Reliance Jio Q3 results: Net profit rises 26% YoY to ₹6,861 crore; Arpu at ₹203.3 | Stock Market News

Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, the telecom arm of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd, surpassed analyst expectations on net profit, revenue and average revenue per user (Arpu) in the December quarter on the back of higher AirFiber customer uptake and mobile users returning to the fold.

The company reported a 4.9% quarter-on-quarter (q-o-q) rise in consolidated net profit for the third quarter to ₹6,861 crore. Consolidated revenue from operations rose 4.3% sequentially to ₹33,074 crore.

In year-on-year (y-o-y) terms, India’s number one telecom services provider clocked 19.4% revenue growth and 26% increase in net profit for the quarter ended December, beating market estimates.

The company’s Ebitda, however didn’t surpass analyst estimates, rising 18.8% to ₹16,585 crore in the quarter ended December from ₹13,955 crore in the corresponding quarter in FY24. Brokerage IIFL Securities had expected Ebitda to rise 19.5% on-year on higher Arpu.

“Robust growth in digital services business was led by sustained subscriber addition and consistent improvement in customer engagement metrics. This was well supported by a favorable subscriber mix, with an increasing number of users upgrading to 5G networks,” Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director, Reliance Industries, said in a media statement. “Jio’s compelling offering of home broadband services also continued to rapidly gain ground and maintain its pre-eminent market position.”

Jio is set to become the largest AirFiber service provider globally in the coming months, said Anshuman Thakur, head of strategy at Reliance Jio Infocomm, with a record quarter of 2 million new connections in the October-December period, taking its current subscriber base to 4.5 million. About 70% of the new connections are coming from beyond the top 1,000 towns and cities, the carrier said. Jio plans to add 1 million homes every month as it aims to get 100 million connected to JioAirFiber.

JioAirFiber is the telecom operator’s fixed wireless access service that provides fibre broadband-like speeds without the need of fibre connectivity directly to home premises. The latter is done by JioFiber.

The company’s Arpu in December was ₹203.3 against ₹195.1 in the September quarter, and up 12% on-year from ₹181.7. Jio said the residual impact of the tariff hike will play out in the coming quarters. The trend will be similar to the previous two tariff hikes, primarily because a larger proportion of Jio users are on one-year packs or have recently topped up recharges.

Jio’s total number of customers was 482.1 million, up 2.4% on-year, including 170 million 5G customers as of December end, the second-largest base of such users after China. Kiran Thomas, president of Jio Platforms Ltd, said that 5G traffic made up 40% of all wireless traffic on its network.

The telecom operator said customer addition has rebounded to pre-tariff-hike levels in the exit month after transient SIM consolidation. Net subscriber addition in the third quarter of FY25 was 3.3 million and monthly churn moderated to 2.0%.

Jio had captured a wide sweep of India’s telecom market with its highly discounted or even free services in 2016. In June last year, it undertook a 13-25% tariff hike, which showed in the numbers.

Reliance Industries’ telecom entity continues to be the world’s largest telecom operator by data usage, with about 46.5 exabytes of data being consumed on the telecom operator’s network during the quarter, 22% higher than the same period last year.

Akash Ambani, chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm, said in the media release, “Jio has played a key role in digital inclusion by bringing the world’s best communication technologies for every Indian. Rapid scale up of 5G adoption and proliferating fixed broadband beyond Tier1 towns over the past year, further strengthens the Digital India mission. Jio will continue to lead the charge in technology innovation by fully embracing the power of AI to create a connected, intelligent future that is truly transformative. This will drive sustained value creation over next many years.”

Thomas said Jio was building national scale AI-ready infrastructure and compute capabilities at ‘GW scale’ to “to deliver one of the lowest cost inference capabilities when it comes to AI anywhere in the world”. He added that it will support the ramp-up of AI driven use cases that will come up in the country, with some already being built within the Reliance group.

The beta version of its Jio Brain platform was available through AI Cloud for consumers, he said. Jio launched the AI Cloud welcome offer earlier in the quarter where users got up to 100GB of free cloud storage to securely store and access photos, videos, documents, digital content, and data, rivalling Google, Microsoft and other cloud storage providers. Thomas said the service will be scaled up from beta level at present to be available for all Jio customers in the coming months.

According to Thomas, the company’s enterprise business was picking up momentum with 280% increase in large government tenders and its share in the segment of modernising co-operative bank branches with the potential to reach 150,000 branches.