Bharti Airtel Q1 net income plunges 73 pct to Rs 97 crore

Telecom major Bharti Airtel today reported a 73.5 per cent drop in net income at Rs 97 crore for the three months to June due to intense competition in the mobile services market. The company had registered a net profit of Rs 367 crore in the same period a year ago. 
 
The Sunil Bharti Mittal-led firm's consolidated income declined by 8.6 per cent to Rs 20,080 crore for the first quarter of this fiscal from Rs 21,958 crore in corresponding period of 2017-18. India revenues during April-June 2018 period declined by 7 per cent on year-on-year basis to Rs 14,930 crore, the company said. 
 
"Industry pricing continues to remain untenable. However, led by our successful bundles, content partnerships and handset upgrade programs, our mobile data traffic surged 355 per cent on a YoY basis," the company's MD and CEO (India and South Asia) Gopal Vittal said in a statement.
 
Analysts, on average, expected a net loss of 3.08 billion rupees, according to estimates by Thomson Reuters. 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 reportedly fell 18.8 percent to 104.80 billion rupees, while overall revenue fell about 9 percent to 200.80 billion rupees.
 
The telecom sector has witnessed an upheaval since the entry of Reliance Jio, the telecoms arm of Reliance Industries Ltd, in late 2016.
 
Earlier today, the government gave final approval to the merger of Vodafone and Idea Cellular which created India's largest mobile operator with about 35 per cent market share and nearly 430 million subscribers.

Watch this Zee Business video

 
The new telecom behemoth, Vodafone Idea Limited, will dislodge Bharti Airtel, the current market leader with 344 million customers from its pole position.