At a dinner with reporters in London last night, Hoencamp promised to invest more in creating a better quality mobile network for its customers.
“My aim is to take the business back to growth in 18-24 months from a profit and revenue point of view,” Hoencamp said.
He noted the difficulty of the highly subsidised, heavily regulated and already highly penetrated British market, but reiterated that the key to success was network service quality.
“Nothing else matters if we don’t focus on our network. It was the one message that came through loud and clear from our customers,” he said.
Hoencamp said that all options would be considered, including the addition of fixed-line broadband services and content to enable quad-play bundles in the future. However he said that Vodafone has not felt the need to launch such a bundle just yet.
“I am not convinced that the customer is genuinely ready [for quad play],” he said.
Vodafone is the biggest mobile player outside of Asia, but last year its call quality was ranked last out of the major UK mobile carriers, and its existing customer numbers in the UK lag behind both O2 and EE.
