Reliance Jio added 11 crore subscribers to its network in FY17

After jolting the whole telecom industry with its entry, Reliance Industries on Monday said that its telecom-arm Reliance Jio has grabbed 10.89 crore subscribers as on March 31, 2017.

It crossed 50 million subscribers in just 83 days, and 100 million in 170 days, adding at an average rate of 6 lakh subscribers per day, the company said. 

Commenting on the results, Mukesh D. Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries Limited said, " In digital services, the Jio movement is set to transform India. Jio is witnessing the largest migration from free to paid services in history. Jio is committed to provide its customers the highest quality and the world’s most affordable data and voice services."

Moreover, the company said Jio has greenfield 4G LTE wireless broadband network, with over 100,000 mobile towers. And it will add another 100,000 towers to the network in the coming months. Jio  has deployed pan-India LTE network across the 800MHz, 1800MHz and 2300MHz bands, giving it tremendous capacity advantage.

As per the regulatory filing, Reliance Retail’s device distribution business sold 2.6 million LYF and JioFi devices during the quarter and nearly 10 million units in the financial year. LYF and JioFi devices continue to be availablethrough over 500,000 retailers, Jio.com, AJIO.com and across all major e-commerce portals. 

With more than 110 crore GB of data traffic per month and 220 crore voice and video minutes a day, Jio has become the largest network globally in terms of data carried and contributed to India becoming the leading country in the world for mobile data usage, the company said.

"Jio users are today consuming nearly as much data as on all the mobile networks in the USA and 50% more data than mobile networks in China in a clear indication that India will adopt digitisation and Digital Life faster than anyone else in the world," the company said.

RIL achieved a consolidated turnover of Rs 330,180 crore ($50.9 billion), an increase of 12.6%, as compared to Rs 293,298 crore in the previous year. Increase in revenue is primarily on account of increase in prices of refining and petrochemical products partially offset by lower volumes from E&P business. 

Turnover was also boosted by robust growth in retail business which recorded a 60.2% surge in turnover to Rs 33,765 crore. 

For the quarter ended 31 st March 2017, RIL achieved a turnover of Rs 92,889 crore ($14.3 billion), an increase of 45.2%, as compared to Rs 63,954 crore in the corresponding period of the previous year.

Profit after tax was higher by 16.6% at Rs 8,046 crore ($1.2 billion) as against ` 6,903 crore in the corresponding period of the previous year.