Bharti Airtel yesterday announced the financial results for the quarter ending September 30 2020 posting its highest ever consolidated quarterly revenues at Rs 25,785 crore with 22.2% Y-o-Y strong growth across the entire portfolio. Bharti Airtel’s EBIDTA stood at Rs 11,848 crore with 32.6% Y-o-Y growth.
Bharti Airtel narrowed down its losses to Rs 763 crore in Q2 FY 21, down from Rs 23,045 crore loss in the preceding quarter. The profit before tax stood at Rs 567 crore, up from Rs 623 crore net loss in the preceding quarter.
“Despite being a seasonally weak quarter, we delivered a strong performance with revenue growing at ~22% YoY. In the mobile segment, we added over ~14 Mn 4G customers and grew revenues by ~26%. Our focus on building the most aspirational brand in Indian Telecom to win quality customers is delivering results. Our data consumption grew by 58% YoY which reflects strong engagement of customers on our network. This further underscores our DNA of customer obsession and delivering brilliant experiences through a future ready network and innovative digital platforms. Other lines of business also continued with steady growth momentum, with Airtel business growing 7.5% YoY. We stay committed to improving the profitability of the business. Our continued focus on ARPU improvement and cost optimization led to EBITDA margin expansion by over ~ 158 bps in the quarter sequentially”.
Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO, India & South Asia
Operating Highlights
The company added 13.87 million net additions to its mobile customer base in India which zoomed to 293.74 million at the end of Q2 FY 21 as opposed to a loss of 3.8 million customers in the preceding quarter. The monthly churn came down to 1.7% from 2.2% in the preceding quarter.
Airtel’s APRU jumped from Rs 157 marginally to Rs 162. The ARPU in September 2019 stood at Rs 128 seeing a 26.7% Y-o-Y growth. The voice minutes usage on the network grew by 5% Q-o-Q while data usage per customer saw a downfall by 1.5 Q-o-Q.
Airtel’s 4G customer base zoomed to 152.7 million with 14.4 million additions in the quarter while data customer base zoomed to 162.2 million. The prepaid customers continued to make up 94.8% of the total customer base. The company added 5K network towers during the quarter reaching over 200K sites.
Even after this, they want TRAI to implement FLOOR tariffs for data. Since TRAI earlier didn’t care, when they sold data @ Rs250+ per GB, they should again NEVER care about their claims for floor tariffs, imho…