I reckon...
They'd do even better if they stocked a larger range of handsets.
Vodafone, the world's largest cellco, grew revenues to £9.1bn, up by nearly 20 per cent, or 1.7 per cent organic growth, in the three months ended 30 June 2008. The company now has 269m mobile customers, an increase of 8.5m on last quarter. Data revenues grew 29.4 per cent to £664m. But Vodafone expects revenue for the year …
is pretty important here as VF accounts in pounds: US revenues have been hit by dollar depreciation but European revenues (apart from Spain) are artificially buoyed by the pound's depreciation against the Euro although declined in real terms. Data traffic is up but there is no mention as to whether data revenues are up.
Simply increasing the range of handset will not work, besides the fact that many operators have exclusivity deals with handset manufacturers it would cost the company dearly if it wanted to have all handsets available to customers, ot to mention the costs for storage of all the handsets that they would need in their warehouses.
The problem I see is that the bigger the company the harder they will fall during this credit crunch we have going on at the moment, oil prices effect pretty much every sector in the market and so Vodafone will have a bigger distance to fall then the other competitors (also the debts it wrote off from before wont help either)
...like voda are doing OK. Personally, I wouldn't anticipate that communications will be particularly hard hit by a recession. I switched to voda myself this year and I've been impressed by the quality of the service so far after years with Orange, but what do I know, I'm only a customer.