Idea Cellular announces Q2 financial results

With increasing proportion of rural subscribers, the seasonal slowdown in the second quarter has become more pronounced resulting in sharp contraction in the ‘Voice Minutes of Use’ by 5.8% to 138.8 billion minutes compared to 147.3 billion minutes in Q1FY14, according to Idea Cellular’s un-audited results for the second quarter and half-year ending September 30, 2013.
This quarter Idea standalone revenue has grown by 18.1% on YoY basis to Rs. 63,170 million against Rs.53,481 million revenue in Q2FY13. The company further strengthened its ‘Revenue Market Share’ to 16.2% and ‘VLR subscriber Market Share’ to 16.7% in Q1FY14, an improvement of over 1% in one year. Idea continues to invest in long term value creators  launched 4,312 new sites (2G+3G) to reach network site EoP of 114,001 sites (2G+3G) and expanded optical fibre network to 77,000 km. Inspite of higher network rollout, Idea recorded YoY standalone EBITDA growth of 38.2%.

The ‘Value Added Services’ (VAS) contribution also increased to 16.1% (15.6% in Q2FY13) further improving overall ARPM.

With 14.7 million additional Idea subscribers initiating mobile data usage, EoP of data subscribers increased to 33.6 million (2G+3G). The blended per user data usage grew to 178 Megabytes, thereby data volume exploded @99.6% to 17.5 billion Megabytes in Q2FY14 over last year.

The revenue growth and scale benefit translated into healthy standalone EBITDA margin of 27.6%, YoY improvement by 4.0%.