Good afternoon and good morning to those joining the call in the U.S. I'm joined by our Group CFO, Raisibe Morathi, as well as our Head of Investor Relations, JP Davids. I'm going to jump straight into our conference call script. Our first-quarter performance supports the confidence we communicated in May this year when we upgraded our financial targets, signaling that Vodacom is poised for stronger growth in the medium term. These trends include strong revenue and service revenue growth in rand terms, a healthier performance trajectory in our international business, South Africa attacking inflation, and another all-round excellent performance by Egypt. These results are the outcome of our purpose-led strategy. I'm extremely proud of the initiatives we drive to positively impact our customers and the economies where we operate. Education is a focus area for us.
In June 2025, we announced a TZS 3 billion partnership to improve the quality of education with the Tanzanian Institute of Education and TAWAWIZA East Africa. More broadly, the Group's digital educational resources, partnerships, and school connectivity to 3 million beneficiaries tailored to specific country needs. Initiatives include the e-learning platform in South Africa, telemoney in Egypt, Voda.ed in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Vodacom FES Kresa in Mozambique, and Instant Network Schools in multiple countries, through our partnership with the UN Refugee Agency. I'm also proud of how we stepped up to help when required in recent times. We have assisted the communities devastated by floods in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. In addition to a monetary donation, Vodacom is also providing support in all the affected teacher training centers in both provinces.
From a mergers and acquisitions perspective, we're encouraged that the South African Competition Commission will no longer oppose the acquisition of a 30% stake in Massive, given the expanded conditions agreed to by the merger parties. The deal was heard yesterday by the Competition Appeals Court, and we expect a decision soon. I'm confident that this deal will enable us to accelerate fiber network expansion in South Africa, help bridge the digital divide, and contribute meaningfully to job creation. Switching back to our trading update for the first quarter, we believe that it was an excellent result at a group level. Revenue of ZAR 40 billion was up 10.6% in rands and 12.7% on a normalized basis. Group service revenue growth accelerated to 13.8% on a normalized basis, tracking favorably against our medium-term target. This growth represents a further acceleration from the fourth-quarter trend of the prior year.
The sequential improvement was driven by our international business, where growth prospects continue to improve. Pleasingly, we also delivered double-digit rand growth. Service revenue was up 11.4% to ZAR 32.3 billion, with Egypt up 33.7% in rand terms. At a product level, Beyond Mobile services reached 21.4% of group service revenue, up from 20.8% in the first quarter of the prior year. Beyond Mobile includes fixed, IoT, digital, and financial services, and we target a 30% contribution as part of our Vision 2030. Financial services is the largest component of Beyond Mobile, and. By making up more than 20% of our profits, it's an important differentiation for our investment case. We remain Africa's leading financial services operator, with $460 billion of transactions processed through our mobile money platforms over the last 12 months, including Safaricom. That represents an impressive $1.3 billion a day.
Our financial services business was up 18.1% in ZAR to ZAR 3.9 billion, or 21.3% on a normalized basis, and reached 11.9% of group service revenue. Of course, this number excludes Safaricom. Shifting focus to South Africa, service revenue grew 3% to ZAR 15.8 billion, supported by strong performance in the contract segment and growth in Beyond Mobile services. Mobile contract revenue was up 5.3%, supported by our pricing actions and more-for-more strategy. In prepaid, we had price adjustments in the prior year and reported a modest decline of 0.4%. In addition to consumer contract, we delivered good growth in financial services and fixed up 5.8% and 8% respectively. For financial year 2026, our EBITDA ambition is around 4% growth as we continue to execute on our cost programs. Egypt delivered another excellent performance. Service revenue in local currency was up 43.8%.
