Idea, the fastest growing large Indian mobile operator, on Friday said that it started new financial year with gross revenue in excess of US$1billion for the quarter.

The company achieved a 6.7% revenue growth on a sequential quarterly basis. This, on the back of 7.0% and 8.2% sequential revenue growth in preceding two quarters, reaffirms the increasing consumer preference for brand Idea.

The company has reversed the two year declining Average Realised Rate (ARR) trend with a marginal improvement of ~1% in ARR to 41.0p for the quarter against 40.6p in the previous quarter.

Idea carried 108.6 billion Minutes on its network, registering a growth of 6.5% compared to previous quarter and remained among the top 10 Global operators in terms of voice minutes of usage.

The company improved standalone EBITDA margin by ~1.2% on a QoQ basis to 23.4%, primarily driven by the strong performance in Established Service Areas, helping it to absorb the higher losses from New Service Areas.

The growth in EBITDA margin was achieved inspite of higher network opex, by better cost management mainly related to lower Subscriber Acquisition, Servicing, advertisement and Business Promotion Expenses. As expected, with the introduction of 3G services in this quarter, additional expenses of amortisation of 3G spectrum fee (Rs. 656mn) and charging of related interest cost (Rs. 1,228mn) has impacted the profits.

On a standalone basis, the Profit After Tax (PAT), for the quarter stands at Rs. 1,541mn compared to Rs. 2,576mn in the previous quarter. The Cash Profit for the quarter stands at Rs. 8,609mn against Rs. 9,031 mn in the previous quarter.

 Idea continues to lead the industry in term of subscriber quality with over 92% of its base on VLR (as per TRAI, 31st May’11 release). With a net gain of over 930,000 subscriber (as on 24thJuly, 2011), Idea also leads the industry w.r.t. Mobile Number Portability.