Idea Cellular Reports 57 Percent Jump in Quarterly Net Profit

The country's third largest telecom player Idea Cellular, which on Monday reported a 57 percent jump in net income at Rs. 728.2 crore for the June quarter, driven by higher demand in mobile Internet services, said it expects to continue to raise its market share by 1 percent per year.

"Currently our market share in terms of revenue stands at 16.6 percent and in terms of incremental revenue market share, we are close to 30 percent. Over past three years, we have been gaining market share of 1.1 percent every year, we hope to continue to improve our market share in similar way,"

Idea Cellular managing director Himanshu Kapania said here today, while announcing the first quarter result. He attributed the good numbers to the strong consumer demand and brand affinity, expanding network and steady cash flows from operations.

The company expects that its Ebitda will also continue to grow in future. "We believe that improvement in market share and Ebitda margins, which have been growing by 1.5 percent every year for the past three years, will continue to grow in a similar manner going forward," chief financial officer Akshaya Mondra said. The company has got a subscriber base of 13.9 crore as of now, including a 3G subscriber base of 1.06 crore.

"We have doubled our 3G subscriber base in the past one year to 1.06 crore from 55 lakh in the previous year. We hope it will also continue to grow in future," Moondra said, adding the combined 2G and 3G subscriber base stands at 2.76 crore.

Idea said it revenue grew to Rs. 515.7 crore during the reporting quarter, thus achieving an Ebitda margin of 30 percent. During the quarter, it saw 136 percent year-on-year growth in mobile Internet business. It sold 32.5 billion megabytes of mobile data on its 2G and 3G platform during the quarter.

The network usage of the company grew by 12.2 percent on yearly basis. The higher voice rate realization and jump in data contribution to 11.5 percent of service revenue helped improve average realisation per minute by 1.5 paise from 43.6 paise in Q4 of FY14 to 45.1 paise in Q1 of FY15, while the value added services contribution improved sharply to 17.8 percent of overall service revenue.

It posted about 16 percent jump in its consolidated revenue at Rs. 7,484.8 crore during the quarter, up from Rs. 6,470.93 crore a year ago. The blended data ARPU (2G+3G) also improved to Rs. 108 and usage per data subscriber is at 409 MB. Shares of Idea closed at Rs. 139.75 apiece, down by 1.01 percent over previous close at BSE, which closed 73 points up.