Idea Cellular adds 8,600 sites in H1 FY09

Idea Cellular 's Q2 FY09 net profit was down 45.23% at Rs 144.07 crore as compared to Rs 263.09 crore QoQ. Its revenues were up 5.75% at Rs 2,303 crore as against Rs 2,178.1 crore QoQ. Revenues in established circles were up 5.5% QoQ.

Sanjeev Aga, MD, Idea Cellular said that the company has added 8,600 sites in the last six months, which is a 35% increase over this year's opening tally of 24,800. He said the drop minutes per user of Idea Cellular was due to the Q2 quarter being poor seasonality months.

Here is verbatim transcript of Sanjeev Aga's comments at the press conference.

Here is verbatim transcript of Sanjeev Aga, MD of Idea Cellular comment in a press conference.

The company has added 8600 sites in six months upon a year opening tally of 24,800; that is a 35% increase in capacity. A majority of these new sites were on red and pink bases instead of the majority being on an ownership basis. The percentage increased in rent paying sites during the first half was 56%.

The speed of the rollout and the profile of the rollout would place pressure on percentage EBITDA margins. During this quarter minutes of use have been depressed in terms of minutes of use per subscriber and not withstanding the fact that we had a decline of 3 paise and a realised rate per minute from 65 to 62 paise while some of the drop in minutes of use per subscriber and consequently the ARPU per subscriber would be due to the softening of the economic environment around the world and in India. But most of this drop due to July-August-September being poor seasonality months. We saw similar pattern last year and we expect the October-December quarter to see a reasonable bounce back in MOU (Minutes of Usage) although that is still in the future and no one can be 100% certain about it.     

During this quarter we accomplished a satisfactory launch of services in Mumbai. The Idea brand has been well received. We crossed the 100000 (hundred thousand) subscriber mark within the five weeks of the launch as on end of September and after the end of Q2 during the early part of October we brought into operation, services in several major towns of Bihar and early indications from there are also positive.