Vodacom bleeds customers in South Africa — but revenue climbs

Vodacom South Africa lost around 5.7 million customers in its last financial year, but still recorded an increase in service revenue due to higher spending by its remaining users.

In its results for the 2025 financial year, the country’s biggest mobile network revealed that its prepaid customer base declined 13.1% from around 44.85 million to just about 39 million customers.

Vodacom attributed the drop to optimising gross adds lower and churning inactive customers.

Despite the decline, prepaid mobile customer revenue increased 3.5% to R27.3 billion.

“The result was supported by increased focus on rate management, while continuing to support data affordability,” Vodacom said.

“In the fourth quarter, prepaid revenue growth was 4.0% (3Q: 5.6%), impacted by a leap-year effect in the prior year.”

“The resultant customer base delivered a healthier fourth quarter ARPU [average revenue per user] of R55, up 12.2%.”

Increased mobile data spending played the biggest part in the improvements, with prepaid mobile data revenues increasing by 12.0% to R14.2 billion.

Overall, data traffic on Vodacom’s network increased 36.4% for the year, with the fourth quarter higher at 39.4%.

Vodacom said the growth was supported by smartphone penetration and network quality.

“Smart devices were up by 1.5% to 32.3 million, while 4G and 5G devices increased by 3.1% to 24.4 million,” Vodacom said. “The average usage per smart device increased by 31.7% to 5.1GB per month.”

Vodacom’s contract customer revenues also increased by 3.8% to R24.4 billion, supported by the addition of 152,000 contract subscribers and price increases during the year.

“Mobile contract ARPU of R306 was up 1.7% for the year, with price increases partly offset by pressure in Vodacom Business, as corporate customers managed spend,” Vodacom said.

Vodacom South Africa’s financial, digital, fixed, and IoT service revenues grew by 10% to R11.2 billion, contributing 17.8% of total service revenues.

“The service revenue result for the year was impacted by a reset to wholesale revenues, which diluted growth by 1.9 percentage points, Vodacom said.

Fixed service revenue increased 17.9%, excluding low-margin wholesale transit revenue.

“Our homes and businesses connected reached 198,000, while our own fibre passed almost 166,000 homes and businesses,” Vodacom said.

Big growth for financial services — but pressure on Vodacom Business

Financial service revenues increased by 7.9% to R3.4 billion, driven by uptake of Vodacom insurance products, Airtime Advance, payments, and lending marketplace businesses.

“Service revenue generated from financial services was up 7.9% to R3.4 billion.”

One division that came under pressure was Vodacom Business, which saw its service revenue declining by 2.3% to R16.9 billion.

“Cloud, hosting and security supported growth, with revenue for this segment up 35.6%.

Overall, Vodacom South Africa’s service revenue increased by 2.3% to R63 billion in FY 2025.

Earnings before interest tax, depreciation, and amortisation (Ebitda) in South Africa grew 2.3%, while operating profit increased 2.1% as Vodacom moderated its investment into energy resilience.

Vodacom still invested R11.6 billion in its network to support resilience, leverage its new spectrum assets, and enhance IT platforms.

It anticipates its capital expenditure will be around R12.0 billion in the next financial year.

The table below summarises Vodacom South Africa’s financial performance for the year ending 30 March 2025.