Idea Cellular Q1 net up at Rs 930.80 cr

Telecom major Idea Cellular today posted a higher net profit of Rs 930.80 crore for the quarter ended June 30.
This is against a net profit of Rs 728.20 crore in the corresponding period last year.
The Mumbai-based firm had a consolidated revenue of Rs 8,798.30 crore in the said quarter as against Rs 7,561 crore in the year-ago period.
The company said that the revenue figures for this quarter are not comparable to earlier quarters due to changes in the TRAI Interconnect regulations, which came in to effect from March 1, primarily reducing mobile incoming IUC charges from 20 paise to 14 paise per minute.

"The gross revenue growth was primarily driven by 4.4 million active subscribers addition (VLR), expansion of voice minutes at 5.8 per cent and 15 per cent mobile data (2G and 3G) volume growth to 62.7 billion MB," Idea Cellular said in a statement.
This is inspite of a negative impact of about Rs 317 crore compared with first quarter of 2014-15, due to IUC rate changes, it added.

Idea clocked 24.9 million annual net VLR subscriber additions between July 2014 to June 2015 and is now servicing 165.8 million consumers in India.
"Despite the large subscriber addition, the quality of Idea's overall consumer base has been steady with average revenue per user (ARPU) at Rs 182 (compared to Rs 181 in first quarter a year ago) and Voice usage per subscriber at 408 minutes (compared to 401 minutes a year ago)," it said.

Its net mobile data customer base rose by 3.7 million to 37.2 million, with 22.9 per cent of the overall subscriber base using 2G or 3G platform to access internet.
Due to increased competition, the blended data 'Average Realisation Per megabyte' (ARMB) fell sharply year-on-year by 6.5 per cent to 24.6 paise per Mb in the said quarter from 26.3 paise per Mb in the year-ago period.
The higher mobile data usage at nearly 600 MB per subscriber in the said quarter (409 MB per subscriber in the year-ago period) helped improve the blended Mobile data ARPU, of both 2G and 3G, to Rs 147 as against Rs 108 in first quarter of 2014-15.

The 3G subscriber base for the company grew by 7.9 million, taking the overall 3G data user base to 16.7 million.
Idea's capex spend in the quarter under review stood at Rs 1,367.40 crore. It excludes spectrum, interest and exchange rate difference capitalisation.
It added 3,208 2G sites, 3,330 3G sites and about 1,700 km of optical fibre cable network.
It is slated to launch its Kolkata 3G services by end of this calendar year.
Idea has also initiated multiple steps towards introduction of 4G LTE services in 10 service areas of Kerala, Maharashtra and Goa, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, Punjab, Haryana, North East, Tamil Nadu and Orissa in a phased manner from calendar year 2016 onwards.