Jio Turns Profitable, User Base Hits 160.1 Million

Reliance Industries (RIL) on Friday announced its Q3 (FY 2017-18) results on its financial and operational performance, and reported that Reliance Jio Infocomm logged a profit within 18 months of starting operations. The Mukesh Ambani-promoted company said its Digital Services Business posted standalone net profit of Rs. 504 crores for the December quarter, with revenues standing at Rs. 6,879 crores. Jio has a subscriber base of 160.1 million as of December 31, 2017, seeing a gross subscriber addition of 27.8 million, and a net subscriber addition of 21.5 million.

Jio reported an ARPU (average revenue per user) of Rs. 154 per subscriber per month, and said it saw a customer churn of 1.4 percent - boasting it was the lowest in the industry.

The RIL-owned telecom operator had other statistics to share as well. It saw total wireless traffic of 4.31 billion gigabytes (or 9.6GB per subscriber per month) in the period, with video consumption crossing 2 billion hours a month. In the quarter, Reliance Jio also saw a total voice traffic of 311.13 billion minutes (694 minutes per user per month).

"The growth in subscriber base is getting further accelerated through the launch of Jio Phone, which has expanded the reach of Jio Digital Services to all the feature phone users as well. Reliance Retail Ltd is geared to increase capacity of supply of Jio Phone, considering the tremendous response from Indians to embrace Digital Life," RIL said in a statement.

Before the publication of RIL's results on Friday, we've had an inkling as the to subscriber growth of the company, with Akash Ambani, Director Reliance Jio Infocomm, revealing the 160 million subscriber milestone at an event in late-December. Jio's entry into the telecom space in 2016 has caused a huge upheaval in the sector, with incumbents forced to drop prices and increase data limits to compete.