Idea Q1 revenue declines 28% to reach Rs. 5,889 Cr

Idea Cellular Q1 revenue declines to Rs. 5,889 Cr as against Rs. 6,137 Cr in Q4 FY18 mainly on account of down trending of ARPU.

The EBITDA for the quarter stands at Rs. 660 Crore.

The ARPU for the quarter is Rs. 100 as against Rs. 105 in Q4 FY18. Idea’s VLR subscribers as on June 30, 2018 stands at 203.4 million with a market share of 20.9% (May 2018), an improvement of 1.4% compared to May 2017.

The increasing adoption of unlimited voice and bundled data plans continued to drive significant volume consumption of mobile voice and broadband data. The quarterly voice minutes at 349.5 billion, grew at a staggering rate of 39.4% vs. 250.7 bn minutes in Q1FY18. The monthly voice consumption (per user) has risen exponentially to 609 minutes from 441 minutes per months in Q1 FY18.

Similarly, broadband data usage per broadband data subscriber has risen sharply to monthly usage of 8 GB in Q1FY19, compared to 3 GB per month a year back. In Q1FY19, the broadband data volumes reached record level of 992 billion MB, more than 4 times compared to mobile broadband data volumes a year back.

The company’s wireless broadband subscriber (EoP) base now stands at ~41 million, an addition of 14.6 million broadband data customers over last one year. During the quarter, Idea completed the rollout of Voice over LTE (VoLTE) services across 20 – 4G Telecom Circles. With the merger round the corner, the 4G network rollout was muted during the quarter but expected to gather momentum in the remaining three quarters.

With the receipt of final DoT approval for merger Vodafone India Ltd. (VIL) & Vodafone Mobile Services Ltd. (VMSL) with Idea, the company is in the final phase of merger completion. The combined entity named ‘Vodafone Idea Ltd.’ will be India’s largest mobile operator and the 2nd largest in the world, with nearly 408 million subscribers.

The key focus area for the merged team will be to fast forward the substantial cost synergies with an estimated NPV of ~$10bn and rapidly expand the broadband coverage and capacity by redeployment of overlapping equipment & refarming /consolidation of spectrum etc.

Both the companies currently, under ‘Active infrastructure sharing’ and ‘ICR (Intra Circle Roaming) arrangements’ are already sharing nearly 66,000 sites.