The Ultimate Review of Vodafone Company
Vodafone Group plc is an international telecommunications company that is owned by the British.
Its headquarters is based in London and Newbury, Berkshire. It also runs its services in regions like Asia, Europe, Africa, and Oceania.
The telecommunication company is ranked 4th among the mobile operators in the whole world in the number of customers i.e. 313 million as by 2018 report.
The company owns and operates networks in 25 countries and 47 more countries with partner networks.
As of February 2016, the company had a market capitalization of approximately 52 billion euros.
History
The name Vodafone was derived from voice data fone (the previous spelling of the phone). It was chosen to reflect the company’s main agenda i.e. provide voice and data services over mobile phones.
Its evolution started in 1982 where it started with a foundation of the Racal Strategic Radio Ltd Subsidiary of Racal Electronics, the largest manufacturer of military radio technology in the UK.
It was first launched on January
1, 1985, as Racal-Vodafone (Holdings) Limited.
The firm later formed a joint venture with Millicom called ‘Racal’, which changed to present-day Vodafone.
Products and Services
The company launched a new internet service for the PC, Mac, and mobile called Vodafone 360. The service was withdrawn in December 2011 after poor hardware sales.
In February 2011, the company launched the cheapest mobile phones in the world called Vodafone 150 which they intended to sell at a price below $15.
It was mainly targeting developing countries thus it was launched in India, Turkey and 8 African which included Kenya, Ghana, Lesotho, etc.
Apart from mobile phones, it also provides services such as:
• Mobile money transfer services.
In March 2007, Kenya’s leading communication provider, Safaricom, which is partly owned by Vodafone, launched a mobile payment solution developed by Vodafone and named it M-Pesa.
Inspired by M-PESA’s success in Kenya, the company extended the service to Afghanistan under the name M-Paisa.
It also announced a worldwide partnership with Visa in February 2012.
• Health services
With one of its success stories emerging from the Novartis-led project, “SMS for Life” in Tanzania, the company developed and set out a text-based system that enables all the public health facilities in the country to report their levels of antimalarial drugs.
This allows the stock level to be viewed centrally in real-time, thus enabling timely re-supply of stock.
Since the piloting of the SMS for Life service, stock-outs in the health facilities dropped from 26% to 0.8%. Hence many lives being saved.
• The Vodafone foundation
The foundation is a charity initiative that supports and initiates projects which use mobile technology to assist the vulnerable.
Corporate Affairs
The company is currently headed by Nick Read, the Chief Executive Officer. He took office in 2018 after Vittorio Colao’s 10-year service as the CEO.
Over to You
Vodafone has on several occasions been on the wrong side of operations. The latest one being in March 2019 when the Indian investigation agency CBI filed a plea in the Supreme Court against them for alleging non-cooperation in the Saradha chit fund scam.
The company was also fined a total of 4.6 million euros by Ofcom for breaching consumer protection rules.
References
https://www.vodafone.com/business/contact-us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vodafone