Reliance Industries Ltd

NSE:RELIANCE

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q3

[Operator]

Good evening, and welcome to the Third Quarter Financial Year 2023 Results Presentation of Reliance Industries Limited.

As always, we will start with Srikanth Venkatachari, who will give you an overview of the financial performance for this quarter. Over to you, Srikanth.

[Srikanth Venkatachari, executive]

Thanks, again, and good evening, friends. Starting with the highlights.

So consolidated EBITDA was INR 38,460 crores, which is 13.5% higher, and it was on the back of consumer business strength and upstream. O2C earnings improved with middle distillate cracks. There has been, of course, as you know, margin pressure on the downstream chemicals, which we will talk in during the presentation of the business.

Overall, retail EBITDA was very strong on the back of store expansion, footfalls were good and also the growth in digital businesses. On the digital side, we are seeing strong traction in subscriber growth as well as data traffic. And as far as 5G coverage is concerned, we have now been -- expanded to 100 cities. And as you know, the target is to complete that by December '23.

Very strong growth in Oil and Gas segment, almost we have doubled the earnings there. And finally, on the net profit at INR 17,806 crore, it's marginally up on a year-on-year basis, constrained, of course, by finance cost, depreciation and the special additional excess duty. So overall, it is fair to say that there has been strong growth across all the operating segments.

Just zooming into each of the businesses, retail with INR 67,000 -- INR 68,000 crores of revenue and close to INR 4,800 crores of EBITDA. That's an EBITDA growth of 35% year-on-year. There has been margin expansion. There continues to be store additions, 789 stores in this quarter, taking the total to about 2,400 stores in this financial year. When you look at footfalls or when you look at the number of transactions, all on a quarterly basis up 26%, each of them is upwards of 200 million in number. Even the registered customer base at 235 million is up 31% year-on-year.

On the digital services side, INR 30,000 crores of revenue, close to INR 13,000 crores of EBITDA, again, EBITDA up 26% year-on-year. ARPU at INR 178 there given the growth in data consumption. Our subscriber base continues to grow. We have added 5.3 million subscribers, taking the total 433 -- we have close to 23 million subscribers during the -- this 9 months and strong data traffic close to 29 exabytes, which is a 24% growth.

On the O2C side, INR 1,45,000 crores in revenue, with EBITDA at almost INR 14,000 crores. This is up year-on-year about 3%, but sequentially up 16%. And when you look at it from a year-over-year point of view, strength in middle distillate has been constrained by weak margins in polymer, polyester, light distillates also, as you know, SAED was applicable on diesel and ATF. And also throughput was slightly lower due to maintenance activity in this quarter.

But overall demand environment remains pretty strong with all growth that is I'm talking about India year-on-year. India demand, I'm talking about oil 7%, polymer 8% growth year-on-year and polyester up 11%.

On the oil and gas side, again very strong performance EBITDA almost doubling, in fact, 91 bps, 91% on a year-on-year basis. It's on the back of higher realization, now returning about $11.3 million Btu, and with a stable production base of about 19 MMSCMD and KGD6 MJ Field that is on track for fourth quarter FY '23. So we delivered about close to INR 4,000 crores in upstream EBITDA.

So bringing these numbers together, as you can see, EBITDA and revenue have been strong on the back of digital services, on the back of retail, on the back of oil and gas, O2C contribution has been positive. This is despite the weakness that I mentioned in downstream.

When you look at it at on a net profit marginally higher on a year-over-year basis, but sequentially, it's up 15%. And when you look at it year-on-year, finance cost has been higher on the back of rate hikes by Central banks across and as you know, through when you look at FY '23, USD rates are up 425 basis points. Rupee interest rates are up almost 325 basis points.

So from our point of view, when you put the context about 36% increase in finance cost against the backdrop of these kind of rates, we have done reasonably well there. One of the main reasons for that performance comes on the mix that we have of currency versus -- foreign currency versus domestic as well as the fixed floating percentages that we have that has helped mute the impact.

