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Reliance Jio turns in first quarterly profit

In its second set of broken out financials, the upstart Indian telco has posted a quarterly net profit of 504 crore rupees, or almost $79 million.
Written by Chris Duckett, Contributor

Indian telco Reliance Jio has posted its first quarterly net profit since kicking off its service in September 2016.

For the company's third quarter, reported on Friday [PDF], the telco posted net profit of 504 crore rupees, almost $79 million, and earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) 2,628 crore rupees, approximately $412 million, from operating revenue of 6,879 crore rupees, or just over $1 billion.

In the previous quarter, the telco made a 271 crore rupees net loss on 6,147 crore rupees of revenue.

Jio said its subscriber base sits at 160 million users as of December 31, 2017, and its average revenue per user sits at 154 rupees, or $2.41, while each user consumes 9.6GB on average every month.

During the quarter, Jio said it added 28 million subscribers and its churn rate was the lowest in the subcontinent, sitting at 1.4 percent. It additionally claimed that it was the first exabyte network globally, and would hit 99 percent population coverage in India in 2018.

The company said it was currently trialling fibre to the home and enterprise solutions based on its existing networks and stack.

Jio recently began offering a deal at 153 rupees per month that allows users to have free voice calls, half a GB of data per day, and unlimited SMS.

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