Vodafone has announced fresh investment of Rs 13,000 crore (£1.3 billion) for capacity augmentation and new business initiatives in India. This was committed to by Vittorio Colao, Vodafone Group Plc‘s CEO, in his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in London.
The investment will be used to set up a new data centre in the country and expanding its network to offer payment banks services. The company will also upgrade its existing telecom infrastructure .
Rs 8,000 crore (£800 million) will be used to enhance, upgrade and expand network coverage.
Rs 3,000 crore (£300 million) will be spent to further increase capacity and upgrade its high-end technology centre and IT and customer experience centres in Pune and Ahmedabad. These centres service Vodafone companies globally.
Rs 1,000 crore (£100 million) will be used for setting up a hi-tech Tier-4 data centre. This is the first of its kind in the Indian telecom sector.
Rs 1,000 crore (£100 million) will be invested in the payment bank for which Vodafone M-Pesa Ltd. has received an in-principle licence from the RBI.
Vodafone has already invested over Rs 111,000 crores and contributed over Rs 100,000 crores to the exchequer and is today the largest FDI investor in the country.
Vodafone’s India business, in addition to being the highest contributor to Vodafone Group’s service revenue growth, has the largest customer base (188 million customers), is the largest data traffic market (by volume) and the third largest contributor to Vodafone Group’s service revenues.