Vodafone Group, the world's largest mobile phone company by revenues, reported a 7.5% rise in first quarter revenue, bolstered by strong performances from recently acquired businesses in India and Turkey, an Associated Press report said.
The Associated Press report quoted Vodafone as saying in a trading update that it posted revenue of 8.3 billion pounds ($17 billion) for the three months ended June 30. Organic growth, stripping out disposals and acquisitions, was 4%.
The focus on emerging markets such as India and Turkey has boosted profit amid tough trading in traditional markets like Germany and Italy, the report said.
Vodafone unveiled a new organizational structure last year to counter slowing growth in mature markets aimed at cutting costs in those markets and boosting growth in emerging markets, the report added.
That included plans to break into key telecoms services that combine both fixed and mobile networks to open up revenue streams that were not available to the company under its previous wireless-only strategy, the report said.
It closed the deal on the purchase of Turkey's Telsim Mobil Telekomunikasyon Hizmetleri for $4.55 billion last year and bought a stake in India's Hutchison Essar for $10.7 billion earlier this year.
The company said those additions helped increase the number of its net subscribers over the quarter by 9.1 million, or 4.1%.
Some analysts believe that Vodafone should abandon its minority stake in Verizon Wireless to better drive growth in Europe and Asia as markets become more competitive and pressure grows to generate extra revenues from each customer, the report further said.