Reliance Jio, India's largest telecom service provider, has reported an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of Rs 203.3, up 11.9 percent year-on-year, adding approximately 3.3 million subscribers during Q3 FY25, which ended December 31, 2024, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) announced during its recent earnings call. While most of the announcements may not be entirely new, this time, specific numbers are worth noting. With that said, let's quickly review these figures while taking a comprehensive look at all the announcements made during the company's presentation.
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Quarterly Revenue
Jio Platforms Limited (JPL) reported quarterly revenue of Rs 38, 750 crore, up 19.2 percent YoY, with a total subscriber base of around 482 million as of December 2024. Jio revealed it added approximately 2 million new home connections in Q3 FY25. The operator highlighted that "Jio continues to be world's leading standalone 5G operator (outside China) with subscriber base of over 170 million."
"Jio’s compelling offering of home broadband services also continued to rapidly gain ground and maintain its pre-eminent market position," said Mukesh D Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries Limited.
The total fixed subscriber base is around 17 million, including approximately 4.5 million from JioAirFiber. "Customer addition has rebounded to pre-tariff-hike levels in the exit month after transient SIM consolidation," RIL said in its quarterly report.
V Srikanth, CFO of Reliance Industries Limited, highlighted during the earnings call that, for Jio, "The story is about higher ARPU, and the fact that we are adding consumers, especially in FTTH." Of the total subscribers added during the quarter, two million subscribers were home connections, he added.
Also Read: Reliance Jio Says Not Concerned About ARPU, Terming It a Misnomer: Report
Jio 5G Subscribers
Kiran Thomas, President of Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, highlighted during the call, "The combination of having that Pan India network available and the increasing adoption of 5G devices in our subscriber base has resulted in the number of Jio 5G subscribers crossing 170 million" as of December 2024."
"We already had the Pan India network up and running for the past many quarters. And now, thanks to the natural upgradation of devices happening in the market where a lot of the new handsets have 5G capability. And as soon as a customer acquires a 5G device, they automatically are able to enjoy all of the 5G services available through Jio True 5G," Thomas explained.
Superlative True 5G Network
Thomas emphasised that nearly 40 percent of wireless traffic from the overall 15 exabytes of data is contributed by 5G. "And this story will continue to unfold into the future. And more interestingly, thanks to the fact that we have this superlative True 5G network, which is a big differentiator vis-a-vis other competitors, also means that any new 5G device that is sold in the market, 70 percent of them end up becoming a Jio customer and using Jio services," he added.
This indicates that Jio's network continues to attract around 70 percent of incremental 5G devices sold in India.
Fastest 5G Adoption
So far, you might have just heard of the fastest 5G rollout, but now, Jio may probably have another milestone to its achievements. We may soon hear about Jio hitting the fastest 5G adoption record, according to Thomas, who said, "Probably in a very short period of time we'll be able to say that probably one of the fastest 5G rollouts, not only 5G rollouts, but 5G adoption anywhere in the world, the total 5G traffic on our network will surpass the 4G traffic very, very shortly."
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Jio AirFiber
Jio stated that its AirFiber service has catalysed fixed broadband adoption in underserved towns. Jio AirFiber service has opened up demand "from beyond what we call the top thousand cities and towns of India," Thomas continued.
Top 100 towns account for 30 percent of AirFiber connections, while 70 percent of new AirFiber connections come from beyond the top 1,000 towns. "More than 70 percent of the new connections are now starting to come from beyond the top thousand towns and cities," Thomas added, noting, "This entire greenfield opportunity of connecting 100 million plus homes across India is now getting that additional momentum thanks to AirFiber."
"And this is an area where we have a significant first mover advantage where essentially, we are going after hitherto unconnected or underserved markets with this offer," he explained.
"JioAirFiber has transformed the broadband connectivity in the country, especially beyond the top 1,000 cities/towns. More than 70 percent of incremental JioAirFiber additions are coming from these previously underserved cities/ towns. Overall pace of home connect for Jio has continued to accelerate with total installed base of around 17 million," RIL reported.
Technologies Deployed
Jio confirmed the deployment of multiple global-first technologies on its True 5G network. These include Voice over New Radio (VoNR) certification, slice-based and device-aware layer management, need-based bandwidth allocation for energy efficiency, location accuracy, and interference mitigation without capacity loss. TelecomTalk reported these updates earlier.
Also Read: Jio 5G Network Extends Handset Battery Life by Up to 40 Percent
JioAI Cloud
JPL highlighted that JioAI Cloud, the AI-powered cloud service, was launched for consumers during the quarter, offering up to 100 GB of free cloud storage. "Jio, along with the Group, is geared to offer rich bouquet of AI services for consumers and enterprises on the back of gigawatt scale AI infrastructure in India," the company said.
