Idea Cellular today said it has increased its Capital expenditure (Capex) plan by Rs 1,000 crore during the fiscal 2017.

With the additional Capex, Idea Cellular will be making an investment of Rs 7,500 crore – Rs 8,000 crore from the earlier planned Rs 6,500 – Rs 7,000 crore during the current fiscal.

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The additional investment plan reflects the company’s willingness to meet the customer demand for high speed mobile Internet across the country.

Idea’s network now spreads to over 2,16,000 sites (1,30,633 – 2G sites, 60,467 – 3G sites, 24,945 – 4G sites) and 126,000 Kms of fibre, covering nearly 1 billion Indians for GSM services in nearly 400,000 Page 4 of 4 towns and villages and mobile broadband services reaching to 430 million Indians, across 17 service areas over 80,000 towns and villages.

In Q2 FY 2017, Idea Capex spend was Rs 2,000 crore, largely funded from cash Profit of Rs 1940 crore.

Idea Cellular aims to offer pan India wireless broadband 4 services (3G and/or 4G) from current 17 service areas latest by March 2017.

Idea Cellular said 4G services will be expanded to 20 service areas from present 11 (9 new 4G service areas of Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh (West), Uttar Pradesh (East), Bihar & Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Mumbai, West Bengal, Assam and Jammu & Kashmir) and 3G services to 15 service areas from present 13 (2 new service areas of Bihar and Rajasthan).

In last 24 months, Idea has expanded its network sites by 63 percent, adding 83,276 network sites (2G+3G+4G), including nearly 3.5x increase in its Wireless Broadband sites (3G+4G) from 25,164 (Q2FY15) to 85,412 (Q2FY17), expanding wireless broadband population coverage to over 430 million Indians in 17 service areas.

The company in the same period increased its OFC network by nearly 45 percent from 87,600 kms (Q2FY15) to 126,000 kms in Q2FY17.

With the new Spectrum acquisition, the Gross Investment in Fixed Assets by Company has risen to nearly Rs. 1,015 billion (excluding October 2016 spectrum auction), an addition of over Rs. 450 billion in last 24 months.

“Idea generated a strong Cash Profit of Rs. 44,616 million in H1FY17. It is gearing itself for the arrival of a tsunami of Mobile Broadband users as Idea expands its wireless broadband coverage to a billion Indians and supplements the company’s broadband capacity @ 15-20 times current data traffic on existing and new spectrum,” said Kumar Mangalam Birla, chairman of Idea Cellular.

Idea Cellular said voice minute contracted on sequential quarterly basis by 1.9 percent to 195.5 billion compared to 199.3 billion in Q1FY17.

Due to competitive pressure on Voice business, Idea’s sequential Voice Revenue declined by 5.3 percent due to a) Voice realisation rate decline @ 3.4 percent, from 34.3p in Q1FY17 to 33.1p per minute in Q2FY17 b) fall in sequential Voice minutes.

Idea pursued a volume growth strategy resulting in, on a sequential quarterly basis 5 million mobile data user addition helping the data subscriber to 54 million and data volume growth at 15.4 percent to 107.4 bn MB in Q2FY17.

Baburajan K
[email protected]