Idea Cellular slips into red in Q4

Hit by a fierce price war in the industry, Aditya Birla Group controlled Idea Cellular posted a consolidated loss of Rs 327.7 crore for the quarter ended March 31, 2017 as against a net profit of Rs 451.7 crore in the same period last year.

The company had reported a loss of Rs 384 crore in the third quarter of the current fiscal (Q3FY17). On a full year basis, the company, for the first time since its initial public offering, reported a revenue decline. The company's revenues for FY17 fell 1% to Rs 35,575.7 crore compared with Rs 35,949 crore in FY16.

Net sales for the telecom operator during the quarter declined to Rs 8,109.1 crore against Rs 8,660.7 crore in the sequential quarter (Q3FY17) and Rs 9,458 crore in Q4FY16. 

During the quarter, Idea was forced to reduce its voice rate by 12.5% to 25.9 paisa/min (vs 29.6 paisa in Q3FY17) as also steeply drop its mobile data rate (ARMB) by 27.6% to 11.5 paisa/MB (vs 15.9 paisa in Q3FY17) on a sequential quarterly basis. 

"The lure of free offerings by the new mobile operator resulted in lower than normal volume elasticity with sequential quarterly voice minutes growing by 10.3%



to 231.4 billion minutes (vs 209.8 billion minutes in Q3FY17). The higher blended voice realisation rate fall was also an outcome of the tsunami of minutes terminating on Idea network from the new operator, resulting in overall higher ratio of incoming minutes recorded at below cost IUC rates," Idea Cellular said.

During the quarter, the company witnessed a sequential quarterly decline of 6.4 million mobile data customers on the back of 5.5 million loss in Q3FY17 (vs Q2FY17) and overall mobile data customer base has receded to 42.2 million (vs 48.6 million in Q3FY17). The mobile data volume elasticity was negated by massive mobile data rate drop of 27.6%, though overall mobile data volume grew by 16.7% (vs Q3FY17) to 127 billion MB (2G+3G+4G). 

Data usage

The per subscriber data usage grew by 36.2% to 957 MB against 703 MB in Q3FY17 but the data ARPU for data subscribers (2G+3G+4G) remained flat in Q4FY17 at Rs 110 against Rs 111 (Q3FY17). 

The non voice revenue (including data) contribution to the overall service revenue' fell to 24.9% as mobile data revenue contribution declined to 18.3% (vs 20.2% in Q3FY17), the company said.