Overall, I would say that it's really driven. This quarter has been driven by quarterly with strong performance across all of our business segments.

So this is just a bridge on a year-on-year basis, as you can see the big jump has come from oil and gas, contributing almost INR 1,850 crores there; digital services, INR 2,700 crores and you can see that the retail is [ INR 11 crores ]. So these are the big drivers of year-on-year change.

On a Q-on-Q basis, clearly, O2C has been the biggest driver of the contribution, almost adding INR 2,000 crores with the increase and this has been supported by middle distillate cracks and had it not been for weak polymers and polyester sequentially, which has been lower margins, profitability would have been much higher.

Oil and Gas segment production has been stable, but the realizations improved. Overall in retail, it's about footfalls, it's about store expansion. It is about festive season. And our digital services, both the growth momentum has come from customer adds as well as usage charge that we saw in this quarter.

On the balance sheet side, net debt at about INR 1,10,000 crores versus INR 93,000 crores in September, largely on the back of CapEx spending for 5-year rollout as soon as we are ramping up our retail operations, and I've talked about our efforts in terms of managing the overall liability side from interest rate optimization. And I just wanted to highlight that when you look at INR 110,000 crores of net debt it is significantly lower than the annualized EBITDA that we have.

So for us, the focus will continue to be on managing our balance sheet conservatively, while continuing to accelerate and execute on our growth plans.

With this, I'm going to request Kiran and Anshuman to take us through the digital services part of it.

[Kiran Thomas, executive]

Thank you, Srikanth. And good evening. So as Srikanth mentioned, the 5G rollout at Jio is now picking up momentum in just over 100 days. We are already present through the 5G service in 134 cities across 18 telecom circles with multiple cities getting added by the day. More than 25,000 sites are already deployed with the 5G equipment. And when we talk about sites, these are -- we are talking about all 6 sectors being activated to offer 5G services.

In these markets where we have launched, we are also observing that there is obviously a phenomenal increase in the kinds of bandwidth that our early adopters are able to enjoy. We are seeing consistent download and upload experiences in excess of 600 megabits per second. And as also mentioned by Srikanth, the plan is to complete this rollout pan India by the end of this calendar year, 30th December of 2023.

Likewise, another exciting frontier being unlocked by 5G is what we are calling JioAirFiber, which is about bringing a very popular JioFiber, which is our optical fiber-based service, something equivalent to that using the power of 5G. The very same services, which are already being offered to millions of customers through JioFiber is now expected to be available through JioAirFiber as well.

The home broadband aspect of it, once JioAirFiber reaches your home, we are already providing seamless WiFi 6 coverage wall-to-wall for all of our customers. We are providing them with very attractive fixed mobile convergence offerings, everything from the broadband as well as the mobile services that they can get from Jio as one bundle.

Along with our fiber-to-home and JioAirFiber connections, we are also offering fixed voice for the home as well as for the societies where the multi-drilling units, we are also offering centric's facility so that all the residents they have an Intercom facility as well.

The real hero use case of home broadband remains the large screen in the home, the Live TV with obviously through our set-top box, multiple offerings in addition to live also the over-the-top services, all the popular media applications being offered as part of that one integrated tariff. And looking forward, again, early rollouts of gaming and cloud gaming in particular as well as advanced services through Jio Glass of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality with a number of exciting launches being planned in the near future.

Once the home is connected, again, there are a number of services that are under the works, looking to be launched in the near future. The Cloud PC, which is offering the power of a desktop or a laptop through a PC, which is hosted in the cloud, so that through a very thin and affordable end device, consumers can reach into the cloud and have access to the full power of a PC being offered through the cloud through obviously, the broadband connectivity.

And home service, home -- a number of services for the home, including the home IoT, all kinds of sensors and actuators that can be enabled in the home. And of course, things like surveillance so that you can have a constant eye on the home even when you are not in the house physically.

