RCom net profit drops 48.5% to Rs 156 cr

Telecom operator Reliance Communications (RCom) on Friday reported 48.5 per cent dip in consolidated net profit to Rs 156 crore in the quarter ended March.

The company controlled by Anil Ambani had posted profit of Rs 303 crore a year earlier.

"In the same period last year, there was a one-time income of Rs 550 crore due to some provision in business restructuring, which impacted performance in that period. Otherwise, business is as usual," RCom Chief Executive for Consumer Business Gurdeep Singh said.

On a quarterly basis, profit increased 44 per cent from Rs 108 crore in the third quarter.

"This was overall a satisfactory quarter," Singh said.

Revenue increased 5.4 per cent to Rs 5,405 crore in the quarter from Rs 5,130 crore a year ago.

Net debt increased 3.3 per cent to Rs 40,178 from Rs 38,864 crore a year ago. Net debt was down marginally from Rs 40,761 crore a quarter ago. Finance costs increased 21 per cent to Rs 907 crore.

For the full year ended March, net profit increased 56 per cent to Rs 1,047 crore from Rs 672 crore in 2012-13.

"We continue to focus on growing profitable and paid minutes on our network and the current rate rises are part of our continued efforts to reduce free and discounted minutes and offset the rising costs of input materials," Singh said.

He added the company expected to improve performance over the next few quarters, with an increase in revenue from its telecom network usage on a per-minute basis.

Revenue in 2013-14 rose 3.3 per cent to Rs 21,238 crore.

"Our growth engine, GSM wireless with data, now makes up 72 per cent of total revenue," Singh said.

The total data (Internet) traffic on the RCom network increased 20.5 per cent on a quarterly basis to 50,251 million megabytes. "Traffic has increased due to increase in data subscribers and higher data usage per customer. Now we have 37.4 million data customers, out of which 12.9 million are 3G customers. Now more than one-third of the data users on our network are 3G subscribers," Singh said. RCom shares fell 0.41 per cent to Rs 122 at the close on the BSE, before the results were announced.