News
Indian operator has more than 350 million customers across 20 countries.
Bharti Airtel saw its net profit fall by 22% in the third quarter of its financial year, but last year ended with the telco reaching another customer milestone, the 350 million mark.
The India-based operator had 350.9 million customers across 20 markets at the end of December, up 12.1% on end-2014, it announced on Thursday.
The operator provides mobile services to the bulk – 336.15 million – of those customers, the remainder being users of its fixed-line, broadband and digital TV services.
Much of Bharti’s mobile base is in its home market, where it serves 243.29 million users. It has an additional 82.07 million mobile customers in Africa and 10.79 million in South Asia.
"Our focus on acquiring quality customers has resulted in healthy net additions of 8.1 million in mobile," said Gopal Vittal, Bharti Airtel’s CEO for India and South Asia, in a statement, referring to the telco’s Q3 net adds in its home market.
"Our strong rollout of 3G/4G sites has resulted in acceleration of data usage growth to 73.3% along with data ARPU reaching 200 rupees (€2.7)," he said.
It is a similar story at Bharti’s African operations, where data consumption grew by 111.6% year-on-year in Q3 and data revenues by 40.8%, Africa CEO Christian de Faria said.
"Operational efficiencies have resulted in improvement in EBITDA margin for a second consecutive quarter," he said.
"I am pleased to report that 8.9 million Airtel Money customers are transacting close to $5 billion of money every quarter," de Faria added.
Overall, Bharti Airtel generated revenues of INR240.66 billion (€3.2 billion) in the three months to the end of December, up 3.7% on the year-ago quarter.
EBITDA rose by 8.3% to INR84.75 billion, but net profit slid by 22.2% to INR11.17 billion.
