Vodafone probably isn’t the first name that jumps to mind when someone in the U.S. is thinking about connectivity, in large part because the operator doesn’t have a mobile network there. Nonetheless, one executive told Fierce it has a plan to achieve double-digit revenue growth in the country by using its fixed and mobile strength in other global markets to appeal to large multi-national enterprise customers.
David Joosten is Vodafone Business’ regional director for the Americas and partner markets, meaning he’s in charge of the carrier’s enterprise-focused operations in the U.S., Canada and Latin America as well as Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Nordics, Austria, Russia and Switzerland. He told Fierce the operator isn’t really looking to displace U.S. incumbents like AT&T and Verizon as a provider of domestic connectivity solutions. Instead, it’s chasing a somewhat niche market, focusing heavily on winning multi-national contracts with the top 500 largest companies in the country.
While it doesn’t have a mobility offering in the U.S. (it offloaded a 45% stake in Verizon in 2014), Vodafone is peddling fixed and cloud connectivity as well as services like SD-WAN in the country, and a broader range of offerings spanning fixed, mobile, cloud and IoT across its global markets. Joosten noted Vodafone has 30 points-of-presence spread across the U.S., generally in “NFL cities” like New York and Los Angeles.
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“We want to be a strong alternative for the largest networking providers in the U.S. for multi-country solutions, where there are gateways required or access required not just in the U.S. but in other countries in the world where we have our strengths,” he said. “For us, the more international the deal becomes the more interesting it will become for us.”
Joosten said the U.S. represents roughly 1% of Vodafone Group’s overall annual revenue, which totaled €43.8 billion (or roughly $50 billion) in its fiscal year 2021, and operator currently holds “a couple percentage” points of market share within the aforementioned target customer base of the 500 largest U.S. enterprises. To hit its revenue growth target, he explained it’s looking to increase its penetration rather than attempting to serve a larger pool of customers.
That strategy is already paying off, he said, thanks in part to greater demand for the capabilities necessary to support a distributed workforce. Looking ahead, he added Vodafone is planning to beef up its enterprise offerings with SD-LAN and simplified multi-cloud capabilities, providing another opportunity for growth.
“We constantly evolve,” he said. “So, we grow from mobility into fixed into IoT and sometimes we do it the other way around. Sometimes we will have a very small American customer that has fixed and then we grow it into mobility or we grow it into cloud or we add security. So, as our portfolio also evolves, we try to sell as much of the different buckets of the portfolio we have to those customers.”