Vodafone enjoys the calm before the storm

New chief Colao faces pricing and regulatory pressures

Vodafone faces a series of challenges if its record £6.6bn profit for the year ended March 2008 is to be repeated in the next financial year.

A difficult European economy combined with pricing and regulatory pressure could take its toll on the company’s revenue in the next 12 months.

Vittorio Colao, replacement for outgoing Vodafone chief executive Arun Sarin, meets an immediate test in the form of Viviane Reding. The EU telecoms commissioner is committed to driving down the cost of mobile voice and data calls through regulation, or at the very least the threat of regulation.

Having already forced down the fees that operators charge customers for making mobile calls between countries, Reding is now looking to reduce SMS and data-roaming charges, and has promised to publish a list of every operators’ tariffs on 1 July. In response, like its rivals O2 and T-Mobile, Vodafone has pledged to cut data roaming tariffs by up to 45 per cent by that date.

Though Vodafone continues to make the majority of its profit from voice calls, its annual revenue from data was up 52.7 per cent to £2.2bn year on year.

Expanded operations in emerging markets could counterbalance flat sales in Europe. Vodafone spent £5.4bn on a 52 per cent stake in Hutchison Essar, now India’s third-largest wireless operator, in May 2007, and £2.3bn acquiring Turkey’s Telsim Mobil Telekomunikasyon Hizmetleri AS in 2006.

The operator’s revenue from emerging markets rose 45 per cent to £9.35bn in total last year. Total annual revenue reached £35.5bn.