Telenor India Q4 operating loss widens to Rs 460 crore

Telecom operator Telenor India's operating loss widened to Rs 460 crore or 368 million Norwegian krone (NOK) for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2015.
Company's operating loss was Rs 358.53 crore during the same period a year ago.
As per Telenor India, average exchange rate in the reported quarter was Rs 12.58 against a krone as against Rs 10.32 in the year-ago period.
"ARPU (average revenue per user) in local currency fell by 13 per cent to Rs 88 primarily driven by lower voice consumption and the impact from reduced mobile termination rate, partly compensated by increased data usage," Telenor India said in a statement.

During the December quarter, the firm's revenue also increased by 21 per cent to Rs 1,806.4 crore from Rs 1,493.25 crore in the corresponding period of 2014.
For the year ended December 2015, the operating loss of Telenor India stood at Rs 1,236.75 crore.

The firm had posted an operating profit of Rs 851.63 crore at the end of 2014 due to refund of licence fee it received from the government, it said.
However, the annual revenue of the company increased by 33 per cent to about Rs 6,969.8 crore in 2015 compared with Rs 5,237.3 crore in 2014, it added.

Telenor India subscriber base increased by 16 per cent to 4.2 crore at the end of 2015 compared with 3.6 crore users in 2014, the statement said.
Telenor group pumped in investments worth Rs 1,306.3 crore in 2015.
"The network modernisation initiated in the third quarter continued in the fourth quarter and impacted the capex for the quarter, as well as accelerated depreciations of current network assets amounting to NOK 181 million. This is expected to continue over the next 12-15 months," Telenor India added.