New Delhi: Reliance Industries’ telecom arm Reliance Jio Infocomm continues the impressive trajectory it took right from its debut over two years ago. Even as other telecom operators bleed, Jio churned out a net profit of ₹ 831 crore in the October-December quarter, up 22.1% quarter-on-quarter. RIL’s consumer business, which includes telecom and retail operations, has now begun to contribute more than a quarter to the company’s business.
The company added over 28 million subscribers in the quarter gone by to cross the 280-million mark at the end of the last calendar year.
The company’s gross revenues came in at ₹ 12,252 crore, rising 12.4% from the immediate previous quarter. Earnings before interest tax, depreciation and amortization were ₹ 4,053 crore, rising 13.4%. EBITDA margin improved 30 basis points to 39%.
Average revenue per user, a key metric to judge the profitability of a telecom services provider, fell ₹ 2 to ₹ 130.
According to comments by RIL Chief Financial Officer Alok Agarwal on a Youtube channel, both voice and data traffic on the company’s 4G network continued to hold strong. Users consumed 8.6 billion GB of data against 7.7 billion GB in the September quarter, each consumer using 10.8 GB of data every month while talking for 794 minutes in the same 30-day period.
The parent company today declared its results for the December quarter. The company’s consolidated net profit of ₹ 10,251 crore for October-December was 7.7% higher from the September quarter. The company’s gross refining margins came at a 15-year low of $8.8 per barrel, a shade better than what many analysts had predicted.
Gross refining margin is the profit earned on each barrel of crude oil processed. RIL outperformed the benchmark Singapore complex margin by $4.5 per barrel. The benchmark GRMs have come down to multi-year lows in the third quarter to below $2 per barrel, as crude oil prices slumped to $50 a barrel from $85 a year ago.
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