Telcos' Q1 gross revenue up by 12% at Rs60,716 crore
04 Aug 2014
Telecom operators in the country saw their gross revenue increase by about 12 per cent to Rs60,716 crore in the first quarter of the current financial year helped by rising data and voice rates, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said in its latest report.
Telecom service providers had reported gross revenues of Rs54,283.78 crore in the year ago quarter.
Adjusted gross revenue on which government levies licence and other regulatory fees increased by 16.26 per cent to Rs41,016 crore during the quarter from Rs35,279.5 crore in the comparative quarter of the previous financial year, the regulator said.
"Gross revenue (GR) and adjusted gross revenue (AGR) of telecom services sector for the quarter ended March 2014 has been Rs60,716 crore and Rs41,016 crore, respectively," TRAI said in its report.
Mobile service providers accounted for 77.83 per cent of the combined AGR of the telecom operators.
The AGR, which is arrived at after allowing for deductions of certain heads in the gross revenue, is considered as the actual revenue of telecom service providers from telecom services.
The licence fee earned by the government increased by 14.86 per cent on yearly basis to Rs3,286 crore in the first quarter of 2014-15.
The report showed that mobile internet usage on CDMA, which is seen as a dying technology by many, is more than three times compared to usage on GSM.
Average data usage per subscriber per month on CDMA network was 176.24 MB in the first quarter of 2014 while it was 59.94 MB per user on GSM network.
The report said that the monthly average revenue earned on a per user basis by GSM operators like Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and others increased by 8.04 per cent on yearly basis to Rs113.
In the case of CDMA players like Reliance Communications, MTS, Tata Teleservices, monthly ARPU increased by 10.22 per cent on yearly basis to Rs104.98 in reported quarter.
The total telecom subscriber base as of 31 March 2014 stood at 933 million, of which 904.5 million were mobile or wireless telecom services subscribers.