Kiran Thomas, at earnings call at Q1 FY24 results

Extracts from presentation made by Kiran Thomas, President, Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited at financial results for Q1 FY24 announcement.

“Our 5G rollout has been underway since October of last year. Happy to announce that we are ahead of time with respect to how we are looking to complete this plan. Our plan on record is to complete pan-India rollout before the end of this calendar year, December 23.

You can see pictorially already how the 5G rollout has come along. What you see in yellow is the plan versus what you see substantially making rapid progress is what is shown in green. 65% of the scope is already completed, and as we speak more than 90% of the census towns are already covered by Jio’s 5G signal.

If you look at the number of sites which are deployed, 1,15,000 5G sites are already deployed in pan India, which roughly translates to nearly 7,00,000 5G cells, which is contributing to this rollout. So, all in all, we are on track to complete what is going to be the fastest 5G rollout anywhere in the world, creating a pan-India coverage for a large country like India within just over a year.

If you look at what that has translated to this entire 5G leadership that we are establishing is also resulting in accelerated customer acquisition numbers. If you look at how the net addition numbers have looked quarter on quarter, you can see that it has been growing quite healthily. When we started our rollout in late last year, the number was around 5.3 million net ads currently, then it grew to 6.5 million, and now we are approaching the 10 million mark of net ads.

In fact, this number is nearly 1.7 times what it was just a couple of quarters ago. And obviously, this is the net and picture. But if you look at even from a retention perspective, and also net port in coming from other operators, all of this is being driven by the superior network quality that is being established through both the 5G and the 4G deployments which are underway.

So, if you look at also how this number has grown year on year, subscriber growth, in a climate where the overall industry growth is very nearly zero, pretty flat growth, what you’re seeing is while the rest of the industry has seen de-growth of nearly 3.7%, that has largely been driven by nearly 7% growth year on year in Jio subscriber base. And if you look at the net port-ins, we were about two and a half times the net port-ins for us as compared to our nearest competitor.

While the 5G growth is really driving the top end with respect to quality customers, people who are really keen to upgrade their phones and take advantage of this network at the bottom of the pyramid, which is really this long-standing vision which has also been shared by our chairman pretty early, which is to make India 2G Mukt.

I think just recently we announced this product which is called Jio Bharat. This is a unique go-to-market approach where we have designed this instrument which can be delivered at under 1000 rupees price point with respect to the phone. But unlike in the past, what we are doing is really creating an ecosystem. So not just us, but this design by Jio product is now being supported by multiple OEMs. And all of these are being created in India, the entire supply chain the assembly is being done in India through multiple OEMs, with Jio as the technology provider. So, it has really been received well in the past few days. Our idea is to quickly deploy about a million of these devices through our own offering as well as through the OEM partners, and to learn from it and adapt and in a very agile way, improve this product rapidly and continue that growth. We’re pretty confident that this device both from a price point perspective and also from completely disruptive offerings – so it supports video streaming, including live video streaming on such an affordable device. And also, things like UPI, so really the India stack coming to life, even at this price point on the device. So, all in all, this entire package really translates into welcoming what used to be 2G customers, stuck with 2G devices, on to now the full 4G ecosystem, while still having the same level of affordability that they had with 2G devices. So, we are really looking forward to learning quickly from this initial deployment and to and to really push ahead that vision of 2G mukt India as quickly as possible.

JioFiber, coming to our home rollout, today, glad to announce that of all the wired broadband net adds which are happening in the country, Jio Fiber is driving nearly 80% of that net adds, and that has largely been driven by obviously a superior product offering, but also very competitive and innovative tariff plans which are really made it more attractive to customers. And if you look at what this has led to is nearly a 50% year on year growth in the subscriber base that we had.

Also, the good news is nearly 98% of the new additions are coming on the postpaid plan, which obviously means a higher quality customer base as well as obviously higher stickiness. We have also really pushed to accelerate this rollout through a partnership program. So, we are partnering with the local cable operators as one of the channels. They have deep presence into the towns of India. They have great relationships and obviously they have a physical presence in those catchments. So, really, we are looking now that partnership to really accelerate this rollout. Already, we have partnerships in more than thousand towns and that’s also really one of the secrets behind how we’ve been able to grow this fast. Of course, in terms of even data, while the growth has been 50% year on year, but if you can see the data traffic on JioFiber, that has grown even higher it has largely been driven by even higher engagement of the of the customers over the past year.

