Airtel Q1 net up 40% at Rs 1,554.3 cr on tower sale, data boom

Telecom major Bharti Airtel today posted about 40 per cent jump in consolidated net profit to Rs 1,554.3 crore 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 crore in the April- June quarter of last fiscal, 2014-15.
Mobile data or Internet revenue of the company grew by 67.3 per cent, year-on-year (y-o-y) basis, to Rs 2,609 crore.
The mobile data customer base of the company increased by 25.8 per cent to 4.95 crore at the end of the quarter, from 3.93 crore in the year-ago period.

In the quarter under review, Bharti Airtel made a net gain of Rs 2,268.7 crore 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 USD 1,340 million, of which USD 243 million has been received on or before June 30, 2015. The remaining USD 1,097 million...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 crore.
The company's consolidated total sales grew by 2.9 per cent to Rs 23,680.8 crore, as against Rs 23,005.5 crore 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 per cent and 83.4 per cent 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 per cent, y-o-y basis, led by 22.2 per cent in Airtel business (B2B) and 15.8 per cent in Digital TV.
However, the company saw a dip of 11 per cent in average spent per user in the voice segment to Rs 148 from Rs 166 in India. This was however offset by 30 per cent in average data revenue per customer to Rs 181 from Rs 139 on y-o-y basis.

Mobile data revenues contributed 19.2 per cent of Mobile India revenues in the first quarter, compared to 12.4 per cent in year-ago period.
The company saw decline in its Africa business with net loss before exception item widening to Rs 976.8 crore in the reported quarter compared to Rs 820 crore loss it posted under same head.