Jio’s Free Lifetime Calls Get Clean Chit From TRAI; Major Highlights of Reliance’s Q2 Results

 

Mukesh Ambani led Reliance Industries has posted yet another billion dollar profit during Q2 of financial year 2016-17. While announcing the results yesterday, RIL informed all shareholders that their quarterly consolidated net profit for Q2 was Rs 7206 crore or $1.1 billion, which was up 46% compared to previous quarter.

Compared to last quarter, RIL posted an increase of 18% for standalone profit.

On one hand consolidated profit dropped 24% to Rs 7833 crore during Q2, compared to Rs 10,314 crore reported last year’s Q2; consolidated revenue increased to Rs 81,651 crore compared to Rs 74,490 crore last year, during the same period.

As of September 30, RIL has cash reserve of $12.4 billion, and outstanding debt consisted of $28.4 billion. During Q2 of 2016-17, Reliance Industries incurred capital expenditure of $2.6 billion. For the half year ending on September 30th, 2016 was $6.6 billion, with majority of this expense occurring due to Jio’s launch in September, and on-going petrochemical projects at Jamnagar, Dahej, Hazira and few US Shale Oil projects.

We scooped out some major highlights from their Digital Services business, which includes their newly launched telecom network Jio besides spectrum and other telecom services.

a) Jio is the only network conceived and born as a Mobile Video Network from ground up and supporting Voice over LTE technology. It’s already future ready, and can support 5G, 6G and beyond.

b) Jio’s sign-up process is completely digital as they are using Aadhaar card based e-KYC process, which takes only a few minutes to complete. This paper-less eKYC process has been launched across 4100 cities and towns.

c) During the first month of operations, Jio activated 16 million subscribers, a record which beats WhatsApp, Facebook and Skype in user-acquisition.

d) During the first week of launch, Jio’s applications were ranked within top 15 in Google Playstore and Apple’s Appstore.

e) RIL admitted that due to issues related with interconnectivity, their customers’ voice calling experience was pretty bad. As per RIL, 75 calls out of 100 were dropped due to this issue, which is clearly a breach of Quality of Service regulation by TRAI.

f) During the quarter, Jio acquired 269.2 MHz (UL+DL) spread across 22 service areas in India. For this, RIL paid Rs 13,672 crore, for a period of 20 years.

g) Overall, Jio has control over 1,108 MHz of spectrum, with an average life of 16 years.

h) Right now, Jio is the only operator using sub-GHz spectrum band for LTE services in India.

TRAI Gives Clean Chit To Jio Over Free Calls

Meanwhile, there is another news which will bring cheers from Jio camp.

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has given clean chit to Jio over their life time offer of free calls for their customers. In a statement issued to all telecom operators, TRAI has said that Jio’s free call offer cannot be termed as ‘IUC non-complaint, predatory and discriminatory’.

Responding to this statement from TRAI, Reliance Jio said: “This (Trai’s letter) clearly establishes the fact that all the tariffs offered by RJIL are in compliance with the prevailing regulations. A key feature of RJIL’s tariff packs is free voice calling for Local, STD and National roaming for all times..”

Earlier, there were speculations in the media that free calls offered by Jio breaks TRAI’s regulations and such offers cannot be given to customers. Jio had already committed that no matter what happens, calls would be always free on their network.

As of now, Jio has confirmed that their Welcome Offer subscription would be available till December 3rd, and all benefits of Welcome Offer (free voice, Internet and bouquet of Jio apps) would be accessed till December 31st.

After December 3rd, Jio will launch new tariffs and offers for customers.

We will keep you updated as more details come in..