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Katie Fehrenbacher from GigaOM reports on an interesting quote from Vodafone’s CEO Arun Sarin in a Businessweek article:

We expect these services to generate 10% of our revenue within three or four years,” he says. Vodafone generated $29.4 billion in revenue and $6.6 billion in profit during the first half of the year, beating analyst forecasts.

She does a quick math and finds out that 10% of their projected 2010 revenue is $7 billion, and thinks this is too optmistic – “that’s just a little less than what Google is estimated to make in sales this year”.

That may be true. However, though Vodafone is bound to face a huge strategic challenge in the next 4 years with VoIP and convergence and whatever (just like all the other operators in the planet), it is sitting on a huge asset that Google doesn’t have – microbilling capabilities to their huge number of subscribers. As we always say – it’s just a matter of stop thinking like media companies and start thinking like innovative service providers, and those $7 billion don’t look out of reach at all.