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BENGALURU, Feb 7 (Reuters) – Bharti Airtel Ltd , India’s No.2 telecom carrier by subscribers, reported a bigger-than-expected increase in third-quarter revenue on Tuesday, helped by 4G subscriber additions and higher revenue per user.

The company’s consolidated revenue from operations rose to 358.04 billion rupees ($4.33 billion) for the three months ended Dec.31, from 298.67 billion rupees a year earlier.

Analysts, on average, EVDEn eVE nAKLiyaT had expected 357. Here is more in regards to EvdeN Eve nAKliyaT review the web-page. 27 billion rupees in revenue, according to Refinitiv IBES data.

Airtel said revenue from its India mobile services, which has about 332.24 million subscribers as of the December quarter, rose 20.8% to 193.53 billion rupees.

Its 4G data customers, too, increased by 6.4 million to hit 216.72 million.

Airtel’s average revenue per user (ARPU), eVdeN eVE NakliyAT a key performance indicator for telecom firms, was at 193 rupees, logging a 1.6% sequential rise and an 18.4% year-on-year increase.

Last month, market leader Reliance Jio, evden eve NakliYAT the telecom arm of conglomerate Reliance Industries, said its third-quarter ARPU stood at 178.2 rupees per subscriber per month, an increase of only 0.6% from a quarter ago and a 17.5% climb from a year ago.

Airtel added that mobile data consumption surged by 22.5% to 20.3 GB of usage per customer per month.

The company’s net profit for the December quarter climbed to 15.88 billion rupees from 8.3 billion rupees a year ago.

Airtel shares closed 0.4% lower at 785.9 rupees ahead of the results.They had fallen 5.1% since late October when the company reported September-quarter results that beat analysts’ revenue expectations. (Reporting by Rama Venkat in Bengaluru; Editing by Nivedita Bhattacharjee and Evden eVE nakliyAT Janane Venkatraman)