The Indian unit of Britain's telecom major Vodafone on Tuesday reported a 13% year-on-year increase in service revenue at Rs 37,606 crore during the year ended March 31 on the back of customer additions, price hardening and strong growth in data revenues.
Operating profit for the fiscal stood at Rs 13,398.6 crore, while the operating cash flow stood at Rs 8,464.4 crore. The company made a capital expenditure of Rs 7,009.4 crore took place in financial year 2014.
The company ended the year with 166.6 million customers serviced through a network of over 1,19,700 total sites, of which 22,400 are combined (2G+3G) sites.
It also reported a strong growth in voice minutes along with strengthened average revenue per minute (ARPM) at 47 paise against 44.3 paise during the previous financial year.
Average revenue per user (Arpu) stood at Rs 199 during the fiscal, driven by focus of quality of subscribers.
On account of rise in smartphones usage in the country, the company's data browsing revenue rose 72% year on year in the last fiscal at Rs 3,436.9 crore, or about 10.3% of service revenues.
Data users were 52 million, of which 7 million are 3G customers.
Data Arpu per browsing subscriber was Rs 65 against Rs 51 a year ago.
In February 2014 spectrum auctions, it acquired 72 MHz of spectrum both 900 MHz and 1800MHz for a total of Rs 19,644 crore.
"Maintaining out focus on profitable growth has led to significant improvement in operating margins and strong cash flows," Vodafone CEO Marten Pieters said.
However, the company declined to be specific if it would be hike headline tariffs. Telecom firms of late have been reducing their discounts and freebies to improve profit margins, though none, except Reliance Communications, has raised headline tariff.
Clarity in various policies, tariff hikes by the market leaders and semi-consolidation, with many small players exiting from the Indian market in the last couple of years, has helped the industry growth.
Recently, Bharti Airtel had reported 89% net profit while Idea Cellular had clocked 91% increase in the net profit as compared to the previous fiscal.
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