the company plans to spend additional $200-400 mn in the current fiscal to ramp up 3G and 4G infrastructure
New Delhi : Country’s largest telco Bharti Airtel posted a 10.1 % rise in its net profit at Rs 1,523 crore for the three months to September, helped by higher mobile data usage and robust growth in customer base. With more people accessing high speed Internet on smartphones, Airtel’s mobile data revenue grew 49.8 % to Rs 3,806 crore and data traffic jumped 76.3 %, Airtel said. Mobile data revenue consisted of 16 % of total revenues for the quarter compared to 11.1 % in the same period last fiscal, it said.
To further ramp up its 3G and 4G infrastructure, the company is open to spend an additional $200-400 million in the current fiscal. Airtel had earlier announced its capex guidance for the current year to be $3 billion. Total revenue rose 4.3 % to Rs 23,836 crore.
Airtel’s total subscriber base across 20 countries in the quarter rose to 340 million, against 303 million a year ago, the company said.
Voice realisation per minute, however, dropped by 3.11 paise to 34.58 paise in the second quarter, compared to 37.69 paise in the corresponding quarter last fiscal. Voice ARPU also declined to Rs 140 from Rs 158 last year.
“Airtel’s revenue growth in India has accelerated to 13.3 % in Q2 on an underlying basis, the highest in the last 12 quarters. With the commercial launch of 4G services across 334 towns and roll-out of 3G services in our gap circles, we are now best positioned in the industry to leverage the fast growing data market,” Bharti Airtel MD and CEO (India and South Asia) Gopal Vittal said.
Vittal added that there has been a marginal pressure on voice pricing in the reported quarter and the competitive intensity continues to be unabated not just by the smaller players but larger players as well.
