Vodafone Australia is owned by Vodafone Group Plc and won Australia’s third mobile carrier licence in 1992 and began operations in 1993. It is now the third largest mobile carrier in Australia after Telstra and Optus. Early in 2009 Hutchison Telecommunications (Australia) Ltd and Vodafone Australia agreed to merge their Australian mobile telecommunications businesses. The merged entity will operate under the name VHA with products marketed under the Vodafone brand with the option to continue to operate the 3 brand. It is perhaps likely that within five years VHA will have significantly closed the gap on Optus in terms of market share. However Telstra may have lost disproportionately more customers to VHA and this may result in a market share split for Australia of roughly a third of the market each as compared to a split of 40/35/25 between Telstra, Optus and VHA today. However the response in the short term from Optus in particular is likely to be aggressive in terms of pricing competition for both consumer and business users. Prior to the merger Vodafone’s directly connected subscriber base stood at nearly 4 million connections with an MVNO base of over 300,000 subscribers. A large proportion of Vodafone’s subscriber base consists of 3G users. Vodafone operates a 3G/HSPA network with coverage in the capital cities and major regional centres and plans to extend 3G coverage to 94% of the population by September 2009.