Looking forward, obviously we have spoken about this in the past updates, but while the fiber rollout is accelerating, we are also looking to even accelerate that further by using what we call AirFiber, which is delivering fiber like experiences using wireless. And while we have the 5G rollout underway, what we have done is we have created a very dedicated slice, because as you know we are a standalone network standalone 5G architecture which allows things like network slicing. So, we have created a dedicated network slice for home broadband activity in such a way that it does not conflict with obviously the mobility capacity that we are also rolling out. So, in a way we are created two lanes in our 5G Highway, one dedicated for the home rollout, AirFiber, and one still continuing to serve our 5G mobile customers with the best network anywhere in the world.

Of course, within the home, again we are upgrading our Wi Fi offering. As you know our JioFiber offer comes not just with the connectivity to the home, but also wall to wall Wi Fi coverage. So, we are now upgrading our Wi Fi offering to Wi Fi 6. So, our home gateway is now going forward will be Wi Fi 6 compatible which also means better indoor coverage. through Wi Fi as well. Also, Single Sign On. So along with our connectivity, we are also providing a set top box, along with a bundled offering of pretty much all the OTT media applications, plus a number of other content applications like YouTube etc that are part of that set top box offering.

And what we’re doing now is creating a single sign on framework which has already been there but making it even more intuitive and stronger to even support the Air fiber offering as well. And of course, now with additional technologies coming in, we are also augmenting our Network Operations Center and our service operations center, so that not just the network quality but the end-to-end service experience of our user, including of course the broadband coming into the home, the Wi Fi within the home, and obviously all these applications being delivered through the set top box can be monitored, and any issues can be proactively addressed even before sometimes our customers are even able to highlight any problems that they may be facing. So, all of this taken together, between JioFiber and Jio AirFiber means that we are accelerating our home broadband ambitions to connect as much as 100 million homes in the quickest possible timeframe.

Another now coming to digital platforms. One of the success stories that we have had in the in the last quarter is Jio Cinema. And really using Jio Cinemas to showcase a streaming experience at scale around IPL as the initial showcase of what is possible. Obviously even before IPL already started introducing the Jio Cinema capabilities through the FIFA as well as the Women’s IPL leading up to the men’s IPL that we had. But with Men’s IPL, we really created world records in pretty much every category that we can think about when it comes to live streaming. 32 million concurrent users watching IPL at its peak with more than 17 billion streams served over the season, obviously translating into nearly 160 billion minutes of watch time. And of course, all of this being done in multiple languages with all kinds of interactive features.

And effectively, you know, this has really set the stage for future. I think looking forward, we can see even more content coming to the through the streaming format as compared to what has traditionally been a linear broadcast-oriented format, which means obviously a set of superior watching experiences that all of the Jio customers can expect to have going forward.

All of this has been done through what we call a glass-to-glass solution which has been built by Jio Platforms. Everything from obviously the lowest latency showing a screen which is coming through the streaming format through the cloud, even faster than it can be on screen even through technologies like DTH, which are much simpler technologies, production being supported: While traditionally we only had up to HD but through the streaming format, we were able to support both 4k and 8k videos. Multiple cameras being offered simultaneously for users to choose from, obviously a pan India content delivery, content distribution network that we were able to create from scratch to be able to support the delivery of this media at scale, multiple other options for keeping the customers engaged, including things like Watch Party, where you can watch things with your friends, Play Along, which is obviously gamification of content so that people can actually consume interactive games while they’re watching the match.

A new monetization model, so this was entirely free from a subscription perspective. But behind the scenes, obviously, we stitched up our own ad platform, so that we were able to monetize it through the ad monetization framework. And like I said, all of these being done in multiple languages simultaneously. Some of it obviously being also curated content and curated commentary that we were introducing from Jio Cinema itself. So really an end-to-end solution, which really proved the point that India is ready for streaming and really migrating away from the linear model that the world is moving away from India could do it much faster.

One of the other platform areas which is also finding traction is our IoT platform. So, everything from monitoring assets, to utilities, to things like transportation, to even things like agriculture. So now our IoT platform slowly but surely has been gaining adoption. If you look at the right, there are these logos everybody from Mahindra, Havells, Schneider, Tata Power, and when it comes to automotive, partnerships with the likes of BMW, Volkswagen, Ather, and on the Agri side, people like Amul; all of that really using the power of the sensors that we have designed and embedded into many of the solutions that they’re using, supported by the narrowband IoT network, which is pan-India. And in many cases, also providing the back-end analytics and cloud capabilities, all packaged as one end-to-end solution that we are able to offer across these industry verticals across these customers. So again, this is an exciting area for us looking forward and this will be a very strong source of additional revenue for JPL looking forward.”

CT Bureau