India's top mobile phone firm Bharti Airtel's quarterly net profit slid 32 per cent, hit by a "hyper-competitive" home market and foreign exchange losses, a statement said Wednesday.
The flagship company of Bharti chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal reported net profit for the three months to June 30 dropped to 16.82 billion rupees ($361 million) from 24.75 billion rupees a year earlier.
Bharti, which has over 20 per cent of the Indian market, has been hit by cut-throat rivalry in the world's fastest-growing wireless sector, where price wars have cut call rates to below a cent a minute.
The slide in the fiscal first quarter came despite a 17.4 per cent rise in revenues to 122.31 billion rupees, lifted by new customers and partial earnings from its newly acquired Africa subsidiary.
"Our business in India and South Asia got off to a solid start with robust revenue growth and healthy margins," Mittal said. "This reaffirms our conviction that leaders emerge stronger in a hyper-competitive market."
But the company suffered a 2.2-billion-rupee foreign exchange loss compared with a gain of 2.8 billion a year earlier amid foreign currency fluctuations.
Announcement of the results came just over two months after Bharti completed its $10.7 billion acquisition of most of Kuwait-based Zain's Africa assets.
The purchase of Zain's Africa assets, now renamed Bharti Airtel Africa BV, made Bharti the world's fifth-largest mobile operator.
Fierce competition on its home turf prompted the company to look abroad for revenues.