India Bharti Airtel Q1 net up 34 pct, beats f'cast

Enlarge Photo A Kashmiri woman and a girl walk past a bill board of a cell phone...

Thu, Jul 24 09:59 AM

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Bharti Airtel Ltd, India's top mobile operator, beat forecasts on Thursday with a 34 percent rise in quarterly profit as it rode a boom in the world's fastest growing wireless market.

Bharti, about 30 percent owned by Southeast Asia's top phone firm, SingTel, said consolidated net profit rose to 20.25 billion rupees ($484 million) under U.S. accounting rules in its fiscal first quarter ended June, from 15.12 billion a year earlier.

A Reuters poll of 12 brokerages had forecast a net profit of 19.34 billion rupees for Bharti, which had 69.4 million mobile subscribers at end-June, up 63 percent 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 percent between April and June compared with a 14 percent drop in the main index.

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