Bharti Airtel’s net profit fell about 58% in the second quarter of this financial year to ₹249.2 crore, compared with its level in the same period of the previous year, the company announced on Thursday, citing competitive pricing pressures. The company’s total revenue declined 6% to ₹20,422.5 crore in the second quarter, while it declined 7% to ₹40,502.5 crore in the first six months of the financial year. Net profit stood at ₹216.1 crore, down 70%, over the April to September 2018 period.
Customer focus
“Led by our focus on quality customers through simplified pricing and content partnerships, ARPU decline has moderated in this quarter,” Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO, India & South Asia, Bharti Airtel, said in a statement. “We remain focused on driving quality base growth with value adding propositions for our customers. We also remain committed to investing in enhanced capacities and have deployed 27k-plus broadband sites during the quarter, enabling a 239% y-o-y growth in mobile data volumes.”
“Mobile revenues have witnessed a year-on-year (y-o-y) de-growth of 7.2% on an underlying basis led by continued ARPU [average revenue per user] downtrading impacted by competitive pricing pressures,” the company said in a release. “India other businesses continue to witness a healthy y-o-y growth. Digital TV revenue has crossed the ₹10 billion mark with a 9.3% growth and Airtel Business has witnessed a growth of 22.8% on an underlying basis.”
The company said mobile data traffic had more than tripled to 2,660 billion MBs in the second quarter, compared with 784 billion MBs in the same quarter of the previous year. Within this, the number of mobile 4G data customers grew by 132.2% to 65.7 million from 28.3 million over the same period.
Competitive pricing pressures have meant that the ARPU from mobile services in India contracted 28.8% in the second quarter to ₹101.
“In constant currency [March 1, 2018] terms, Africa revenues grew by 10.8% y-o-y led by strong growth in data and Airtel money transaction value,” the company said. “Mobile data traffic has grown by 53% to 89 billion MBs in the quarter as compared to 58 billion MBs in the same quarter last year. Data customers increased by 32.1% to 27.1 million from 20.5 million in the corresponding quarter last year.”
