Lisbon, Oct. 23, 2025 (Lusa) - The chief executive officer (CEO) of Vodafone Portugal said on Thursday that Digi's entry into the Portuguese market was not having a dramatic customer flight, emphasising that the operator does not want to compete on price.

"I can't say that the impact that the new entrant is having on Vodafone is a dramatic customer drain," said Luís Lopes, at a meeting with journalists at the operator's headquarters in Lisbon's Parque das Nações, on the occasion of the company's 33rd anniversary celebrations.

"We don't want to compete on price, we want to compete on offering what is called “value for money”," he continued.

He admitted that there is a segment of the Portuguese consumer who only wants price, but "most Portuguese people and companies want “value for money”, they want quality at a good price, it's a different thing," he emphasised.

"I"m convinced that this is the main reason why, when an entrant enters the market and charges prices that are, in some cases, 80% cheaper than those charged by the operator, what you would expect, if people only want price, is: “this must be a complete bleeding of customers”," he said, but this hasn"t happened.

Vodafone "today has the number of customers it had when Digi came in," he added.

"Obviously we lost customers to Digi and obviously we also gained some customers in this space of time," said Luís Lopes, reiterating that the brand and essence of the Vodafone company "do not compete on price", but "on quality and on offering the best price for the quality it provides".

Vodafone is bigger in the countries where it operates directly. In Europe, the biggest countries where we operate directly are Germany, England, Turkey, and then Portugal," said the CEO.

During the meeting, Luís Lopes took stock of Vodafone's 33 years in Portugal (originally Telecel), highlighting the highs and lows.

"There was a very important moment when Telecel became Vodafone, even though Vodafone was already a major shareholder, but then it took 100% of the capital" and went public, he recalled.

Another important moment, he pointed out, was when Vodafone decided to invest in fibre in Portugal: "It's not an easy decision at all, especially when Vodafone's roots were to be a mobile operator".

At the time the decision was made, "we were even the world's largest mobile operator, globally, with a significant presence in many countries" and this "really required convincing the Vodafone shareholder on the part of the Portuguese management that there was a future for investing in fibre," he said.

It required "a lot of work because it's Portugal and I would say that if it had been in the current context, I think we would hardly have had this opportunity," he said.

This was "a very important milestone because it transformed Vodafone, a mobile operator, into an integrated telecommunications operator", he emphasised.

Then there are milestones such as passing the target of one million fibre customers, "because it shows this significant transformation process that we have carried out" or launching 4G in Portugal, where "it was the first operator".

Now, "obviously I can't say that in the mobile area" everything has gone well "in the last five years, especially after the delay in launching 5G".

Despite this, we have reached a milestone we consider quite relevant in 2025: having 5G available in every municipality in Portugal and in 99% of the population.

As for the lowest points, he listed the cyber-attack on Vodafone and, more recently, the blackout.

"The cyber-attack was both a low point and a high point," he said.

Asked if he knows what happened, Luís Lopes said that he does, but that the matter "is still a matter of judicial secrecy", so he can't give any more information.

"But yes, we know who did it, how it happened," he added, noting that it was "an external actor".

Cybersecurity is a "fundamental aspect that we took seriously and we take even more seriously" and "obviously something like this will never happen again", he said.

"Having said that, it"s always possible that there"s something else, but there you go, it was a high point too, because at such a low point, the company managed to give a response that I consider extraordinary, because it managed to restore things that seemed almost impossible to restore and brought out the best in the people who worked for Vodafone, in the sense of the urgency of having customers, and some of the customers we have are customers that we consider critical to the functioning of the country," he argued.

As for the costs resulting from the cyber-attack, Vodafone Portugal won't divulge figures but said they were in the "millions of euros" range.

The CEO said that there were "internal weaknesses that were corrected" and that many of these exist in almost all companies in Portugal and beyond.

"And we weren't the only company that this organisation (...) attacked," he said.

Then there was the blackout last April: although Vodafone's services were working, the fixed network was always operational in companies with generators, but the same didn't hold for the mobile network, he said.

"The part that stopped working throughout the day, sequentially, was the mobile network. As the batteries ran out, the mobile network went down," recalled the CEO.

The mobile network "went down faster than I would have liked" and "in some places it went down too fast" and, therefore, "what we did the next day, and this is the important part, I didn"t even wait for any report from Anacom or regulatory obligations, we authorised a very significant investment, of several million euros, to strengthen the energy resilience of the Vodafone network," he said.

"I think it's absolutely critical in our mission to give this comfort to our customers, whether they're consumers or businesses," he continued, adding that the investment started the week after the blackout, totalling "several million euros".

"We've put generators in dozens of locations, we've put in batteries, some of which last eight hours," he said.

Vodafone has 5,500 sites and "it's not possible to do energy resilience for so many hours, especially in some places where, for example, very few customers are served and it's simply not economically viable".

During the blackout, "there were Vodafone sites that went down in 15 minutes". After “two hours, 40% to 45% of Vodafone's sites were down”, he said.

"We want to be the most resilient network," he said.

ALU/ADB // ADB.

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