Nervous investors in Vodafone might as well bin the figures for the year to the end of March or turn straight to the dividend declaration. The company’s numbers are abnormally hard to fathom. Its main metric is organic service revenue growth, which excludes both changes in tariffs forced on the company by regulators and currency movements. On that basis, revenues were up by 1.9 per cent, slowing to 1.5 per cent in the fourth quarter.
The bottom-line loss was €6.1 billion. This comes from a €3.7 billion writedown of the value of the assets in India, which in March were merged with local operator Idea Cellular, Vodafone emerging with a 45 per cent stake.
This came about because of a bruising price war with Jio,