Vodafone beats forecasts with 4.9 million new subscribers

The mobile phone operator Vodafone yesterday announced it had won another 4.9 million customers around the world in the final quarter of last year while increasing the revenues it gets from each customer in its main markets.

But shares in Vodafone closed down 3.3 per cent, or 3.75p, at 111p as stock prices in London plunged across the board. The FTSE 100 finished down 3.4 per cent at 3480.8.

In the three months to 31 December, the operator won a total of 4.9 million new customers, or 4.064 million new customers after accounting for stake changes in some of its businesses – beating analysts' forecasts of an increase of about 3 million.

The latest set of figures means the operator now has a customer base of 112.5 million worldwide, up from 107.5 million at the beginning of October.

Sir Christopher Gent, the chief executive, said: "This is the third consecutive quarter that has seen an increase in group organic customer growth and in annual ARPU [average revenue per user] in some of our key markets."

He added: "In this quarter, it's particularly pleasing to see progress in Germany and Italy as well as a return to positive growth in the UK." In Britain, Vodafone added 267,000 new customers while in Germany, it won another 922,000 users and in Italy it added another 529,000 customers.

While most City analysts said the customer growth had beaten expectations, they were also impressed with Vodafone's ARPU data.

In the quarter, ARPU in the UK came in at £287 for the 12-month period to 31 December, an increase from £278 in the same period a year before. In Germany, the ARPU figure stood at €312 (£207), up from €303 while in Italy, ARPU for the year was €347, an rise from €345.

While Sir Christopher said the impact of its new Vodafone live! service, which allows customers to send picture messages, had had a "negligible" impact on the data, he said he was pleased with its progress so far.

Earlier this month, the company announced that it had registered more than 380,000 customers with Vodafone live! handsets since its launch at the end of October. The figure includes more than 150,000 users in Germany, more than 90,000 in the UK and more than 60,000 in Italy.

Julian Horn-Smith, Vodafone's chief operating officer, said: "I've never known a product that we've launched that we've actually managed to sell to so many customers in such a short period of time from a standing start."

Vodafone also said yesterday that data revenues – sales from non-voice services such as text messaging – had risen to 13.9 per cent of sales for 2002 from 13.2 per cent in the year to September.

Separately, mmO2, the rival mobile operator formerly known as BT Cellnet, signed deals that will allow its customers to send picture messages to customers of either Orange or T-Mobile, the operator owned by Germany's Deutsche Telekom.

Vodafone said it hoped to have signed up deals with rival networks "within a few weeks" while Orange said it hoped to have agreements with all the UK networks by spring of this year.