Reliance Jio, which announced the financial result for the first quarter during 2018-19 today, has overtaken Vodafone India — in terms of quarterly revenue.
Reliance Jio has posted operating revenue of Rs 8,109 crore (+13.8 percent), EBITDA of Rs 3,147 crore (+16.8 percent) with EBITDA margin of 38.8 percent and net profit of Rs 612 crore in Q1 2018-19.
Vodafone India revenue was €959 million (–22 percent) or Rs 7,666 crore in the first quarter of 2018-19. Vodafone India’s mobile service revenue was €885 million indicating the rest of the business came from fixed line business. Reliance Jio relies on mobile service business for its revenue.
Airtel India posted mobile services revenue of INR 10,480 crore in the first quarter of 2018-19. Airtel India’s EBITDA from mobile service was INR 2,760 crore with EBITDA margin of 26.3 percent. The total revenue of Airtel India was INR 14,930 crore that includes income from DTH, mobile, fixed broadband and enterprises.
Idea Cellular will be announcing its financial result shortly. The combined Vodafone Idea will be the largest telecom operator in India in terms of revenue and mobile customer base in the country. Vodafone India and Idea Cellular are yet to formally announce the completion of the merger.
“FTTH and Enterprise services with strong fibre backbone across the country would further establish Jio’s leadership as a digital services provider,” Mukesh D Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries, said.
Reliance Jio, which entered the Indian telecom market with free voice and data services in September 2016, did not reveal about the company’s Capex during the first quarter.
Jio growth
Reliance Jio added 28.7 million during the first quarter of 2018-19 as against 26.5 million in the previous quarter.
Reliance Jio achieved gross subscriber addition of 30.5 million and lost 1.8 million implying the lowest industry churn rate at 0.30 percent per month.
Customer activity grew substantially in the quarter with average data consumption per user per month of 10.6 GB and average voice consumption of 744 minutes per user per month. Video consumption increased to 340 crore hours per month on the network and average video consumption was 15.4 hours per subscriber per month.
Reliance Jio’s wireless broadband subscriber base increased from 186.6 million as of March-2018 to 215.3 million as of June-2018. Reliance Jio added 92 million during the past twelve months.
The main concern area for Reliance Jio is the ARPU of Rs 134.5 per subscriber per month. Reliance Jio achieved total wireless data traffic of 642 crore GB, while total voice traffic was 44,871 crore minutes.
Baburajan K
