(Reuters) - India's Bharti Airtel Ltd posted a surprise first-quarter profit helped by a tax write-back, though a pricing war in the country's telecoms sector continued to weigh on the mobile carrier's bottomline.
Profit fell 73.5 percent to 973 million rupees ($14.17 million) for the quarter ended June 30, compared with 3.67 billion rupees a year earlier, the company said in a statement on Thursday.
Exceptional items for the quarter rose to 3.62 billion rupees, including a charge of 1.65 billion rupees towards operating costs for network upgrades and re-farming - the process of re-allocating spectrum.
Analysts, on average, expected a net loss of 3.08 billion rupees, according to estimates by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. However, tax write-backs of about 18.44 billion rupees helped Airtel turn in a profit for the quarter.
Last year, India's telecoms regulator cut interconnect usage charges - the fees that mobile operators pay each other for calls from one network to another - impacting revenues of operators including Airtel.
The firm's revenue from mobile services in India fell 18.8 percent to 104.80 billion rupees, while overall revenue fell about 9 percent to 200.80 billion rupees.
The sector has seen an upheaval since the entry of Reliance Jio, the telecoms arm of Reliance Industries Ltd, in late 2016.
($1 = 68.6700 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Chris Thomas in Bengaluru; Editing by Adrian Croft and Vyas Mohan)
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