to identify and
realise new opportunities for monetising data and growing data
usage by developing Consumer digital services in a range of areas,
including:
•
Digital content:
We aim to provide the best digital experience
across our six chosen verticals: video, music, sports and
gaming, digital advertising, e-Commerce, as well as delivering a
compelling ecosystem of third-party propositions. We made
good progress this year in most verticals and will now focus on
building scale, with a particular focus on exponentially growing
digital advertising, video and the above ecosystems. This year,
we secured a 25.2% growth in content-related revenue, and a
76.0% increase in unique content-users.
•
Consumer IoT:
We continue to develop product and service
offerings in areas such as home automation and security, pet
trackers, and personal accessories and wearables.
•
e-Commerce and related e-Services:
We are also developing
new data monetisation opportunities through targeted
partnerships in areas such as e-Commerce, e-Education,
e-Health and e-Sport.
We are placing a strengthened focus on ‘owning the household’
through a three-part strategy:
•
Providing the best network in mobile and fibre.
•
Ensuring the most compelling household/family propositions.
•
Delivering the best customer experience.
Making progress on rolling out fibre:
We progressed our fibre roll-out this year, covering more
estates and business parks. We have 54 247 homes and
business passed and 15 846 connected with fibre or
fibre-like services. Looking to the future, we will be
identifying opportunities for co-build, and are confident
that we will deliver our fibre roll-out targets.
Segmented Propositions
continued
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Vodacom Group Limited
Integrated report for the year ended 31 March 2018