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By Ukraine Rebuild News Staff
Vodafone Ukraine, the second-largest mobile operator in Ukraine after Kyivstar, increased capital spending in the first half of the year by 75% year-on-year as it repaired damage inflicted in the ongoing war and increased its resilience to power outages and shortages.
Capital expenditures rose to 2.2 billion hryvnias ($59.7 million) in the period, including repairing war damage and increasing the reliability of its electricity supply, the company said in its first-half earnings report.
“Thanks to this, Vodafone engineers restored the destroyed infrastructure, promptly repaired the equipment, developed and expanded the network, and also prepared the infrastructure for a possible lack of power supply in the winter period,” the firm said.
It also equipped 9,000 base stations with new batteries that are less vulnerable to power outages and voltage fluctuations and that charge as much as three times faster, the firm said. It also equipped 1,124 nodal technical facilities with backup power using stationary generator sets, prepared 522 mobile generators and created a reserve of diesel and gasoline to run them.
“The company's energy engineers are testing new solutions, alternative energy sources such as solar power plants and microturbine generators are already being used at a number of facilities,” it said.
The subscriber base remained stable in the second quarter from the first quarter, at 15.2 million customers, including 2 million refugees abroad. However, it fell 8% from the second quarter of 2022 “as a result of active hostilities, the unavailability of mobile networks in temporarily occupied territories and in the zone of hostilities and mass migration.”
Vodafone’s biggest rival, the Veon-owned Kyivstar, said in June that it plans to spend $600 million over the next three years on infrastructure as it moves toward a “5G-focused reconstruction.” Kyivstar’s 4,000 employees serve 24.3 million mobile and 1.1 million fixed-line users.
