Reliance Jio Subscriber Base Rises to Over 280 Million, Adding 27.9 Million in a Quarter

Telecom major Reliance Jio Infocomm on Thursday reported a 65 percent increase in its standalone net profit for the October-December 2018 period.

Its standalone net profit stood at Rs. 831 crores in the third quarter of the financial year 2018-19, against Rs. 504 crores reported in October-December 2017-18, the company said in a statement.

Reliance Jio's operating revenue during the period under review stood at Rs. 10,383 crores, 50.9 percent higher than the Rs. 6,879 crores earned during the corresponding period of the last financial year.

Its subscriber base as of December 31, 2018 was 280.01 million. Earning per subscriber marginally moderated to Rs. 130 per month from Rs. 131.7 previously. 

"Jio has sustained its pace of underlying subscriber additions with net addition during the quarter of 27.9 million (as against previous four-quarter average of 28.4 million)," said the statement.

Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani said RIL maintained robust growth momentum across retail and Jio platforms and "the share of consumer businesses is steadily increasing its contribution to the overall profitability of the company".

Further, average data consumption per user per month was 10.8GB and average voice consumption was recorded at 794 minutes per user per month. Video consumption drove most of the usage, increasing to 460 crore hours per month, it said.

The company said last month it would hive off its tower and fibre assets, a move that could help sell or list the assets in future.

"We're in the process of de-merging our tower and fibre business and the end objective will be to have different set of investors who would want to run these companies," said V Srikanth, joint chief financial officer.

"This means that these assets go off our balance sheets so the liabilities also go down," he added.

Written with agency inputs