So there are just a few of those services, but the very same power, like I said, of JioFiber now envisage to be offered to an order of magnitude larger number of homes using the power of 5G through JioAirFiber.

Another exciting thing that we were able to offer quite innovative was really unlocking the power of streaming and especially live events on a streaming basis, which has got tremendous transformative potential, especially when combined with the home broadband offering that I just mentioned. Jio Platforms through the JioCinema offering, was the enabler for the FIFA World Cup, which got concluded recently.

To talk about some numbers using -- on the JioCinema app, we had north of 100 million viewers watching World Cup on a streaming basis. Of course, 80-plus percent through mobile, but also through a number of connected TVs, which are already on connected using home broadband. At the peak, there is a completely cloud native implementation. So we were able to scale very comfortably to north of 12 million concurrent users at peak with on any given day, more than 30 million users coming and watching matches on JioCinema.

At the peak through both the cloud as well as our edge network, especially the content distribution network or what is called CDM, which were deployed across the country, we were able to support cumulatively north of 20 terabits per second of cumulative media throughput being offered to give us across India.

These are records which compare pretty much anywhere in the world and even these are the highest daily active users and peak currencies, the concurrency is being seen in India. So far, and we are positioning ourselves to really beat all of these records comfortably as IPL comes around in a few months.

While I spoke about JioAirFiber, our optical fiber rollout also continues, and we are scaling up quite rapidly, vis-a-vis JioFiber as well. We continue to lead the industry with respect to net adds for fixed broadband in India. And very encouragingly, the quality of the subscribers are increasing -- are improving on a day-by-day basis with a much higher mix of postpaid customers coming onboard, and also people who are adopting to use our set-top box, so that they can consume all of the exciting media and other services that we are offering for the large screen.

For some of the -- to help with the faster rollout in small to midsized towns, we have also introduced a very innovative partner model, working with local cable operators and other partners, so that they take ownership of the rollout as well as ongoing customer engagement in those small towns, while we focus on the much larger terms.

We are seeing that across the network, the engagement is extremely high, north of 6 hours of daily engagement on the Jio set-top box. And year-on-year, we have seen a 2x growth in the data traffic being consumed by the home. So both in terms of consumption of data as well as time spent, we are seeing very encouraging increases on a year-to-year, quarter-to-quarter basis.

When it comes to the enterprise side, again, of course, we are growing our enterprise broadband and enterprise fixed line offerings continue to gather momentum and adoption. But on top of that, we are now building. And in many cases, we have launched a number of industry-specific propositions.

For example, focusing on hospitality as a sector, we have created a solution, which is what we call a Room as a Service, everything from connectivity to entertainment to customer management and of course, also helping the hospitality provider manage their operations. All as a single unified service.

Similarly, for the BFSI sector, we are offering what is called a Branch as a Service, which is for a small bank branch, everything that is required to operationalize it. For contact centers, again, offering Contact Center as a Service in a box that people can operationalize a contact center using the applications that we are providing on top of the connectivity.

When it comes to education, similar offerings to enable coaching institutes end-to-end. When it comes to logistics, again, what we call warehouse in a box, again, value-added services on top of connectivity.

Similarly, there are solutions that we are targeting for small manufacturers, for hospitals, for schools and in general, work-from-home of any industry as a horizontal service as well as for large enterprises, managing their entire IT landscape through what we call smart cloud management, whether it is on-premise, hybrid or public cloud deployments all using a single pane of -- single pane of glass through which they can control their entire IT landscape.

This is a solution, of course, that we've been using in Jio for multiple years now, and this is now being productized and made available to other enterprises as well. So in addition to connectivity, a number of interesting solutions being now developed on a rapid basis and also, we offer to the market.

