Bharti Airtel on Tuesday reported third-quarter consolidated net profit slid 2.8% to ₹830 crore, after network operating expenses and finance costs rose from a year earlier and the company prepaid ₹15,519 crore to the government to clear past dues.
The telecom operator’s revenues, however, rose 12.6% to ₹29,867 crore. Network operating expenses jumped 17% to ₹6,499 crore, while finance costs increased almost 10% to ₹4,367 crore.
“We have delivered another quarter of sustained performance across all our business segments,” Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO, India & South Asia, said in a release. “Overall sequential revenue growth was at 5.4% and EBITDA margins came in at 49.9%,” he added.
Observing that a recent tariff revision for mobile services had gone down well and the firm’s ARPU (average revenue per user) had increased to ₹163, Mr. Vittal said: “The full impact of the revised mobile tariffs, however, will be visible in the fourth quarter”.
“Our balance sheet is robust and we are now generating healthy free cash flows. This has enabled us to recently prepay some of our spectrum liabilities to the Government thereby reducing the interest burden,” the CEO added.
Bharti said it prepaid ₹15,519 crore to clear all deferred liabilities for spectrum acquired in 2014.
The company, which serves about 485 million customers across 16 countries including in Africa, said its India mobile services business continues to garner a strong share of 4G customers. 4G data customers climbed 18.1% to 195.5 million, with average data usage per user at 18.3 GBs/month.