Reliance Jio’s 330 million subscribers boost revenue by 5.4% compared to 3 months ago

• Mukesh Ambani’s digital services unit, Reliance Jio posted revenue growth of 5.4% compared to a quarter earlier.
• The company added 25 million new subscribers in the three months ending June 2019.
• Reliance Industries consumer businesses including Reliance Retail and Reliance Jio now make up for more than a quarter of the total revenue.

Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) released its first quarter results for the current fiscal year today. Revenue from its digital services, which includes Reliance Jio, showed a quarterly growth rate of 5.4% to ₹ ₹14,910 compared to three months earlier.

"Our subscribers now exceed 330 million. We added a net of 25 million subscribers in this quarter," CFO Alok Agarwal said.

Reliance Jio, the company’s telecommunications arm, has shown a growth on the back of a steadily growing subscriber base. In fact, Jio beat out Airtel to become the second most subscribed network operator in the country earlier today, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) report.

Its user base has been growing steadily where BSNL, Airtel and Vodafone have been leaking subscribers. From May to June, Airtel lost 1.5 million users and Reliance Jio added 8.1 million subscriptions to its user base.

But the growth in subscribers also means there’s an impact on the average revenue per user (ARPU). Agarwal stated that there’s been a decline in ARPU from 126 to 122, but added, “From our customer profile, we’re seeing a distinct shift to higher tariff packages which are inherent really slightly cheaper than lower tariff packages.”

Reliance Jio’s EBITDA is up 8% and EBITDA margins are up by 110 basis points.

Reliance Jio has today managed to raise as much as ₹25,215 crore from a Canadian asset management company, Brookfield’s subsidiary — BIF IV Jarvis India. This will help the company repay some of its mammoth debt accumulated in the process of investing in Jio and offering deep discounts to win over customers.