Bharti Airtel’s Profit Falls More Than 70% In January-March Quarter
The company sees a drop of more than 70 percent in its quarter earnings.
The country's largest telecom operator is facing the heat from the latest entrant in the telecom space. Bharti Airtel Ltd.'s bottomline fell 71.7 percent, year-on-year, to come in at Rs 373 crore, its highest quarterly drop in more than four years.
The telecom operator also witnessed a year-on-year decline in revenue for the second consecutive quarter. The topline fell 12.2 percent to Rs 21,935 crore as compared to the corresponding quarter last year.
Both bottomline and topline numbers missed Bloomberg consensus estimates.
The company reported its lowest ever average revenue per user of Rs 158 in the fourth quarter of financial year 2016-17. It is a drop of more than 8 percent from the previous quarter, when Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. launched operations and continued to offer free voice and data services till March this year.
The sustained predatory pricing by the new operator has led to a decline in revenue growth for the second quarter in a row. The telecom industry as a whole also witnessed a revenue decline for the first time ever on a full year basis.Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO, India & South Asia
The data average revenue per user moved down by seven percent to Rs 162, while on the other hand data usage per customer increased by 37 percent to 1,331 megabyte.
Bharti Airtel’s average realizations in its voice as well data business also witnessed a significant fall. Data realisation per megabyte decreased 32 percent to 12.2 paise while the voice realisation per minute fell 17.5 percent to 24.28 paise on quarter-on-quarter basis.
Africa Business
Airtel posted its first ever profit of Rs 36 crore in Africa in the fourth quarter. The company currently has operations spread across 5 countries in the continent and has been in talks for a merger or stake sale in some of the these nations.
Customer Base Grows
Airtel managed to add close to 78 lakh subscribers in third quarter in its mobile business, taking the total customer base to 27.3 crore as on March 31, 2017. The telecom operator also managed to lower its churn ratio to 3.6 percent from 4.1 percent in the earlier quarter.
The company also managed to reduce its consolidated net debt by 6 percent to Rs 91,399.9 crore after it used the proceeds from selling 10.3 percent stake in Bharti Infratel to pare debt. Higher spectrum related costs pushed up finance cost by 13 percent in the fourth quarter.
Corrects an earlier version which reported Airtel's Q4 net profit at Rs 471 crore instead of Rs 373 crore.