Bharti Airtel Q1 profit plunges almost 75%, revenue drops 14%
This is the company’s smallest profit in 18 quarters.
Bharti Airtel on Tuesday reported a consolidated net profit of Rs 367 crore for the first quarter of 2017-’18 fiscal year, indicating the extreme impact newcomer Reliance Jio’s offers has had on the telecom major. This is the company’s smallest profit in 18 quarters, reported Mint.
The net profit for the June quarter was 74.9% lower than the net profit against the corresponding quarter last year. Net profit for the January-March quarter was around Rs 373 crore.
Total revenue of the country’s top telecom company slipped 14% year-on-year to Rs 21,958 crore in the June quarter. Last year, in the same quarter, the company’s total revenue was Rs 25,546 crore. Indian revenues for the quarter has declined 10% year-on-year to Rs 17,244 crore, it said.
The company said its consolidated mobile data traffic had more than doubled at 527 million MBs in the said quarter. Meanwhile, the mobile data revenue for the quarter was reported at Rs 3,765 crore, at a drop of 16.8% year-on-year on an underlying basis. “Mobile broadband customers increased by 33.7% to 48.9 million from 36.6 million in the corresponding quarter last year,” the company said.
Airtel said the telecom market remains turbulent because of the disruptive pricing by a new operator. The pricing has created “further stress on sector profitability, cash flows and leverage,” said Gopal Vittal, Airtel’s managing director and chief executive officer for India and South Asia.