By IANS,
Mumbai : Reliance Communications, the flagship telecom services company of the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, Thursday reported a 23.9 percent jump in net profits at $352 billion for the first quarter ended June 30.
The company’s revenues were also higher by 23.7 percent at $1.24 billion, as against $1.06 billion for the like period of the last fiscal, a filing with stock market authorities said.
The company had reported a net profit of $301 billion during April-June, 2007.
“Reliance Communications has maintained strong operating performance and continues to remain the most profitable telecom company in India,” said Anil Ambani, commenting on the results.
He said the company will be investing between $10-12 billion over the next two years, which will lead to significant acceleration in earnings in the years to come.
The results were reported after the closing bell at stock exchanges.
In the quarter under review, $1.6 billion worth of investments had already been made, the company said.
The results posted Thursday also revealed that the company’s return on net worth was an impressive 34 percent with $6.2 billion jump in the net worth (equity of shareholders) – ranking it among top three in India.
The company said it now has a customer base of 53 million, including 1.7 million individual overseas retail subscribers. Its network covers 20,000 towns and 540,000 villages.
Some of the recent developments highlighted along with the results announcement included a joint venture with Alcatel-Lucent to foray into the $16 billion global market for managed networked services for mobile phone operators.
The group also signed a pact to acquire Vanco, a global managed network service provider, which has reported annual revenue of $365 million.
The group’s plan to consolidate operations with South Africa’s MTN, a leading mobile phone service provider in the region, was, however, aborted after nearly 50 days of exclusive talks with the company.