Vodafone 2013 Annual Report Download - page 34

Strategy (continued)
Operations2015
We are using the benets of our global reach and scale to standardise
and simplify the way we do business across the Group. This will both
improve cost efciency and reduce the time to launch new services
and products to our customers.
Market context:
Against a background of challenging
economic, regulatory and competitive
pressures, in our European markets
in particular, we are taking a number
of actions to improve operating efciency
and reduce unnecessary processes and
costs. We are also experiencing a trend
towards greater data usage, which requires
us to recongure our IT systems and
standardise operating practices to support
new pricing plans and new data centric
services such as mobile payments and
M2M solutions.
Towards 2015:
Over the next three years we will simplify
further our business processes both across
and within countries, eliminating legacy
structures, reducing non customer-facing
costs and moving towards more standardised
offerings. This will enable us to maximise the
benets of our scale and share commercial,
technical and support functions across
geographies in Europe, and to speed
up and co-ordinate our time to market
for new propositions and services. We see
a signicant opportunity in unifying network
and IT management across multiple markets,
in further centralising and standardising
functions and processes, and in offshoring
more business functions to shared service
centres of expertise.
Strengths:
Vodafone is one of the world’s largest mobile
companies. Our scale enables us to secure
considerable unit costs savings through
various measures including bulk purchasing,
standardisation of processes and transferring
activities to lower cost locations within
the Group.
Actions:
We are targeting an absolute reduction
in European operating expenses (‘opex’) from
cost saving programmes of £0.3 billion in the
2014 nancial year.
Progress:
Over the last three years we have reduced
the absolute European opex base by some
£0.3 billion, which has been used in part
to offset inationary pressures or cope with
the volume of extra trafc on our networks.
1 2 34
10.4%
represents our supply chain saving
as a share of controlled spend during the
year, which exceeded the Hackett world
class benchmark of 7.6%.
>69%
of the new radio sites deployed across
the Group were shared with other
mobileoperators, which reduces the
costof renting or building new sites.
Vodafone and Telefónica UK (O2) network collaboration
Together with Telefónica UK we have started a collaboration to operate and manage
jointly a single network grid in the UK that will run two competing nationwide
mobile internet and voice networks. These networks will be able to offer indoor
2Gand 3G coverage targeting 98% of the UK population by 2015, delivering mobile
voice coverage and mobile internet services to the vast majority of UK households.
We also intend to offer indoor 4G coverage targeting 98% of the UK population at
speeds of at least 2Mbps by 2015.
32 Vodafone Group Plc
Annual Report 2013