India's Bharti Infratel Q1 net profit surges 68 pct

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Telecommunications tower operator Bharti Infratel Ltd reported a 68 percent rise in quarterly profit as sales rose and the company was helped by a one-time boost after a restructuring.

Bharti Infratel, majority owned by top mobile phone carrier Bharti Airtel Ltd , said consolidated net profit rose to 3.58 billion rupees for its fiscal first quarter ended June from 2.13 billion rupees reported a year earlier.

The company, which owns 42 percent of Indus Towers Ltd, the world's biggest telecommunications tower company, was expected to report a net profit of 3.07 billion rupees, according to the average of three analyst estimates on Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

 

Revenue for the quarter rose an annual 9 percent to 26.22 billion rupees, missing estimates. Four analysts on average had expected revenue of 27.44 billion rupees.

The merger of a wholly-owned unit of Bharti Infratel with Indus Towers boosted net profit for the quarter by 350 million rupees, but lowered revenue by 500 million rupees, Bharti Infratel said in its quarterly report.

Shares in Bharti Infratel, which went public last December after a $750 million listing that was India's biggest IPO in two years, were down more than 3 percent as of 0820 GMT in a Mumbai market that was down 0.7 percent. The stock is down more than a third from its IPO price.

Demand for mobile towers has been hit after several smaller players either exited India or scaled back due to a court order invalidating numerous telecommunications licences, but tower companies are betting on demand from growth in high-speed mobile data services.

Bharti Infratel expects infrastructure sharing to pick up in the coming quarters with the regulatory environment in the sector settling down, faster 3G rollouts by operators and some early indications of 4G rollout plans, the company's vice chairman, Akhil Gupta, said in a statement.

(Reporting by Devidutta Tripathy; Editing by Matt Driskill)