Vodafone 2014 Annual Report Download - page 15

Where we aim to be ve years from now
Project Spring
Project Spring is our organic investment programme which will allow
us to accelerate and extend our strategic priorities through investment
in mobile and xed networks, products and services, and our retail
platform. Announced alongside the Verizon transaction in September
2013, Project Spring will strengthen further our network and service
differentiation. The transition to 4G and unied communications,
coupled with an improved economic outlook for Europe, lead
us to believe Vodafone has a unique opportunity to invest now.
We expect total investments, including Project Spring, to be around
£19 billion over the next two years. The main elements of our
investment are:
4G in Europe: we aim to reach 91% population
coverage by March 2016;
3G in emerging markets: with 95% population
coverage in targeted urban areas in India
by March 2016;
next-generation xed line infrastructure: laying bre
to more base stations and deep into residential areas
across Europe and in selected emerging market
urban areas;
development of enterprise products and services:
extending our M2M reach to 75 countries and rolling
out hosting and IP-VPN services internationally; and
investment in our retail estate: modernising 8,000
of our stores to improve the customer experience.
Outlook
In the short term, we continue to face competitive, macroeconomic and
regulatory pressures, particularly in Europe, and still need to secure our
recovery in some key markets. While we are therefore heavily focused
on the successful execution of our signicant capital investment
programme, we are also absolutely committed to operational efciency
and standard operating models across all markets. We anticipate that
our investments will begin to translate into clearly improved network
performance and customer satisfaction in the coming year. In the
medium term, this will become more evident in key operational metrics
such as churn and average revenue per user (‘ARPU’); and subsequently
into revenue, protability and cash ow.
I am condent about the future of the business given the growth
prospects in data, emerging markets, enterprise and unied
communications. We have commenced our Project Spring two-year
investment programme which will accelerate our plans to establish
stronger network and service differentiation for our customers. I expect
the rst signs of this to become evident later this year, with wider 4G
coverage in Europe and 3G coverage in emerging markets, improved
network performance and increased customer advocacy. While cash
ow will be depressed during this investment phase, our intention
to continue to grow dividends per share annually demonstrates our
condence in strong future cash ow generation.
Vittorio Colao
Chief Executive
Want to nd out more?
Market overview,
and where are
we going?
18
Our strategy
and positioning
for the future
21
Our nancial
guidance
39
Read more about our strategy
21
Project Spring accelerates and extends our strategic priorities
through investment in mobile and xed networks, products
and services and our retail platform, to strengthen further our
network and service differentiation.
Supported by:
An excellent network experience A simplied and cost-efcient
business model and operations
Consumer Europe
A leading mobile data provider
Unied
Communications
Converged services in all
key European markets
Consumer
Emerging Markets
A strong leader and rst
choice for data
Enterprise
Major enterprise provider
with full service offering
13Overview Strategy review Performance Governance Financials Additional information