Vodafone Share News (VOD)

Telecoms giant Vodafone pleased investors with its quarterly performance on Friday after an improvement in service revenue in Africa, the Middle East and Asia Pacific partly offset declines in Europe. Overall, group service revenue fell 4.2% to £9,446m, as anticipated, while organic group revenue declined 4.4% to £10,204m. The group said it had faced a more challenging operating environment in Europe, where service revenue declined 7.9%, although its performance in several markets, including Germany and Italy, have begun to show some signs of stabilisation quarter-on-quarter. Spain delivered a particularly weak performance, due to increased competition and a change in market habits towards SIM-only packages. Chief Executive Vittorio Colao said: "The year has started in line with our expectations. Through our commercial actions and investment, our performance is beginning to stabilise quarter-on-quarter in several of our European markets, with customer appetite for 4G services clearly growing. "We also see very strong growth in demand for data in India. In unified communications, we have made further good progress on our strategy, continuing to implement our plans in several markets, and our customer growth trends demonstrate the strength of our commercial execution. "Our £19bn Project Spring investment programme has taken off quickly, with capex nearly doubling year-on-year, and our 4G coverage in Europe up 20 percentage points to 52% in the last nine months. We are increasingly well positioned to deliver high speed mobile and fixed data services to consumers and businesses alike."Shares had risen 2.6% to 203p by 09:27.NR