South African telecoms operator Vodacom Group said on Monday its half-year headline earnings fell 9.5%, impacted by start-up losses in Ethiopia and higher finance costs.<\/p>\n
The company, majority-owned by Britain’s Vodafone, said headline earnings per share, the main profit measure in South Africa, fell to 457 cents in the six months ended Sept. 30 from 505 cents a year earlier.<\/p>\n
Vodacom said it implemented a new simplified dividend policy, which is set at least 75% of Vodacom Group headline earnings, and declared an interim dividend of 340 cents per share.<\/p>\n
Kenya’s Safaricom leads a consortium, including Vodacom and Vodafone, that entered the Ethiopian market last month, becoming the first private operator in one of Africa’s largest telecoms markets.<\/p>\n
It has already launched its network in 16 cities in Ethiopia, with plans to expand services to 25 cities by April 2023 and reach its first milestone of 25% population coverage, Vodacom Chief Executive Officer Shameel Joosub said.<\/p>\n
The company also blamed various initiatives it took to help financially strained customers for the earnings decline.<\/p>\n
“Vodacom has attempted to absorb considerable inflationary costs from the dramatic increase in energy costs as far as possible,” Joosub said.<\/p>\n
Group revenue, however, rose by 7.7% to 53.7 billion rand ($3.10 billion), thanks to additional 3 million customers and demand for data and financial services.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
South African telecoms operator Vodacom Group said on Monday its half-year headline earnings fell 9.5%, impacted by start-up losses in Ethiopia and higher finance costs. The company, majority-owned by Britain’s Vodafone, said headline earnings per share, the main profit measure in South Africa, fell to 457 cents in the six months ended Sept. 30 from 505 cents a year earlier. Vodacom said it implemented a new simplified dividend policy, which is set at least 75% of Vodacom Group headline earnings, and declared an interim dividend of 340 cents per share. Kenya’s Safaricom leads a consortium, including Vodacom and Vodafone, that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-799671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telecom"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799671\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}