Bharti Airtel on Wednesday reported net loss widened to ₹15,933 crore for the first quarter ended June 30, mainly on account of incremental provisioning for adjusted gross revenue (AGR)-related dues.

Bharti had posted a net loss of ₹2,866 crore in the April-June 2019 quarter, while the net loss stood at ₹5,237 crore during January-March 2020. Revenue, however, rose 15% to ₹23,939 crore. The revenue for January-March 2020 quarter stood at ₹23,723 crore.

Noting that the Supreme Court, in its hearing on July 20, 2020, had observed that the amounts of AGR dues given by DoT were to be treated as final, the company said, “Consequently, without prejudice and on prudence, during the quarter ended June 30, 2020, the group has further recorded an incremental provision of ₹10,744.4 crore to give effect to the differential amount between the DoT demand and the AGR provision, which has been presented as an exceptional item.”

As per the communication to the stock exchange, there is an additional net charge pertaining to re-assessment of levies of ₹1,001.3 crore. “Net tax benefit due to the...exceptional items; net charge due to re-assessment of deferred tax assets and adoption of 'Vivad Se Vishwas Scheme 2020'...and deferred tax asset pertaining to one of the subsidiary recognised in this quarter, aggregating ₹3,643.2 crore is included under tax expense/(credit). As a result, the overall net exceptional charge (after tax) is ₹15,389 crore,” the company added.

According to a company statement, net loss before exceptional items for the quarter stood at Rs 436 crore.

Bharti Airtel, whose capex spend for the quarter was ₹3,975 crore, said that India revenue increased by 14.6% to ₹17,589 crore. Mobile revenue jumped 18.5%, while ARPU for the quarter rose to ₹157 as against ₹129 in Q1’20 “led by full impact of our tariff hikes in the previous quarter alongside our continuing focus on quality customers”.

It added that 4G data customers increased by 45.3% to 138.3 million and traffic rose to 74.09 PB/day vs 42.90 PB/day in the corresponding quarter last year. While average data usage per data subscriber stood at 16.3 GBs/month, voice usage was at 994 minutes/sub/month.

Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO, India & South Asia, said: “We are going through an unprecedented crisis caused by COVID. Despite this, our teams have served the country well and kept our customers connected. Data traffic growth surged by about 73% YoY even as 4G net additions slowed down to 2 Million caused by supply chain shocks in the device eco system.”