Idea Cellular, which reported its third quarter numbers today is focusing on investing more in data services going forward, said MD, Himanshu Kapania in an interview to CNBC-TV18’s Kritika Saxena.
Country's third largest telecom operator, Idea, reported 4.5 percent growth in net profit and 4.6 percent in revenues on sequential basis, missing analysts' expectations.
Quarter-on-quarter consolidated net profit for the company increased to Rs 467.7 crore (from Rs 447.6 crore) on revenues of Rs 6,613 crore (from Rs 6,323.3 crore) in the quarter ended December 2013. Revenues included 16 percent contribution from Indus Towers.
Kapania said: “As our belief is at this point of time, there is a huge amount of work mobile operators have to do, to grow this business. Currently out of the overall industry which is at the size of Rs 1,65,000 crores not more then 9 to 10% of the revenue comes from wireless broadband. Therefore, significant investments need to be done to expand newer services and to offer the latest technology expanding.”
“For companies like Idea, we have to expand from a present regional operations of 3G to pan-India. We also have to make sure that as time passes by and demand for capacity increases, we have to roll out latest technology,” he added.
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