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Mobile phone network Vodafone made a £14.9 Billion loss in 2005

Vodafone today announced record losses for a UK firm of £14.9 billion over the last year. Following aggressively pursuing German business Mannesmann in 2000 which it then paid £112 billion for and Vodafone's difficulty in making progress in Japan it's profits have taken a huge drop.

The major loss on the balance sheet for Vodafone comes from a "write-down" of it's German business, acquired from Mannesmann in 2000 for a price tag of £112 billion which failed to live up to it's cost. However had the loss in value of the Japanese subsidiary, which was sold to Softbank in March been taken into account a further loss of £6.9 billion would have been seen.

Vodafone have stated that their strategy for moving forward with the business is to concentrate on being more innovative and focus on growing sales in emerging countries such as India, while cutting costs in the European markets, as evidenced by it's announcement of the loss of 400 jobs.

Specifically Vodafone are looking to pursue the introduction of HSDPA, a high speed data download platform and to look further into the possible integration of mobile phones and PCs, however this does not address the root problems of Vodafone's UK offerings.

Anthony Ball, director of Onecompare comments:

“Today’s results have shown that its not just Vodafone customers that are the victims of the giants overall poor performance levels - the telecoms sector will now be hit with another round of job cuts as a result of this record annual loss.

“Our research has shown that mobile phone companies have been great at acquiring customers but not great at servicing customers, Vodafone are no exception. They are consistently low in the best buy tables and in our recent Customer Service Report it was evident that Vodafone had the least knowledgeable customer service staff of all the mobile networks.

Four basic questions were asked to customer service centres across all the networks but only half (51%) of Vodafone customer service staff could answer all correctly. Simple questions should be bread and butter for all customer service staff yet Vodafone are the biggest culprits for incorrect responses to straight forward questions costing customers in the pocket.”