BENGALURU: The merged Vodafone IDEA entity closed fiscal 2019 (year ended 31 March 2019, FY 2019, year or period under review) with 8.07 crore 4G subscribers says the company in its earnings release. Vodafone Idea Ltd (Vodafone Idea) says that it added 0.54 crore 4G subscribers in the quarter ended 31 March 2019 (Q4 2019, quarter under review) and that it closed financial year 2019 with a broadband subscriber base of 11.02 crore. The company’s mobile subscriber base was 33.41 crore. It says that the combined entity lost 5.32 crore subscribers as incoming-only or low ARPU customers migrated their spending from multiple SIMs to single SIM. The Vodafone Idea Cellular merger was completed in August 2019, hence financial results for FY 2019 and FY 2018 are not comparable.

The company says that sequential stabilisation of revenue in Q4 2019 benefitted from introduction of ‘service validity of vouchers’ as compared to the previous quarter Q3 2019 (q-o-q). Revenues grew 0.1 percent q-o-q to Rs 11,775 crore. This implies that ARPU for the fourth quarter was higher. The company says in its earnings release that average daily revenue or ADR grew 2.3 percent in Q4 2019 after declines for eleven successive prior quarters. Vodafone-Idea says that its revenues stabilised and integration between the two entities that it comprises of was moving at a pace with approximately 60 percent of the targeted synergies realised during the quarter under review.

Vodafone Idea has managed to increase EBITDA by 57 percent q-o-q to Rs 1,790 crore, while normalised EBITDA after one-offs stood at Rs 1,590 crore. The company managed to shave off Rs 1,280 crore in Q4 2019 from operating expenses as compared to Q3 2019. Consolidated loss for the quarter narrowed to Rs 4,881.9 crore as compared to Rs 5,004.6 crore in Q3 2019.
Vodafone Idea recently successfully closed India’s largest rights issue to date raising Rs 25,000 crore of equity. The issue was oversubscribed by 1.2 times.