Commenting on the progress, Akash M Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm, said, "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."
Also Read: Reliance Jio Partners With Polygon Labs To Launch Web3, Blockchain Solutions In India
Enterprise Business
Jio highlighted that its Enterprise Business has outpaced Industry growth. Thomas highlighted that the enterprise business is also picking up momentum. "If you look at year on year growth, there is a nearly three times or 280 percent year on year increase in all the large government tenders which have come out. And of course, if you look at both the national and state government connectivity infrastructure, we are continuing to increase our share in that segment."
He noted that Jio is well-positioned to be an exclusive service provider on a Pan-India basis to enterprises with multiple locations and Pan-India presence looking for a single solution provider.
"And wherever we have such demand coming in, we are seeing that we are the provider of choice there. In addition to connectivity again we are providing a true developer-friendly platform as a service for connectivity. We call connectivity and communication platform as a service," he added, noting the company refers to this service as JioCx.
Jio AI
"Empowering every Indian with free secure storage of up to 100GB," RIL highlighted JioAICloud as India's own Customer Data Platform in its presentation.
Thomas highlighted that the company is on the course to set up a national AI infrastructure to create AI-ready infrastructure, hard infrastructure and compute capabilities. "We believe that this transformation will be across the board, and we need to be ready to ramp up and support the emergence of AI-driven use cases in the country," he added.
The company plans to deliver one of the lowest cost inference capabilities when it comes to AI anywhere in the world. "And this is a similar mission as compared to what we were able to do in broadband," he added.
Thomas spoke about implementing AI technology across Reliance Group's operating companies. He reiterated the previously announced JioCloud PC, which features 100 GB of storage, 8 GB RAM, and a 2.45 GHz processor. This cloud computer service comes with auto updates via the cloud, enabling users to keep their systems up-to-date with the latest technology on a pay-as-you-go basis with no lock-in.
Jio presented the Cloud PC service, enabled by the Jio Set Top Box, as a "Powerful, Scalable Computer for Every Home."
Speaking about JioCloudPC, Thomas said, "...effectively a very low cost and pay as you go. Capability of having a personal computer, evergreen personal computer never needed to be upgraded, always the latest specs and pay as you go. You only pay for the time for which you are using that PC. Again, services for education again, using AI to power various, I would say personalised education use cases, AI for skill development."
Also Read: Reliance Jio Slows Down 5G Expansion Amid Monetisation Issues: Report
Jio AI Cloud
Thomas also highlighted that Jio AI Cloud integrates connectivity, cloud storage, and AI into a single package for Indian customers. "We made an announcement of providing 100GB free of cost. I think the earlier benchmark was either 5GB or 15GB depending on whether you were an Apple customer or Google customer through Android. But it kind of raised the bar multifold by providing 100 GB free of cost to all Jio customers," Thomas stated.
He outlined its features, which include storing, sharing, syncing, and securing data. "You can stream various kind of media assets all from the same app without having to use any other applications. Unlocking the content that you have onto the big screen through integration with our set top box," Thomas explained.
A set of AI-powered use cases has already been made available. "All of that today already made available and we've just launched this as a beta offering in the market and in the coming Quarter we will look to scale this up to every Jio customer and beyond the JioCloudPC," he added.
AirFiber Success
Continuing the presentation, Anshuman Thakur, Head of Strategy at Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, shared metrics on Jio services, including Jio AirFiber. He noted, "Home additions- we added almost 2 million new connections during the quarter and with an increasing run rate the Jio AirFiber product has been very successful in the market. We're seeing a lot of demand coming from towns and cities beyond the tier 2s. We already are at 4.5 million Jio AirFiber homes connected, and which will be fairly, you know the rate at which we are growing, we should be the largest air fiber service provider globally in the next few months. Customer engagement continues to be very strong."
Also Read: Jio AirFiber Plans and OTT Benefits Detailed for January 2025
Users on Long-Term Plans
"As most of you are aware we have subscribers who are on longer term plans and who tend to recharge over a longer period of time and therefore we expect some more flow through to happen as well. And you know the affordability as well as increasing engagement should sustain both in the subscriber growth run rate as well as the ARPU growth in the coming quarters as well as you know a bunch of new services and facilities Kiran spoke about a few of those plus the media offerings that we're providing to our customers; we expect to further improve the customer wallet share that we have," Thakur said.
Data and Voice Traffic Growth
Overall, Jio's data traffic grew by 22.2 percent and voice traffic grew by 6.5 percent on a year-on-year basis, RIL reported in its quarterly update.