One other thing which is very exciting, which goes along with 5G as well as our fiber offering is what we call Edge service. As you know, as the content consumption rises exponentially as well as real-time applications become more prevalent, providing these applications from centralized data centers is limiting after a certain scale. And what we need are compute resources to be placed much closer to where the consumption is, much closer to where the customers are.

In a data center, obviously, we can create a lot of sophisticated IT and other environment management capabilities to manage the service, especially when it comes to cooling, we can create pretty sophisticated types of cooling solutions in a large data center. But as you start going to the edge to create very small but very large number of such individual sites, all with the same kinds of IT environment is becoming a problem.

To solve that problem, our engineers have created this very innovative solution where we have created a server designed in a similar way to how radio equipment is designed with very little cooling requirement. In fact, no pooling requirement and which can be placed on any rack without any of the OpEx or any of the surrounding infrastructure that is required to keep the service running on a 24/7 basis.

So this is what we are calling our 0 cooling solution, and this can be placed even -- hundreds of these can be placed in a single room with nothing more than a simple exhaust fan, which will keep the service cold and operational 24/7. So this is an exciting area, which will enable us to rollout edge locations on a rapid pace across the length and breadth of India.

With this let me hand it over to my colleague Anshuman, who will talk about both the operating and financial metrics.

[Anshuman Thakur, executive]

Thanks, Kiran, and good evening, everyone. I'm going to summarize the operating and financial results for the quarter.

In this section, quarterly highlights, Jio Platforms continued with its strong financial performance. Revenue for the quarter came in at INR 24,892 crores, which is a 21% increase year-on-year, and EBITDA at INR 12,519 crores. So the EBITDA margin at the consolidated Jio Platforms Limited cross 50% in this quarter. RJIL,of course, met that milestone several quarters ago.

Subscriber traction continued to be healthy. Total subscriber base of 432.9 million. So if you just think about industry growth rates, we are the only operator really steadily growing our subscriber base quarter-after-quarter.

ARPU came in at INR 178.2, which was a 17.5% increase year-on-year. Most of the increase over the last quarter was primarily on account of higher usage, higher consumption and people moving up on their direct plans.

The data traffic grew further to 29 exabytes for the quarter. That's a 24% increase year-on-year per capita data consumption at 22.4 GB. And as Kiran mentioned, we are rapidly expanding our 5G footprint. We're in 134 cities now, over 35,000 sites deployed across the [ 700 and 3,500 ] WAN's in -- with 6 sectors. Really the focus now is on the transformative 5G rollout and the 5G JioAirFiber and the 5G mobility product that's going live in the market.

Moving on, I spoke about the consistent increase in Jio subscriber base. Overall subscriber market share continues to grow quarter-after-quarter. We've crossed 433 million subscribers this quarter. Our net gains on mobile number portability continue and market share in overall broadband base is well over 50%.

Summarizing the key operating metrics for RJIL, the connectivity business, subscriber base at 432.9 million. That was a net addition of 5.3 million. Gross addition of 34.2 million during the quarter. The ARPU came in at INR 178.2, total data consumption at 29 exabyte for the quarter with per capita data consumption at 22.4 GB and voice consumption at 985 minutes per month. So all of these metrics have been steadily increasing and been fairly consistent through the last few quarters.

The key financials for our connectivity business. RJIL, operating revenues increased to INR 22,998 crores, which was an increase of almost 19% year-on-year. The EBITDA, of course with operating leverage growing faster at 24.9% year-on-year to INR 12,072 crores. So that's an EBITDA margin of 52.5% against steadily improving quarter-after-quarter.

And the consolidated financials for Jio Platforms Limited, operating revenues at INR 24,892 crores and EBITDA of INR 12,519 crores. As I said, JPL at consolidated level has crossed 50% EBITDA margin. The profit after tax came in at INR 4,881 crores, which was a 28.6% year-on-year increase.

With this, I'm going to hand over to Gaurav to take you through the Reliance Retail results highlights.

