Dean Bubley: Voda data revenues

Dean Bubley posts at the Disruptive Wireless about the Vodafone's results and strategy review. He deconstructs some of the data services revenues:

• The company's non-messaging data services revenues have increased 60% in the year, up from £516m to £832m. This is on a base of 27m Voda Live! handsets at the end of March, plus 7m Live 3G.
• More interestingly, it had 648k 3G Mobile Connect PC data cards, and a handful of other "business devices" (presumably 2G cards and maybe some 3G-integrated laptops). It also had 426k Blackberries in use at the end of March.

Bubley then dissects how much of Vodafone's revenue comes from business vs. consumer use of 3G & other data services. He states that:

looking at last year's numbers, the company had about 500k Connect cards (although more 2G ones), so it seems like an average of 600k during the year seems reasonable. At (and this is a hand-waving estimate) £40/month on average (which doesn't assume much international roaming), this equates to £288m. I suspect that some users are much higher than than £40/mo, while others in large corporates probably negotiate discounts. And let's say £25/mo for the push email part of the Blackberry service - so, at an average of maybe 300k users during the year, that's another £90m or so.

Bubley also estimated that "perhaps £380m of the total £832m data revenues is from corporate users. Sure, there's a lot of guesstimates in that, but I reckon I'm being conservative if anything - I could easily believe the number's actually well north of £400m. In other words, 34m Voda Live users (OK, probably an average of 32m across the year), of which maybe 5m were 3G, have contributed a grand total of £450m. Maybe £1-1.50 ARPU per month, probably more likely to be 50p-£1 for 2G, and £1-£2 for 3G users"