Idea Cellular, India’s third largest cellco by subscribers, has booked revenues of INR70.41 billion (USD1.16 billion) for the three months ended 31 March 2014 and INR265.04 billion for the twelve months to that date, up 17.3% year-on-year. EBITDA was INR19.88 billion for the quarter, compared to INR15.04 billion in the corresponding period of 2013, and INR73.88 billion for the year (+37.5% y-o-y). EBITDA margins, meanwhile, also edged up, increasing by 3.5 percentage points annually to 28.2% for the three-month period and by 4.1 to 27.9% for the full year. The cellco saw a 27.8% y-o-y increase in profits for the quarter to INR16.69 billion, whilst annual net profits rose by 37.0% annually to INR64.35 billion.
Idea attributed the financial gains to its substantial subscriber growth, the cellco registering a total of 135.8 million subscribers at end-March 2014, compared to 121.6 million twelve months earlier. The cellco also highlighted the data segment as a key vehicle for growth, noting that it had doubled its 3G subscriber base from 5.1 million in March 2013 to 10.2 million, although total data users (including those connecting via 2.5G technologies) declined to 25.26 million from 26.22 million, due to a reclassification of data customers to exclude those that use less than 1MB per month.