Vimplecom's net profit rose 29% in the second quarter to $138 million compared with a year earlier on the back of strong growth in mobile data revenue and strong performance in Pakistan and Ukraine, offset by Algeria weakness.
The Amsterdam-based Operator which also has operations in Italy, Ukraine and Pakistan posted 26 percent year-on-year increase in mobile data revenue in the three months to end-June. Vimpelcom's total revenue, however, declined 16 percent to $2.16 billion.
Vimpelcom's organic service revenue was down 0.7 percent year-on-year in Q2 due to a drop in voice revenue while total sales fell 16 percent to $2.2 billion. Vimpelcom said it expected flat to low single digit growth in organic service revenue in 2016.
Jean-Yves Charlier, CEO, Vimpelcom
In the past few months, we have reached major milestones in executing on our strategy to transform VimpelCom as we closed the transaction in Pakistan with Warid and announced a landmark partnership with Ericsson to invest USD 1 billion to overhaul our IT systems. Furthermore, we remain confident in securing approval from the European Commission for our joint venture in Italy, to merge Wind and 3 Italia, which we expect by the beginning of September.
