Vodafone is pinning its hopes on camera phones and data services for growth.

The company has lost 177,000 subscribers in the UK over the last three months but has managed to boost its Average Revenue per Subscriber (Arpu). It has also added over two-and-a-half million subscribers worldwide.

Vodafone chairman Sir Christopher Gent remained upbeat on the figures and said revenues would be higher this year as the company seeks to boost data usage and voice calls from its pre-paid customers.

"This summer we will see for the first time pre-pay users being able to use their phones on holiday," he said. "Literally tens of millions will use their phones in this manner and this will be significant."

He added that the company hoped this would benefit an autumn launch of new data services. Among those are camera phones, which have been a success for the company in Japan where it has five million subscribers using such handsets.

Gent said that he hoped these phones would be a Christmas hit for the company, in the same way that its pre-pay predecessors were a few years ago. Should this happen, Vodafone's data revenues could jump next year.

Almost 20 per cent of revenues for Vodafone's Japanese operation comes from data services. This figure falls to 10 to 15 per cent in Europe, where SMS dominates data revenues.

Vodafone has trimmed its number of low-usage pre-pay customers, a move which helped the mobile giant increase Arpu from £276 to £278, but this figure was still below its £291 figure of a year ago. The rise in its number of subscribers includes just under one-and-a-half million extra subscribers not taken on through acquisition.

Vodafone now has 103.9m customers worldwide and just over 13m subscribers in the UK.