Bharti cuts Q3 loss, shares soar

MUMBAI: Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd has revealed that its quarterly loss has dropped by 83 percent, causing its shares to zoom.

Bharti’s subscribers jumped to 3.09 million at the end of December, up 21 percent from the preceding quarter and 148 percent from a year earlier. Bharti rolled out mobile services to nine new districts in the current year, expanded fixed-line phone services to five districts from one. It also launched its national and long-distance phone service, along with group data and broadband operations.

That helped narrow the consolidated net loss to 70.7 million rupees ($1.47 million) in the third quarter, ended December, from 417.5 million a year earlier, boosting its shares more than 15 percent to 25 rupees in a flat BSE.

Total income for the October-December quarter doubled to 8.5 billion rupees from 4.2 billion.

"The numbers have come as a surprise to us," said Srinivas Rao Ravuri, a telecom analyst with Edelweiss Capital. "It is the result of aggressively managing costs."

Bharti said growth of long distance traffic on India's mobile networks had also helped.

Stiff competition has pushed long-distance telecom rates sharply lower over the past year, encouraging people to use mobile phones for long-distance calls. Bharti's customers account for 26.5 percent of Indian mobile users.

The company said its 2.4 billion rupee operating profit for the past quarter was 93 percent higher than a year earlier and 98 percent more than in the preceding quarter.

"The improvement in profitability was the result of increasing revenue and controlled costs which ensured that most of the incremental revenue was translated into EBITDA (operating profit)," the company statement said.

The average customer spent 224 minutes a month on the phone, eight percent more than in the previous quarter, but analysts noted that usage tended to be higher in October-December, a festival period.

© Reuters