Vodacom ready for mobile competition

While a silent price war is brewing in the South African mobile industry, mobile operator Vodacom is prepared for the next amount of salvos from the competition – which sees four mobile operators taking on each other in a highly-competitive industry.

Vodacom CEO Pieter Uys (image: Vodacom)

“Strong competition and falling prices aren’t new – over the past year our average effective price per minute has fallen 14% and the price per MB on the same basis is down 18%,” said Vodacom CEO Pieter Uys.

Uys explained that the operator has a number of actions in place in order to promote growth. “Our approach to dealing with this has a couple of legs – primarily looking for other growth areas, and at the same time managing our costs.”

They are also anticipating that data price will fall even further, and have based their future model on that assumption. “Our business plans assume data prices going down, higher data volumes, new technologies, and new services,” he concluded.

Charlie Fripp – Consumer Tech editor