Jio PAT beats Street estimates, up 65% y-o-y on robust user addition

Reliance Jio Infocomm (RJio), the telecom arm of Mukesh Ambani-controlled Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), beat Street estimates by reporting a profit of Rs 831 crore for the December quarter (Q3), up 22 per cent sequentially and 65 per cent year-on-year (YoY), riding on a sustained pace of subscriber additions. Revenue from operations at Rs 10,383 crore was in line with expectations. Net addition during the quarter of 27.9 million was slightly lower than the previous four-quarter average of 28.4 million. “This quarter we also had to change from eKYC to digital KYC and again we had to train the retailers. We lost out on a few days because of this but we are back to our old momentum now,” said Anshuman Thakur, head of strategy and planning at RJio.

RIL reiterated plans to hive off the fibre and tower businesses into separate companies to manage spend on these capex heavy business segments. "We're in the process of demerging our tower and fibre business and the end objective will be to have different set of investors who would want to run these firms. This means that these assets go off our balance sheets so the liabilities also go down," said V Srikanth, Joint CFO RIL.