The result was broad-based with strong growth in consumer mobile and fixed business and Vodafone Cash. Vodafone Cash grew 55% to EGP 1.8 billion and increased its contribution to 7.6% of Egypt's service revenue. In ZAR terms, Egypt's revenue was ZAR 9.3 billion and increased 34.2% in ZAR. Local currency revenue growth was excellent at 44.2%. Our international business reported service revenue growth of ZAR 8.1 billion was up 9.7%. Normalized service revenue growth was 12.4%, accelerating from the fourth-quarter growth rate of 9.2%. The acceleration reflected improvement in DRC and Mozambique. In DRC , we grew service revenue 12% in us dollar, supported by data and M-Pesa. Service revenue in Mozambique was down 2.5% in local currency, marking a clear improvement from prior quarters, which provides scope for return to growth this financial year.
Tanzania continued to deliver excellent growth of 22.7% in Shillings, while Lesotho was up 11%. Our fourth. Business segment and important earnings driver is our associate Safaricom. The results for Safaricom Group are disclosed on a biennial basis and therefore not included in the quarterly update. However, Safaricom did provide a market update on Ethiopia. The business is scaling at a good pace. Customers reached 10.1 million, up from 4.6 million a year ago. Local currency service revenue growth in Ethiopia was 234% up, with mobile data contributing almost 70% of the growth. Data metrics confirmed the strong growth trends, with data customers reaching 7.8 million, up 144%, and data usage at 6.6 GB per customer. That concludes my review. Raisibe and I are now ready to answer any questions you may have.
Thank you, Shameel. This is JP Davids. I've got questions in front of me that have been posted online, so please continue to post these. The first question is from Prashendran at 361. Firstly saying congrats on the results, and then he's got two questions for us. First of all, references the 4G and 5G devices we have on our network at 24.6 million. What is the total number of smart devices on your network, including 3G? I'll take that one. I think I've got some detail to hand on that. And then he's just asking about enterprise revenue for South Africa in the quarter. Can you provide an update on how that's tracking? And just more broadly within that, the wholesale roaming revenue performance.
Coming back to the smart devices, 24.6, we still have about a little bit under 3 million 3G devices that would take us obviously towards sort of 27 million for that number. What we're seeing on the 3G base, for what it's worth, is that number is falling rapidly, around 40%-50% year -on -year. The decline we're seeing there is being taken up effectively by the growth we're seeing on 5G devices. Shameel, let me hand back to you on the enterprise growth.
The enterprise growth for the quarter was up 4%. With a bigger portion of the growth coming from fixed, IoT, and cloud. Your cloud and security was up 37.8% as an example. A strong growth in Vodacom business overall, but I'd say more of it coming from fixed and beyond mobile, so fixed, IoT, and so on. A very good trend. We're quite happy with the trend in Vodacom business. In terms of wholesale revenue, wholesale revenue was up 10%. We've seen a full recovery on the wholesale revenue segment. It is not dragging down the performance like it did last year. We've lapped that, let's call it, issue of last year.
We have questions from Jonathan from Precient and Jonah from ABSA. Both wanted to talk about prepaid voice. I'm just going to bundle that into one question. The reference being that it looks like voice traffic decline has accelerated towards down 7%. Can we provide a little bit of color on this? Are we losing market share, do we think, in voice, or is there WhatsApp substitution? Perhaps some comments on the revenue trend and what would be causing that.
Yeah, I think a few things. So basically, overall, the macro wasn't great. Especially in the month of June. You've seen that from some of the retailers today also announcing the same. That was affected by things like the floods, the increased holidays, and so on during the month of June. June wasn't the greatest retail month, which, of course, very similar trends that you see in retail and prepaid. That's the one part. Then, of course, last year, we had a very strong performance because we put prices up. We increased liquidity through Airtime Advance and so on. We were lapping some of that this year. That would have also affected things like voice when you do, when we did the increase parts last year. That did help voice a little bit more, so they eased that part.
Then, of course, with the outages, the voice part was definitely impacted. There was definitely a weakening of voice during the quarter. What we're working on now is to try and pull it back with more integrated offers, looking at the customers that actually dropped, how can we enhance the offerings, and so on. It did weaken to a minus 13% during the period, but data was strong to offset it.