[Gaurav Jain, executive]

Thanks, Anshuman. Good evening to all of you. Let me start the presentation with the operating context in which we operated our business.

The operating environment has been now maintaining at pretty much at normative levels as the impact of COVID is wind, which means that we have been able to operate all our stores, distribution and procurement centers, processing centers, offices and facilities at pretty much the COVID levels of efficiency.

So this has also been evident through the fact that the customers have started to come back into stores for shopping. And this being the first festive period post the back of COVID has been. We have seen a sharp rise in footfalls. And during this particular quarter, we have seen over 201 million customers who have come into stores.

Just to give you a sense on the footfall growth last year, during the full 12 months, we witnessed about 519 million footfalls as compared to that in 9 months. This year, this number is well over 515 million footfalls. The shopping habits of the customers with the normalization of the pre-COVID lifestyle has also resulted that they have been reprioritizing their shopping missions, and we are seeing very strong and balanced growth across all our stores as well as digital commerce channels.

From a macro experience, the consumer sentiment remains cautiously optimistic. What we saw during the quarter was that the discretionary spend was impacted with November being soft and December pickup being coming a little bit late due to delayed winters. But all in all, I think the demand momentum remained strong in the festive period.

With that said, moving on to the key highlights for the quarter. The business-maintained revenue growth momentum for the business across all the consumption baskets. We saw growth across all the businesses from grocery, consumer electronics, fashion to pharma. Our operating leverage and the efficiencies drove EBITDA margin improvement, and we continuously deliver strong profit performance.

We continue to serve customers at scale. Our registered customer base grew 30% year-on-year. We are well over 235 million registered customers now. Our customer engagement is strong at 265 million transactions during the quarter, that's a 30% year-on-year growth. That translates to nearly 3 million transactions a day, which is really at our scale, considering that we operate across over [ 7,000 cities ].

We continue with our store expansion. We operationalized over 789 stores during the quarter that added additional 6 million square feet of retail space to our operations. We again crossed a new milestone of 60 million square foot of operational area across the geographies and formats.

Digital and new commerce businesses continue to remain strong. Our daily orders have grown 30% year-on-year, and our partnerships with [indiscernible] merchant partners have been one of our big focus areas and that has also scaled up 70% year-on-year.

During the quarter, we have further strengthened our capabilities and also added to the product offering from our businesses. V Retail, which is Centro Footwear [indiscernible] and outlets were the key acquisitions that we made during this period.

On the revenue side, we delivered a growth of 17% year-on-year. Revenue of INR 67,623 crores. Grocery led by the back on growth with 65% growth year-on-year. Consumer electronics, excluding the devices part of the business grew 45% on a year-on-year basis. Fashion & Lifestyle business grew 13%. There was a little bit of a delay in winter, which impacted some of the categories related to winter in North and East.

The Digital and New Commerce businesses grew 38% year-on-year and continue to contribute a 18% of revenue at similar scale to last quarter.

From a profit perspective, our EBITDA performance remains strong. We grew 25% year-on-year at INR 4,773 crores. Our EBITDA margin for expansion of 40 basis points at 7.9% of net sales. Our EBITDA margin from operations saw a margin expansion of 70 basis points and close at 7.7% of net sales. This came in from a very favorable mix of channel sales, operating leverage and efficiencies.

Looking at growth across the business. We've touched the store count to 17,225 stores. between the third quarter last year and now, we have opened close to 2,800 stores, added close to about 20 million square foot of space during this period from 40 million going all the way up to 60 million square foot of operating space.

So while our expansion in the retail side is strong, we have up the total investments in our warehousing fulfillment capabilities as well. So 17 million square foot of warehouse space went up to nearly double at about 33.6 million square foot of warehousing space, which is 3x grow towards where we started from a pre-COVID period. So that's a strong investment that we continue to make to support our continue growth. From a workforce perspective, our total workforce stands at 418,000 employees.

