New Delhi: Bharti Airtel Ltd, India's top mobile operator, beat forecasts on Thursday with a 34 per cent rise in quarterly profit as it rode a boom in the world's fastest growing wireless market.
Bharti, about 30 per cent owned by Southeast Asia's top phone firm, SingTel, said consolidated net profit rose to Rs 2025 crore ($484 million) under U.S. accounting rules in its fiscal first quarter ended June, from Rs 1512 crore a year earlier.
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A Reuters poll of 12 brokerages had forecast a net profit of Rs 1934 crore for Bharti, which had 69.4 million mobile subscribers at end-June, up 63 per cent from a year earlier.
Bharti provides mobile services on the popular GSM platform in all of India's 23 service areas and accounts for nearly a quarter of the country's total mobile users. It added 7.4 million users between April and June.
The New Delhi-based firm mainly competes with No. 2 Reliance Communications and unlisted Vodafone Essar, controlled by Britain's Vodafone Plc.
Shares in Bharti, India's fourth-most valuable firm at $36.4 billion, fell 12.6 per cent between April and June compared with a 14 per cent drop in the main index.
