Vodafone 2015 Annual Report Download - page 20

We now cover 28 million homes across Europe
with owned infrastructure, equivalent to 19% of our
European footprint. We expect this total to increase
next year as we continue our building programmes.
The total coverage increases to 50 million (35%
of households) when including our wholesale
access deals.
Europe NGN coverage
(owned assets)
Achieved
As part of our evolution to a unied communications
provider, we are expanding our high-speed
broadband coverage through a combination of cable
and bre assets, through both acquisitions and
self-building programmes.
Monitoring our
strategic progress
We track our performance against strategic, nancial and operational
keyperformance indicators (‘KPIs’) which we judge to be the best
indicatorsof how we are doing.
We increased the number of 4G customers
by 12.6 million in the year and we expect this number
to grow signicantly in the coming year as the
majority of new contract connections are now on 4G.
We have now reached 72% coverage across our
European markets and expect this to be over 90%
by March 2016.
The total number of customers has been boosted
by the acquisitions of Kabel Deutschland (added
2.1 million) in the 2014 nancial year and Ono (added
1.6 million) and Hellas Online (added 0.5 million)
during this year. In addition to this, we added 853,000
customers over the year across Europe and expect
to continue to grow our base next year and beyond.
The average smartphone usage has doubled over
the last two years, helped by our worry-free Red
plans and the uptake of 4G and content packages.
We expect this average to continue to increase next
year and beyond.
More on data usage:
Pages 22 and 23
Our active data customer base continues to grow
signicantly with nearly 20 million added in the year,
half of which were in India. More and more of our
data users are now using 3G, with 19 million 3G
customers in India alone. We also currently offer 4G
services in South Africa, Kenya, Lesotho and Qatar
and expect this to expand in the future.
Europe 4G customers
Achieved
Europe 4G coverage
Achieved
Europe xed
broadband customers
Achieved
Europe average
smartphone data usage1
Achieved
Emerging markets active
data users2
Achieved
We previously reported smartphone penetration
as a KPI, which is now 52% and above our 50%
target for the year. While this metric remains crucial,
we are increasingly focused on ensuring as many our
customers experience data on 4G.
Expanding our 4G coverage is a key objective
of Project Spring as it provides customers with
a better experience and stimulates higher data usage
and improved monetisation.
As we expand our broadband coverage we are
successfully growing our broadband base.
A key goal of our strategy in Europe is to get
customers to use more data as this should, with
successful monetisation, support revenue growth
in the years ahead.
Data is a huge opportunity in our emerging markets
and we are increasing our data coverage across them
all. Around half our customers still only experience
data on 2G so a key goal for us is to increase the
number of customers using 3G and 4G.
Key performance indicators
3
20
2013 2014 2015
46
72
20142013 2015
3.3
0.5
15.9
345
2013 2014 2015
473
755
Data
not
available
2013 2014 2015
19
28
6.1
2013 2014 2015
8.5
11.3
68.2
2013 2014 2015
94.6
114.2
2 2
111
%
million homes passed
million
million
MB
million
Vodafone Group Plc
Annual Report 2015
18