Reliance Industries Ltd
NSE:RELIANCE
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Reliance Industries Ltd
Earnings Call Analysis
Q1-2025 Analysis
Reliance Industries Ltd
Reliance Industries recently held an earnings call where they revealed significant information on the performance of their various business segments for the first quarter of the financial year 2024-2025. In this review, we will break down the key takeaways from the call, focusing on the consolidated performance, retail, digital services, and oil and gas segments.
Reliance Industries reported an EBITDA of INR 42,748 crore, a modest increase of 2% year-on-year. This incremental growth was primarily driven by the consumer business and robust upstream operations, which managed to offset the weaker performance in their oil to chemicals (O2C) segment. The overall revenue saw an 11.5% rise to INR 258,000 crore, while the profit after tax (PAT) dipped by 4.5% year-on-year to INR 17,500 crore. This decline in PAT was largely due to challenging conditions in the O2C business.
Reliance's retail segment continued its expansion trajectory, with revenues growing by 8% to INR 75,615 crore. EBITDA for the retail division rose by 10% to INR 5,664 crore, supported by operational efficiencies and an increase in footfalls. The segment achieved an EBITDA margin of 8.2%, a year-on-year improvement of 30 basis points. This growth was attributed to an increase in store count, with 331 new stores added this quarter, bringing the total to 18,918 stores covering 81.3 million square feet. The consumer electronics business saw significant growth driven by high demand for air conditioners, refrigerators, and TVs due to the hot summer and major sports events like the Cricket World Cup and IPL. However, the Fashion & Lifestyle segment faced slower growth due to tepid discretionary spending.
Reliance Jio, the digital arm, posted strong results with a revenue growth of 12.8% year-on-year to INR 29,449 crore and an EBITDA increase of 11.6% to INR 14,638 crore, resulting in an EBITDA margin of 49.7%. The segment's growth was fueled by an 8 million net increase in subscribers, bringing the total to 489.7 million. Notably, the company now has the world's largest 5G subscriber base outside of China, with 130 million users. Data consumption also surged by 33% to 44.1 billion GB with per capita usage jumping to 30 GB per month.
The oil and gas segment reported an EBITDA of INR 5,210 crore, reflecting a 30% year-on-year increase. This was mainly due to a substantial rise in production, particularly from the KG D6 block, where production increased by 44% year-on-year. However, the EBITDA growth was partially dampened by a 14% decline in price realization. The company also saw improvements in their Coal Bed Methane (CBM) production, driven by a significant well development program. The global LNG market showed strong demand, especially from India where the power sector's consumption surged.
Despite achieving robust results across several segments, Reliance faced challenges, particularly in the O2C segment. The EBITDA for O2C fell by 14% year-on-year to INR 13,100 crore, largely due to weaker product margins, particularly in gasoline and polymers. However, some relief came from low ethane prices and strong domestic demand. In the short term, geopolitical uncertainties and volatile energy markets present risks, but the long-term structural fundamentals for oil and refining remain solid. Reliance's commitment to technology and infrastructure investments, particularly in the digital and retail segments, positions it well to maintain growth momentum. The company's balanced portfolio and strategic investments aim to drive future performance while navigating external challenges.
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Good evening, and welcome to the first quarter financial year 2024-2025 financial business presentation of Reliance Industries. As always, we will have Srikanth walk you through the consolidated performance of the quarter, followed by Anshuman Thakur, who will give you the overview of Jio's performance; Dinesh Taluja, on Retail; Sanjay Roy on E&P, then Srikanth will to come back to talk about O2C and summarize our performance. Over to you, Srikanth.
Thanks, Srini, and good evening to all of you. Starting with the performance, EBITDA at INR 42,748 crore, up 2% year-on-year. This is important for me to say that the growth in consumer business and strong upstream offset weak O2C. On retail, we have seen growth led by grocery and consumer electronics and also improvements in the overall customer engagement as well as contribution from digital channels. On the digital side, benefits coming from healthy subscriber addition and also increasing FTTH penetration. Overall, on the O2C side, we will see it later on, but clearly, decline in fuel cracks and challenging downstream margin environment. In oil and gas, led by higher volumes, which was offset a little bit by lower price realization.
