Margherita Della Valle News

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Vodafone Group’s deal to merge its U.K. business with rival operator Three raises competition concerns, the U.K.’s antitrust authority said, creating uncertainty on a deal poised to shake up the country’s telecommunications market.

Vodafone has achieved a groundbreaking milestone by making the world’s first video call via satellite using a regular smartphone. The call was placed from a remote location in the Welsh mountains, where there was no network signal, to the company’s CEO, Margherita Della Valle. This innovation marks a major step toward universal digital connectivity, with Vodafone planning to roll out the technology across Europe later this year and in 2026.

Vodafone said Tuesday that it sank into a first-half loss and revenue dipped after one-off gains from asset sales were not repeated as it undergoes a vast overhaul. Net losses totalled 346 million euros ($370 million) in the six months to the end of September, Vodafone said in a results statement. That compared with profit after tax of 945 million euros in the same period a year earlier. Revenues fell 4.3 percent to 21.9 billion euros, hit by adverse foreign exchange rate moves as well as the sale of Vantage Towers, Vodafone Hungary and Vodafone Ghana last time around. But services revenue grew 4.2 percent to 18.6 billion euros. Vodafone added that its transformation plan was «progressing», two weeks after it announced the sale of its Spanish division to investment fund Zegona for up to 5.0 billion euros. In a further streamlining, Vodafone in June agreed to merge British operations with Three UK, owned by Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison, to create Britain's biggest operator with 27 million customers, as it targets an acceleration in faster 5G connectivity. «During the first half of the year, we have delivered improved revenue growth in nearly all of our markets and have returned to growth in Germany in the second quarter,» said chief executive Margherita Della Valle. «Vodafone's transformation is progressing.

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