Reliance Jio net profit jumps 65% to Rs 831 cr in Dec qtr

Telecom operator Reliance Jio Thursday reported a jump of 65 per cent in net profit to Rs 831 crore during the December 2018 quarter, mainly on account of a rise in customer base.

The company had recorded a net profit of Rs 504 crore in the corresponding period a year ago.

The operating revenue of Reliance Jio increased by 50.9 per cent to Rs 10,383 crore during the October-December 2018 period, compared with the Rs 6,879 crore it registered in the corresponding period a year ago despite decline in average revenue per user (ARPU).

The ARPU of Reliance Jio declined by 15.5 per cent to Rs 130 per subscriber per month, against Rs 154 in the year-ago period.

While ARPU of Reliance Jio continued to decline, the impact seems to have mitigated with a sharp increase in customer base to 28 crore by the end of December 2018, from 16 crore a year ago.

"The Jio family is now 280-million strong and growing on one of the world's largest mobile data networks, in line with our vision of connecting everyone and everything, everywhere always at the highest quality and the most affordable price," Mukesh D Ambani, chairman and managing director, Reliance Industries Ltd.

Data consumption on the Jio network more than doubled to 864 crore gigabyte (GB) during the quarter, compared with 431 crore GB in the third quarter of 2017-18 with video consumption on its network growing proportionately to 460 crore hours per month.

The average data consumed per user per month on the Jio network reached 10.8 GB from 9.6 GB and recorded a voice consumption of 794 minutes as compared with 694 minutes per user per month a year ago.

"We are similarly working on re-inventing the connectivity solutions market for homes and enterprise with our next generation FTTX services (optical fibre-based broadband services)," Ambani said.

The company is hiving off its fibre and towers assets into separate companies and filed a composite scheme of arrangement for this purpose among RJIL, Jio Digital Fibre Pvt Ltd and Reliance Jio Infratel Pvt Ltd in the Ahmedabad NCLT on January 7.