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Reliance Jio, the telecom entity of conglomerate Reliance Industries, turned out a March quarter performance in line with estimates by some brokerages, clocking 11% growth in revenue and 13% in net profit compared to the same quarter last fiscal.
In sequential terms, net profit, at ₹5,337 crore, was up 2.5% from Q3FY24; and revenues, at ₹25,959 crore, were up 2.3%. The company announced its results after market hours on Monday.
Brokerages such as BofA Securities had estimated revenue increase of around 0-3%, while Morgan Stanley expected net profit to rise by 1.7% sequentially. The former has also estimated flat Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) growth on-year. However, Jio’s Ebitda rose 11.5% to ₹13,612 crore from ₹12,210 crore during the corresponding quarter last fiscal.
In a separate announcement, the carrier said that one of its two managing directors, Sanjay Mashruwala, resigned from his position. Mashruwala, 76, has been one of the longest serving executives at Reliance and was closely associated with founder Dhirubhai Ambani. He had been the MD of Reliance Jio since 2013, even before the company made its commercial entry into the Indian telecoms market in 2016.
The telecom carrier’s average revenue per user (APRU) remained flat at ₹181.7 sequentially, but with better subscriber mix partially offset by increasing mix of promotional 5G traffic, which is offered unlimited to subscribers and not yet charged separately.
It added 10.9 million subscribers on a net level for the quarter, taking India’s largest telco’s subscriber base to 481.8 million. Comparatively, Bharti Airtel had a subscriber base of 377.5 million as of December 2023 (March numbers have not been declared yet).
“Performance of the digital services segment has been boosted by accelerated expansion of subscriber base, supported by both mobility and fixed wireless services. With over 108 million True 5G customers, Jio truly leads the 5G transformation in India,” said Mukesh D. Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Limited.
Wireless 5G broadband service Jio AirFiber services are available in 5,900 cities and towns, with further ramp-up towards pan-India coverage soon. Average daily data usage for AirFiber subscribers is at 13 GB, which is 30% higher than JioFiber subscribers, the telco said. Jio AirFiber is the telco’s fixed wireless access service, which provides broadband-like speeds without the need of fibre connectivity directly to home premises. The latter is done by JioFiber.
Jio, which rolled out its 5G network across India within a year of launch, now has about 108 million subscribers on 5G, the second largest base of such users after China, said Kiran Thomas, chief executive officer of Jio Platforms and president of Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd.
The 5G network now carries almost 28% of its mobility data traffic, he added.
Jio’s finance costs in Q4FY24 were lower sequentially at ₹1,018 crore compared to ₹1,028 crore in the December quarter. Customer engagement on Jio network remained strong, with total data and voice traffic increasing, respectively, by 35.2% to 40.9 billion GB, and by 9.7% to 1.58 trillion minutes compared to the same quarter in the previous fiscal.
Thomas also noted a spurt in demand of Jio AirFiber from tier-III and tier-IV towns, besides rural markets. The service is now available across 6,000 towns and was translating into higher demand from lower tier cities. The data usage was approaching 500 GB usage on a monthly basis, he added.
The telco has identified hotels, small manufacturers, schools, colleges and hospitals as specific categories for taking software solutions such as information management, surveillance and entertainment solutions, on its own and through partnerships.
“This increased distribution and presence means that our home strategy will also see now an accelerating momentum into the future,” he said.
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