Bharti Airtel Q3 earnings: Net profit drops 55% to ₹6,630 crore, revenue rises 20%, ARPU improves to ₹259

Bharti Airtel, the country's second largest telecon company, on Thursday, February 5, reported net profit of ₹6,630 crore in the third quarter of current financial year, marking a decline of 55% from ₹14,781 crore in the same period last year. On a sequential basis, Bharti Airtel's profit declined 2.4% from ₹6,792 crore in the previous quarter.

The Delhi-based company's revenue from operations advanced 20% in October-December period to ₹53,982 crore from ₹45,129 crore in the year-ago period.

Bharti Airtel's operating profit also known as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) came in at ₹31,144 crore and EBITDA margin stood at 57.7%.

Bharti Airtel said that strong operational performance was driven by portfolio premiumization and sharp execution. Smartphone data customers increased by 20.8 million annually and 5.2 million quarter on quarter (QoQ), accounting for 79% of total mobile customers.

The company added 0.62 million postpaid customers.

Bharti Airtel's average revenue per user (ARPU), a key metric of profitability of a telecom company, improved to ₹259 per user per month from ₹245 in the year-ago period.

The company added that its mobile data consumption increased by 29.2% year-on-year (YoY) to 29.8 GB per customer per month.

During the quarter, Bharti Airtel entered into a strategic partnership with Google to set up India’s first Artificial Intelligence (AI) hub in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. This landmark initiative will accelerate the adoption of AI across India, strengthen the country’s digital backbone and bring Google’s full AI-stack and consumer services closer to Indian businesses, the company said.

“Q3’26 marked another strong quarter, with consolidated revenue of ₹53,982 crore, a growth of 3.5% sequentially, underpinning our strategy of a diversified and resilient portfolio. India revenue including passive infrastructure services increased by 1.4% sequentially. Africa delivered yet another quarter of exceptional performance with constant currency revenue growth of 5.8%,” said Gopal Vittal, Executive Vice Chairman, Bharti Airtel.

“One of the reasons for our stepped-up performance in Africa is the deployment of our home grown digital stack that has sharpened our go to market excellence, the secret sauce of Airtel,” Vittal added.

Bharti Airtel shares ended 1.66% lower at ₹1,992 ahead of its earnings announcement.