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Subscriber retention helped Vodafone Idea Ltd (VIL) pared its consolidated net loss to ₹4,532.1 crore for the third quarter ended December 31, 2020, from a net loss of ₹6,438.8 crore recorded during the comparable year-ago period.
The company had posted a net loss of ₹7,218.2 crore during the sequential second quarter ended September 30, 2020. During the quarter under review, VIL’s revenue on a consolidated basis fell to ₹10,894.1 crore from ₹11,089.4 crore recorded during the same year-ago period. However, revenue for the quarter improved from ₹10,791.2 crore supported by higher 4G additions, the company said in a statement.
“In the third quarter of FY21, we improved subscriber retention and operating performance.... We remain focused on executing our strategy, and our cost optimisation plan remains on track to deliver the targeted savings. The board has approved fundraising to support our strategic intent and we are in active discussions with potential investors,” VIL Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Ravinder Takkar, said.
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The service can be accessed by pre-paid and post-paid subscribersVIL, which had received board approval to raise ₹25,000 crore through a combination of equity and debt in September 2020, said it is currently in “active discussions” with potential investors for the same.
The company had embarked on a cost optimisation exercise and is targeting to achieve Rs 4,000 crore of annualised cost savings by the end of this calendar year. Through several initiatives, VIL has already achieved about 50 per cent of the targeted annualised savings on a run-rate basis by the end of Q3FY21.
The company’s overall broadband site count stood at 4,47,936 as of December 2020, lower compared to 4,57,386 in the sequential second quarter, following the refarming of its 3G sites to 4G.
During the quarter, VIL, which has started to upgrade its 3G network to 4G, added 12,000 4G Frequency Duplex Division sites primarily through re-farming of 2G and 3G spectrum. Till date, the company has deployed 61,000 Time Division Duplex sites in addition to the deployment of 12,900 Massive MIMO sites and 11,800 small cells.
At the end of the quarter, the 4G subscriber base was 109.7 million (versus 106.1 million in Q2), an increase of 3.6 million in the quarter. The data volumes grew by 3.4 per cent on a quarter-on-quarter basis, driven by higher 4G additions, it said.
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