Bharti Airtel on Monday posted a consolidated net profit of ₹759 crore for the January-March quarter, driven largely by higher mobile revenue and a one-time gain.
The firm had posted a loss of ₹5,237 crore in the year-earlier period. However, sequentially, the profit dropped by about 11% from ₹853 crore in the previous quarter (October-December 2020).
Revenue from operations rose by almost 12% to ₹25,747 crore. Quarter-on-quarter, the revenue fell 3%.
For FY21, the company posted a net loss of ₹15,084 crore against a net loss of ₹32,183 crore in the previous year. Revenue from operations rose almost 19% to more than ₹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,” said Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO, India & South Asia.
“Our mobile revenues grew at 19.1% YoY backed by 13.7 million 4G customer additions. We are seeing a strong momentum in our homes business with 2,74,000 net additions. The enterprise segment delivered a double-digit growth. Our digital assets continue to scale and we are beginning to see strong traction in monetisation of these assets,” he added.
The company in a statement added India revenue at ₹18,338 crore increased by 17.5% Y-o-Y on a comparable basis and 9.6% YoY on a reported basis. Mobile revenue increased 19.1% YoY on comparable basis on account of the improved realisations 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. Voice usage stood at 1,053 minutes/customer/month.
Bharti Airel added its customer base at the end of the quarter stood at over 350 million, and the capex spend for the quarter was RS. 5,141 crore for the India market.
The telecom operator said it rolled out an 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 ₹580.1 crore largely because of “...gain on account of reversal of impairment of intangible assets.”
