Reliance Jio Q3 profit surges 28% to ₹4,638 cr; revenue up 19%

Reliance Industries Ltd's telecom arm Reliance Jio Infocomm has reported a 28.3% rise in its October-December quarter net profit at ₹4,638 crore as compared to ₹3,615 crore profit in the year-ago period.

India's biggest telecom service provider saw its Q3 FY 2022-23 revenue from operations surging 19% to ₹22,998 crore as compared to ₹19,502 crore revenue in the year-ago period, the company said in a statement today.

The company's expenses rose to ₹16,839 crore, up from ₹14,655 crore in the year-ago period. The company's EBITDA stood at ₹12,009 crore, up 4.5% as compared to ₹11,489 crore during Q2 FY23. The company's operating profit margin in Q3 FY23 was 26.6%, up from 26.3% in Q2 FY23 and 26.1% in the year-ago period.

In the previous quarter of FY23, Reliance Jio had clocked in a net profit of ₹4,729 crore against ₹3,728 crore in the year-ago period, a growth of 26.9%. Its revenue surged 22.8% to ₹28,506 crore.

As per the latest available Trai data till October 2022, Reliance Jio has the highest number of wireless subscribers at 42.1 crore in India. With intense competition from rival telco Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio is pushing hard to ramp up 5G infrastructure in the country. The company this week launched its True 5G service across 16 more cities. With this, Jio has launched its 5G services across 134 cities of the country.

At the spectrum auction last year, Reliance Jio had acquired the largest wireless spectrum for 5G, which includes 700MHz, 800MHz, 1,800MHz, 3,300MHz, and 26GHz bands, for ₹88,078 crore. In November 2022, Reliance Jio became the first company to launch 5G across the Delhi-NCR.

Jio says it aims to build a strong pan-India 5G network and ensure a countrywide 5G rollout by end of 2023, for which it has committed an investment of ₹2 lakh crore. It has also entered into a strategic alliance with global players, including Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson and Finnish telecommunications firm Nokia, to develop a 5G network in India.

At the company’s 45th annual general meeting (AGM), Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries, said that with the launch of the 5G network, the oil-to-telecom conglomerate will use wireless and wireline assets to blanket 3.3 million square kilometres of India’s landmass with fibre quality broadband.

Meanwhile, Mukesh Ambani-led RIL will also announce its quarterly results shortly. In the first half of FY23, RIL reported a 19.4% increase in net profit to ₹34,955 crore, and a 41.7% surge in revenue to ₹496,479 crore. RIL had posted a net profit of ₹60,705 crore in FY22 — a 23.56% rise year-on-year — on revenue of ₹7,39,518 crore, a 43.81% increase.