Bharti Infratel, the tower company under Bharti Airtel, has seen a substantial net profit growth in the first quarter of the current fiscal year. This growth in net profit has been driven majorly by the rise in its co-locations on its telecom sites. As per the ET Telecom report on this matter, this trend for Bharti Infratel is expected to continue as the big phone companies will remain focused on network rollouts especially considering the fact that a lot of them have recently raised huge amounts of funds. Bharti Infratel, which is the only listed telecom tower firm in India, reported a net profit of Rs 887 crore in the April-June quarter thus translating into a 39% on-year jump over last year.
Company Finally Sees Net Addition in Co-Locations
The net profit of the company was as much as 46% higher sequentially and up from Rs 608 crore, which was the number in March quarter FY19. In its statement on Wednesday, the company also revealed that its quarterly consolidated revenue, in turn, rose 1% on-year to Rs 3,712 crore.
About the quarterly report, Bharti Infratel chairman, Akhil Gupta remarked, “After negative trend in net co-locations for the last six quarters due to consolidation in the telecom industry, we had net additions in co-locations this quarter.” It is worth noting that co-locations are points where tower company deploys mobile telecom antennae of multiple telecom companies at the same location. The top executives in the industry believe that this trend would continue as after the consolidation period, the operators are raising a significant amount of funds which would then be used for wide network rollouts to increase capacity and coverage.
Both the incumbent telecom operators, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea, have recently raised hefty capital by means of right issues, and this capital will be used to compete better with the Mukesh Ambani led telecom operator, Reliance Jio. As for Bharti Infratel, the quarterly reported highlighted that the company’s consolidated earnings before interest, tax, depreciation & amortisation (Ebitda) saw a 28% on-year increase to Rs 1,953 crore in the June quarter, while operating free cash flow rose 22% on-year to Rs 1,207 crore.
Company's Tower Base Increases by 873 On Year
The net on-quarter additions in co-locations this quarter by Bharti Infratel was reported to be 523 thus upping the total count of co-locations to 1,73,247 as of June-end. Owing to this, the sharing revenue per tower has seen a sequential rise of 7% to Rs 81, 503. In the first fiscal quarter, the company’s tower base rose 873 on-year and 354 sequentially to 92,632. It is worth noting that Bharti Infratel’s tower base includes towers by virtue of its 42% stake in Indus Towers. The National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has recently cleared the Indus-Bharti Infratel merger that is set to create one of the largest telecom tower companies globally. As per the estimates, the company will have over 1,63,000 towers across 22 telecom service areas in the country.
Bharti Airtel also revealed in a filing on Wednesday that Bharat Sumant Raut, Jitender Balakrishnan, Leena Srivastava and Narayanan Kumar were re-appointed as independent directors for a further term of five years with effect on April 1, 2019.
