Mobile voice revenue is following the same structural decline as SMS, Vodacom Group CEO Shameel Joosub said in an interview on Monday – an unusually direct acknowledgement from the head of South Africa’s largest mobile operator that the product on which the local industry was built is fading as a meaningful revenue contributor.
“It’s not dissimilar to what we went through with SMS,” Joosub told TechCentral when asked whether voice would disappear as a significant source of revenue for mobile operators in coming years.
Voice now contributes just 29% of Vodacom’s South African service revenue, down from being the dominant stream during the first two decades of the industry.
The driver, Joosub said, is simply that data networks are cannibalising the category they have largely replaced. “You’re still going through that structural decline as more and more people also start to use voice-over IP services, and things like WhatsApp voice,” he said. “So, you do have some of that cannibalisation in your numbers.”
The shift from circuit-switched calls to voice carried over data networks has been under way for years. But the consumer behavioural change is what has accelerated the revenue decline. South Africans increasingly think of “making a call” as sending a voice note in WhatsApp rather than dialling a number.
The challenge for mobile operators like Vodacom is that data revenue growth has to be big enough to offset the structural decline in voice. “Effectively, your data growth needs to be big enough to offset some of the structural voice decline,” Joosub said.
Competitive intensity
The pressure on South African voice is being compounded by competitive intensity in the prepaid market, where mobile virtual network operators – led by Capitec Connect, which recently began offering free on-net calls between its Sims – are eroding the pricing power of the established operators. Vodacom has responded to competitive market dynamics by repricing some of its prepaid offers, a move Joosub conceded “ended up with a bit of a negative result” to financial performance.
He attributed the broader pressure on the South African consumer mobile market to a combination of the weak local economy and competition from MVNOs and other mobile operators, with the economy “probably being the major part of that”.
Read: Free calls, dead voice and Shameel Joosub’s Spanish ghost
Asked whether voice would disappear as a meaningful revenue contributor over time, Joosub said: “In a lot of cases, you’ll have bigger voice bundles, but I think it will be mainly data going forward. Data and all your beyond mobile services.”
That “beyond mobile” category – which Vodacom defines as financial services, fibre, digital and the internet-of-things – generated R29.8-billion in the 2026 financial year, or 22.3% of group service revenue. The group is targeting that share to approach 30% by 2030.
Voice, the product around which Vodacom and its peers built their networks, balance sheets and share prices for decades, is becoming a declining commodity. The operators that thrive over the next decade will need to find new sources of growth above the connectivity layer – in fintech, fibre, enterprise digital services and the cloud.
For Vodacom, those bets are already visible in the results. South African financial services revenue is up 8.1% to R3.7-billion, Vodacom Business cloud, hosting and security revenue is up 27.1%, and the group has just finalised a R12.6-billion fibre play through Maziv. Each is growing faster than the core South African consumer mobile business.
Read: Vodacom says it has made South Africa’s first 5G voice call
The repositioning is well under way. Joosub’s comparison of voice’s decline to that of SMS is, in effect, an acknowledgement that the operator can no longer rely on the product that built it. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
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