The country’s fourth-largest carrier by market share, Reliance Communications (RCom), on Friday reported a 13% sequential increase in net profit to Rs 228 crore for the quarter ended March on the back of a significant surge in the telco’s data traffic.
Revenues during the period stood at Rs 5,694 crore, up from the Rs 5, 435 crore it posted during the previous December quarter. On a yearly basis, the company’s bottom line improved by 46% in the final quarter of fiscal 2015 while revenues improved 5% during the same period.
Reliance Communications said that while total data traffic improved 73.6% year-on-year (y-o-y) to 87,211 million Megabyte (MB) during the recently concluded quarter, the total data customer base grew by 26.2% (y-o-y) to 33.7 million during the same period.
On the operational front, the telco recorded a 2.8% increase (y-o-y) in overall revenue per minute (RPM) to 44.4 paisa during the March quarter, while its voice RPM improved by 0.6%to 33.2 paisa.
RCom’s minutes of usage (MoU) improved by 5.7% to 108.1 billion while its average revenue per minute (ARPU) was up 14.8% to Rs 147 during the above mentioned period.
On a yearly basis, RCom’s net profit for FY 15 stood at Rs 714 crore, down from Rs 1,047 crore the company reported during the previous year. However, revenues for FY 15 improved by 2.5% to Rs 21,770 crore. Reliance Communications, which is looking to pare debt, could sell its Indian wireless infrastructure to parties like American Towers, according to a Bloomberg report.
The company, whose net debt stood at Rs 38,690 crore at the end of December 2014, could fetch a valuation of as much as Rs 20,000 crore.
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