Mobile operator Vodacom's African business, outside of South Africa, has helped drive its group revenue growth for the period ended 30 June 2014.

Vodacom's international business includes Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Lesotho.

In the past year, Vodacom says it added more than eight million customers in Africa, increasing its active customer base to just shy of 60 million across the continent.

And the company revealed on Thursday that its international operations’ revenues grew by 17.3% to R3.493 million for the quarterly period.

According to the South African headquartered telco, growth in its international services was driven by strong customer growth, higher voice usage, increased data usage and M-Pesa.

The quarterly information also revealed that the mobile operator's group revenue increased by 4.3% to R18.287 million.

Shameel Joosub, Vodacom Group chief executive officer, said in a statement that data and the company’s international businesses were the largest contributors to growth during the quarter.

"The International businesses performed well with service revenue increasing 17.3% and the customer base increasing 21.7%," Joosub said.

"Data continues to be a key growth driver with the number of active data customers increasing 69.5%.

"Mobile data revenue including M-Pesa grew 51.1%. We now have more than 6.6 million M-Pesa customers. We increased the number of 3G sites in our international operations by more than 50%," said Joosub.

Joosub also noted that the telco's international business contribution to group service revenue increased to 23.4%.

Meanwhile, Vodacom's South African operations service revenue declined by 2% to R11.442 million driven by a 50% cut in mobile termination rates (MTRs) in April 2014.

Vodacom has noted; however, that its customer revenue increased 0.4% to R10.057 million driven by a 3% increase in prepaid customer revenue.

"We continued with our price transformation strategy, bringing down the overall effective price per minute by 25.3% to 68 cents and driving an increase in outgoing voice traffic of 26.1%," said Joosub in the statement.

Vodacom is South Africa's number one mobile operator followed in market share by MTN and Cell C.