Vodafone, which acquired controlling stake in India's Hutch Essar, will bring its brand to the subcontinent later this year, the company's chief executive officer Arun Sarin has said.

Announcing Vodafone's results for the year ended March 31, 2007, Sarin said: "We will be introducing the Vodafone brand later in the year. I remain confident that acquiring Hutch Essar is a very positive development for Vodafone."

The company would soon be rechristened Vodafone Essar. He said that site sharing discussions with Bharti were progressing well and this would enable Vodafone to realise the synergies of a more efficient rollout.

"Overall, revenues continue to grow in excess of 50 per cent year-on-year."

Elaborating on the progress in India after the recently concluded buyout of Hutch Essar from HTIL, Sarin said: "Business is performing well. We added over 3 million additional customers in the first quarter.

The race for Hutch-Essar

"We are committing significant capital of over one billion Euro this financial year to aid in the network rollout and this of course will support significant growth."

Vodafone is repositioning itself toward high growth markets with the sale of Japan, Switzerland and Belgium businesses that resulted in cash accruals of 10 billion Euro. It also plans to invest 1 billion pounds (Rs 8,000 crore) or one-fifth of global spending in India this year.

Barring India, the company's total capital expenditure would go down this year, he said. Vodafone, which has equity interests in 25 countries besides India, said that its capital expenditure on fixed assets this fiscal would be around 4.7-5.1 billion pounds as compared to 4.2 billion pounds last year.