Yeah, so I think that does also cover Nadeem's question around the SA prepaid revenue deceleration. Nadeem follows up from SPGs, follows up just around what are we thinking about price adjustments going forward on SA prepaid. Perhaps we can tackle that. One to, I'm not sure whether it's Raisibe or yourself, just around CapEx priorities for South Africa for that ZAR 12 billion.
Basically, where we are is that. In terms of. What was the question on the first one?
We're just looking about price adjustments.
Oh, sorry, yes. We have seen some price movements from Telkom in the market in terms of price increases. That, of course, has created some room for adjustments there. We're also looking at where we open up some more offers to customers, specifically in the prepaid data offerings. We are seeing more momentum on our prepaid LTE offerings and so on. There are quite a few things that we're doing to try and make sure that we can accelerate the prepaid growth. Broadly speaking, we're trying to look at exactly or doubling down on the customers where we've seen some decline on spend, and then relating that back to the affected areas with floods and stuff and where we see recovery. Of course, some of that's already recovered. We're being very specific in the offers to customers to increase the revenue growth, both in voice and on data.
From a capital perspective, yes, the ZAR 12 billion is what we expect to spend for this year. Still focusing on network, building capacity and also the normal transition for 4G. We have optimized from the benefit of our, the big RFP that we had, what we call Spring 6, which we completed at the beginning of this year. We expect that we'll see more benefit from our refresh of some of the network capability in different areas, benefiting from the pricing as well as just the different terms that we got on that Spring 6.
We managed to get as much as a 20%-25% benefit in terms of the network through our big global procurement part. Then effectively across our markets, that gives us a little bit of space to make the CapEx go forward. As Raisibe says, I mean, the big thing for us is 5G rollout. Of course, it is basically making sure capacity, as the traffic's growing, we always prioritize capacity first, yeah.
Before we move on to some other aspects of the business, just a few more follow-ups on SA prepaid. We have questions from Sazaar and Maddie. Sazaar from Bank of America and Maddie from HSBC. I think their questions around the quarter-on-quarter deceleration have been answered. In the case of Sazaar, he's asking about what initiatives we have in place to see that performance improve through the course of the year. Maddie's just asking around the expected margin outlook in South Africa, EBITDA outlook, given the pressure on prepaid. Perhaps we're just revisiting our thoughts around that EBITDA growth for SA.
Okay, so on the prepaid part, essentially what we're doing is we've identified exactly the customers, the regions, the towns, the cities, and so on and so on. The first thing you do is, of course, you focus on where do you need to add more capacity, where you're leaving money on the table, type of thing. If there's blocking, you deal with those issues first. That's the first part. The second part is then you're looking at where your base is growing and so on. Then you look at where you've seen a drop in usage and so on. What is related to, let's call it, temporary things like the floods and so on, and then the recovery from that and how the recovery comes in. Also, kind of looking at specifically customer-by-customer offers to make sure that you're capturing more of the customer spend.
If the customer's not with you for all 30 days of the month, you're doubling down in terms of specific offers. What we're also trying to do is, or will be doing more of, is the link between Vodapay, loyalty. We have 14 million loyalty customers, an example. That part of trying to make sure we get more loyalty engagement, that loyalty is used as a tool to accelerate usage, but also to reward customers for usage. That ties into Vodapay, where you can convert that into cash and then buy more bundles, or you can buy other products on Vodapay. That's the kind of mechanism that we're creating and pulling more loyalty, but very specific in terms of being able to grow in particular towns, areas, but also specific customers where either usage is dropped or we don't have them for the full month.
We're doubling down on those to try and increase revenue, including do you put them on a smartphone, do you use handset financing. It's a full integrated approach of trying to grow prepaid faster.
In terms of margin. We have seen very nice growth in contract. Where revenue growth was. Service revenue growth was 5.3%. In a way, it is a balancing effect to prepaid. It is too early to call for margin adjustment as a result of the quarter one performance in prepaid, particularly given that we have a number of initiatives that Shameel has just articulated. Noting that we still remain quite committed to our cost program. We will continue to find opportunities there. For that reason, no change in margin.
