Abhijay Raj Vaish, Pune
Reliance Jio has emerged as the largest telecom operator in terms of data usage, striking a net profit of Rs. 5,445 crore for the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2024-25. In the April-June quarter, a 33 percent hike over the past year in data consumption amounting to around 45 exabytes of data on the operator’s network was reported.
The company has also amassed a 2% increase in profits going up from Rs. 4,863 crore in the year-ago valuation. The Telecom entity also went past the market estimates in generating around 10% revenue growth despite the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) remaining static for three consecutive quarters. The company’s expenses rose to Rs. 19,266 crore in the first quarter of this year as compared to Rs. 18,917 crore last year.
According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s data, the telecom giant increased their mobile customers by 2.19 million rising to 474.6 million in May this year. Reliance had earlier increased mobile data tariffs by 25 percent from July 3 while not charging separately for providing 5G services. According to them, the main component for their increased revenue stream was the consistent subscriber growth.
The conglomerate has also launched two new applications, JioSafe, for secure communication and encrypted file sharing along with Jio Translate for translating calls, texts, audio through AI capabilities. Aligning with their business models across spectrums, both of these apps will be free for Jio users for about a year. Jio has also acquired an increased spectrum capability in the 1800 MHz band in West Bengal and Bihar during the spectrum auctions that were held in June this year spiking their total spectrum impression to around 27,000 MHz. The 5G network that India encompasses has about 85 percent of it dominated by Jio’s 5G capacity.
The company plans on delivering unlimited 5G data at the moment with the results of the hikes initiated last month will be witnessed in the quarter that ends in September this year. According to global brokerage Jefferies, there might also be a case for Jio’s public listing in 2025.