Indian number four RCOM has seen its profits leap by 46% following a significant upswing in data consumption.
The group’s net profit for Q4 reached INR 2.28 billion ($36 million), up from INR1.56 billion for the same period last year. Its revenue also grew, although by less than 1%, reaching INR57 billion.
The major driver behind this increase was a surge in data traffic, with an increase in consumption of around 37 million megabytes. Customers are using on average around 893 megabytes, an increase of 438 megabytes.
Gurdeep Singh, the CEO of RCOM’s consumer business, said that the operator saw the highest data consumption per customer of any Indian operator.
While the operator’s overall total of data subscribers initially seems to have shrunk to 33.7 million down from 37.4 million last year, this is actually due to a revision in RCOM’s definition of data subscribers; the company no longer considers users who access less than 1Mb per month to fall into this category.
While its overall subscriber numbers were down from 112 million to 111 million, RCOM saw its 3G base grow from 12.9 million to 17.4 million. In addition, its ARPU jumped 15% to INR147.