Switching to contract, but remaining in South Africa. Rohit just wanted a bit of color on the subscriber trends, which he notes is broadly flat quarter -on -quarter. Historically, we've been able to add a few thousand, maybe 40,000 a quarter. Any impact of the tariff increase constraining, I guess, demand in the contract space? We are going to switch gear to the fiber deal, the Massive deal. Let's maybe deal with that contract question first, and then we'll come to Massive.
Yeah, I think on the contract side, just a more rigorous approach in terms of making sure. We're taking a harder line on fraud management and so on. We've actually deliberately, because you do have people find ways to have fraudulent connections, those type of things. We've made sure that we can cut that. That's the one part. That's given rise to a different growth rate on contract. The base is more stable, but there's been a cleanup on some of that with much more rigorous controls. It's reduced your gross heads a bit. Of course, you've got to work out the churn during that period. We think it gives rise to better A&R management, lower bad debt, and so on. I think that optimization is really, really important for us. In the contract segment, the trends remain strong. No issues in that respect.
Switching gear to the Massive deal, we have questions from John , Rohit, and then David Lopez from New Street Research. John O just wanted to get any updates or color to share from the Competition Appeal Court hearing yesterday. If there's any sense of direction from that. Rohit is asking, is it possible that there is risk of further remedies or conditions for the deal to be approved from here? Finally, David's just asking if we could provide any sort of time frame around that decision from the Competition Appeal Court. I guess timing, sense of direction, and any additional remedies.
I mean, what was very encouraging is that the judges listened. Intuitively, you could see they were well prepared and so on. On the deal, we thought our lawyers did a very good job in presenting the case, but also pointing out why the competition tribunal had erred in the making of their decision, specifically around that they did not look at the pro-competitive benefits of the deal and so on. We presented, I would say, a very strong case in terms of why the deal should be approved. I think, of course, we went in buoyed by the fact that the competition commission was now supportive of the deal, given the enhanced remedies. That did help the conversation. You are in the hands of the court now. We did ask for a clear timeline.
They promised that it would not be as long as anybody before and that they are cognizant of the fact that we need a quick answer. We do not think it will be long. I mean, it was a day's hearing. I think we are expecting a decision in a shorter space of time. I cannot give you an exact indication of what it is because it is unique in the way that the competition commission and Vodacom and Massive are coming to an agreement with the enhanced conditions. They have to apply their mind on that. We wait on that. We do not think there is any risk of any additional conditions being added because it is not really the appeals court's part to now negotiate new conditions. It is more for them to basically judge that and overrule the decision of the competition tribunal.
Any potential remedies? Incremental stuff?
I didn't. I said no to that. Yeah.
Okay, good. Just staying on the Massive transaction. Perhaps the first one I will take and then the second one. Either Shameel or Raisibe. The first one is, can we provide any color on the revenue and EBITDA attached to the Vodacom South Africa assets that will be contributed to Massive through that transaction? The second one perhaps you guys can take is just around, from Rohit, given the commitment to increase fiber CapEx by Massive, do you expect further equity infusions in the future or is the business plan funded? Just on the first one, Vodacom South Africa assets, that is going to be around, broadly speaking, around ZAR 600 million worth of revenue. Obviously, we would hope that when that lands in the books of Massive, they can generate an attractive EBITDA margin consistent with what they are already doing. Shameel, Raisibe on?
Yeah, so effectively, the CapEx commitment that was being made as part of the deal was basically set from 2022 onwards. Of course, the competition commission asked that it be set going forward from 2025 because those years had passed. We were quite comfortable to make the commitment because it does match the commitments that were in the business plan that we planned for. It is very much part of the business plan. No, it does not require additional funding.
Good. Switching gear to our international markets. David is just asking for some feedback or color on the better performance in the DRC and Mozambique.
