RCom Q3 Net up 86 pc at Rs 201 crore

Telecom operator Reliance Communications today reported an 86 per cent jump in consolidated net profit at Rs 201 crore for the third quarter ended December 31, 2014 helped by lower finance costs and higher margins in telecom services.

The company had posted a net profit of Rs 108 crore in the same quarter a year ago. "Our circle-specific Go-To-Market strategy and differentiated data offerings has helped us in acquiring good quality customers in post-paid and corporate segments. Our finance charges has reduced significantly by Rs 100 crore year-on-year basis," RCom Chief Executive Officer for Consumer Business Gurdeep Singh told PTI.

The net debt of the company reduced by about Rs 4,000 crore to Rs 36,767 crore at the end of December 2014 from Rs 40,762 crore it posted a year ago. The company at the end of reported quarter had 3.14 crore Internet subscribers out of which 1.67 crore were 3G customers.

"We saw our data customers growing by about 50.5 per cent year-on-year (y-o-y) basis. Total data usage on our network is 76,434 million MBs, which is a growth of 83.3 per cent y-o-y and data usage per sub is 834 MB, which remains the highest in the industry" Singh said.

The consolidated revenue of the company increased by 5.4 per cent to Rs 5,435 crore in the reported quarter from Rs 5,157 crore it posted in previous fiscal."I am happy to share that after several quarters of declining trend, our CDMA revenues have now stabilised, largely due to improvement in handset eco-system. "Our GSM revenues, in-line with industry trends have grown by over 4.2 per cent quarter-on-quarter and now contributes 74 per cent to wireless revenues, " Singh said.

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RCom had mobile mobile customer base of 10.62 at the end of December 2014. Its average revenue from mobile customers stood at Rs 142 and revenue per minute from usage of its telecom network increased to 45.2 paise from 44.4 paise in previous quarter. "We were able to achieve this with ongoing removal of free and promotional minutes from the system and higher contribution from data services," Singh said. Shares of RCom on BSE today closed at Rs 72.05 apiece, up by 1.34 per cent over their previous close.

Source PTI