Bharti Airtel Posts 40 Percent Jump in Quarterly Net Profit

Telecom major Bharti Airtel on Tuesday posted about 40 percent jump in consolidated net profit to Rs. 1,554.3 crores for the first quarter ended June 30, 2015-16, on account of sale of mobile tower assets and boom in data usage.

It had posted net profit of Rs. 1,108.5 crores in the April- June quarter of last fiscal, 2014-15. Mobile data or Internet revenue of the company grew by 67.3 percent, year-on-year (y-o-y) basis, to Rs. 2,609 crores. The mobile data customer base of the company increased by 25.8 percent to 4.95 crores at the end of the quarter, from 3.93 crores in the year-ago period.

In the quarter under review, Bharti Airtel made a net gain of Rs. 2,268.7 crores from divestment of telecom tower assets in Uganda, Ghana, Congo Brazzaville and Nigeria. "The gross sale proceeds of the tower disposals during the quarter are $1,340 million (roughly Rs. 8,556 crores), of which $243 million (roughly Rs. 1,551 crores) has been received on or before June 30, 2015. The remaining $1,097 million (roughly Rs. 7,004 crores)...has been netted off in the computation of Net Debt," Bharti Airtel said in a statement.

The net debt of the company stood at Rs. 68,134.5 crores. The company's consolidated total sales grew by 2.9 percent to Rs. 23,680.8 crores, as against Rs. 23,005.5 crores in the first quarter of 2014-15.

"Our customer base has continued to steadily expand. Mobile minutes and data traffic have grown by 7.4 percent and 83.4 percent respectively. I am pleased that our revenue growth is broad based across all business units, especially the domestic enterprise and corporate segment," Bharti Airtel MD and CEO, India & South Asia Gopal Vittal said.

India revenues reported a growth of 10 percent, y-o-y basis, led by 22.2 percent in Airtel business (B2B) and 15.8 percent in Digital TV.

However, the company saw a dip of 11 percent in average spent per user in the voice segment to Rs. 148 from Rs. 166 in India. This was however offset by 30 percent in average data revenue per customer to Rs. 181 from Rs. 139 on y-o-y basis. Mobile data revenues contributed 19.2 percent of Mobile India revenues in the first quarter, compared to 12.4 percent in year-ago period.

The company saw decline in its Africa business with net loss before exception item widening to Rs. 976.8 crores in the reported quarter compared to Rs. 820 crores loss it posted under same head. The net finance cost of Bharti Airtel almost doubled to Rs. 1,927.6 crores during the first quarter of the current fiscal, from Rs. 964.3 crores in the year-ago period. Its customer base in India grew 10 percent to over 23 crores from 20.9 crores a year ago.

Total customer base of Bharti Airtel across 20 countries globally stood at 33.18 crores at the end of June. Bharti Airtel Africa revenue declined by 11.6 percent to Rs. 6,159.5 crores, compared to Rs. 6,968.5 crores in the first quarter of last fiscal.

The company, however, saw 1 percent y-o-y increase in Africa revenue in constant currency terms. Data revenues in Africa stood at $128 million (roughly Rs. 817 crores) with growth of 48.5 percent on annual basis, the statement said.

The company saw increase in active Airtel Money customer base increase to 7 million, boosting the total transaction values on Airtel Money platform by 72.6 percent to $3.3 billion (roughly Rs. 21,071 crores).