At the Reliance Industries 41st Annual General Meeting, Mukesh Ambani announced that its telecom arm, Reliance Jio has crossed 215 million user base mark in just 22 months after opening the services to the public. The subscriber base number is up to June 2018. At the end of March 2018, Jio had 186.6 million subscribers under its belt and it has added close to 30 million subscribers in the June quarter. With this new subscriber base number, Jio has closed the gap with Vodafone India and Idea Cellular, whose subscriber base is above 220 million at the end of April 2018. Vodafone India is losing subscribers on a good note, while Idea Cellular is adding subscribers on a massive number, better than Bharti Airtel and less than Jio.
Reliance Jio, which launched its telecom services back in September 2016 took the entire industry by surprise with its aggressive tariff plans and free services for nearly six months. Jio started charging its subscribers since April 2017, which resulted in the slowdown of subscriber growth, but it's still way ahead of other telcos and any other telecom operator in the world.
Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries that the company has reached a point with its consumer business contributing as much as the petrochemical business.
He also revealed some statistics on Jio network. Ambani stated that the data growth has been impeccable in the last one year with growth from 125 crore GBs to 240 crore GBs per month. Also, voice usage on the network has increased from 250 crore minutes to 530 crore minutes per day. Coming to video consumption, Jio has recorded a growth of 50% from 165 crore hours per month to 240 crore hours per month.
Ambani also reaffirmed that Jio would achieve the target of 99% population coverage it set while launching the services. Reliance Jio has doubled its network capacity in the last 12 months. Furthermore, Ambani stated that the capacity utilisation is less than 20%, meaning, the telco can multiply its subscriber base without any additional investment.
Alongside these announcements, Jio also announced that it sold over 25 million units of JioPhones since the launch, which is also one of the reasons behind the strong subscriber addition on the network.
