However, the pandemic continued influence performance across the business – for example driving up mobile money in Africa and weighing on roaming revenues in other markets.
Full year guidance remained on track.
Chief executive Nick Read (pictured) said: “I am pleased to report that we are back to service revenue growth in Europe, as well as Africa. This growth was broad based within both consumer and business segments, with the vast majority of our markets contributing.
"This is a result of our commercial and operating momentum built over the past three years as part of our strategic transformation."
Total roaming and visitor revenue grew 56% year-on-year, but remained 54% lower than Q1 FY20, i.e. pre-pandemic. In Europe, mobile contract churn was 1.6 percentage points lower than the same quarter two years ago, but commercial activity is "yet to return to normal conditions"
Also in Europe, Read said the business segment is seeing "stronger growth with our public sector and corporate customers", while there is a "pipeline of demand" for such digital services as IoT, security and cloud. Vodafone Business service revenue saw growth of 2.7%, driven by strong growth in IoT and digital services
Service revenue growth in Turkey accelerated, reflecting price increases and the easing of lockdown restrictions. Mobile contract customer additions finished on 223,000, supported by migrations from prepaid customers. Contract churn improved by 5.7 percentage points year-on-year to 15.2%.
Service revenue growth in Egypt also accelerated, supported by the easing of lockdown restrictions, customer base growth and increased data usage.
Across Africa, M-Pesa saw strong growth with the platform processing "almost 4.5 billion transactions", an increase of 45% year on year. The reintroduction of M-Pesa peer-to-peer fees, which were temporarily suspended in some markets during the pandemic last year, also had an impact.
In Vodacom’s international markets, M-Pesa now represents 23.7% of total service revenue, an increase of 4.4 percentage points year-on-year.
In South Africa, Vodacom saw service revenue increase by 7.9%.
Across eight African markets, Vodafone counts 182 million mobile customers and covers 67% of the population in the African markets in which it operates 4G services.
