Vodafone Indian unit says public offering unlikely this year

A planned initial public offering of Vodafone Group Plc's Indian unit is unlikely this year, says the unit's Chief Executive Marten Pieters in New Delhi.

Pieters said the company would wait for clarity on rules around airwaves and cellular permits before going ahead with the Initial Public Offering (IPO).

"It is impossible to do the IPO (initial public offering) if we not have not achieved more certainty around the spectrum pricing for the next years. Many of our licenses are actually up for renewal, some of them next year and quite a few more, the year after. So that has such a big impact on our numbers that it is impossible to do the IPO, if we do not have clarity on these two issues," said Pieters.

He added that Vodafone India would only invest half of what it invested in data as compared to previous years.

"This coming year we are probably going to invest probably about half of what we invested in data and that is not only in the front end meaning radio networks and spectrum but data is not very scalable, so that means when data volumes grow and they grow much faster than the revenue grows. The revenue grew 50 percent but the usage grew far over 100 percent, so meaning that volumes grow very fast. That means we have to build a lot of capacity in our ..... network, in transmission networks and in our international connectivity, so lot of money goes into that," he added.

Meanwhile, Vodafone would reinvest a $3.2 billion dividend from its healthy U.S. arm to counter weakness in southern Europe that contributed to the largest ever quarterly fall in the group's main revenue measure.

But Vodafone posted a 4.2 percent quarterly fall in organic service revenue, in line with forecasts, but worse than the 2.6 percent it recorded in the third quarter and the largest quarterly drop since the company started using the measurement in 2003.

The steepest falls came from southern Europe, where operators are cutting prices to win business from struggling consumers. In Italy service revenue fell 12.8 percent, while in Spain it was down 11.5 percent.

The group also took a 1.8 billion pounds impairment charge on its business in Italy, taking the total write downs for Spain and Italy for the year to 7.7 billion pounds.

Vodafone is the second largest mobile operator in both those markets but it has lost share to cheaper rivals, as cash-strapped customers switched to low-cost operators or ditched their phones altogether.