Reliance Jio adds 9.9 mn customers in Q1, profit rises 183%

Reliance Industries (RIL) said on Thursday that its Jio business added 9.9 million net customers and yielded a 183% rise in standalone net profit for the first quarter of financial year 2019-20, despite a Covid-19 related national lockdown.

The platform’s per capita wireless data usage increased to 12.1 gigabytes per subscriber per month, driven by the lockdown induced work from home, learn from home and health from home user trends during the quarter, RIL said in a presentation deck to analysts.

Shares of the company were down about 2% in morning trade.

Reliance Jio’s net profit rose to Rs 2,520 crore or 15 paise per share in the quarter ended June 2020, from Rs 891 crore or 14 paise per share a year ago. Its revenue for the same period rose about 36% year-on-year Rs 16,833 crore.

Parent company RIL’s operational revenue, however, declined about 44% to Rs 91,238 crore, primarily due to a steep fall in its petroleum refining segment, in a quarter that saw average Brent crude price plummet.

“Jio Platforms with partnerships across promising Indian startups and globally renowned technology companies is set to drive the next leg of hyper growth for digital businesses,” Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of RIL, said in a statement.

The digital first business of the oil-to-telecom conglomerate has raised capital from 13 global technology companies and private equity investors since April. It last raised funds from search engine giant Google, which invested $4.5 billion (Rs 33,737 crore) in the firm. Jio and Google are also set to jointly develop an entry level affordable smartphone with optimisations to the Android operating system and the Play Store.