Vodafone Business

A leading international challenger in fixed, ‘industrialising’ IoT

We operate more than 99 million IoT connections, and we estimate that over 30% of them directly enable customers to reduce their emissions. Examples include; smart meters and IoT technologies embedded in vehicles to optimise route management, vehicle maintenance and driver behaviour. This year, we enabled our customers to avoid 2.9 tonnes of CO2 for every one tonne generated from our operations.

In 2018, we rebranded our former Enterprise division as ‘Vodafone Business’, in order to increase our brand recognition as we broaden the services we offer. Our strategy is to drive growth and deepen our existing mobile customer relationships by cross-selling additional services including NGN fixed, IoT, and Cloud services.

Key pillars of the strategy

Global footprint

Our unique global footprint is a competitive advantage in selling to multinational customers.

IoT solutions

IoT service solutions for specific industry verticals, expanding beyond our current focus on automotive.

Cloud services

Immediate access to all of IBM’s leading multi-cloud offerings.

A challenger to incumbents in fixed

In fixed, our revenue market share is low at around 10% across our major European markets, compared to our mobile market share of over 30%. We therefore see significant future opportunities to gain share and disrupt legacy relationships, particularly as the Wide Area Networking (WAN) market transitions to Software Defined Networking (SDN). This provides large enterprise and SME customers with both greater flexibility and significant cost savings compared to legacy products. This enables Vodafone to become increasingly a total communications provider.

Strategic cloud partnership with IBM

In January 2019, we signed a strategic cloud partnership with IBM. Under the terms of the agreement, we retain the end customer relationship, and our customers will gain immediate access to all of IBM’s leading multi-cloud offerings. This cloud partnerships also allows us to simplify our operating model, reducing our exposure to capital-intensive data centres and instead move to a capital-light variable cost model.

Leveraging our IoT global leadership

We have a market leading global platform in the rapidly growing IoT segment. Today we are a leader in terms of connectivity market share, with 99 million SIMs on our network. We expect to continue to take market share in connectivity, however there is also a significant opportunity to grow in the services segment. We are therefore investing in IoT service solutions for specific industry verticals, expanding beyond our current focus on automotive (which represents 22% of IoT revenues) to digital buildings, healthcare, logistics, and insurance. This year we grew IoT connectivity service revenue by 14.5%, adding more than 1.4 million SIMs per month.

Digital enabler for SoHo/SMEs

For "Small Office/Home Office" (SoHo) and SME customers, which represent around 50% of divisional service revenues, we aim to cross-sell fixed and unified communications propositions and also position Vodafone as an integrator of value added digital and IoT services.