So for us, the diversified portfolio helped deliver this performance with consumer being more than half of the overall earnings. Specifically on retail, you can see revenue is at almost INR 76,000 crores, EBITDA about INR 5,700 crores. They are up about 8% and about 10.5%. Overall PAT at INR 2,549 crores, up close to 5%. And you can see some of the operational metrics like footfall 296 million, up 19%; registered customer base at 316, up 18%. When you look at revenue and EBITDA growth, it includes the fact that we had strong consumer electronics business growth, specifically ACs and refrigerators and TVs. We also had strong performance in grocery stores, some of the sales that we did showed high traction with almost 30% year-on-year growth. However, in fashion and lifestyle, it was much more tepid with discretionary demand being lower there. So that -- in some sense, that was vis-a-vis consumer electronics and grocery, it was on the lower side.
The revenue and EBITDA growth also covers for the fact that there was a streamlining of operations with focus on margin improvement. And as you can see, year-on-year, there has been an improvement of margin by almost 30 basis points at 8.5%. Also, when you look at the -- while the gross adds were at 331, you can see that the net adds were about 82 stores. Also the performance covers for the fact that we continued to focus on enhancing the tech platform, focus on supply chain and distribution capabilities. This is for us to maintain our growth momentum, both in the near and medium term. So for us, strengthening the market leadership in a structurally long-term growth industry, that's really what has been the focus here.
On digital side, revenues and EBITDA up -- revenue is at 12.8% and 11.6% for EBITDA, almost INR 15,000 crores of EBITDA. This is on the back of subscriber addition. We added 41 million on a year-on-year basis and 8 million in just this quarter. Data traffic data, you can see it's about almost 33% at 44.1 billion GB and 130 million subscribers migrated to Jio through 5G and Anshuman will cover. At this level, we are the largest operator in the world when you look at data capacity and what we handle. Also, we'll be the second largest in terms of 5G subscribers. And as you know, the tariff hike happened and the benefits of the tariff hike will be seen in the coming quarters.
On the O2C side, as you can see, INR 13,100 crores EBITDA, lower 14% on a year-on-year basis. And that is primarily driven by gasoline cracks, which was down 30%. PE was down, PP was down anywhere between 16% to 17%. Polyester chain, integrated deltas were also lower by 15%. These are big products and you could see these are big falls in terms of margin, but it was partially offset by the fact that we continued to benefit from being able to crack ethane and also the domestic demand, both for oil, polymer and polyester held well.
Overall, when you see the performance in energy markets, you are seeing this kind of volatility in earnings at different points in time. It is geopolitics. It's whether. It is outages. It's refining capacity. So when you look back over the last 8 quarters, we have seen EBITDA ranging anywhere between INR 12,000 crores to INR 20,000 crores. But overall, fair to say that the structural drivers of the business remain fairly very constructive. So therefore, this performance would have to be seen in that context.
Oil and gas, INR 5,210 crores of EBITDA, it's up 30%. This was on the back of volume increase, as you can see, KG D6 production up 44% on a year-on-year basis. However, there was price correction of a decrease of about 14% resulting in net EBITDA of 30%. Overall, we now have gas of almost 29 MMSCMD. It used to be 20 MMSCMD same time last year and oil and condensate production of almost 22,000 barrels per day.
This is the overall financial results. As I was highlighting to you, revenue at INR 258,000 crores, up 11.5%. As you know, both because of O2C revenues being higher because oil prices were much higher than what it was a year back. Also, it is also on the back of growth in retail. EBITDA, we spoke about overall growth of 2% with consumer businesses more than offsetting the sharp reduction in O2C performance, given the broader operating context there. And therefore, you could see the translation coming through in terms of PAT at INR 17,500, which is lower by 4.5% on a year-on-year basis.
Just the bridge, when you see a year-on-year comparison, I talked about cracks, gasoline, PE, PP, polyester chain being lower. I talked about oil and gas benefiting from higher volume, but to some extent, offset by lower price there. Retail benefiting from store expansion and increasing footfalls. Digital side benefiting from customer add, I mentioned about 41 million year-on-year and also the fact that people are using more, 33% increase in data traffic. Now per user per month is almost 30 GB per customer. So you're seeing good traction in terms of consumption of services. On the quarter-on-quarter side, predominantly what you see and hear that the product mix was slightly different in the sense that the big fall you saw was really in gasoline, gas oil and ATF, which was down about 36% to 37%. There was actually an uptick in terms of downstream with PVC up 17% and PE up 7%. Oil and gas was marginal declines in volume that we saw, and realization also was marginally lower.
