All it took for Bharti Airtel to rise in share price, was for the company to beat the pessimistic estimates of analysts for its second quarter results. Beleagured from every side - intense competition from Reliance Jio, which is undercutting Airtel sharply in price, and an unsympathetic regulator in TRAI, which has slashed interconnect call charges - Airtel reported a dramatic 76% fall in consolidated net profit at Rs 343 crore for the second quarter against Rs 1,461 crore in the year-ago period. A boost in share price was helped by the fact that Bharti Telecom is set to buy up to 4.62% of Bharti Airtel's stake.
The fact that this is the outcome of price pressure is clear: revenues are falling, but mobile data traffic grew four-fold in the quarter to 784 billion MBs, compared to 178 billion MBs in the year-ago quarter. Mobile broadband customers rose 34 per cent to 55.2 million.
The depressed number still beat analyst estimates - the second-quarter net profit, the smallest profit in 19 quarters was above the average estimate of Rs.303 crore from Thomson Reuters.