For the second quarter ended June 30, 2009, Axiata Group Bhd's pre-tax profit grew 57.9 percent - to RM878.621 million from RM575.382 million in the corresponding quarter of 2008.

Furthermore, its quarterly revenues hiked by eight percent to RM3.163 billion from RM2.930 billion previously.

The company's pre-tax profit sunk to RM1.070 billion, for the first six-month period of 2009, from RM1.214 billion in the corresponding period of the previous year. However, it should be noted though that the first-half revenue of the company increased to RM6.030 billion from RM5.651 billion previously.

Axiata specified in a filing with Bursa Malaysia that, during the Q2, its revenues increased because of the higher contribution from Celcom and Axiata (Bangladesh) Ltd
(AxB).

A positive quarter-on-quarter revenue growth was posted by Indonesian operations of Axiata in local currency.

However, the XL's revenue in the current quarter, in terms of ringgit translated results, plunged by two percent against that of the corresponding quarter in 2008. The blame for the drop goes to the depreciation of the Indonesian rupiah against ringgit.

It should be noted that a quarter-on-quarter revenue drop of 3.5 percent and 17.4 percent respectively was posted by Axiata's Sri Lankan unit, Dialog, and Telekom Malaysia International (Cambodia) Company Limited (TMIC), in local currency.

Axiata said that the revenues for second quarter of 2009 were affected by downward tariff revision by Dialog in the fourth quarter 2008.