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Driving Enterprise growth
Vodacom Business delivered another solid performance, with
mobile market share remaining strong, continued growth in the
fixed-line business and further delivery in Internet of Things (IoT).
In South Africa, Enterprise service revenue grew 10.8%, now
contributing 25.7% of service revenue.
The Enterprise mobile customer base increased 6.9%
year-on-year to 1.3 million customers, driven predominately
by growth in the small and medium enterprise (SME) and
public sector markets.
Mobile revenue was negatively impacted by the slower
roll-out of services from the National Treasury contract, with
ARPU declining as we implemented the increased discount
coupled with an unexpected lag in onboarding of new
departments.
Service revenue growth from fixed services increased 55.6%,
driven by the inclusion of wholesale transit revenue (a new
low margin business), IPVPN revenue growth of 7.5%, Cloud
and Hosting revenue growth of 17.2% and other connectivity
growth of 30%.
We extended fibre capillarity through partnerships with
existing providers, and extended Cloud and Hosting through
the successful launch of the SME Business Place. We also have
extended our hybrid Cloud capabilities to private and public
entities.
Our IoT business continues to grow, with revenue up 11.1% to
R758 million. As Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN)
technologies and use cases become more ubiquitous across
the globe, we consolidated our leadership position for LPWAN
in narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) technology. This year, we executed
the first billing projects on the Vodacom IoT enablement
platform, digitalising several commercial buildings to enable a
‘Smart Building’ service. We also executed IoT service projects
in smart utility management services, cold chain
management and smart asset management, combining IoT
hardware, connectivity and platforms. In health, we achieved a
milestone of 10 million stock reads on our stock visibility
solution platform, reducing the number of stock-outs in the
national health system.
Our mobility and managed services solution have also gained
traction. Vodacom Business is partnering with the South African
Department of Education to improve access and learning to
students, especially in rural areas. We have now rolled out
over 46 000 laptops, tablets and interactive white boards
together with Vodacom E-Learning Managed Service in
various rural schools.
At year-end we had a 13 point lead in Enterprise NPS score
over our nearest competitor, increasing our lead in small and
medium enterprises. We have actions in place to improve our
lead with a goal of securing a 15 point lead.
Strategic big bet
Enterprise, digital and IoT
To drive Enterprise growth to 2020, we are focusing on three
strategic investment areas:
•
Build our core sales channel:
We will continue to defend our
lead in mobile, through pricing transformation, strong network
performance, and the expansion and enhancement of our
product portfolio. At the same time, we will work to position
Vodacom as a market leader in fixed data and fixed voice (VOIP)
through our targeted investment in fibre and fixed wireless
capillarity, and in next generation networks. In South Africa, we
have contracted with a leading national retailer in the FMCG
sector for expanding our fibre network. This is an excellent
example of Vodacom’s capability in delivering fibre solutions at
a national scale. In our International markets, we will further
expand our ecosystem to support M-Pesa for Enterprise.
•
Cloud and security:
We will grow our Cloud business, with
emphasis on the application level versus infrastructure
products. We will continue to attract large global brands
through co-location, with a strong pipeline of new
opportunities. In addition, we will look to partner with
hyperscale Cloud providers – such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon
Web Services, Alibaba and Google – whose platforms are used
by many of our existing customers. We will also expand our
professional capability to assist our customers in migrating
their existing workloads, as well as building new capabilities on
the new platforms. We will expand our security capability to a
richer solution set. The investment in our own Cyber
Intelligence Centre has provided great insight from customers
on the market appetite for an evolved security strategy. On Big
Data, we will launch our own retail analytics capability,
providing new insights from AI and machine learning.
•
Market leadership in IoT:
Our goal is to become the IoT
solutions partner of choice, building on Vodafone’s recognised
leadership in this area and its extensive resources in Africa.
Vodacom was awarded the 2018 Africa Technology Innovation
Award for its NB-IoT technology deployment. We will be
extending our IoT connectivity leadership in all vertical
markets, providing end-to-end services across the full IoT value
chain: connecting things; collecting the data; analysing the
data; and taking action on this data. We continue to identify
opportunities in hardware, connectivity management, and in
developing and providing services in areas such as Big Data
analytics, application enablement, and Cloud and Hosting.
In doing so, we are leveraging off the deep vertical expertise
developed in conjunction with our subsidiaries XLink and
Mezzanine. We currently have 3.6 million machines or things
connected to our network.
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Our business
Our performance
Our governance
Administration