Bharti Airtel is heading towards reporting its first quarterly loss due to constantly falling revenues because of Reliance Jio's entry.
Bharti Airtel is heading towards reporting its first quarterly loss due to constantly falling revenues because of Reliance Jio's entry.
After reporting 39.3 per cent drop in consolidated net profit for the third quarter of the FY18, Airtel could end up posting a loss in the March quarter, a first in 60 quarters (or 15 years) on falling revenue and rising costs.
The last time the firm reported a loss was in the December 2002 quarter, when the figure came in at a negative Rs 70.70 million.
For Q3, Airtel had posted net profit of Rs 306 crore for the third quarter of 2017-18 compared to Rs 504 crore posted during the corresponding period in 2016-17, the company said in a statement.
The total revenue of the company stood at Rs 20,319 crore for the third quarter of 2017-18 compared to Rs 23,336 crore posted during the third quarter of 2016-17. It was a drop of 12.9 per cent.
Earlier this year, it was reported Mukesh Ambani led Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel have decided to spend around Rs 74,000 crore to fix the problem of call drop, that is plaguing the sector, said telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan.
After the meeting with top level official of Sunil Mittal owned Bharti Airtrel, Sundararajan said that the firm will invest Rs 24,000 crore on infrastructure.
She said the Sunil Mittal-led firm has already invested Rs 16,000 crore to improve its infrastructure. "Reliance Jio has said that they will invest Rs 50,000 crore in installing 1 lakh towers in the coming financial year."
Besides, Airtel and Reliance Jio, Idea Cellular and Vodafone have also committed to increasing mobile towers in their network, she informed.
As per data shared by telecom operators with the Department of Telecom (DoT), call drops in southern states like Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana stand at around 30-33 per cent, while the worst affected circles include Delhi, Mumbai, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, she said.
"We have asked them (telecom operators) to take measures where call drops are the worst and put those on fast track," Sundararajan said.
She said telecom operators presented their analysis of call drops which showed that it has stabilised but other problems like fading of voice call have increased due to various issues, including some mobile phones not complying with required certification norms.
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