Reliance Industries Ltd in its second quarter result on Wednesday reported that the telecom-oil-to-retail conglomerate came up with more than 600 new stores in the second quarter of the ongoing financial year, averaging almost seven new stores every day.
Reliance Jio, the quarter report added, now has almost 72 percent of market share of entire 4G traffic data in India. Jio also now has more than 25 crore subscribers.
The revenues for Jio crossed Rs 10,900 crore quarter-on-quarter and carried 11 GB of data per month with an average speed of 22.3 mbps.
Jio also recorded a quarter-on-quarter spike in revenue of 25 percent.
RIL’s Chief Finance Officer Alok Agarwal informed that Jio is now spread across 5,800 towns and cities across 9,100 stores.
RIL also opened 1,343 new retail outlets with a total footfall rising by 33 percent on a year-on-year basis.
Agarwal added that Jio’s call drop rate is the lowest in India at 0.1 percent.
Additionally, RIL reported a 0.6 percent sequential growth in consolidated profit to Rs 9,516 crore for the quarter ended September 2018.
Meanwhile, Hathway approved raising fund up to Rs 2,940 crore via preferential allotment to RIL.
Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd’s impending deals with Den Networks Ltd and Hathway Cable & Datacom Ltd may not only allow the company gallop to 1,100 cities and target 50 million homes with its broadband services faster, but also reduce the cost of reaching out to customers as last mile capex will not be incurred by Reliance Jio alone, said two people aware of the development.
According to news report, Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) could buy more than a 25 percent stake in each of these two companies to boost its high-speed broadband network. RIL had in July unveiled its fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband plans.
Additionally, deals with Hathway and Den Networks will help Reliance Jio GigaFiber achieve last-mile connectivity, overcoming the challenges the company has been facing from local cable operators who stonewalled its expansion plans.
Reliance Jio is building a robust digital content ecosystem in the country, which will get a huge boost after the official rollout of its fixed broadband service, called GigaFiber.
Hathway Cable is owned by the Raheja Group while Sameer Manchanda owns DEN Networks. Both these companies have informed the stock exchanges that their respective boards are meeting on October 17 to discuss and approve a proposal for raising funds. Interestingly, RIL’s step-down subsidiary, Reliance Jio Media, which owns a pan-India cable licence, already boast links with both companies JioGigaFiber hopes to leverage.
The fixed broadband market is dominated by the state-owned BSNL, which has a subscriber base of 9.15 million subscribers, followed by Airtel with 2.21 million customers. Atria Convergence Technologies holds the third largest share with 1.34 million subscribers.
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Source: News18