Vodafone’s TV customer base tops 9 million

Vodafone closed the quarter ending March 31 with 9.1 million TV customers and 11.3 million broadband customers in Europe as it moves forward with plans to become a “full service, integrated operator”.

Announcing its fiscal fourth quarter and fully year results, the mobile operator said that 25% of its service revenue in Europe now comes from fixed line, compared to just 10% five years ago.

“We are well on the way to becoming a full service, integrated operator in our main markets. Through organic investment and acquisition, we now cover 28 million households (and thousands of businesses) across Europe with our own fibre or cable infrastructure,” said Vodafone.

“In addition, we can reach a further 21 million households by accessing the incumbent operators’ networks.”

The company said that it is due to launch its consumer broadband offering in the UK “in the coming weeks” and that its planned UK TV service will follow “later in 2015.”

“As a result will be offering integrated fixed and mobile services in all of our major European markets,” said Vodafone.

In the past year, Vodafone completed its acquisition of Spanish cable operator Ono and said it made “strong progress” in integrating KDG in Germany – “combining our fixed and mobile networks and beginning to migrate Vodafone broadband customers to our new infrastructure.”

Overall for the year ended March 2015, Vodafone said group revenue was up 10.1% to £42.2 billion, while EBITDA was up at 7.5 year-on-year to £11.9 billion.