Forecast: the Vodafone share price will pass £1 very soon!

After a fairly nervy start to 2025, UK shares have had an outstanding year. The elite FTSE 100 index is up 21.7% over the past 12 months, while many of its constituent shares have done even better. For example, take the Vodafone Group (LSE: VOD) share price, which has surged strongly since its spring lows.

Volatile Vodafone

Vodafone stock has been a loser for a long time, having lost around two-thirds of its value since end-2013. Over the last five years, this popular and widely held share has lost almost a fifth (â19.1%) of its value, versus a 52.9% gain for the wider FTSE 100.

In January 2023, Vodafone appointed Italian executive Margherita Della Valle — its former chief financial officer — as the global telecoms group’s new chief executive. Alas, this failed to turn this telecoms tanker around, with the share price crashing to lifetime lows by February 2024.

However, there finally seems to be light at the end of this tunnel, as the shares have surged strongly since their 2025 low. After President Trump announced hefty US import tariffs in April 2025, the Vodafone share price bottomed out at 62.4p on 9 April. As I write, the stock trades at 97.82p, valuing this Footsie firm at Â£23.1bn — its highest value since April 2023.

Disclosure: my family portfolio bought Vodafone stock in December 2022, paying 90.2p a share for our stake. Today, we are sitting on a paper profit of 8.5% (ignoring dividends, which we have reinvested into buying more Vodafone shares). However, for most of our ownership period, we have endured painful paper losses!

Decreased dividends

The above returns all exclude dividends: regular cash payouts made by some companies to their shareholders. But as I often warn, future dividends are not guaranteed, so they can be cut or cancelled at short notice.

So it came to pass at Vodafone, which decided to halve its dividend after 2024. From 2021 to 2024, the yearly payout was held at â¬0.09 (nine euro cents) per share. From this year, this was halved to â¬0.045 per share. Shareholders were hardly happy with this news, with the Vodafone share price going nowhere in 2024.

By slashing its dividend and selling non-core assets, Vodafone has reduced its debt pile and invested in growth markets. Today, the group’s net debt stands at â¬25.9bn (Â£22.6bn), which has risen partly as a result of this year’s â¬1bn share-buyback programme. Yet even after ‘the halvening’, the dividend yield stands at 4.1% a year, well above the FTSE 100’s yearly cash yield of just over 3%.

What next?

With Vodafone stock trading close to its 2025 highs, I suspect it might only be weeks before it hits the psychologically important Â£1 mark. After that, I’m not sure what comes next, but the shares still don’t look particularly expensive to me. Therefore, we will hang onto our holding until the company releases its third-quarter trading update on 5 February.

But what other exciting growth stocks are out there right now?

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The Motley Fool UK has recommended Vodafone Group. Cliff DâArcy has an economic interest in Vodafone Group shares. Views expressed on the companies mentioned in this article are those of the writer and therefore may differ from the official recommendations we make in our subscription services, such as Share Advisor, Hidden Winners and Pro. Here at The Motley Fool, we believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors.