South Africa’s largest mobile operator the Vodacom group’s growth in data usage helped boost the company’s profits for the six months ended 30 September 2013.

Group revenue was up 6.6% to R36.69 billion and service revenue increased by 2% to R30.21 billion, said Vodacom.

According to the mobile operator group data revenue growth was 29% for the period - driven by bundle sales and integrated offers.

In South Africa there were 949,000 net connections and 2.3 million in international operations for the six months period.

Vodacom added that it invested R3.1 billion in the network during the period and increased 3G coverage to 88.9% of the population.

The group chief executive officer, Shameel Joosub said, “In South Africa, average data usage per smartphone increased 79% and for the group, data traffic is more than 80% higher than a year ago. To cater for continued growth, we plan to accelerate network investment and we are currently in the process of determining the investment allocation per country.”

International operations maintained strong growth with service revenue up 34.7% and an earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) growth of 39.2%.

Joosub explained that the firm’s international operations now account for 21.6% of group service revenue, increasing from 19% a year ago.

Outside South Africa, Vodacom has operations in Lesotho, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Tanzania.

He added, “In our international operations, our customer base increased 22.4% to 23.7 million. Data revenues in these operations increased 100.6%. This was driven by a 41% increase in the number of active data customers.”

The Vodafone owned operator also increased the number of active customers by 9.7% to 53.8 million.