Indian operator Reliance Jio Infocomm reported a near tripling in its net profit for the fiscal fourth quarter to March, to INR 23.3 billion from INR 8.4 billion a year earlier. The customer base rose by 26.3 percent year-on-year to 387.5 million, and Jio added a net 17.5 million new customers in Q4 alone.
Quarterly revenues increased 26.6 percent to INR 148.4 billion. Jio also improved its EBITDA margin, to 41.8 percent from 37.0 percent a year earlier, as total EBITDA rose 43.2 percent to INR 62.0 billion.
In addition to customer growth, the operator reported a strong increase in traffic. Mobile data was up 34.3 percent year-on-year to 12.8 billion GB, and voice traffic rose 21.0 percent to 876.3 billion minutes. Average use per customer was 11.3 GB and 771 minutes per month.
Churn reduced compared to the previous quarter to 0.57 percent, and ARPU was at INR 130.6 per month.
Jio said it had started aggressive sales initiatives to help offset the slowdown in subscriber additions since the Covid-19 lockdown took effect in India. The company is offering double data and extra off-net minutes on mobile packs, double data on JioFiber and a free 10 Mbps fibre offer, and an extra 100 minutes and SMS and free incoming calls for JioPhone users. The network operations have been unaffected the company said, as much is virtualised and automated already, and there is sufficient capacity to meet the extra demand.
The FTTH and Enterprise services have benefited from the move to home working, the company said. It's in the process of converting the FTTH trial users to paid plans and ramping up sales across 1,600 cities. The company also introduced this quarter the Jio POS-Lite, a mobile device for entrepreneurs to sell its products to smaller communities.
