Bharti Airtel on Tuesday reported a net loss of ₹763 crore for the quarter ended September 30, 2020, even as it posted its highest-ever consolidated quarterly revenue at of ₹25,785 crore driven by a rise in data usage and new 4G users.
The net loss for the second quarter is significantly lower than the net loss of ₹23,045 crore recorded in the July-September 2019 quarter on account of higher provisioning following a recent Supreme Court order related to AGR.
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“Despite being a seasonally weak quarter, we delivered a strong performance with revenue growing at 22% year-on-year,” said Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO, India & South Asia.
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ARPU improvement
“Our continued focus on ARPU improvement and cost optimisation led to EBITDA margin expansion by over 158 basis points in the quarter sequentially,” he added.
The company said India revenue for the quarter came in at ₹18,747 crore, an increase of 22%, while mobile revenue rose grew by 26%. The ARPU (average revenue per user) for the quarter increased to ₹162 compared with ₹128 in year-earlier quarter.
It added that 4G data customers increased by 48.1% to 152.7 million, while traffic increased to 77.3 PB/day vs. 48.9 PB/day in the corresponding quarter last year.
“Engagement parameters continue to be best in industry – average data usage per data sub at 16.0 GBs/month; while voice usage was at 1,005 mins/sub/month,” it added.
Meanwhile, home business segment witnessed a revenue growth of 7.3% with more than 1.29 lakh customers added during the quarter, taking the total base to 2.58 million customers.
AGR dues
On the AGR issue, the company said, “The Group has represented to DoT that it has already paid more than 10% of the total dues as demanded by the DoT and will ensure ongoing compliance with the Hon’ble Supreme Court’s orders.”
The company said its total capital expenditure spending for the quarter stood at ₹6,791 crore.