Okay, so effectively in the DRC, it's coming from continuous data growth and it's coming from basically M-Pesa. We did go through some repricing last year. Of course, we've now got more momentum on that in terms of M-Pesa. A lot of growth in terms of also network investment. It's now paying off. We put a lot of CapEx in last year, and now we're seeing and reaping some of the benefits of that specifically as it relates to 4G coverage. That's good. M-Pesa, we've started to launch things like lending, international. We've introduced products like Overdraft, international money transfer. Those are all picking up, and they're all contributing to a more overall success in the performance in the DRC.
DRC already had the momentum last year. They were already growing at a double digit. The issue was just from an EBITDA line where the top line was still quite fairly healthy.
Okay, coming in Mozambique to answer your question. Remember now we're lapping the. Last year we had this whole debacle of the price floors and the removal of the price floors. We repriced the entire market. We took a lot of pain bringing the prices down. Now, of course, we start to lap that. Effectively now in the part where it's starting to turn more positive. Still slightly negative, but of course, it's a much better result than the -14% from last year. A much more positive sign going forward. Still some work to be done. We are still trying to discuss with government on price floors and so on, both in Mozambique and in the DRC . Both countries are currently running processes to assess through independent consultants to look at the level of what the price floor should be.
We're going to come back to South Africa. I'll take the first question from John O on the penetration of Airtime Advance in Q1, but perhaps you can answer the second, Shameel, which is their appetite to grow it further. We've got a follow-up question from Maddie. He's just wondering how the impact of wholesale pricing in the market has impacted the playing field for prepaid growth, if at all. Just on Airtime Advance, still very similar to where it's been in the past, John O, which is in and around 50%. I'll leave it to Shameel in terms of appetite to grow or potential to grow.
Yeah, I think. We've been very conservative in that respect in terms of trying to grow it beyond the 50%. We manage that very, very carefully in terms of how much do you open it and when do you open it. We have different mechanisms and when you give loans and how much you give and so on. That part is quite well managed. You're not going to get the growth rates on M-Pesa in South Africa, sorry, on Airtime Advance in South Africa that we had historically. However, the fintech side is still growing nicely because the insurance part is actually growing very strongly and our payments business and Vodapay and so on. The other elements have now grown and become. Insurance as an example is at ZAR 1.7 billion-ZAR 1.8 billion a year business now. It's got a very healthy margin.
We're now looking to take that platform and expand it to more of our countries.
Just the impact of wholesale pricing on the competitive environment.
Yeah, so on the wholesale pricing perspective, I mean, firstly, I think the big picture, the Vodacom, Telkom, CLC, MTN, that part is more stable, I would say. You are seeing much more stability in that line. In terms of the MVNOs and how that relates to wholesale, you are seeing a bit of a change in when you look at the market shares. The big change in market shares is actually between Telkom gaining from CLC, right? That is the first part. Then within CLC is the MVNOs. I think you are then having some impact within the CLC result. It is not showing any growth in the CLC numbers as such, where you should see if the wholesale part is really affecting it. It does create a little bit more noise, to be fair.
We have had to make sure that our offers are competitive with the likes of Capitec and so on. It does introduce a different dynamic into the prepaid market. The real traction, I mean, look, the MVNOs that are successful, as I previously said, are where people are willing to subsidize. If you are willing to cross-subsidize, you can gain some. The problem is you can never do that massively, right? You see a little bit of that from the likes of FNB, but the number on their base has been static from what we can see for the last 10-12 years. If you are prepared to subsidize, then you can gain a little bit of traction, but it is not sustainable. That is the piece that you have to do. You are always limited by the wholesale price that you are getting.
Remember, in this case, CLC is buying from MTN. CLC is then there to market up to the MVNO.
Sipilele from Matrix. I think that also covers your question around the competitive landscape in SA Prepaid and who's gaining and losing market share. An unrelated question from John O. Both of these probably for you, Raisibe. Just any indication on the Please Call Me matter and the timing there? Separately, Cash App streaming in Egypt, any issues there or any updates on Vodafone Egypt dividends that are going to be paid in the near term or have been paid in the recent past?
