Reliance Communications (RCOM) has booked a 64.2% quarter-on-quarter decline in net earnings for the three months ended 30 June 2013, as growth in the wireless segment failed to offset falling revenues from the telco’s Global Enterprise and ‘Other’– including the company’s DTH services, retailing, and property leasing – operations. Total revenues for the period were INR54.12 billion (USD889.22 million), of which its wireless business contributed INR48.16 billion (66% of the total), Global Enterprise INR23.00 billion (31%) and ‘Other’ INR1.98 billion (3%). Income from wireless had increased 4.1% from 31 March 2013, whilst earnings from Global Enterprise and ‘Other’ fell by 6.7% and 12.7% respectively. Consequently, EBITDA decreased by 23.3% q-o-q to INR17.01 billion with an EBITDA margin of 31.4%, compared to 37.2% three months earlier, whilst net profits for the period under review slumped to INR1.08 billion from INR3.03 billion in the previous quarter.
On the wireless front, the quarter saw marginal improvements across the board with the telco reporting increases in subscriptions, ARPU and voice and data traffic as well as a decrease in churn. RCOM booked 2.7 million net additions for the quarter bringing its total subscriber base to 125.7 million users, of which 31.1 million were data customers, including 7.7 million 3G connections (compared to 29.4 million and 7.2 million respectively at end-March 2013). Total voice traffic increased to 105.5 billion minutes from 105.3 billion in the previous quarter, whilst mobile churn dropped to 4.6% from 4.8% and blended ARPU grew by INR1 to INR129. Total data traffic over the cellco’s network expanded by 14.0% to 31.04 billion MB, alongside an increase in per-user data traffic from 319 MB to 342 MB.