Vodafone Ireland pays €60m dividend to global parent group

Vodafone Ireland paid a dividend of €60 million to its global parent group last year.

This mirrored the payment made by Ireland’s largest mobile phone company in the previous 12-month period and came in a year when the group’s profits rebounded strongly despite a 2.6 per cent decline in turnover.

Latest accounts for Vodafone Ireland Ltd show it made a pretax profit of €138.6 million in the year to the end of March 2012. This compared with a pretax profit of €103.7 million in the previous year.

However, the company’s turnover fell by almost €28 million to €1.03 billion as consumers continued to rein in their spending in the economic downturn and competition in the marketplace remained high.

The increase in profitability was due to reduced amortisation and depreciation costs connected to its assets, and a €12 million gain relating to the consideration it paid for 3G licences.

“Vodafone performed well over the course of the year despite high customer acquisition costs driven by handset subsidies,” the directors’ report stated.