Idea Cellular Q2 profit sinks 88 %; revenue growth under pressure

Aditya Birla Group Entity Idea Cellular, country’s third largest telecom player posted its second quarter earnings post market hours on Monday, October 24. Idea Cellular posted a decline in profitability by a whopping 88 per cent year-on-year to Rs 91.46 crore as against Rs 809.26 crore achieved in the corresponding quarter of last fiscal.

Total income from operations for the quarter in review saw an increase of 7 per cent at Rs 9300 crore compared to Rs 8689 crore in the year ago period. Revenue during the second quarter declined by 2 per cent compared with Rs 9,486.6 crore in previous quarter, partially led by voice minutes’ decline and rest due to rate fall in mobile voice & data segment on hyper competition.

Consolidated EBITDA slipped 7.6 per cent QoQ to Rs 2,840.3 crore and margin contracted by 187 basis points to 30.54 per cent in Q2 on higher operating expenses.

Idea's sequential voice revenue declined 5.3 per cent due to voice realisation rate fall at 3.4 percent from 34.3 paise in Q1FY17 to 33.1 paise in Q2FY17.

Blended mobile data ARPU (average revenue per user) fell to Rs 130 from Rs 144 in Q2FY16 but data usage per subscriber increased to 694 MB during the quarter from 615 MB in same period last year.