Page 34 - vodafone

32 Vodafone Group Plc
Annual Report 2013

Strategy (continued)

Operations 2015 1 2 3 4

We are using the beneits of our global reach and scale to standardise
and simplify the way we do business across the Group. This will both
improve cost eficiency and reduce the time to launch new services
and products to our customers.

Market context: Towards 2015: Strengths:
Against a background of challenging Over the next three years we will simplify Vodafone is one of the world’s largest mobile
economic, regulatory and competitive further our business processes both across companies. Our scale enables us to secure
pressures, in our European markets and within countries, eliminating legacy considerable unit costs savings through
in particular, we are taking a number structures, reducing non customer-facing various measures including bulk purchasing,
of actions to improve operating eficiency costs and moving towards more standardised standardisation of processes and transferring
and reduce unnecessary processes and offerings. This will enable us to maximise the activities to lower cost locations within
costs. We are also experiencing a trend beneits of our scale and share commercial, the Group.
towards greater data usage, which requires technical and support functions across
us to reconigure our IT systems and geographies in Europe, and to speed Actions:
standardise operating practices to support up and co-ordinate our time to market We are targeting an absolute reduction
new pricing plans and new data centric for new propositions and services. We see in European operating expenses (‘opex’) from
services such as mobile payments and a signiicant opportunity in unifying network cost saving programmes of £0.3 billion in the
M2M solutions. and IT management across multiple markets, 2014 inancial year.
in further centralising and standardising Progress:
functions and processes, and in offshoring Over the last three years we have reduced
more business functions to shared service the absolute European opex base by some
centres of expertise. £0.3 billion, which has been used in part
to offset inlationary pressures or cope with
the volume of extra trafic on our networks.

Vodafone and Telefónica UK (O 2) network collaboration
Together with Telefónica UK we have started a collaboration to operate and manage
jointly a single network grid in the UK that will run two competing nationwide
mobile internet and voice networks. These networks will be able to offer indoor
2G and 3G coverage targeting 98% of the UK population by 2015, delivering mobile 10.4%
voice coverage and mobile internet services to the vast majority of UK households. represents our supply chain saving
We also intend to offer indoor 4G coverage targeting 98% of the UK population at as a share of controlled spend during the
speeds of at least 2Mbps by 2015.
year, which exceeded the Hackett world
class benchmark of 7.6%.
>69%

of the new radio sites deployed across
the Group were shared with other
mobile operators, which reduces the
cost of renting or building new sites.