Idea Cellular on Monday announced a 74.5 percent decline in net profits for June 2016 quarter compared to the same quarter last year. The company cited full impact of spectrum acquisition in March 2015 and February 2014 as reason for the fall in profits in its financial statement.
Idea had spent Rs. 301.4 billion in March 2015 for renewing mobile licenses in 9 service circles, which had their expiry in the period between December 2015 and April 2016.
The net profit of the company stood at Rs. 220.4 crore for June 30, 2016 quarter, a decline of 61.7 percent sequentially from March 2016 quarter.
Revenues posted a sequential and year-on-year (YoY) gain for India's third largest telecom company. Standalone revenues came at Rs. 9486.6 crore, a growth of 79 percent, YoY, and 2.95 percent sequentially.
The average revenue per user (ARPU) came down year-to-year from Rs 147 in the 2015-16 first quarter to Rs. 142 in the FY17 first quarter. Idea Cellular added 162 million total subscribers for June 2016 compared to 157.8 million in the previous quarter.
The company added 5 million new users under the mobile data segment, its highest as per the financial statement, taking total mobile data subscribers to 49 million in the April-June 2016 quarter. Mobile data also saw a volume growth of 13.2 percent to 93.1 billion MB.
The Aditya Birla group company added 5,296 4G sites during the quarter, taking the total 4G services sites to 19,939 4G sites and reported 1.8 million active 4G users at the end of the June quarter.
The telecom service provider identified Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh (West) among its top destinations in terms of revenue market share.
Shares of Idea stood at Rs. 103.10 apiece, down 2.83 percent compared to the previous close at Rs. 106.10 on the Bombay Stock Exchange.
