Vodafone's Business Unit Juggernaut

Vodafone (VOD) is rightly criticised for its inadequacies in the UK consumer market, but it never seems to get complimented for the awesome market power of its business unit. This is the engine that delivers UK leading turnover and margin. Hidden within the Vodafone Interims was an interesting factoid that UK Enterprise customer market share was now 46%, an increase of 3% y-o-y, with service revenue growth of 3.1% y-o-y.

Vodafone is by far and away the leader in the 3G data card market, I’ve heard market share figures of 80% bandied around. (If anyone has more accurate and uptodate market share data feel free to email me.) It is therefore no surprise that Vodafone UK announced yesterday two software acquisitions and an exclusive software deal.

The first is a software house, Aspective, which seems to specialise in mobilising business applications.

The second is a full fixed and mobile service provider called Isis Communications who apparently have over 38000 customers and seem to own a nifty billing platform.

The exclusive software deal is with a company US company called Fiberlink who seem to provide a highly rated security solution for remote access of workers. Vodafone has a three years exclusive deal and has already sold the solution into the Financial Services Industry.

All the deals seem to make theoretical sense although no price data was released. There is also a mysterious reference to the connection with the MobilePlus strategy. I not sure if this connection is real or if you just have to claim it is in order to get anything approved internally at Vodafone.