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India’s Bharti Airtel profit dives surprise 37%

NEW DELHI — India’s biggest mobile phone company, Bharti Airtel, reported on Wednesday a surprise 37-percent dive in quarterly profit, hit by “hyper-competition” that squeezed earnings.

Bharti, India’s largest cellular phone firm by customers, said in a statement that net profit for the first financial quarter to June tumbled to 7.62 billion rupees ($138 million) from 12.15 billion rupees a year earlier.

“Telecom revenues in India have been depressed due to hyper-competition,” Bharti’s billionaire chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal said, even though the company has grabbed some market share from smaller rivals.

The figure sharply undershot market expectations that Bharti would post a 12-billion-rupee profit and marked the company’s 10^th straight quarterly profit fall.

Bharti’s India revenues were hit by two major changes — regulatory curbs on sales of “combo packs” of mobile offerings and a hike in service tax.

Despite these “adverse developments,” Bharti “kept its focus” on network expansion and market investments in the world’s second-largest mobile phone market, Mittal said.

Bharti’s shares plunged by close to four percent after the earnings announcement, then recovered slightly to trade down three percent at 285.30 rupees, bucking a firmer market.

Operating costs climbed 21 percent to 92 billion rupees while revenues climbed 14 percent to 193.5 billion rupees.

The earnings came amid turmoil in India’s telecom market after the Supreme Court this year cancelled 122 second-generation (2G) mobile licences issued in 2008 on the grounds that the distribution process was under-priced and corrupt.

The government aims to re-auction the airwaves in November at a far higher price, alarming the sector which says the minimum bid price is too great and threatens India’s goal of pushing the mobile network across rural areas.

Larger operators Bharti and Vodafone were not hit by the Supreme Court ruling but they want to buy more spectrum to ease the load on their overburdened networks.

Bharti says paying higher prices for the 2G airwaves will make the creation of a profitable industry “unsustainable”.