London - Vodafone announced plans to continue an aggressive cost-cutting programme, even as results for the first half of 2009 showed a boost in profits over 2008 levels.

The British mobile phone company reported an operating profit of 6.1 billion pounds (10.2 billion dollars) for the first six months of 2009, up from 4.1 billion pounds for the same period in 2008.

Those figures were on revenues of 21.8 billion pounds in 2009, against 19.9 billion pounds in 2008, an increase of 9.3 per cent.

"Despite the economic environment, we continue to see good uptake of handheld business devices and mobile broadband," reported the company.

Indeed, Vodafone said it anticipates operating profit of between 11 billion and 12 billion pounds for 2010.

Nevertheless, the company announced that it would continue efforts to rein in costs.

"The one-billion-pound cost reduction programme is expected to be delivered a year ahead of plan and we have extended this to a further 1 billion pounds of cost savings by 2012," said Vodafone chief executive Vittorio Colao. (dpa)