RCom Q4 net profit drops 48.5% to Rs 156 crore

Telecom operator Reliance Communications today reported a 48.5 per cent dip in consolidated net profit to Rs 156 crore in the quarter ended March 31.
The company controlled by Anil Ambani had posted a profit of Rs 303 crore a year earlier.
"In the same period last year, there was a one-time income of about Rs 550 crore due to some provision in business restructuring, which had impact on performance in that period. Otherwise, business is as usual," RCom Chief Executive Officer for Consumer Business Gurdeep Singh told PTI.
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 5.36 per cent to Rs 5,405 crore in the quarter from Rs 5,130 crore in the same period a year ago.

The company's 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 in the preceding quarter.
Finance costs increased 21 per cent to Rs 907 crore.
For the full year ended March, net profit increased 55.8 per cent to Rs 1,047 crore from Rs 672 crore in FY13.
"We continue to focus on growing profitable and paid minutes on our network and the current tariff hikes are part of our continued efforts to reduce free and discounted minutes and offset the ever-rising costs of input materials," Singh said.

He added that the company expects to improve performance over the next few quarters with increase in revenue from its telecom network usage on a per-minute basis.
Revenue in FY14 rose 3.29 per cent to Rs 21,238 crore.
"Our growth engine, which is GSM wireless with data, now contributes 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.