On retail, the effect of lower discretionary spend, especially on fashion and lifestyle and the fact that I referred to the streamlining of operations and the focus on some of the other areas that I talked about. And digital services, strong traction with 8 million customers being added on the network and also good traction on Jio AirFiber, which Anshuman will talk about.
Overall, net debt at about INR 112,000 crores versus an INR 116,281 crores in March. And CapEx overall INR 29,000 crores, which is much lesser than the cash profits that we have been generating and also significantly lower than the CapEx of close to INR 39,000 crores, which we had same time last year.
Overall net debt to EBITDA well within the very conservative framework that we have. So we have the balance sheet strength to deliver on some of the growth initiatives that we have and importantly for generating value. With this, I'm handing it over to Anshuman.
Thank you, Srikanth. Good evening, everyone. I'll take you through the results of the Digital Services business and Jio. In terms of the highlights for the quarter, the JPL consolidated revenues came in at INR 29,449 crores, which is a growth of 12.8% Y-o-Y and EBITDA at INR 14,638 crores. So fairly healthy growth driven by a combination of things. Operating performance was good. Subscriber uptake of new services was good. And we continue to see good traction across all of the service offerings. The subscriber base for the quarter ended at 489.7 million, which was a net addition of 8 million for the quarter.
The 5G subscriber base was close to 130 million, which makes the largest 5G subscriber base outside of China. ARPU for the quarter came in at INR 181.7 which was almost at the same level as the previous quarter. Again, a combination of things here, some improvement because of increased utilization, but given the promotional efforts at this point in time for promoting 5G consumption, there was an impact on ARPU. I would just remind you that this does not factor in any of the tariff increase. The tariff increase happened after the quarter had ended. On the data consumption itself, we saw a very healthy growth trend, 33% year-on-year increase in data traffic at 45, almost close -- a bit over 44 exabyte for the quarter, which now makes Jio the world's largest operator in terms of data traffic. And this is compared with all of the other operators. So that excluding China qualifier does not apply year.
Also, 5G now accounts for 31% of the overall wireless data traffic, so very healthy growth in 5G. The subscribers are consuming a lot of data and the per capita data consumption is growing fairly rapidly. On the fixed wireless or the homes front, our FTTH business continues to do well and grow healthily. The fixed wireless business is also -- we crossed 1 million connections there, and the performance has been very steady. The data consumption, customer engagement metrics are all very healthy. We continue to build on the #1 position that we have in the broadband services with more than 60% share of the industry net adds. So all in all, fairly healthy, good, robust performance, good growth. The growth momentum being driven by the 5G mobility and AirFiber, very high data consumption uptake. So the things that we're targeting have been delivered quite well this quarter.
So as I said, the transition to 5G has been ahead of schedule. People are taking up 5G services very rapidly. We are already -- we have the world's largest 5G subscriber base outside of China at close to 130 million. And the 5G data accounting for 31% of the overall data traffic on the Jio network. All of this data has been carried on our own 5G plus 4G combo core. So this is our own network, the core network that Jio had put together, that is carrying all of this traffic and our tech capabilities are getting validated on the field with extremely high utilization, in terms of both number of subscribers and overall data consumption. Riding on the benefits of 5G, we started launching some new services in the market as well. You would have come across some of these JioSafe, which is an app for ultra secure communication, quantum level security on a 5G network now. Given our stand-alone 5G network, we are able to do some of these things, which would not have been possible on any other network or even on 5G is only possible with the stand-alone configuration that we've got.
JioTranslate, another app, which with now fairly -- the quality of networks being so much better, the latency being so much lower, it's time to launch some of these kind of apps and services, which are very useful for people. We have covered almost all of the Indian languages in this app, and it's real-time conversation like feeling. So I'd encourage you to go and try this app as well on the Jio 5G network.
Moving on to the AirFiber and our home offering. We are continuing to push the AirFiber offering. It is now available across the country, pan-India, and we're seeing demand coming pan-India -- not only from the metro and Tier 1 cities, but Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities as well, small towns. We have seen demand coming pretty much from all across the country. And we are being able to service that demand now with our network available across the country. The run rate of connecting new homes has been picking up and this quarter, we have had the highest ever quarterly home connects at over 1.1 million. And as we keep deploying across the country, we expect to be able to connect many more homes in the quarters to come.
