India’s largest operator, Bharti Airtel has announced its first quarter results, which saw a plunge of nearly 75% in net profit, a third consecutive quarter decline.
Airtel also recorded a 14% fall in total revenues in spite of adding close to 7 million customers in the first quarter, which now totals to 280 million customers.
"The pricing disruption in the Indian telecom market caused by the entry of a new operator continued with industry revenues declining over 15 per cent year-on-year, creating further stress on sector profitability, cash flows and leverage," Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO, India & South Asia, Bharti Airtel said in a statement.
The Airtel CEO was referring to the entry of Jio in September last year with disruptive tariffs. As part of its strategies to manage the churn, Airtel rolled out free data for three months during the quarter which saw data usage per customer almost doubling to 2,611 megabytes. Airtel's Mobile data traffic also doubled to 527 billion MB, from 225.1 billion MB in the previous quarter.
However, Gopal Vittal remains confident of the market and expressed, "We remain committed to providing the best value & experience to our customers and continue to invest towards it. As a result, our network witnessed data and voice traffic growth of 200% & 34% Y-o-Y respectively. We also added 5.2 Mn data customers in the last quarter – our highest ever.”
