Bharti's profit dives 22 percent

India's top mobile phone firm, Bharti Airtel, on Wednesday reported an unexpected 22 percent plunge in quarterly profit from a year ago, hit by lower phone usage and heavy interest charges. Net profit slid to 10.1 billion rupees ($206 million) in the three months to December from a year earlier, Bharti said in a statement, bucking analysts' expectations that profits would rise to around 13.6 billion rupees.
The fall marked Bharti's eighth straight quarterly profit drop in India's hyper-competitive mobile market and sent the company's shares tumbling by 6.58 percent to 354.00 rupees. "Competition (in the market) is still intense," Bharti chief executive Sanjay Kapoor told reporters at the company's headquarters in New Delhi.
However, revenues climbed more than 17 percent to 184.77 billion rupees, which Sunil Bharti Mittal, the company's billionaire boss, called "healthy". He said Bharti was focusing on an "ever increasing demand for data" after the company rolled out third-generation (3G) wireless services.