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You get the goss with a verdict, a score out of 10, and the sources to check us.

Do we like Vodafone?

Mobile, broadband and IoT operator across Europe and Africa; Vodafone Group Plc is based in Newbury, England.

Our score: 5 out of 10. Mixed. It is a big, fixing-itself telecom with real investment pledges. Regulators keep fining it over data and customer protection, and outages keep happening.

Vodafone is a British telecom giant, run from Newbury, that was once the world's second-biggest mobile operator. Margherita Della Valle has been CEO since April 2023. She joined the Italian startup that became Vodafone Italy and has been at Vodafone since 1994. She was interim CEO from the start of 2023, then got the job permanently.

Her strategy has been to cut the empire down to size. Fortune says Vodafone sold its Spain and Italy operations and merged its UK arm with Three in 2025, making it the UK's largest mobile operator. In May 2026 it announced it would take full ownership of the merged business. Fortune also says the dividend rose for the first time in eight years.

The UK merger was a big deal. The CMA cleared it in December 2024 after an 18-month review, but only if the companies signed binding commitments to invest £11bn in 5G. The CMA had provisionally found it could mean higher prices, so the approval came with conditions and a lot of scrutiny.

Now the less shiny bit: fines. Germany's data regulator BfDI fined Vodafone's German arm €45m in 2025 over partner-agency fraud and weak eSIM security checks. Spain's regulator fined it €750,000 in August 2026 after a supplier was hacked. Italy fined it €12.25m in 2020 over unwanted marketing calls, and Ofcom fined it £4.6m in 2016.

So, would we back them? Halfway. Vodafone does cooperate with regulators and does pay for fixes, and the UK investment promise is sizeable. But the repeat privacy fines and outages, such as the UK data outage in October 2025, stop us getting excited. That's a 5.

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Our take, from what the sources we read say on the day we checked. It can miss things; tap a source to read it.