Indian telco Reliance Jio has laid claim to be the only telco outside China to boast a customer base of over 400 million people while reporting its second-quarter results.
At the end of the quarter on September 30, the telco said it now has 405.6 million subscribers, an increase of 1.8% over the three months.
On the fiscal numbers, the reporting group containing the telco, Jio Platforms, posted revenue of Rs.21,708 crore, approximately $2.9 billion, which represented a quarter-on-quarter increase of 7.1%. Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation increased 8.7% quarterly to Rs.7,971 crore, and net profit was reported as jumping almost 20% compared to last quarter to be Rs.3,020 crore.
While the Jio Platforms group only reported quarterly comparisons, the vast bulk of the platform group Reliance Jio Infocomm, allowed for year-on-year comparison. Jio Infocomm saw its revenue increase by over a third to Rs.17,678 crore, while net income more than doubled from Rs.990 crore for the second quarter of 2019 to Rs.2,844 crore this quarter.
The telco said it increased its average revenue per user to Rs.145, around $1.94 each month, as total wireless data increased to 1.44 exabytes.
In the prior quarter, Jio sold a third of itself to others for Rs.152,056 crore. Buyers included Google, Facebook, Silver Lake, Vista Equity Partners, General Atlantic, KKR, Mubadala, ADIA, TPG, L Catterton, PIF, Intel Capital, and Qualcomm Ventures.
“All of these investments, excluding Google, have been completed post fulfilling applicable conditions and total amount of Rs.118,319 crore has been received by the company,” Jio said in its second-quarter results.
Earlier in October, Jio announced it had teamed up with Qualcomm to work on virtualised 5G infrastructure, as well as hitting 1Gbps in a radio access network (RAN) test.
“We are excited about working with Qualcomm Technologies in developing new generation cloud native 5G RAN technology that is truly open and software defined,” Jio Infocomm president Mathew Oommen said.
“The development of secure RAN solutions with Qualcomm Technologies combined with Jio Platforms and scale provides the ideal combination for local manufacturing and for accelerating the realisation of Atmanirbhar Bharat for an inclusive 5G nation.”
Overall, the Reliance oil behemoth posted revenue of Rs.128,385 crore, and net profit of Rs.10,602 crore for the second quarter.
