Bharti Airtel reports earnings for Q1FY21

Bharti Airtel Limited ("Bharti Airtel" or "the Company") today announced its audited consolidated Ind AS results for the first quarter ended June 30, 2020.

Q1'21 Performance:

The consolidated revenues for Q1'21 at Rs 23,939 crore grew 15.4% YoY on reported basis (15.8% YoY on an underlying basis). Consolidated mobile data traffic at 7,019 PBs in the quarter has registered a healthy YoY growth of 73.5%.

India revenues for Q1'21 at Rs 17,589 crore have increased by 14.6% YoY on a reported basis (15.1% YoY on an underlying basis). Mobile revenues have witnessed a YoY growth of 18.5%. ARPU for the quarter is at Rs 157 as compared to Rs 129 in Q1'20 led by full impact of our tariff hikes in the previous quarter alongside our continuing focus on quality customers. 4G data customers1 have increased by 45.3% to 138.3 Mn from 95.2 Mn in the corresponding quarter last year while traffic has increased to 74.09 PB/day vs 42.90 PB/day in the corresponding quarter last year. Engagement parameters continue to be best in industry - average data usage per data sub at 16.3 GBs/month; while voice usage was at 994 mins/sub/month.

Airtel Business continues to accelerate its revenue growth momentum with a 9.2% YoY growth led by growth across all its segments - connectivity revenues from global business, domestic enterprise business besides solutions such as data centres, cloud, IOT. In the new world order of work from home post COVID-19, the company remains excited about this area of business and has continued to invest to ensure strong growth.

Digital TV revenue witnessed a growth of 9.3% YoY on an underlying basis, on the back of strong customer additions growth of 5.1% to 16.8 Mn from 16.0 Mn in the corresponding quarter last year. The rollout of the new tariff order also helped Airtel in improving its market share and revenue growth. Effective March 1, 2020 onwards, the company has implemented new guidelines of NCF (Network Carriage Fees) under the new tariff order.

Homes business segment continues to remain steady and witnessed a revenue growth of 1.4% YoY. Although on a YoY basis, customer base increased by 4.5%, growth was impacted during the quarter on account of closure of several commercial establishments owing to COVID. The company continues to invest in this segment with all new roll-outs fully being on fibre. In order to augment its footprint across the length and breadth of the country; the company continues to capture demand in unwired cities through a LCO partnership model which is now live in 14 cities.

Airtel's journey as a digital business continues to grow strongly in Q1'21. There are over 1.1 million retailers transacting and making payments every day on Mitra App. In order to further increase penetration of the digital services, the Thanks app is now available in 11 vernacular languages, developed through in-house capabilities of native language processing. In line with our philosophy of deep partnerships, Verizon and Airtel have partnered to bring secure Enterprise-Grade BlueJeans Video Conferencing service to India to help people communicate with simple, reliable and trusted solutions, while meeting the stringent security needs of banks, healthcare providers and other organizations. The offering includes a cloud point of presence in India enabling low latency and improved quality of service for India-based customers.

During the quarter Airtel and Carlyle entered into an agreement whereby Carlyle will acquire approximately 25% stake in Airtel's Data Centre business at a valuation of US$1.2 billion, subject to customary approvals. All of the above underscore the significant growth potential in an emerging Digital India.

Consolidated EBITDA witnessed an increase of 25.3% YoY to Rs 10,639 crore in Q1'21. This led to an improvement in EBITDA margin by 3.5 p.p. YoY to 44.4%. Incremental EBITDA margins across businesses remained healthy, with mobile services clocking an incremental EBITDA margin of 4.9 p.p. YoY on account of retooling many costs.

Consolidated EBIT increased by 107.4% YoY to Rs 3,328 crore. The Consolidated Net Loss before exceptional items for the quarter stands at Rs 436 crore. The Consolidated Net Loss after exceptional items for the quarter stands at Rs 15,933 crore. The Net Debt-EBITDA ratio (annualized) and including the impact of leases as on June 30, 2020 is at 2.74 times as compared to 3.43 times as on June 30, 2019.

Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO, India & South Asia, said: "We are going through an unprecedented crisis caused by COVID. Despite this, our teams have served the country well and kept our customers connected. Data traffic growth surged by ~73% YoY even as 4G net additions slowed down to 2 Million caused by supply chain shocks in the device eco system. Revenues grew by 15% Y-o-Y and performance was satisfactory across all segments. Our flagship "War on Waste" program, helped improve EBITDA margin by 1.6% over the previous quarter. To serve our customers even better, we have launched a company-wide program to improve our customer experience. We continue to invest in the best of emerging technologies to make our networks future ready.

We have made rapid strides in our digital business, with nearly 155 million monthly active users across Airtel Thanks, Wynk, Xstream and our payments platforms. Today, 60 percent of Airtel's entire business goes through its digital channels. We are most excited about the string of partners we are attracting in order to build greater stickiness and ultimately growth from our digital assets."

Shares of BHARTI AIRTEL LTD. was last trading in BSE at Rs.566.35 as compared to the previous close of Rs. 564.65. The total number of shares traded during the day was 727234 in over 11792 trades.

The stock hit an intraday high of Rs. 569.15 and intraday low of 560.45. The net turnover during the day was Rs. 410961878.

Source : Equity Bulls

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