I spoke about stand-alone 5G network, the ability to do things on that stand-alone network like network slicing or also deploy point-to-multipoint offerings is helping us give very high throughput and fiber-like experience on our AirFiber service. And in fact, in terms of data consumption, time utilization, et cetera, the AirFiber homes are currently keeping pace. In fact, most of them are doing -- consuming more data than the FTTH homes and the uptake has been very, very encouraging. There is clear service differentiation and innovative distribution, which is helping us increase demand for the service.
Moving on to the Enterprise business, where also we have been making inroads in key verticals as per our strategic direction. This is something we've been speaking to you about the last few quarters. We are now successfully displacing competition wherever we are getting an opportunity. As you would appreciate, enterprise deals tend to be longer tenure. So we have to wait for the opportunity where these come up for renewal and then make our entry, and we've been able to do that. We have expanded our wallet share beyond connectivity. So once again, for us, enterprise offering is a combination of connectivity, but value-added services, and we have spoken about these value-added services with you in the past, which is what we take to the market. And this would include Cloud, Chatbot, CPaaS and several vertical solutions that we offer to our clients. So we've been expanding wallet share across connectivity into these other services that we are offering.
We are building partner ecosystems as well to tap into opportunities, especially in some of the specialized sectors where getting access through partner ecosystem is easier and faster. Another service offering, which is gaining traction is IOT and here, again, it's a combination of connectivity, device and the software element, the platform itself that we offer to our clients, and we are seeing good uptake in these services as well. There have been cohort specific propositions. And in the past, we've spoken with you about some of these, like those for the hospitality segment. So we are seeing good traction in education, manufacturing and hospitality. BFSI continues to be very strong for us. And in BFSI, therefore, we are now leveraging on the relationships to offer more services and also tie up with some of our BFSI clients to do more beyond just providing them connectivity and some enterprise offerings.
So all in all, we're seeing good traction in the Enterprise segment, which is building up quite well for us. A couple of updates now which happened during the quarter or towards the end of the quarter. One was the tariff increase. You're already familiar with this. This was announced and made effective from the 3rd of July. So not in the previous quarter, the impact will only be seen starting this quarter. The tariff increase across the industry was in the 13% to 25% range. But what we have done is for the JioBharat and JioPhone which are the entry-level devices which really are focused towards our aim of 2G Mukt Bharat and really transitioning all of the subscribers on to digital services and digital platforms, which is an aim that we have got. For them, there has been no change in tariff.
In addition, for the 5G experience that we are currently offering is still available at no additional cost to subscribers who have subscribed to certain plans and this is to encourage 5G consumption on the network and people to adopt more and more of 5G services. We expect -- as was on expected lines post the tariff increase, the other operators have also raised tariffs. Overall, the industry tariff levels have gone up. There may be some transient impact. But we think in the longer term, this is going to be good for the overall telecom industry and help build a premier digital society and strengthen the overall sector.
The other development in the previous quarter was the spectrum auction, which happened. As we have told you in the past, we have a very good spectrum bank with us, which fulfills the requirements across all of the services that we are offering, LTE, 5G, whatever we're doing at home and using some of that spectrum. So we were very focused in acquiring more spectrum or right to use spectrum only in places where we have seen demand go up, the data consumption going up and therefore, in order to ensure that the customer service never suffered, we added more spectrum in Bihar and West Bengal in the 1,800 MHz band at a total cost of INR 974 crores. So we were very focused in looking at spectrum which we really needed to just ensure that our customers always get the best offering. Otherwise, we have fairly good spectrum bank to offer all of the services that we are doing.
Our spectrum footprint across brands is now at 26,801 MHz. This is combining across all of the circles in the country and uplink and downlink together. You would know already, just reiterating that we are the only operator who is running 5G across low band, mid-band and high band, 700 MHz, 3300 MHz, and 26 GHz which gives us unique advantages like carrier aggregation and stand-alone network.
Moving on to the operating and financial metrics, key operating metrics for RJIL, our connectivity business, we ended the quarter at 489.7 million subscribers, that's an addition of 8 million for the quarter. ARPU came in at INR 181.7, almost similar to the last quarter for reasons that I already spoke about. The 5G consumption uptick has driven data consumption to 30.3 GB per user per month. That's more than 1 GB per user per day, something that we used to speak about when we have just about started that consumers should be consuming more than 1 GB of data per day. And the voice traffic also continues to be healthy. So all of the business KPIs or the operating KPIs growing healthily.
