Doha:
Vodafone Qatar QSC, the sole competitor to incumbent operator Qatar Telecom, reported a narrower full-year net loss as it reached more than a million customers and offered post-paid services for the first time.
The company, which launched in 2009, said its net loss for the full year ended March 31 was 401 million Qatari riyals ($108 million), compared with a 486 million riyal loss the previous year.
Revenue rose to 1.5 billion riyal from 1.2 riyal billion. It had 1 million subscribers in the full year, up from 837,000 in the previous year.
“We continued to deliver solid growth in our third full year of operations with strong revenue growth of 25 per cent over the year to reach 1.5 billion riyal driven primarily from the mobile business,” Chief Executive Richard Daly said in the statement. “As a result, our share of the mobile revenue in Qatar grew to 27.4 per cent for the year, up from 24.5 per cent last year.”
Vodafone Qatar, a division of the UK-listed telecom giant Vodafone Group PLC (VOD), has been looking at new ways of increasing revenue as mobile subscriber growth is expected to slow in a market where penetration rates are over 160 per cent.