Looking at the financial summary, our gross revenues at INR 67,623 crores, which is a 17% growth. EBITDA from operations is 32% growth at INR 4,657 crores. EBITDA margin from operations as I said in the previous slides at 7.7%, expansion of 70 basis points. Profit after tax is INR 2,400 crores, which is a 6% growth on a year-on-year basis. So very strong revenue and profit performance delivered during this period.

Looking at the businesses to start with consumer electronics, the business had a very strong quarterly performance, all-time high for the stores. It was delivered with very high footfall and average bill value; the customer came in with a passive chair. During the entire quarter, there were several events that were planned all the way starting from Diwali to the Black Friday to Christmas and New Year sales. So there were a very high level of footfalls, which also resulted in the average bill values through the quarter.

From a Diwali specific perspective, we saw 40% year-on-year growth, which was led by our finance accounting schemes. There was a growth across all the product categories, but mobile phones, TVs and appliances really led the pack with double-digit growths.

Our digital commerce revenues grew with orders going up 5x and traffic also growing at 35%, led by cell activations that we did through the quarter. Our own brands and partner brands business that we continue to expand, that has doubled during this period. We have launched several millions of products, especially in electrical's and smart instrument plans and also taking these products into new geographies, which has resulted in a strong traction for these brands.

On the JioMart Digital business, that business grew 55% quarter-on-quarter since this is relatively new, so the reference here is more relevant from a quarter-to-quarter growth perspective. And that has come from the growth in mobile phones and large appliances. And now our merchant base addition has been 12% on a quarter-on-quarter basis.

Moving into Fashion & Lifestyle business. The footwear business posted its best quarter, which was led by festive and wedding season. The growth came in across several categories, Men’s formals, Indian ethnic wear, Indian wear, kids wear and footwear did particularly well. On the winterwear side, there was a bit delay in a pickup because of delayed winter, but over the back end of December, we saw a strong pickup in that category as well.

We continue to have focus on strengthening our own brands and brands like Avaasa Netplay,DNMX,Teamspirit have outperformed their own brands as well as external brands. The contribution of own brands between the apparel and footwear categories as well in the range of about 70% and continues to really bring uniqueness to our offerings.

AJIO Luxe, which is a destination for online shopping, that continues to grow strength to strength quarter-after-quarter. This particular quarter was, again, a big share because of the festive sales and several events that went well, which helped in expanding our customer base by almost 1/3 during this period.

The focus on catalog expansion has been one of our big initiatives. We have seen the catalog growth 62% year-on-year, now live with over 1.2 million options. We continue to add more and more unique brands to enhance the choice to our customers with 92 brands, particularly during this period.

From partner brands, which operates more in the premium and luxury space, that side of the business grew 38% year-on-year. The mall stores drove a lot of customer traffic, including new store launches and brands that we did during this quarter.

AJIO Luxe, which is an online destination for premium products that platform offers over 470 brands and is the most preferred option for customers looking at the most trendiest of the clothes, and the products across lifestyle categories. That business also grew 3x on a year-on-year basis.

From the omnichannel perspective, we continue to strengthen our play. We have now over 20 mono-brand sites in the partner brand space that are operational during the period we launched Tumi, Hunkemoller and Pottery Barn as the brand sites.

The jewelry business has also remained strong during the quarter, which was led by festive sales and weeding season. We leveraged our design capabilities to launch several new variants of collections. Diamond Delight went into its fourth edition Nitara in the kids' side and the value applies for silver wear one of our strong launches.

Dhanteras, which is a big festive for jewellery buying, that saw its best ever performance with 30% year-on-year growth. So a strong play from jewelry business as well. Lingerie business, we continue to consolidate our presence across the spectrum of brands between Zivame, Amante, Clovia all put together a 62% year-on-year growth across these brands.

Our focus has been to expand the presence of these through new shop-in-shops and EBO locations, and that continues to do well for us. During the quarter, we linked several new products bringing from curvy styles, maternity range, minimizers, and so on, leveraging our innovative and innovation-based strengths.

