A quarter of a billion customers across Africa. That is the milestone Vodacom's chief executive Shameel Joosub highlighted this week as the group reported revenue of R102.5 billion, roughly $6.2 billion, for the six months ended 30 September 2026. That is a 25.6% year-on-year increase, and the number tells only part of the story.
The bigger story is geography. Egypt delivered service revenue growth of 36.3% in local currency, Safaricom grew service revenue by 13.1%, and Tanzania, the DRC and Lesotho all posted strong numbers. Vodacom's international business as a whole recorded normalised service revenue growth of 13.7%, with EBITDA rising 15.9%. South Africa, by comparison, is a maturing market where growth takes more work to extract, though the team did return its prepaid business to growth and lifted its South African EBITDA margin to 37.4%, the highest it has been in several years.
A lot of the international momentum traces back to Vodacom's acquisition of a controlling stake in Safaricom, East Africa's largest telco. That deal brought M-Pesa, Safaricom's widely used mobile money platform, and a broad financial services ecosystem into the Vodacom group. The consolidation of Safaricom also contributed directly to the revenue jump in this reporting period.
Joosub said the group had exceeded its medium-term targets on service revenue, EBITDA and operating free cash flow, calling it one of the strongest six-month performances in the company's history. Vodacom added 26 million customers over the past 12 months alone.
With mobile connectivity and financial services still opening new doors across the continent, the question is no longer whether Vodacom's growth engine has shifted north of South Africa. It clearly has. The more interesting question is how far that engine still has to run.
Originally published by TechCabal.