Moving on to the RJIL financials. This is just for the connectivity business. The operating revenues increased to INR 2,478 crores, that was a 10.1% year-on-year increase and the EBITDA went up to INR 14,022 crores at an EBITDA margin of 53%. So the margins have kept on steadily improving and fairly consistent performance on this front.
Moving on to the consolidated financials for Jio Platforms Limited. The operating revenues for the quarter came in at INR 29,449 crores. That was a 12.8% year-on-year growth. The EBITDA was at INR 14,638 crores and the EBITDA margin was 49.7%. Profit after tax increased to INR 5,693 crores, again, around 11.7% year-on-year increase. So fairly steady across all of the key financial metrics as well. With that, I will hand over to Dinesh to take you through the results of the retail business. Thank you, everyone, and have a good evening.
Thanks, Anshuman. Hi. Good evening, everyone. For the retail business, the revenue had an 8% growth year-on-year at INR 75,615 crores. EBITDA growth was at 10% at INR 5,664 crores. This was led by growing footfalls, expansion of our store footprint as well as streamlining of operations, which is driving the margin improvement. Our EBITDA margin from operations came in at 8.2%, which is a 30 basis points growth on a Y-o-Y basis. All our operational metrics, whether it's registered customers, footfalls or transactions show healthy growth trend. All our channels continue to grow well. Digital commerce and new commerce contribution stands at 18% of total revenues. We opened 331 new stores during the quarter with a gross area addition of 3.1 million square feet. The net addition was at 82 for the quarter, and the total store count stands at 18,918 with a total area of 81.3 million square feet.
We continued to make enhancements to our technology platform, our supply chain capabilities, our distribution capabilities. All of these are putting us in a good position to sustain the growth momentum in the near and medium term. We've covered this revenue growth of 8% at INR 75,615 crores, EBITDA of INR 5,664 crores, a 10% growth and profit after tax at INR 2,549 crores.
Moving on to the highlights for each of the consumption baskets. The consumer electronics business had a healthy growth on average bill values as well as growth in customer walk-ins. Our digital stores continue to deliver steady growth with high percent LFL growth. We had a really hot summer, so the growth in summer season was driven by ACs and refrigerators plus we had Cricket World Cup and IPL, which drove the demand for TVs. ResQ, which is our services business. We launched 50 plus new centers during the quarter. We also launched on-demand services, which are now available in 45 cities where basically customers can book out of warranty services on the app, and we will service those. Our B2B2C business, JMD continues to grow across categories. Mobile phone is the biggest portion, but even other categories are growing well. We continue to expand our merchant base, which is up 14% Y-o-Y.
Our product business, we continue to launch new products across categories as well as grow our distribution network, which is up 100% on a Y-o-Y basis. We are already getting a good volume share in the overall industry as well as the share in our own digital stores, for our own products, is growing steadily.
Fashion & Lifestyle business, the demand for the -- it has been across the industry, the discretionary spend has been tepid. Our focus has been on ensuring that we refresh the assortment, we have trendy assortment in our stores and we continue to expand our store footprint. Our new formats, Yousta, Azorte, and GAP, which we had launched last year, they continue to receive very strong traction from consumers, and we are scaling up these formats substantially. We also announced an exclusive partnership with ASOS, the U.K. fast fashion retailer, to launch their brands in India, across both online and offline channels. ASOS is primarily an online retailer, but we'll also be opening stores for them in India.
Our online fashion business, our Ajio B2C had another very steady quarter. We added close to 2 million customers during the quarter. The focus has been on differentiating by exclusive brands, exclusive products and we continue to expand our brand portfolio with the catalogue growing more than 20% on a Y-o-Y basis. We added multiple new brands across categories during the quarter. Also, our flagship Big Bold Sale event did very well. We had a 20% higher traffic and 50% higher conversion versus BAU during this period.
Premium brands business, we continue to expand the stores. We also are looking at expanding into new categories. So on the F&B business, we opened multiple Pret A Manger new stores. This is a franchise that we have for India. AjioLuxe, which is the premium luxury fashion destination. We had a strong growth in the number of brands as well as number of options. The total portfolio of luxury brands on the platform crossed 700 and it is the leading platform for luxury fashion in the country.
