Bharti Airtel posted a net profit of Rs 854 crore for the third quarter of the fiscal, as compared to a loss of Rs 1,035 crore a year ago on the back of improving realisations and customer additions. It also posted its highest ever quarterly revenue at Rs 26,518 crore, up 24.2%, and the India business saw its highest ever quarterly revenue at Rs 19,007 crore.
Airtel said its mobile revenues grew by 32.4% year-on-year. Its Average Revenue Per User grew to Rs 166 from Rs 162 last quarter, and Rs 135 in Q3 of FY20. This, Airtel said, was “an outcome of our focus on acquiring quality customers as well as secular upgrading of customers to data.”
According to the company, its customer base stands at around 33.6 crore in India. It added 1.29 crore 4G customers in the quarter, taking the total to 16.56 crore customers. Airtel said it has added four crore 4G customers in the last four quarters. It put average data usage per consumer at 16.4 GB per month, and voice usage at 1,027 minutes per customer each month. In the postpaid segment, Airtel said it added 7 lakh customers this quarter.
Airtel added that in the homes business, it saw the highest ever customer additions in Q3 at 2.15 lakh people, and the digital TV business saw 4.85 lakh new customers.
The company had a net exceptional gain of Rs 4,559.9 crore during the quarter ended December 31, 2020, consisting of charge on account of re-assessment of contractual, regulatory levies and taxes of Rs 3,159.6 crore.
“The Digital services offerings of Airtel continue to see robust growth. MAUs increased to over 190 Mn across our key digital assets – Thanks, Wynk, Xstream. There are over 1.2 million retailers transacting and making payments every day on Mitra App,” Airtel said in a statement.
“Despite the unprecedented volatility that we have confronted through the year, we delivered another strong performance this quarter. This consistency in performance was across every part of our portfolio, as reflected in market share growth across all our business segments. This has been made possible due to our agility, the continued re-orientation of our business model and our relentless focus on what truly matters – serving our customers. The main highlight of the quarter was the ~13 Million 4G customers we added in our Wireless business. As a result, we grew our revenues by ~25% over the same period last year and margins expanded,” CEO Gopal Vittal said in a statement.