Heating up the results season today was Indus Towers with its performance over the last quarter. This telecom infrastructure company on Tuesday announced a near 32 per cent rise in its consolidated net profit for Q4 period to ₹1,853 cr against ₹1,399.1 cr that it had logged a year ago.
According to the company’s regulatory filing, Indus Towers’ consolidated revenue from operations grew 6.5% to ₹7,193.2 cr during Q4 against ₹6,752.9 cr in the March 2023 quarter.
Indus Towers, as far as the year ended March 31, 2024 is concerned, posted close to a 3-fold jump in consolidated profit to ₹6,036.2 cr from ₹2,040 cr at the end of the FY23.
Indus Towers, which is the country’s biggest telecom infrastructure company, made about the same amount of money this year as it did last year. The annual revenue earned was to the tune of ₹28,600.6 cr in the most recent fiscal year, which is almost the same as the ₹28,381.8 cr they earned in FY23.
Indus Towers MD and CEO Prachur Sah explained the situation, saying, “The network expansion by a major customer and increase in our market share helped us deliver record tower additions, surpassing the milestone of 2,00,000 towers. On the financial front, we were pleased to see steady collections and part clearance of the over-dues.”
As for the future, where did Sah see the company heading, he said, “We expect the ongoing network expansion and 5G roll-outs, supplemented by the encouraging developments around a major customer’s fund raise to provide a fillip to our growth”.
Indus Towers surpassed 200,000 installed mobile tower base in FY24 and it reported an increase of 26,862 mobile towers year-over-year to 2,19,736 towers at the end of March 2024. Notably, at the end of FY23 it had 1,92,874 towers.
In its financial report, Indus Towers stated that it has ₹5,385.3 cr in doubtful receivables. This includes all the money owed by a troubled telecom company as of March 31, 2024. However, Indus did not name the company. It is widely surmised that the said company is none other than Vodafone Idea , which has recently conducted a successful fund raising exercise through an FPO worth ₹18000 crore. Some of this will be used to clear its debt, reportedly.