On our beauty business, as you would recollect, we have taken over the Sephora franchise for India. And we have done a couple of big brand exclusive launches during the quarter. Kylie Cosmetics and Rare Beauty summer collection. Jewels business also delivered a steady growth in spite of the gold prices rising substantially. We launched almost 30 new collections, which helps us differentiate in the market to capitalize on both Akshay Tritiya as well as the wedding season, and the business continues on a steady growth path. We continue to leverage events, festivals to really drive assortment, which is relevant for the occasion. And during Akshay Tritiya, we had very strong growth.
Grocery had another steady quarter led by the big box format, Smart and Smart Bazaar and expansion into Tier 2 and beyond cities. For many of the cities, we are the first modern trade retailer in those locations. In addition, we are expanding our premium formats of Signature and Freshpik in select affluent catchments, they offer an opportunity for better margins and throughput as well as differentiate our brand. Our key flagship events, Summer Ready Sale and Paisa Vasool sale have got good traction in customer engagement with healthy growth over the same period last year. We had broad-based growth across categories, pulses, cereals, nonfood. General merchandise and apparel, their share is growing, which is helping on margins as well.
Also, it was a summer season and some of the seasonal categories like cool drinks, ice creams and even some of the seasonal fruits like mango did extremely well. Our B2B business, Metro, we continued to scale the store presence. We opened 30 new stores during the quarter, taking the total store count to 200 plus with presence across 180+ cities. This model enables us to offer an omnichannel model to the merchants, where they come into the stores and experience the wide range of assortment plus they can order online at their convenience on the app as well.
JioMart, the focus has been on enhancing the economics by increasing average order values, which were up 16% on a Y-o-Y basis. As you are aware, it started as a grocery platform. But over the last 18 months, we've been working on growing it as a multi-category horizontal platform. And towards that objective, the non-grocery categories, both 1P as well as 3P continue to do well.
Electronics, which is a key category after grocery, had a 50% growth on a Y-o-Y basis. We continue to add new options as well as the seller base to expand the options which are available to the consumer so that they have a wide choice when they come to the platform. We are also leveraging our hyperlocal presence for customer acquisition and target them for grocery and cross-sell other categories through targeted interventions. We have a big advantage with our pan-India store network compared to any of the other online players, who spend a lot on customer acquisition. We are able to take very targeted initiatives and create customer stickiness through an omnichannel offering.
We continue to improve our platform and add new functionalities. It's an ongoing endeavor to enhance the experience of the consumers and we added some interesting options during the quarter. For example, if you have SKUs with multiple weights, there's a weight drop down based on which the customer can just select what weight of that category do they want.
Our consumer brands business, which is one of our newer businesses, continues to get very strong traction in the market. We now have multi-category presence across beverages, staples, home and personal care, processed food, et cetera. And across categories, we have been launching new products as well as we have been expanding our presence in the general trade channel, which delivered 150% of Y-o-Y growth. While the business has a big advantage of leveraging our own store network as well as the B2B channel that we have, but we are also taking these brands into general trade, and they're getting very strong traction there.
During the quarter, we launched products across multiple brands, including Campa, Independence, Maliban, Ravalgaon, et cetera. The idea is to have an expanded portfolio at attractive price points. And there are multiple pilots underway across different categories. So you'll see a host of product launches in the coming quarters, which will further enhance our product portfolio. We are also investing in strengthening the supply chain across categories through partnering with different players so that we have localized supply chain, which will give us a big cost advantage over other FMCG companies. That's it for our consumer brands. We can move on to the oil and gas section.
Thanks, Dinesh. Good evening, everyone. Just to recap the performance over the last quarter. So in EBITDA, we are marginally lower quarter-on-quarter with INR 5,210 crores, but a substantial jump year-on-year, almost 30%. This is mainly on the back of steady production from KG D6. We continue to produce around 29 million standard cubic meters of gas and about 22,000 barrels of oil in condensate. The main impact was felt due to the price realization. In the month of April, we saw prices come in much lower. But as the months roll by, in the subsequent 2 months, we saw, global markets, a price surge. And accordingly, we've seen better price realizations over that period.
