Reliance Jio Infocomm reported a 26 per cent YoY rise in profit growth in the third quarter, while revenue rose 19.2 per cent due to partial impact of tariff hike, ramp up in pace of home connect and accelerating non-connectivity digital services businesses. Its EBITDA grew to ₹16,585 crore, a quarterly growth of 4.1 per cent and an 18.8 per cent yearly growth owing to revenue growth and stable margins.

On-year basis, subscriber base grew by 2.4 per cent and ARPU grew 11.9 per cent, to over Rs 200

On a sequential basis net profit rose 4.9 per cent to ₹6,861 crore in the quarter on a 4.3 per cent growth in gross revenue

Regarding Rjio’s performance, Mukesh D Ambani, RIL Chairman and Managing Director said, “Robust growth in digital services business was led by sustained subscriber addition and consistent improvement in customer engagement metrics. This was well supported by a favourable subscriber mix, with an increasing number of users upgrading to 5G networks. Jio’s compelling offering of home broadband services also continued to rapidly gain ground and maintain its pre-eminent market position.”

The total subscriber base increased to 482.1 million with flattish sequential growth while Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) increased to ₹203.3 per subscriber, a 4.2 per cent growth sequentially. The company attributed the ARPU growth to sustained tariff hike impact and better subscriber mix, adding that the remaining tariff hike impact that is yet to play out. Regarding subscriber base, Jio said customer addition has rebounded to pre-tariff-hike levels in the exit month after SIM consolidation with net subscriber addition reaching 3.3 million and monthly churn moderated to 2.0 per cent.

5G network to surpass 4G soon

Data traffic hit 46.5 billion GB in Q3, a 3.3 per cent sequential increase and 22 per cent on-year growth. Per capita data consumption was 32.3 GB/ month. Voice traffic grew 1.46 trillion minutes, a 2.8 per cent quarterly growth and 6.6 per cent on-year growth. 170 million subscribers used Jio’s True5G network, accounting for 40 per cent of Jio’s wireless traffic. JioAirFiber reported a subscriber base of 4.5 million.

According to Kiran Thomas, President at Jio Platforms, the total 5G traffic network of the company is expected to surpass its 4g market shortly. In terms of JioAirFiber, Thomas said the technology has unlocked demand from beyond the top 1,000 towns of India with over 70 per cent connections coming from such towns.

Akash M Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm, said, “Jio has played a key role in digital inclusion by bringing the world’s best communication technologies for every Indian. Rapid scale up of 5G adoption and proliferating fixed broadband beyond Tier1 towns over the past year, further strengthens the Digital India mission. Jio will continue to lead the charge in technology innovation by fully embracing the power of AI to create a connected, intelligent future that is truly transformative. This will drive sustained value creation over next many years.”

Jio also launched JioAICloud this quarter for consumers, offering up to 100 GB of free cloud storage. It also launched its machine learning platform JioBrain for seamless integration across operations. Other AI offerings included, JioEducation for immersive learning, JioFrames and JioPartnerWorld for skill development and supervision of field workforce, and JioKrishi for improving crop productivity. Jio also introduced JioCloudPC that enables users to convert TV screen into a computer through set-top box.