Telecoms has always been regarded as one of the last sectors to be hit in a downturn – you may forfeit a holiday abroad or cut down on eating out, but you will not stop using your mobile phone. However, Vodafone’s first quarter results this morning show nothing is immune.

As Vodafone trimmed its full-year outlook to the bottom end of the £39.8 billionn - £40.7 billion range given in May, shares in the world’s biggest mobile phone company, considered to be one of the most defensive stocks in the FTSE, fell by as much as 16 per cent, wiping £11 billion off its value.

The slide almost single-handedly brought the FTSE into the red, and led a fall across the telecoms sector with analysts predicting more revenue downgrades to come for Vodafone.

Vodafone’s fortunes, which may have appeared unstoppable after the company rung up record profits of more than £13 billion in its year-end results in May, have finally been hit by the downturn in Europe, and more specifically by the housing slump in Spain. Construction work has dried up, shrinking the migrant workforce, which had helped drive growth of around 10 per cent in the last four years. As a result, organic revenues, which had been up 5 per cent in the fourth quarter, fell to -2.5 per cent.

Chief executive Arun Sarin, who hands over the baton to deptuy Vittorio Colao next week, is credited with bolstering Vodafone’s fortunes with his forays into burgeoning emerging markets such as India and Egypt. However, as the core European market finally looks to have cracked, he may be wishing he had brought forward his departure by a few weeks. Today’s share price slide, which has brought the stock back down to virtually the same level as when he arrived five years ago, is not the swansong he would have hoped to leave on.

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