Telecom Lead Europe: Vodafone is regrouping the business, after reporting 0.4 percent dip in enterprise revenue in H1 2012.

The first step is to hire a new head for enterprise business.

In the first half of 2012, Vodafone plc reported strong growth in Vodafone Global Enterprise and M2M business.

As per Vodafone’s Enterprise 2015 vision, it plans to strengthen its position in enterprise, enhancing product offering to large and medium-sized businesses and creating a dedicated enterprise operational structure, following the market success of Vodafone Global Enterprise (VGE) and the CWW acquisition.

VGE, serving the biggest multi-national accounts, will continue to expand its remit, driven by an increasing appetite among customers to consolidate telecoms procurement cross-border and bring mobility into the heart of their business strategies.

In converged services, it will continue to develop Vodafone One Net for small- and medium-sized companies, and increasingly provide total communications services to larger customers. In M2M, it will leverage its new business unit organization, global technical platform and vertical sector competences to exploit the current wave of adoption of M2M solutions across many industry and service sectors. In addition, we will develop our product offering in high growth segments, such as cloud and hosting, thereby leveraging the expertise acquired with CWW.

The £1.05 billion acquisition of CWW, a provider of managed voice, data, hosting and IP-based services and applications, is expected to strengthen the enterprise business of Vodafone Group in the UK and internationally. In addition, CWW offers attractive network and other cost saving opportunities for the Vodafone Group.

CWW contributed £307 million of revenue and a loss of £42 million to the profit.

Vodafone Group’s head of new enterprise business will be Nick Jeffery.

The new unit, starting 1 January, 2013, will include Vodafone’s global enterprise and carrier services business, as well as machine-to-machine and hosting and cloud services.

Jeffery was named head of Cable & Wireless in July this year and had formerly run the company’s global enterprise unit. New global enterprise chief Jan Geldmacher will retain his position and report to Jeffery.

It has become clear that there is strong customer demand for combined products and services. To realize this growth opportunity, we have decided to accelerate the CWW integration process ahead of our original schedule, according to Vodafone.

Also starting January 1, the two companies will combine their U.K.-based enterprise businesses, customer service, human resources, finance and other departments.

Vodafone Group CEO Vittorio Colao said: “We have consolidated its position as a market leader in core national enterprise operations, whilst also broadening reach across a wide spectrum of businesses, from SoHo up to the largest multinational corporations. Enterprise revenue growth has outstripped consumer revenue growth in Europe over the last two years.”

On top of this, in the last two financial years, the proportion of its revenue deriving from non-voice services and emerging markets has risen from 56 percent of service revenue in H1 of the 2011 financial year, to 65 percent in H1 of the current financial year, thus reducing our dependence on voice revenue in mature markets. Data revenue in the financial year ended 31 March 2012 was £6.2 billion, an increase of £2.2 billion over the financial year ended 31 March 2010. 30.7 percent of our European customers now use smartphones, compared to 14.5 percent at September 2010.

However, Vodafone forecast does not include any mention about enterprise business. “Overall performance in our controlled operations in the first half of the 2013 financial year has been slightly below our expectations, mainly as a result of a further weakening in the macroeconomic environment. However, this has been offset by a very strong performance by VZW. We expect the environment to be similar in the second half of the 2013 financial year.”

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