On the Urban Ladder, which is into furniture and furnishings that side of the business grew 21% year-on-year, which was led by 2 key events of Full House Sale as well as Very Merry Sale, which grew 30% higher traffic onto our platforms.

Our focus on ramping up the product catalog is evident from the fact that we are now increasing our catalog size to 2.5x on a year-on-year basis. And that is also helping us to improve our customer experience because of making how much wider choice of products available to them.

In addition to the existing product portfolio, we have expanded our presence in the design services side with the full spectrum from design all the way to delivery.

On the grocery business, talking about the offline and digital commerce, really grocery was the business that really led the growth back, 65% growth on a year-on-year basis. On the back of a double-digit like-for-like growth, very strong customer engagement through our flagship event called the Bestival sale, which created a new high for us 74% growth year-on-year.

Our focus on delivering a very unique and improved customer shopping experience is in place as we continue to premiumize our assortment, bringing more wider choice both from grocery as well as our non-grocery categories. That has continues to also drive our average bill values across the business.

The business delivered very down -- very well-rounded growth across foods and vegetables, staples, general merchandise, packaged foods and HPC categories.

On the Digital Commerce business side, we saw a huge uptick in traffic MilkBasket, which is the subscription service that grew double over a period as compared to last year as it extended its reach to our 20 markets.

On New Commerce business, our focus has been to onboard a wider set of merchants and that we continue to expand across geographies. Our focus has also been to ensure that the level of services to these customers especially on products and the timely deliver that continues to go up for which we continue to invest in improving our supply chain infrastructure. We have added 11 new fulfillment centers during this period.

On the Consumer Brands business, that business has doubled over year-on-year basis. All categories are ranging from processed food, beverages, to home and personal care, all categories have really performed well for us. The focus, again, there has been to bring in products with more regional tastes and preferences, and we continue to launch a large number of variants across processed foods, beverages and spices. Products like the Runner Energy Drink and the Joyland Masala Kairi some of these examples of how we have been able to serve the specific customer choices in very specific markets.

We talked about launching of independent brand in the quarter that got launched in Staples category in Gujarat and that is currently getting expanded into other categories and newer geographies as well in a base panel.

We did the acquisition of Sosyo and on Lotus Chocolate will further augment our brand portfolio and help us create very unique offerings to our customers over a period of time.

Talking about JioMart, the groce-category horizontal platform, and that platform does really well during this period, especially demand from Tier 2 and beyond towns was really fast as compared to the metro towns JioMart on WhatsApp, which was the partnership that was announced last quarter. That continues to do well the active customer base is growing 37% month-on-month. So very, very strong growth coming there.

The order value and the number of orders continues to grow. Orders have now grown 9x since the launch. So this platform is helping us really democratize WhatsApp reach to hands up new customers who are otherwise not being able to shop on digital platform.

The focus on expanding the offering to the customers is there. We have expanded the catalog 71% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, which is also resulting in an uptick of noncategory and non-grocery category contribution going up.

And a big part of that is also coming from the seller base, which is getting expanded 83% on a quarter-on-quarter basis. These sellers are small and medium enterprises and artisans, which are really helping us augment our product offerings with the used manned.

The Tyohaar Ready Sale, which is the flagship event for JioMart during the quarter, that really did well during Diwali. A 2.5% -- 2.5x growth in traffic, 3x the app installations and 4x growth in the active user, some very strong performance matrices that we saw during the period.

Pharma business, revenue doubled on a year-on-year basis across all the channels. The digital commerce orders went up 67% and the hyperlocal deliveries for us which is really the omnichannel play. That went up 4x during the period as compared to last year. We successfully executed our large number of marketing events to keep that freshness and also strong engagement with the customers.

New Commerce revenues continue to grow. Our operations are now well extended into over 2,600 cities.

