The Kuwait-based Zain Telecom today reported a profit of $3.37 billion for the nine months ended September, with more than half of the earnings coming in from the sale of its African assets to India's Bharti Airtel.
Of the total profit, a whopping $2.65 billion came from the sale of African operations to Bharti Airtel. The $10.7 billion acquisition, completed in June, has helped the Indian entity to become the world's fifth-largest telecom player.
"Net Income soared 411 per cent to reach $3.37 billion inclusive of the capital gain of $2.653 billion from the sale of Zain Africa assets to Indian telecom giant Bharti Airtel on June 8, 2010," the company said in a statement.
Consolidated revenues of the company stood at $3.5 billion for the January-September period.
"In this new era of focus on our Middle East operations, we are extremely pleased with the robust 25 per cent customer growth and 8.4 per cent revenue increase, both of which are in line with our targets for the period," Zain Chairman of the Board of Directors Asaad Al-Banwan said.
Asaad also revealed that the first nine-month period in 2010 witnessed an increase in total shareholders’ equity of approximately 9.3 per cent, reaching $9.26 billion, compared with $8.47 billion for the corresponding period of 2009.
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The company has been able to increase customers across its network by 25 per cent to reach 35.3 million.
Bharti had acquired Zain Telecom's operations in 15 nations, excluding Sudan and Morocco. Zain has operations in 17 African countries.