Vodafone’s European operations revenue growth dropped, but not as much as various regulatory interventions would have warranted, implying a strong operational performance

Apple has at least revolutionised two aspects of the mobile business: getting customers to queue overnight for a handset, and selling ‘contracts-in-a-box’, neither of which are likely to catch on in Europe

The distribution business had a strong year, marred by a longer than usual Christmas hangover in the last quarter, but the early signs for the new financial year are promising

Vodafone achieved its 2006/07 full year targets on revenue and profitability, with solid revenue growth (underlying about 2% in Europe) but dropping margins (by around 2pps in Europe)

Growth in Q1 2007 for the aggregate non-Vodafone European mobile operations was 4.2%, a slight decline from 4.7% last quarter (Vodafone reports its results next week)

The new consumer data tariffs from Vodafone and Orange in the UK continue the trend towards dramatically lower data prices for high end users, although they are cunningly structured to involve more moderate increases for low end users

iPod revenue (quarterly, year-on-year) declined for the first time. Even though unit sales were up 24% year-on-year, the average iPod price was down 20%. Apple group revenue growth is increasingly dependent on Mac sales and new product launches, like Apple TV (March 2007) and the iPhone (in June 2007)

UK broadband market growth fell to 3.2 million net additions in 2006 from 3.8 million in 2005. With 47% of UK households already on broadband, new entrant unbundlers (BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse) are racing against the clock of a maturing market to sign up customers

Vodafone and Orange are planning to share their 3G networks in the UK, and are looking at potentially sharing their 2G networks in due course

Vodafone’s underlying service revenue growth in its core European markets again improved, to 3.0% from 2.3% in the previous quarter, although most of this improvement was due to the impact from termination rate cuts being lower