South African telecom giant shooting the lights out

Vodacom grew its revenue significantly in the past three months, with strong growth in Egypt providing a welcome boost.

The telecoms giant released an update for the quarter through June 2025 on Wednesday, 23 July 2025.

This update showed 10.6% growth in revenue to R40 billion, up from R36.21 billion the prior year.

Service revenue grew by 13.8% in the quarter, from R28.96 billion to R32.26 billion, driven by growth in the company’s Egyptian, South African and International operations.

The company’s service revenue from South Africa constituted the largest portion of the total, at R15.79 billion, up 11.4% from the prior year.

Egypt, while only contributing R8.50 billion to the total, saw growth of 33.7% in the quarter, with total revenue from this segment having grown by 34.2%.

Vodacom explained that Egypt’s strong performance was underpinned by clear NPS leadership and consistent network investment, including the launch of 5G services in the quarter.

“All of the ongoing enhancements to our integrated connectivity and content packages, Vodafone Cash traction and fixed service revenue growth contributed to Egypt’s commercial momentum,” the company said. 

These efforts paid off, as Vodacom’s financial services customers in Egypt increased by 37.3% to 12 million and data traffic grew 23.6%. Egypt ended the quarter with 52.2 million customers, up 6.4%. 

South Africa, Vodacom’s home market where it is also the country’s biggest telecoms provider, also performed well this quarter.

South Africa’s strong results were supported by strong performance in the contract segment and good growth in financial services, fibre and cloud services, offsetting a marginal decline in Vodacom’s prepaid segment. 

The company said this performance was supported by additional data allocations, good growth in smart devices and significant investments in its network, which saw data traffic grow 32.7%. 

Having invested R1.6 billion in the quarter, Vodacom expects to invest around R12.0 billion in capital expenditure in the current financial year.

“Looking ahead, we’re focused on delivering on our Vision 2030 targets, which include growing our customer base to 260 million and our financial services customer base to 120 million,” CEO Shameel Joosub said. 

“Core to this strategy will be accelerating mobile and fixed connectivity, scaling handset financing and the roll-out of innovative digital and financial services in all our markets.”

Joosub added that Vodacom will also seek to expand its partnerships across Africa to power the company’s growth, drive infrastructure sharing to increase rural and fibre connectivity and extend the reach of its Tech for Good solutions.

As part of Vodacom’s Vision 2030 strategy, the telecoms giant aims to achieve the following in the next three years:

• Group service revenue growth from high single-digit to double-digit growth
• Group EBITDA growth from high single-digit to double-digit growth
• Group capital expenditure of 13.0% to 14.5% as a percentage of group revenue remains unchanged

“I firmly believe that Vodacom is ideally positioned to capture the structural growth opportunities across our markets, while at the same time delivering on our purpose of connecting people to a better future,” he said.