CBM, the good news is that we're seeing a turnaround in the field. The production has been up by almost 10%, both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year. And the 40-well multi-lateral well program, that is currently underway, is yielding positive results. We have completed 21 wells and the balance wells are expected to be put online by the year-end, and we expect to see an incremental 0.5 million standard cubic meters of gas in that period from these wells. All in all, a strong EBITDA, driven by higher production and stable operations. So overall, you can see that the production has grown 4x, and we are currently focusing on sustaining this production which both from KG D6 as well as ramping up production from CBM.
In terms of the global markets, so like I mentioned, it was an interesting quarter. The first month, there were headwinds. Prices had gone down to almost -- the price realization was around $8.50 or so. But with time -- with the outages globally in LNG terminals as well as some of the production disruptions and maintenance activities that were undertaken we could see coupled with some of the strong summer demand from Asia, particularly due to the heat waves and so on and outages in nuclear plants and coal plants in Asia, particularly in Japan and Korea, overall, the supply is coming down, demand being stronger. Consequently, we saw prices go all the way up to $13, slightly over $13 in June, and we saw better realizations.
In the short term, we expect prices to be range bound. We don't expect any major new LNG capacity additions as well as there is expected to be maintenance activities in the Norwegian fields. Uncertainty of the Russia pipeline supplies also looms largely in the near term. And we believe that with strong Brent prices, prices for LNG look to be in a firm place. Overall, we expect prices to remain supportive in the near term.
And then gas market looks quite robust. In fact, LNG imports increased by 30% in the first quarter and mainly driven by CGD demand and higher gas-based power generation due to the heat waves in India. In fact, we almost saw the consumption go up to 40 million standard cubic meters in the power sector compared to the 24 million standard cubic meters as well as in CGD, we saw the demand go up from about 37 million standard cubic meters to up to 41 million standard cubic meters. So good demand in those sectors. As such, in this half, the ceiling price remains at $9.87 per MMBtu. Overall, with the pipeline infrastructure we have and surging power demand, we expect the demand to remain robust in India. Thank you.
Thanks, Sanjay. So moving to the last part of the presentation for O2C, EBITDA at INR 13,100 crores, lower by 14% on a year-on-year basis and about 22% on a Q-on-Q basis. As we are talking about year-on-year, fall is primarily because of gasoline, which was down 30%, polyethylene and polypropylene about 16% to 17% as well as the whole integrated polyester chain was down 15%. For us, the fact that low ethane prices helped because of ethane cracking capabilities and also, we're supported by the fact that domestic demand was good. Overall, energy market volatility is something that we have been seeing for a various set of reasons. However, we do think that the structural business dynamics remain constructive. The extent of volatility in the markets can be gauged from the fact that the last 8 quarters, we have seen this whole range between INR 12,000 crores to INR 20,000 crores of EBITDA, which is the one that we reported.
On Q-on-Q basis, again, primarily driven by this time, transportation fuels, gasoline, gas oil and ATF down about 37%. The good news was that there was some margin improvement downstream with PVC up 17% and also PE was also up 7%, which helped offset some of the fall that we saw in transportation fuel. Continuing benefit from ethane cracking economics also supported in the quarter. When you look at just the crude price, effectively, we were looking at $85 per barrel as far as first quarter was concerned, which is higher by about 9% on a year-on-year basis. And overall, kept higher, it has been higher because of demand from emerging markets, also the fact that OPEC supplies were on the lower side. I talked about ethane economics as reflected in the fact that ethane prices were down 9% year-on-year, but at the same time, naphtha prices increased by 16%. We did see regional refining margins come off on the back of higher runs. We saw new capacity ramp up in Middle East and also demand environment in Europe and China was muted. Overall oil demand, you can see year-on-year, up $0.7 million, primarily in Asia, which accounts for most of the increase. On the transportation fuel, you can see that gasoline was up 0.2 million barrels per day. Gas oil was down 0.2 million barrels per day. Big jump was in jet/kero, which was up 0.6 million barrels per day and more led by Asia. In India, the oil demand at almost 61 million tons, that was up 3.5% year-on-year and flat Q-on-Q. Here, gasoline demand was up by 7% on the back of tourism, on back of auto industry growth. High-speed diesel demand about 2% and ATF up 11%, given the domestic air passenger traffic increase that we saw. Fairly healthy growth in oil demand in India.
