Idea Cellular has reported a 68.89 per cent increase in its net consolidated profits from Rs 4.47 billion for the quarter ended September 2013 to Rs 7.55 billion for the quarter ended September 2014. The revenues increased by 19.71 per cent from Rs 63.23 billion in July-September 2013 to Rs 75.69 billion in the corresponding period in 2014. The earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) grew by 27 per cent from Rs 19.58 billion to Rs 24.90 billion for the period under review, with the EBITDA margin at 32.9 per cent for the quarter ended September 2014.
The increase in revenues for the operator can be attributed to the growth of its value added services (VAS) and data services. Together, VAS and data services accounted for 35.1 per cent of the total service revenues for the quarter ended September 2014, as against 24.8 per cent in the corresponding quarter in 2013. The data traffic for Idea Cellular grew by 125.92 per cent from 17.45 billion MB in July-September 2013 to 39.42 billion MB in July-September 2014. The increased data traffic was majorly due to the rise in data usage per subscriber, which increased from 178 MB to 447 MB for the period under review. As of end-September 2014, the company had a total of 10.52 million 3G customers.
The average minutes of use per user also grew from 368 minutes to 384 minutes, resulting in rise in the average revenue per user from Rs 164 to Rs 176.