On Please Call Me matter, no news yet. We are still waiting for the courts. Obviously, they do not give you dates. Yeah, we are in a waiting game right now. In terms of dividend upstreaming, absolutely normal liquidity in Egypt. We have received our dividends in the past year on time, which was roughly about July, August. This year as well, our dividend should be coming through soon.
Prashendran has a couple of follow-ups, which I will take. He's asking how many 2G devices do we still have on the network? If you can ask what our SMS revenue is and whether that's growing or declining at the moment in the context of South Africa. Firstly, on the 2G devices, if we look across all the devices on the network, we probably have around 6 million, probably. We do have around 6 million still on the network. That's declining at high single digits, around 7% or 8% year -on -year. Remember there that there is a big whack of IoT devices within that number. There's always going to be an element of base in 2G on IoT until it's sunsetted into 4G IoT. Separately, on SMS revenue in South Africa, that is a very low single digit contributor to South African service revenue.
It is declining in high single digits, but actually not quite at the same pace as voice. As you'd expect, that has been in structural decline for many years. Not really a big swing factor anymore for the South African business. Okay, Shameel, to you. Nadeem from SPG has a question on Tanzania and wanted some color on the RAN swap that we're doing in Tanzania and how to think about the impact on the business and the impact on also just the cost profile of what we're doing in Tanzania over the next 18 months.
Yeah, so. Basically, we're swapping out the entire network from Nokia to Huawei. The reason for that is that basically we've got a much more attractive offer, both in OpEx and CapEx in terms of the swap. And so basically, we are now in the process of swapping, it'll probably be just over a two-year period to swap the entire network. And we've already done something like 470-odd sites that we've swapped in the last quarter. So it's actually moving quite fast. What it gives you, it gives you a lot more capacity. It gives you on the site itself because the new modernized equipment, of course, has bigger capacity, allows you to use all your spectrum bands. And remember, we acquired spectrum and so on. That's why you also, it is contributing to an acceleration in revenue in Tanzania. That's been quite positive in that respect.
We've seen better network metrics coming through as well in the market. It does give us a bit of a, of course, not everywhere. We started in the Dar es Salaam region, which is the main money corridor, and then we moved to the country. Of course, as we swapped the equipment, we moved that equipment to areas that we can reuse that equipment in. Or if we had a 2G site, we put a 4G site on and so on and take the 2G stuff out of the network. We're continuously trying to reuse that equipment so that we can basically get more revenue growth and opportunity from that. It's quite a transformational deal in that respect. The only impacts from a cost perspective is not everything is accounted for within the budgets and within the CapEx framework and so on.
It's just you would have some accelerated depreciation when you go through a swap. Then, of course, there's some accounting entries that affect how you account for it, which year you put it into, and so on.
Yeah. That is basically just acceleration of the write-down, so to speak, of the equipment that you're removing and replacing with the new equipment. That is a short-term issue. However, for the long -term, we're seeing good benefits from top line, which will drop to bottom line as well.
We have a few questions on Egypt. The first one from Louise, first congratulating us on the momentum in the business, but then reflecting that perhaps CapEx to sales of 12% seems low for a business like that to maintain its network advantage versus peers. What Louise is asking is, should we expect that to ramp up to 15%-16% for the rest of the year and I guess over the medium term? An additional question from Louise around 5G spectrum allocations. Is there any additional frequencies coming to market? Any color on that? If we could try to take a third because it is also related to Egypt, it is just around the price elasticity and the data volume growth we are seeing in the market.
I will provide a little bit of color on the exact numbers of data volume growth, but maybe Shameel, you can just reflect on the elasticity discussion. CapEx, spectrum, and data growth.
