The active customer base increased 6.5 percent to 63.5 million at the end of June, and data customers were up 10.8 percent to 28.0 million. Compared to March, Vodacom added 1.2 million new customers in South Africa, for a total 33.31 million. At the international operations, the DRDC led growth, gaining just under 700,000 new customers, and Mozambique added 154,000 new subscribers, while the Tanzania base was slightly lower on a sequential basis.
Vodacom attributed the strong growth in part to its accelerated network investments, which totaled ZAR 2.4 billion in the quarter. The increased capacity supported data traffic growth of 45.7 percent in South Africa and 140.4 percent at the international operations. In South Africa, 3G coverage reached 96.4 percent and LTE service covered 40.9 percent of the population, while the number of 3G sites at the international operations rose by 50 percent from a year earlier. Among the some 12 million smartphone users at the South Africa network, average data use was up 24.8 percent to 408 MB per month.
