Indian telecoms group Bharti Airtel has booked total revenue of INR255.46 billion (USD3.348 billion) for the three months ended 30 June 2016, an increase of 7.9% year-on-year. EBITDA for the period grew 16.4% y-o-y to INR95.91 billion with an EBITDA margin of 37.5%, up from 34.8% a year earlier. Net income, however, was down 30.8% compared to the corresponding period of 2015 at INR14.62 billion, with Airtel attributing the decline to a number of exceptional items, including restructuring costs and charges relating to the reassessment of the useful life of certain network assets.
In terms of subscribers, Airtel counted a total of 341.965 million mobile customers, an increase of 7.5% y-o-y, despite continuing contraction in its African user base. In India, mobile subscriptions grew 10.9% annually to 255.735 million, of which 58.903 million were data users (up 19.1% compared to June 2015). Similarly, its South Asian wireless subscriber base grew by 2.5% to 9.245 million, including 2.749 million data customers. In Africa, though, Airtel booked a 1.7% decline in mobile subscriptions to 76.986 million. The group did see some improvement in its subscriber base, noting that at 5.0% customer churn was its lowest in the past 17 quarters. The proportion of pre-paid users also dipped from 99.4% to 99.2% and the number of data subscribers grew 26.0% y-o-y to 16.425 million.