Vodafone Idea has revealed that it has significantly lowered its Capex spend to Rs 6 billion in the June quarter of 2020 as against Rs 18.2 billion in March quarter of 2020 due to Covid-19 impact.

Capex

Vodafone Idea, the third largest mobile operator, has added ~13,000 4G FDD sites primarily through refarming of 2G/3G spectrum to expand 4G capacity. The 4G population coverage of Vodafone Idea is around 1 billion compared to 916 million a year ago.

Vodafone Idea said it made progress in implementing LTE 900 in select locations, including through dynamic spectrum refarming, to improve customer experience. Vodafone Idea has deployed ~59,800 TDD sites in addition to deployment of ~12,100 Massive MIMO sites and ~11,700 small cells till date. Vodafone Idea has 446,131 broadband sites vs 436,006 in Q4 FY 2020.

“4G coverage and capacity expansion remains a priority for us to further improve our customers’ experience and we continue to lead the league tables on 4G data download speeds across several states, metros and large cities,” Ravinder Takkar, MD and CEO of Vodafone Idea, said.

Vodafone Idea has the fastest 4G download speeds across the circles of Delhi and Mumbai, along with West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Assam, based on Speedtest Intelligence data from Ookla.

Vodafone Idea also has the fastest 4G download speeds in several major cities like Jaipur, Indore, Nagpur, Bhopal and Guwahati.

Vodafone Idea has a 4G subscriber base of 104.6 million. Total data volumes grew by 10.6 percent quarter on quarter and 40.4 percent year-on-year to 4,523 billion MB. Total minutes on the network declined by 6 percent during the quarter, Vodafone Idea said.

Vodafone Idea’s revenue fell 9.4 percent quarter-on-quarter to Rs 106.6 billion on account of large scale lockdown and disruption of economic activities.

Vodafone Idea job cut?

The financial statement from Vodafone Idea indicates about a job cut at the third largest telecom service provider. But Vodafone Idea did not reveal any details. Vodafone Idea said it is aiming for a lean organization.

Vodafone Idea, according to analysts, will be shutting down operations in some of the telecom circles due to non-viability.

“We are in the process of organization wide restructuring, which will transform the company into a lean and agile workplace,” Vodafone Idea said.

Vodafone Idea has rolled out a further cost optimization plan across the company in line with the evolving industry structure and business model. Through this exercise, it plans to achieve Rs 40 billion of annualized cost savings over next 18 months.

“We continued to make progress on our strategy with integration largely complete, enabling us to realise cost synergies well ahead of our initial targets. We have launched a new cost optimization initiative that will drive further cost savings,” Ravinder Takkar said.