Buoyed by the government’s decision to stick to deadlines for digitisation, the DTH industry in India is continuing its bloom run, if one were to go by the results reported by Bharti Airtel Limited about its Digital TV services (Airtel DTH) for the quarter and year ended 31 March 2016 (Q4-2016, current quarter, FY-2016, current year).
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Country’s largest telecom player Bharti Airtel on Wednesday announced that the company proposes to buyback shares at ₹400 per share and would set aside as much as ₹1,434 crore for this goal.
However, its total revenue rose 8.4% to Rs 24,960 crore for the reported quarter as compared to Rs 23,016 crore corresponding period previous year.
The company’s improved performance during the quarter was despite adjusting for lower termination charges and higher finance cost, up 23.2% R1,713.9 crore sequentially. The buyback constitutes about 0.9% of the total paid-up equity share capital of the company.
Concerns about added competition brought on by the entry of Jio, the telecom unit of Ambani’s flagship Reliance Industries Ltd, prompted Fitch Ratings to downgrade its 2016 outlook for the Indian phone industry to negative from stable in November.
In the last two months alone Bharti has spent about $1.2 billion on buying radio spectrum to expand its 4G service.
Note that Airtel has not provided a break up its 4G customer base.
The total mobile Internet base saw a 6.09% increase quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) to 58.2 million connections, from 54.86 million connections in the previous quarter, while it increased 25.25% year-on-year (YoY) from 51.03 million in the same quarter last year.
Mobile data traffic carried on Bharti Airtel’s networks during the quarter jumped to 178.1 billion megabytes, up 75.6% from the year-ago quarter.
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“Solid execution has resulted in an acceleration of revenue market share…y-o-y mobile data growth continues to lead, with traffic and revenues up 69.4 per cent and 44.5 per cent respectively”. It registered a 4% fall in data realisation per MB due to increasing competition, which led to a reduction in data rates. This encouraged more calls and helped the company’s voice business register a sequential growth of 6% in total minutes on the network and ARPU to rise marginally to Rs. 138 from Rs.137. The board has proposed a dividend of Rs 1.3 per share (face value of Rs 5 per share) for the financial year ended March 31, 2016.
