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Vodafone added just 1.3 million net customers in the past quarter, with only 3,000 additions in Ireland, showing a major dip in growth over the Christmas quarter.
The key performance indicators were published on Thursday. Vodafone's chief executive Chris Gent said the company was pleased with the figures, which showed total customer growth of 22 percent in the last 12 months, better than its own forecasts.
The numbers published showed net customer growth of 1.3 million people during the period ended 31 March. Those figures were a sharp decline compared to the Christmas quarter, when Vodafone added 4.2 million customers.
The company was playing down the drop on Thursday, saying the Christmas figures always represent a seasonal high, and noting that the company realises it will not return to the major growth rates of two years ago.
"We never expected a repeat of the 2000 situation and we have made that clear," a Vodafone spokesman told ElectricNews.Net.
In Ireland Vodafone added 90,000 customers during the three months to December to reach a customer base of 1.701 million. During the March quarter that total showed virtually no growth, with the company adding just 3,000 net customers to finish at 1.704 million. The proportion of pre-paid customers stayed the same at around 72 percent in Ireland.
Joan Keating, head of corporate communications for Vodafone in Ireland, played down the modest figures, saying the company is pleased with the growth and the quality of its customer base.
"It is customer growth and we are pleased with it...we have a very low inactive customer base," she said. "We have long stated that the company policy was moving from a volume to a value basis."
Keating also said that Vodafone in Ireland was pleased with its other results, including data revenues, which will not be publicised until the company's end of year results in May.
Despite the positive spin from Vodafone, shareholders are still suffering as the company's share price has gone into free-fall, from a high of more than STG4.00 at the height of the boom to a four-year low of around less than STG1.03 in early trading in London on Thursday. More than 450,000 Irish people inherited shares in Vodafone when the company acquired Eircell, Ireland's largest mobile operator.
Vodafone's hopes lie in the fact that it is seeing a stabilisation in average revenue per user (ARPU) trends in its major European markets, and Gent said the company expects ARPU to improve in most of those markets this year.
The company desperately needs to garner more of its revenues from data than from voice, and it is hoping that new applications that are taking hold in mature markets like Japan will take off in its other territories.
Gent pointed out that more than one third of Vodafone's Japanese customer base now uses "sha-mail," a photo-messaging service, which has helped boost data revenues dramatically. During March alone nearly 20 percent of service revenues in Japan came from data; the percentage for the group overall was much lower, at around 13.5 percent.
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