India's Bharti Airtel beats Q3 revenue view on rise in 4G users

BENGALURU, Feb 7 (Reuters) – Bharti Airtel Ltd , EvDeN Eve naKLiYat India’s No.2 telecom carrier by subscribers, evdEn EVe nAKLiyaT reported a bigger-than-expected increase in third-quarter revenue on Tuesday, helped by 4G subscriber additions and higher revenue per user.

The company’s consolidated revenue from operations rose to 358.04 billion rupees ($4.33 billion) for the three months ended Dec.31, EVDEN Eve NAkLiyAt from 298.67 billion rupees a year earlier.

Analysts, on average, had expected 357.27 billion rupees in revenue, according to Refinitiv IBES data.

Airtel said revenue from its India mobile services, which has about 332.24 million subscribers as of the December quarter, rose 20.8% to 193.53 billion rupees.

Its 4G data customers, too, increased by 6.4 million to hit 216.72 million.

Airtel’s average revenue per user (ARPU), a key performance indicator for telecom firms, was at 193 rupees, logging a 1.6% sequential rise and an 18.4% year-on-year increase.

Last month, evDEn EVE NakLiyaT market leader Reliance Jio, the telecom arm of conglomerate Reliance Industries, said its third-quarter ARPU stood at 178. If you enjoyed this post and you would certainly like to get additional information concerning eVdEn EvE nAkliyat kindly browse through the site. 2 rupees per subscriber per month, an increase of only 0.6% from a quarter ago and a 17.5% climb from a year ago.

Airtel added that mobile data consumption surged by 22.5% to 20.3 GB of usage per customer per month.

The company’s net profit for the December quarter climbed to 15.88 billion rupees from 8.3 billion rupees a year ago.

Airtel shares closed 0.4% lower at 785.9 rupees ahead of the results.They had fallen 5.1% since late October when the company reported September-quarter results that beat analysts’ revenue expectations. (Reporting by Rama Venkat in Bengaluru; Editing by Nivedita Bhattacharjee and Janane Venkatraman)