NEW DELHI, May 5 (Reuters) - Bharti Airtel , India's top mobile phone carrier, on Thursday reported a bigger-than-expected 31.5 percent fall in quarterly profit, hit by losses at its African operations.
Bharti, 32.3-percent owned by Southeast Asia's biggest phone firm SingTel , said consolidated net profit fell to 14 billion rupees ($314 million) for its fiscal fourth quarter ended March, from 20.44 billion a year earlier.
The results were based on international accounting standards.
A Reuters poll of 10 brokerages had on average expected net profit of 16.32 billion rupees for the New Delhi-based firm, which last June acquired mobile operations in 15 African countries from Kuwait's Zain in a $9 billion deal and became the world's fifth-biggest mobile carrier by number of subscribers. ($1=44.6 rupees) (Reporting by Devidutta Tripathy; Editing by Ranjit Gangadharan and Matt Driskill)