Yeah. So. Effectively. When you look at the CapEx envelope. We back-end some of the CapEx last year. In the last quarter, we gave them more CapEx. That is affecting a little bit of the CapEx in the first quarter because we pulled some of it forward. Towards just before year-end. That was the first part. The second part is. Basically the CapEx for the year in Egypt will probably be around about 14 ich, 14% somewhere there. It is not 12%, just to be clear, because we are getting the growth to your point and we are putting in the requisite CapEx and so on. Remember, we have gone live with 5G, so we have been activating 5G sites. That is now our big focus at the moment. Of course, growing 5G utilization and the number of 5G sites in the network.
In terms of data growth, the good part in Egypt is all converts. The traffic is 23%. Effectively, traffic growth of 23%. Remember, because of the pricing structure with the price floors and so on, it all converts into revenue. You have that strong ARPU growth that continuously comes through in Egypt and in Tanzania. We are trying to get more markets onto a similar kind of structure. That is what we are spending a lot of time on, to make sure that we can create healthy markets. We are having those conversations in every market, to be honest. Of course, some are more advanced in terms of the conversation and are more critical. That is the one part in terms of being able to do that.
In terms of spectrum in Egypt, effectively, we will always look to gain more spectrum because one of the ways that we can provide better network coverage without rolling out as many sites. Of course, it is that cost-benefit analysis of which spectrum bands, when the spectrum bands come, and so on. That is a little bit in the hands of government. It is always a negotiation in Egypt in terms of what is offered to the market, in terms of how you take it up and so on. I mean, there are good conversations in terms of how you balance the payment, what should the payments be, that type of thing.
The question from John O on South Africa, I think he's picked up some of our headlines around our ZAR 67 smartphone offering in South Africa. Asking if this will be a drag to margins. I. Let Shameel respond to that, but I do hope, John O, that you're taking advantage of this offer. Although I would note it's actually. Quite contained and constrained in terms of its geographic reach. My understanding is it's actually only. A few stores in KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga and Limpopo that. Will do this and obviously in aid of Mandela months. But Shameel just.
It's a promotion. It's not a promotion that we're doing to millions of customers. You have to have promotional activity all the time. I mean, 20 years ago, we were giving phones at ZAR 99 as a promotion. That logic still holds. You have different promotional activities to create hype, to get people in, but also to get people off 2G devices. You target it to specific areas where you want to make sure that you can move customers off the 2G devices because some of it's sticky on the 2G devices. You want to try and get them off onto a 3G device. Sorry, onto a 4G device, not 3G.
The 4G kicker in this case. Maddie from HSBC, I think, has for the moment got the final question, which seems like a good way of pulling it all together. He is asking, in the context of our overall growth ambitions, is double-digit revenue and EBITDA growth achievable given the performance of SA Prepaid? Or maybe asked another way, how important is SA Prepaid to the group's overall growth ambition?
I think you've seen the resiliency in terms of the performance. I think what we're proud of is that the first. What we've been saying internally is that the first checkpoint is the quarterly results. Are we delivering on our guidance of double-digit? I think. 13.2% normalized service revenue growth. The reported. 11.6%, I think, is very. Impressive in terms of being able to. Show that we are delivering on the guidance. Remember, you've still got the whole year to go, and you're still putting in the capital investment, and you still need to monetize, and still quite a few different things that are there. I think it's a good proof point that you can achieve it. You will always have in the portfolio some ups and downs, and I think that's just reality.
You try and make sure that you've worked on the downs to make them ups as you go into the next quarter or to minimize. Any impacts on that. I think what we have said is that we think SA will grow. At inflation or slightly above inflation. You'll see in the. Fact that we're basically saying that we'll probably grow around about 4%. Of course, we wanted to be a bit higher than that, but we've got strong growth in Egypt, and the currency is stable. We've got strong growth. In. The international markets coming through quite nicely. Safaricom continues to perform, and Ethiopia, as we've disclosed, is also picking up quite nicely. There will always be some. Challenges that. We have to deal with. And manage through. That's par for the course. We're quite confident that. We can continue to deliver on the guidance.
Super. Thank you, everyone, for your questions. Let me hand back to Shameel to close up the call.
Thank you for joining us on today's call. If there are any questions that you might have, please reach out to the Vodacom investor relations team. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you.