Bharti Airtel on Monday posted a consolidated net profit of ₹759 crore for the January-March 2021 quarter, largely driven by higher mobile revenues and a one-time gain.
The firm had posted a loss of ₹5,237 crore during the same period, a year ago. However, sequentially, the profit was down about 11% from Rs 853 crore in the previous quarter (October-December 2020).
The company’s revenue from operations stood at ₹25,747 crore during the quarter, up about 12% from ₹ 23,018 crore in the year-ago period. On a quarter-on-quarter comparison, the revenue was down 3% from ₹ 26,517 crore.
For the full year 2020-21, the company posted a net loss of ₹15,084 crore against a net loss of ₹32,183 in 2019-20. Revenue from operations for the full year were up 18.8% to over ₹1 lakh crore.
“Our services are the digital oxygen that the country needs in this challenging time as we experience a vicious second wave of COVID-19...Our mobile revenues grew at 19.1% YoY backed by 13.7 Mn 4G customer additions. We are seeing strong momentum in our homes business with 274k net adds. The Enterprise segment delivered double digit growth. Our digital assets continue to scale and we are beginning to see strong traction in monetisation of these assets,” Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO, India & South Asia, said.
The company in a statement added that India revenues at ₹18,338 crore increased by 17.5% year-on-year (Y-o-Y) on a comparable basis and 9.6% YoY on a reported basis. Mobile revenues were up 19.1% YoY on comparable basis on account of the improved realizations as well as strong customer addition.
The average revenue per user (ARPU) stood at ₹145 during the quarter.
It added that 4G data customers increased by 31.5% YoY to 179.3 million, while the average data usage per data customer stood at 16.4 GBs/month and voice usage was at 1,053 mins/customer/month.
Bharti Airel added that its customer base at the end of the quarter stood at over 350 million, and the capex spend for the quarter was ₹5,141 crore for the India market.
The telecom operators said it rolled out additional about 8,300 towers in the quarter to further expand and strengthen network coverage.
In a regulatory filing, the company noted an overall net exceptional gain (after tax) of ₹5,801 million (₹580.1 crore) largely because of “...gain on account of reversal of impairment of intangible assets”.
Published - May 17, 2021 05:44 pm IST
