India's Bharti Airtel grew its net profit for the quarter ending in September by 10.1% year-on-year to 15.23 billion rupees ($234.6 million), on the back of strong mobile data growth.
The operator reported total revenue of 238.36 billion rupees, up 6.6% year-on-year. Revenue from India grew 13.3% adjusted for the impact of reduced termination rates.
Mobile data revenue swelled by an impressive 60.3% to 28.93 billion rupees. The segment accounted for 21.5% of total revenues for the quarter, up from 14.5% a year ago.
Africa revenues adjusted for the impact of tower asset sales grew 5.1% year-on-year, with mobile data revenues up 40.6% to $138 million.
Airetl's total mobile customer base meanwhile increased 2.5% from the previous quarter to 325.9 million. Indian customers grew 2% to 235.2 million, the combined African customer base grew was up to 80.8 million and South Asia customers grew 9.2% to 9.8 million.
“Airtel's revenue growth in India has accelerated to 13.3% in Q2 on an underlying basis, the highest in the last 12 quarters,” Airtel CEO Gopal Vittal commented.
“Mobile data revenues has grown by 60% With the commercial launch of high speed 4G
services across 334 towns and roll-out of 3G services in our gap circles,we are now best positioned in the industry to leverage the fast growing data market.”