Vodafone Europe’s reported organic service revenue growth improved in the June quarter for the first time in over a year, albeit to the still-somewhat-unimpressive figure of -7.2%

This was however helped by slightly improving MTR cuts and the previous quarter being hit by the leap year effect; on an underlying basis growth declined again

Contract net adds continue to be weak, ARPU continues to suffer from the dilutive Vodafone Red tariffs, and the company continues to invest heavily in fixed line and lightly in mobile, the wrong way around in our view

By the end of 2013 there will be more iOS and Android devices in use than PCs. Google is using Plus and Android to reposition itself to take advantage of this, extending its reach and capturing far more behavioural data

We believe a helpful way to look at Google is as a vast machine learning project: mobile will feed the machine with far more data, making the barriers to entry in search and adjacent fields even higher

For Google, Apple’s iOS is primarily another place to get reach: we see limited existential conflict between the two. However, mobile use models remain in flux, with apps and mobile social challenging Google’s grip on data collection

Germany’s fixed line market is in state of flux as Liberty Global and Vodafone, the third and fourth largest players respectively, are reportedly engaged in a bidding war for Kabel Deutschland (currently number two).

The Vodafone bid would offer the most direct cost synergies, but this would be at greater execution risk. The Liberty bid would finally reunify most of the German cable sector, but would consequently need stronger undertakings to get anti-trust clearance.

Either merger would create a strong number two triple play operator, increasing competitive pressure on Deutsche Telekom and Sky Deutschland.

Apple’s iTunes will add free-to-the-user online and mobile radio to the platform in the autumn of 2013, meshing music purchase with enhanced tools for discovery.

iTunes Radio also meshes with Match, the cloud-based music storage and retrieval utility sold for $24.99/year, whose users will enjoy ad-free online and mobile radio.

The main casualty of iTunes Radio is likely to be #1 US internet station Pandora, which this week launched the next phase of its battle to win the better royalty terms of commercial radio.

In this presentation we show our analysis of revenue growth trends for mobile operators in the top five European markets (UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain). The historical analysis is based on the published results of the operators, although they include our estimates where their data is inconsistent or not complete. A copy of the underlying data in spreadsheet format is available to our subscription clients on reques

UK residential communications revenue growth was very strong in Q1 2013, rising to 4.6% from 2.1% in the previous quarter with most of the improvement driven by improved unit ARPU growth, which turned positive for the first time since early 2011

We expect unit volume growth to remain strong for the rest of the year, although ARPU growth is likely to moderate as overlapping price increases drop out, but it is still likely to be firmer than 2012 given the continued growth of high speed broadband (at least at BT and Virgin Media) and firm pricing in general

The outlook for market shares is less certain, with a number of difficult-to-predict factors coming into play, and while we do not expect dramatic changes in market share to result from any of these factors, they do create a risk of pushing operators to adopt more aggressive pricing strategies, which would disrupt an otherwise very healthy outlook

Overall UK mobile revenue growth slipped slightly in Q1, dropping 0.4ppts to -4.3%, although, taking into account the leap year effect, underlying growth likely improved a touch, marking the second quarter of growth being at least stable

EE announced 4G subscriber figures for the first time, reporting 318k subscribers at the end of the quarter, a very respectable figure given coverage, handset and price tier limitations. We expect this figure to grow strongly as coverage rolls out and 4G handset availability spreads, but the 4G revenue premium is still unlikely to be significant in 2013

The outlook for revenue growth in the rest of 2013 is fairly positive – the MTR impact will partly drop out from Q2 onwards, boosting reported revenue by over 2ppts, some mid-contract price increases will take effect, and pricing (so far) has remained reasonably stable

Vodafone’s European revenue slowed again, with declining underlying growth compounded by increased MTR cuts, and Vodafone Red tariffs seemingly driving both reduced customer acquisition and ARPU

Vodafone is investing in 4G on a leisurely timetable, planning to upgrade only 40% of sites to 4G by March 2015, and is seemingly more concerned about securing fixed fibre access than driving mobile

The March quarter growth may mark a nadir of sorts, but we believe a return to positive growth can only come when Vodafone apes its US associate and invests substantially in its network to truly differentiate

Apple’s numbers have got so good they’re bad: after growing at over 50% for two years, relative revenue growth has, inevitably, slowed. The products remain very strong, and direct competitors continue to have little impact. (Apple’s mobile phone market share has never been higher, for example.) However, the premium phone market itself, which the iPhone dominates, is at a potential tipping point.

EE reported 4G subscriber numbers for the first time at the end of March; we estimate the 318k implies that over half of addressable joiners/upgraders are choosing to pay extra for 4G

The rest of EE’s results were more prosaic, with steady net adds and mobile service revenue growth declining slightly due to leap year and price increase timing effects

Vodafone and O2 are planning to launch 4G services in the summer, which may boost the market for all