Airtel biggest revenue earner among telecom operators

Bharti Airtel has maintained its lead over rivals in terms of gross revenue earned during the quarter ended March 31, 2007, while Hutch-Essar, in which UK's Vodafone recently bought a controlling stake, has displaced BSNL from the third spot in terms of subscribers.

The Sunil Mittal-led firm earned revenues of with Rs 5,958.82 crore, followed by Anil Ambani group company Reliance Communications with Rs 3,766.89 crore. Hutch is at the third spot with revenues of Rs 3,052.97 crore, according to the figures provided by service providers to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.

The revenue figures of BSNL, the country's largest telecom company, were not available while its sister concern MTNL posted a revenue of Rs 1,311.30 crore from its services in Delhi and Mumbai.

Hutch-Essar, which would soon be renamed Vodafone-Essar following the British firm's $10.9 billion takeover, has also emerged as the third largest mobile player in terms of subscribers and second largest in terms of GSM customers.

According to figures released by the Cellular Operators Association of India, Hutch-Essar has 2.92 crore subscribers and a market share of 22.36 per cent in the GSM space as of May-end against 2.79 crore and 21.43 per cent respectively for BSNL.

Overall, Hutch-Essar is now the third largest cellular operator in the country after Bharti Airtel and RCom, which is mainly a CDMA player. Airtel has a market share of 31.2 per cent with over 4.07 crore subscribers, while Reliance has 3.05 crore users.

The GSM-based players together added 50 lakh users in May, taking the total to 13.06 crore subscribers in the world's fastest-growing mobile market. In terms of revenues, Tata Teleservices earned Rs 1,766.65 crore, while the other Tata group company VSNL, which has NLD, ILD and ISP operations, posted revenues of Rs 1,012.22 crore.

Birla group company, Idea, recorded revenues of Rs 1,374.29 crore for the January-March quarter. Spice Communications, which is about to list on the stock exchanges, earned Rs 228.92 crore from its operations in two circles, while Aircel, in which Malaysian operator Maxis has a controlling stake, raked in a revenue of Rs 418.26 crore.

According to industry figures, in terms of average revenue per user (ARPU), a key indicator for operators' revenue rise per subscriber, Bharti again topped the list, which was once dominated by Hutch-Essar.