Although Central and Eastern Europe barely figures in Vodafone’s latest set of results, the group remains highly active in the region.
In the Balkans, for instance, it has just entered a strategic partnership with Telekom Srbija covering Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia & Herzegovina. The agreement will allow the telco to benefit from Vodafone’s Partner Markets programme, which includes such key areas as procurement services.
Vodafone Ukraine, which is part of NEQSOL Holding, also has a strategic partnership agreement in place with the group and it was extended in March last year to include consumer and business products. Since then, Vodafone Ukraine has secured an agreement with Raiffeisen Bank International and entered the country’s fixed-line market.
Elsewhere in CEE, Vodafone also lists Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Russia and the three Baltic Republics as partner markets. However, its only operations are in Albania, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, with the last three having been acquired from Liberty Global in a deal completed in July 2019.
Vodafone does not provide individual subscriber figures for its CEE operations, instead including them in an ‘Other Europe’ category. This had a combined total of 2,425,000 TV customers at the end September, unchanged on three months earlier but up from 2,389,000 in the same period in 2020.
While this indicates there has been no major shift in customer numbers since the Liberty acquisition, important developments have and continue to take place in the CEE markets. In the Czech Republic, for instance, Vodafone earlier this autumn entered into an agreement with TV Nova, one of the country’s leading broadcasters. It also announced that its 5G network now covers 50% of the population.
Meanwhile in Hungary, Vodafone enhanced both its TV and internet offer following “comprehensive research on the Hungarian market” and in Romania introduced simplified and flexible subscriptions for fixed internet and TV services.
Clearly Vodafone has a positive story to tell about its involvement in CEE. Unfortunately, what we mostly hear about is its progress in other markets.
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