Vodafone had an almost instant uplift following the acquisition of Liberty Global’s assets in Germany, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic.
Latest results published by the company show that its reported revenues in the six months ending September 30 increased by 0.4% year-on-year to €21.9 billion.
In Germany, which accounted for 30% of Q2 service revenues, Vodafone notes that there was a fast start to Unitymedia integration, with the commercial launch date being September 2. In September alone there were 41,000 net cable additions, while the DSL total fell by 20,000.
Meanwhile, in the group’s ‘Other Europe’ assets, which exclude Germany, Spain, UK, Italy and Germany, Q2 revenues were up 3.3%, compared to 2.1% in the previous quarter, with good momentum in – amongst others – the Czech Republic and Hungary.
As in the case of Germany, there was also a fast start to the integration of the CEE assets acquired from Liberty Global.
Vodafone notes that the first two months following the acquisition of the assets in Germany and CEE have seen the integration of management teams; start of cross selling and DSL migration activities; and centralised procurement.
The next six months will involve rebranding the business and the start of migrating the TV base onto the Vodafone platform.
From FY 21 there will be the merger of the network backbone infrastructure and consolidation and simplification of IT and billing systems.
All told, the company is confident on delivering €535 million of savings annually.
In his comments on the results, Vodafone chief executive Nick Read said: “I am pleased by the speed at which we are executing on the strategic priorities that we announced this time last year. This is reflected in our return to top-line growth in the second quarter, which we expect to build upon in the second half of the year in both Europe and Africa.
“The consistency of our commercial performance has improved in both regions, and we have made a fast start on integrating the acquired Liberty Global businesses, where we see significant long-term opportunity. Our digital transformation is already creating a better experience for our customers, improving our differentiation, supporting growth and at the same time reducing our structural costs.
“We have now secured network sharing agreements across most of our major European markets, and we recently announced a major long-term wholesale partnership with Virgin Media in the UK, in order to improve the utilisation of our network assets. And we expect our European TowerCo to be operational by May next year, enabling us to continue to unlock the significant value embedded in our tower infrastructure.”
