Idea Cellular, India’s third largest telecom service provider, reported Rs 815.9 crores net loss in the first quarter of FY18 ended June 30, 2017. This is the third quarter net loss in succession, following the launch of Reliance Jio services, which impacted Idea’s voice and data revenues in India.

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For Idea, the fall in realisation rates was largely compensated by a substantial volume growth in both mobile voice and data segments. Idea’s revenues marginally increased 0.5% to Rs 8166.5 crore in the quarter but declined 13% on a yearly basis.

The Aditya Birla Group company, in a statement, said that the upheaval in the Indian wireless industry continued in the quarter, despite the new entrant (Reliance Jio) slowly migrating from ‘Free Services’ to ‘Paid Services’ but with heavily discounted unlimited voice and data pricing plans.

Amidst this market aggression, existing operators including Idea also introduced similar competitive unlimited price plans, which
is likely to result in a decline in industry revenues, although the impact of the same is expected to be more pronounced on non-4G operators.

“These aggressive tariff offerings by Idea, led by unlimited voice and data bundled plans, resulted in the steep decline of voice and mobile data realisation rates,” the telco said.

During the quarter, the sequential quarterly voice minutes grew by a healthy 8.4% to 250.7 billion minutes (vs. 231.4 billion minutes in Q4FY17), while the voice realisation rate fell by 5.7% to 24.4 paisa/min (vs. 25.9 paisa in Q4FY17).

Mobile data volume witnessed a growth of 99.1% on sequential quarterly, and its 4G network carried 252.8 billion Mega Bytes in Q1FY18, nearly double the traffic consumption in Q4FY17. However, the mobile data rate (ARMB) saw an unprecedented decline of 52.9%, reaching to as low as 5.4 paisa/MB (vs. 11.5 paisa in Q4FY17).