On the polyester side, 8% growth in polymer, 5% growth in polyester. In polymer, really led by PVC benefiting from all the government schemes on agriculture and infrastructure. Polypropylene was specifically consumer durables and food packaging that we saw in automotive demand. And overall, on the polyester side, the big jump, 27%, you see in PET on the back of summer and also the fact that it was election so you saw that kind of surge in demand. In PSF, 9% was driven by the fact that there was -- we did see downstream operating rates improve, and therefore, by definition, the PSF volumes went up. But on the converse side on polyester filament yarn, we saw a fall of 4% because of fabric imports that we saw. This is the transportation cracks here. You can see that year-on-year gasoil and ATF year-on-year has been a little bit lower, but not too much. While on gasoline, you can see year-on-year cracks come off very sharply as we saw earlier on.
The Q-on-Q has been more pronounced in all the 3 products, which is the 37% that I talked to you about. And in Q-o-Q, it was really driven by the fact that we did see a supply glut in Asia because of the Red Sea tensions because of the higher freight and therefore lower exports. And therefore, there was a significant surplus that we saw in this part of the world. So that explains the shortfall there.
On the polymer delta, as I was mentioning, polymer deltas were around 17% lower on a year-on-year basis. Though on a Q-o-Q basis, it improved by about 7%. PVC specifically went up very sharply at about 17%. And as I mentioned about the ethane cracking, economics was pretty favorable here. Polyester has been year-on-year 15% fall, more driven by weaker global demand and also much slower China recovery. Q-on-Q has been just about 1% improvement there. We did see improvement in PX margins because of shutdowns. PTA margins have remained under pressure, but we did see PFY and PSF margin improve with Chinese downstream demand. Here, there has been an increase in throughput, as you can see, from 17.1 to 17.7. We continued to do the things which are effectively controllable in terms of maximizing our primary and major secondary units by continuing to focus on group sourcing, by maximizing fuel sales domestically, also by, in terms of, optimizing PX versus gasoline there. And also, given the quarter-on-quarter improvement in deltas you saw, we maximized production in petrochemical side, and we continued to split the gasifier complex to full capacity.
Overall, when you look at the business environment, global oil demand is expected to normalize this year at about 1 million barrels per day. As you know, it was pretty strong last year at about 2.1 million barrels per day. Overall, when you see in the more -- in the near term to medium term, there are factors at play. Driving season demand normally results in increase in demand for gasoline. International aviation, expectation of further recovery there. Also there are possibilities of active hurricane season. It is now -- people are talking about it with high probability. So as you know, almost 1 million barrels per day of capacity gets affected when there is a hurricane there.
Then, if there is a ban on Russian gasoline exports given their shortfall. Then, that could also have an impact in terms of the deltas for gasoline. Overall, downstream, as I mentioned, yes, you are seeing a gradual improvement with demand recovering and also importantly, the slowing pace of new supply and the fact that India demand both for fuels and downstream is expected to remain fairly resilient. So that should aid in terms of margin improvement.
Overall, from a challenges point of view, clearly, it is all about geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, in Russia, Ukraine, the disruptions in the Red Sea, the impact on freight. So all these have kept the markets volatile. And also in the short term, increasing supply with whatever balance capacities that come in as well as the fact that some of the refineries will come back from post maintenance. But when you see the last 2 years, the almost 2.5 million barrels of refining capacity that got added. It's been a very, very long time since so much of capacity has come in. And going forward, it is not very obvious that there will be surges in this kind of capacity increase. So we'll have to wait and watch them. Overall, that is really some of the thought process while saying that structurally refining looks strong.
Just to summarize, it has been a strong operating quarter, consumer businesses and upstream fully negating the impact of weak O2C. Overall, as I was highlighting, fuel markets likely to remain supported by seasonal demand drivers for gasoline, for ATF demand also because of weather and geopolitical disruptions. So these things have an impact on the overall price and deltas. The fact that there is strong demand in India helps and also the fact that, thanks to a fairly integrated O2C operation, we can leverage that kind of integration there.
On the consumer side, we are strengthening our market leadership in a structurally long-term growth business. Dinesh talked about the whole focus on tech platform, on supply chain, on distribution. All this to both sustain growth momentum in both near and medium term. On Jio side, clearly, the traction that we are seeing in home and enterprises and the fact that the impact of revised tariffs will start getting reflected in the coming quarters. And finally, the balance sheet remains strong. As you saw, net debt was lower than what it was in the previous quarter. With this, I come to the end of my presentation. Thank you so much for being here.