Jio posts 51% rise in revenue despite losing 4.8 mn 4G subscribers

Reliance Jio has posted 12.4 percent rise in the third quarter revenue despite losing 4.8 million 4G subscribers in the Indian telecom market.
Reliance Jio revenue Q3 2018-19Reliance Jio has reported operating revenue of Rs 10,383 crore, EBITDA of Rs 4,053 crore with EBITDA margin of 39 percent and net profit of Rs 831 crore during Q3 fiscal 2018-19.

Reliance Jio has 280.1 million subscribers. Jio achieved Rs 130 ARPU during the December quarter of 2018.

Reliance Jio has achieved 12.4 percent quarter-to-quarter growth in revenue and 13.4 percent  rise in EBITDA. The year on year growth in operating revenue was 50.9 percent. The year on year EBITDA growth was 54.2 percent.

Reliance Jio said its wireless data traffic reached 864 crore GB, while voice traffic touched 63,406 crore minutes during the third quarter. Average data usage per user per month was 10.8 GB and average voice consumption was 794 minutes per user per month. Video usage increased to 460 crore hours per month, Reliance Jio said.

“The Jio family is now 280 million strong and growing. We are working on re-inventing the connectivity solutions market for Homes and Enterprise with our FTTX services,” Mukesh D Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries, said.

Reliance Jio added 27.9 million subscribers during the third quarter against previous four-quarter average of 28.4 million. Jio lost 4.8 million subscribers during the quarter. Jio said it achieved the lowest industry churn rate of 0.61 percent per month.

Jio’s earlier announced expansion of 4G LTE network coverage to 99 percent of population will be be completed over the next few months. Reliance Jio does not share Capex (capital expenditure) related figures. Samsung is one of its main vendors for the roll out of 4G network.

Reliance Jio’s main spending was Rs 3,190 crore for network operating expenses, Rs 1005 crore for access charges, Rs 1,136 for License Fees/Spectrum Charges, Rs 426 crore for employee benefits expense, Rs 1091 crore for finance costs and Rs 296 crore for selling and distribution expenses.

Jio is the only network to deploy tri-band (850MHz/ 1800MHz/ 2300MHz) 4G across all its network sites. It has the world’s largest VOLTE network, supporting 2x traffic growth over the past year and maintaining lowest call drop rate at 0.12 percent.

Jio said JioGigaFiber services is currently connecting homes on priority based on the requests received and optimising its service offerings across 1,400 cities.