The mobile operator Vodafone Ukraine plans to acquire more than 50% of the shares of the telecom operator Vega (PrJSC Farlep-Invest).
A source in the relevant field told Interfax-Ukraine that the relevant documents are already being considered by the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine (AMCU).
Vodafone Ukraine does not comment on the deal.
Vega also declined to make comments.
The mobile operator Vodafone Ukraine during the first quarter of 2021 launched a high-speed mobile Internet network in more than 550 settlements of Ukraine.
According to the company’s press service on Thursday, to date, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, Ternopil, Volyn, Sumy, Vinnytsia, Kherson, Poltava, Cherkasy and Lviv regions are among the top ten regions in terms of 4G network speed.
Among the regional centers, the “fastest” cities were ranked as follows: Mykolaiv, Chernihiv, Rivne, Vinnytsia, Kherson, Dnipro, Odesa, Lviv, Zaporizhia and Cherkasy.
Vodafone Ukraine is the second largest mobile network operator in Ukraine.
In January-March 2021, Vodafone Ukraine (PrJSC VF Ukraine) reached an income of UAH 4.728 billion, which is 8% more than in the same period in 2020, the company said in its press release on Wednesday.
According to it, the company’s net profit for the first quarter amounted to UAH 888 million versus a loss of UAH 744 million in January-March 2020, which was associated with the exchange rate difference on the revaluation of $500 million eurobonds issued by Vodafone Ukraine in February 2020.
The operator’s OIBDA (Operating Income Before Depreciation and Amortization) increased by 9% compared to the first quarter of 2020 and reached UAH 2.558 billion. At the same time, the OIBDA margin increased by 0.8 percentage points (p.p.), to 51.1%.
“The main growth factor was the increase in consumption of data services. The number of date users in the Vodafone network at the end of March 2021 reached 12.4 million, or 66% of data users in the database,” the operator said.
At the end of the first quarter of 2021, some 81% of Ukrainians could use 4G in the Vodafone Ukraine network, the operator said in the press release.
According to the results of this reporting period, the company’s subscriber base amounted to 18.8 million, which is 3.6% less than in January-March 2021, while growth in the segment of contract connections continues, including an increase in the number of IoT users.
“A slight decrease in the subscriber base is due to the general tendency to refuse from second SIM-cards, which is caused by a decrease in the population’s income,” the operator said.
At the same time, ARPU increased by 16% to UAH 79.8.
Vodafone Ukraine (PrJSC VF Ukraine) at the end of 2020 cut its net profit by 52.4% compared to 2019, to UAH 1.2 billion.
Vodafone Ukraine CEO Olha Ustynova said that the drop in net profit was due to the exchange rate difference.
“The only and main factor why this happened is the exchange rate difference on our loan. The U.S. dollar exchange rate has changed, the $500 million loan, which is more than [UAH] 1 billion of loss as a result to our net profit,” she said during the presentation last year’s results on Tuesday.
According to her, the company’s revenue last year increased 14% and amounted to UAH 18 billion, and the OIBDA (operating income before depreciation of fixed assets and intangible assets) grew by 18% year-over-year, reaching UAH 9.8 billion.
The number of Vodafone Ukraine customers in the country at the end of the year amounted to 19 million. The operator’s 4G network covers 81% of the country’s territory, which is 12% higher than the previous indicator for 2019.
At the end of 2020, the number of Vodafone Ukraine data users was 12.2 million, and the number of 4G users was 7.3 million.
Over the past year, the use of data traffic grew by 26%.
Vodafone Ukraine is the second largest mobile network operator in Ukraine.
The mobile operator Vodafone Ukraine in its retail network Vodafone Retail in 2021 intends to launch a model of buying a smartphone with a bundle of services, Director of Vodafone Retail Olena Myronenko has said.
“In our country, only smartphones without prepaid services were previously sold. We now place a small emphasis smartphone deals with bundles in our network. This year we really look forward to the launch of the European model, when one can buy a smartphone on a one-year or two year contract and get a rather interesting discount. This is our tiny idea and, most likely, we will launch it this year,” she said at a press conference on Tuesday.
At the same time, Myronenko said that the deals will be available only for phones in the medium and below medium price segments. For premium segments, she said, it will not be in demand.
“According to our research, the ARPU of our customers who use the iPhone is not 3-5 times higher than that of a customer who uses a standard mid-segment smartphone. Typically, the ARPU of an iPhone user is 30-50% higher, which does not allow us to equip an iPhone with such cost of services to cover it,” the director of Vodafone Retail said.
“In order to subsidize the iPhone and sell it at a discount, the operator must have an ARPU that allows it to cover the cost of this smartphone at the expense of its income. The average ARPU in the United States today is $50. Our subscriber’s ARPU is $3. That’s when our ARPU will be at least $15 then we can talk about the iPhone,” Myronenko said.
Vodafone Retail currently has more than 200 stores in 82 cities of Ukraine.
Ookla (the United States), the developer of Speedtest service, has recognized Vodafone Ukraine as the mobile network operator with the highest average mobile Internet speed in Ukraine in July-December 2020.
Such data were released during an online conference on Thursday.
“Now we have already recorded almost 5 million Ukrainians who have tested Internet services on this platform. This is an extraordinary figure in scale. Today we are here to welcome the fastest mobile Internet in Ukraine – Vodafone Ukraine,” the sales director at Ookla said during the conference.
According to him, in Q3-Q4 2020, Vodafone Ukraine reached the Speed Score of 30.85 (in 2019 it was 17.93). The average download speed was 29.38 Mbps, upload – 14.1 Mbps (in 2019 it was 19.37 Mbps and 11.16 Mbps, respectively).
He also said that in 2020, Ukraine climbed one position in the global ranking in terms of Internet connection speed, being 86th.
Ookla is a leader in fixed and mobile internet speed testing and analysis. According to the company, users run more than 10 million tests on the application every day.
