Key Takeaways and Financial Snapshot — Q4FY21
- Jio’s data traffic continues to grow steadily as it adds more users; its 426 million-strong user base used 16.68 exabytes of data in the quarter ended March 31, 2020. That translates to over 16 billion gigabytes of traffic. This is up 26.7% YoY. RIL Joint CFO V Srikanth said this translated to “2.3 GB per customer usage of data and about 823 minutes of voice” on a monthly basis.
- Revenue from operations stood at Rs 18,278 crore, up 18.9% YoY.
- Net profit was up 47.5% YoY to Rs 3,508 crore.
User addition was a lot better than last quarter — on a net basis, the company added about 15 million new subscribers. In the previous quarter, Jio had blamed rhetoric around the farmer protests for causing high churn on its business, and it added around 5 million subscribers in Q3.
Anshuman Thakur, Head of Strategy at Jio, had this to say on the telco’s spectrum acquisition:
One of the developments in the last quarter was a spectrum auction, where we participated and enhanced our spectrum footprint. Between that auction, and the spectrum that we acquired through a spectrum trading arrangement that we have entered into with Bharti Airtel we have now taken our spectrum footprint to 1732 MHz. This now gives us 2 to 10 megahertz of spectrum in the 1800 band across all of these circles, 40 MHz of contiguous spectrum in the 2300 band across all of these circles, and 2 X 10 in 800 band across 18 of the 22 circles. The average life of the spectrum is the longest in the industry at close to 16 years, and all of the spectrum is suitable to even deploy 5G technology as well as our narrowband IoT, that we are already we have gone commercially live with.
The total cost of spectrum purchase was Rs 57,123 crores, and with an upfront payment of Rs 19,939 crore. This is the spectrum that we had acquired the right to use in the spectrum auction.
Press Release | Earnings Call (.mp4) | Transcript | Investor Presentation (Page 22 onwards)
I cover the digital content ecosystem and telecom for MediaNama.
