Vodafone EBITDA up 21% to $392m

Vodafone Romania, the second biggest mobile telephony operator on the domestic market, in the first fiscal half of this year (April-September period) generated total revenues worth 813 million dollars (597 million euros), up 24% from the same period of last year, with the increase due to the rising number of customers and the higher average revenue per user (ARPU).
Service revenues in the above-mentioned period hit 776 million dollars (570 million euros), 23.1% higher than last year.
Orange Romania, leader of the domestic mobile telephony market, in the same period registered service revenues growth of around 22.1 percent, to 621 million euros.
Total revenues are the sum total of service revenues and of revenues from sales of equipment (mobile phones), accessories and SIM cards. The operator’s figures show Vodafone in the first fiscal half of this year posted revenues worth 36 million dollars (27 million euros) from sales of phones, data cards, GSM accessories and SIM cards.
In the fiscal half ended September 30, 2007, Vodafone Romania saw its EBITDA rise by 21.4% against the same period of last year, to 391.67 million dollars (287.57 million euros). The EBITDA margin accounted for 48.2% of total revenues in the first half of this fiscal year and for 49.2% in the July-September quarter.
Vodafone added 625,514 new customers in the first fiscal half, with the operator’s total number of customers getting to 8.579 million. The number of customers advanced by 19.9% against the end of September 2006. Of the total number of customers, almost 3 million are post-paid subscribers, up 1.3% from the same time last year. The number of 3G services users rose to almost 500,000, almost 200,000 more than at the end of last year.
During the April-September period, Orange and Cosmote Romania attracted the biggest number of new customers on the market (1.039 million and 959,036 new users, respectively).
Liliana Solomon, Vodafone Romania CEO, states the operator’s priority is a “healthy growth” of the customer base, and Vodafone “no longer has as an essential performance indicator the number of customers and therefore the customer share calculated in SIMs, but the revenue market share”.