RCom posts 86% rise in profit to Rs 201 crore

Company's revenue up by 5.4% to Rs 5,435 crore in the quarter

Reliance Communications has reported an 86 per cent year-on-year increase in its consolidated net profit to Rs 201 crore for the quarter ended December, on the back of high data usage and lower finance costs.

It had posted a net profit of Rs 108 crore in the same quarter previous year. The consolidated revenue increased by 5.4 per cent to Rs 5,435 crore in the quarter from Rs 5,157 crore in the same quarter previous year.

The total data customer base has grown 5.7 per cent to 31.4 million, including 16.7 million 3G customers, in the quarter. The total data traffic increased 16.2 per cent to 76,434 million megabyte (MB) compared with a quarter ago and 83.3 per cent up compared to the same quarter previous year.

The traffic has increased due to an increase in data subscribers and higher data usage per customer, the company said.

The total minutes of usage was up 1.3 per cent to 103.4 billion during the end of the quarter compared to a period ago. The average revenue per user stood at Rs 142, up 3.6 per cent on a quarter ago.

RCom generated operational cash flow (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) of Rs 1,851 crore and invested Rs 348 crore in capital expenditure during the quarter. It remains free cash flow positive and this is expected to continue, the statement added.

"Our circle-specific go-to-market strategy and differentiated data offerings have helped us in acquiring good quality customers in post-paid and corporate segments. Our finance charges have reduced significantly by Rs 100 crore year-on-year," the chief executive for consumer business, Gurdeep Singh, told a news agency.

The net debt reduced by about Rs 4,000 crore to Rs 36,767 crore at the end of December 2014 from Rs 40,762 crore a year ago.

"After several quarters of declining trend, our CDMA revenues have now stabilised, largely due to improvement in handset eco-system.Our GSM revenues, in-line with industry trends have grown by over 4.2 per cent quarter-on-quarter and now contributes 74 per cent to wireless revenues," Singh said.

Recently, RCom entered into a partnership with Facebook to offer free data access to useful websites to its customers through Internet.org portal. These services are available in circles of Mumbai, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Chennai, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The services will be extended to the rest of the country in a phased manner, the statement added.