I think that [indiscernible] all from the retail business. I will hand it over to Sanjay.

[Sanjay Roy, executive]

Thank you. So the quarter gone by was a solid quarter in terms of the EBITDA growth. We have seen year-on-year growth of over 91%, [ norms ] are in EBITDA. And quarter-on-quarter, we've seen increase of 23% growth and, this is mainly due to the sustained production in high gas price realizations. The reservoirs in the field have behaved as per expectations. And that has been the key driver behind the performance.

Overall, the price realizations also have been higher. In KGD6 we are seeing an average -- weighted average price realization of $11.3 and similarly, in CBM we are seeing about [indiscernible]

Next slide, please. So even as we continue to produce at a steady pace from the existing fields, we are now quite advanced towards commissioning the MJ Field. in terms of the drilling of wells, we are now completing the wells. A total number of 8 wells will be completed and connected. The floating production storage and offloading vessel are derived in September and in that location. The hookups have been done. So the entire subsea production system has been installed. The hookups with the FPSO have been undertaken. The testing is currently underway. The marine systems testing is currently underway and so -- and there are the top side systems testing to be undertaken along with the pre-commissioning and commissioning.

We expect to commission the field in the -- within this time and window. The important facet is that once this production starts by sometime in FY '24, a few months later, we should be able to achieve full capacity and therefore, about combined production of 30 million standard cubic meters per day.

So the global gas outlook still remains buoyant, still remains quite robust. We've seen some cool off to happen because of a milder winter, but what we have seen is the demand -- LNG demand in Europe has grown consequently, even though there has been a slowdown in the Chinese economy due to the lockdown and so on, we still have some growth. We've seen Chinese LNG and imports come down by almost 13%. Elsewhere in Europe, the storage is continuing to be at a much higher level, about 83%, plus there's some higher even flow starting from Norway and the new [indiscernible] about 3 to 4 of them expected to be commissioned by the end of the year.

However, there means an uncertainty, again, because of the geopolitical uncertainties and as well as the weather, but we expect demand to be still quite robust, given the Chinese demand is expected to come up in the subsequent months.

In terms of domestic gas prices, as many of you may be aware, the Dr. Tarang Audit Committee reviewed the various auctions and then came up recommending the removal of ceiling price for HP, HP imported gas from January 1, 2026, post which it should be open market-based pricing.

At the current juncture, ceiling price remains at $12.46 per MMBtu and revising price will be expected just before the first half of next fiscal. Overall, realizations continue to be higher, and the EBITDA growth is expected with incremental production coming in from [indiscernible]

Thank you.

[Srikanth Venkatachari, executive]

Thanks, Sanjay. Moving into O2C, let me just give the context about the energy markets in this quarter.

Starting with the fact that our crude prices were lower by 12%, averaging over $89 a barrel. The fall can be attributed to decisions fears in EU and U.S. as well as it was better than expected Russian supply. As Sanjay alluded to the old LNG environment, those prices are also down by almost 34% to around $31 per million Btu. On the back of Europe being well stopped and also the winter being mild in the fourth quarter of this calendar year.

On the back of LNG prices, retail prices also were significantly lower. And we also saw broadly the benchmark regional refining margins also lower on the back of lower light distillates and fuel oil cracks which, of course, was to some external compensated by the fact that middle distillates were stronger. So in the sense this was more about demand concerns which brought it down.

On the operating side, as we saw revenues at INR 1,45,000 crores higher by 10% on a year-on-year basis and the same on the quarter-to-quarter on the lower side. EBITDA close to INR 14,000 crores, 3% higher on a year-on-year basis and strong at 16% growth there. When you look at the year-on-year side in as far as the performance is concerned, the natural feedback to middle distillate strength as well as the benefits on the feedstock side.

Of course, it's important for me to highlight that it was constrained by significant weakness in the chemical side. As you may have seen, volume and margins are anywhere between 26% and 44% lower, and also on the polyester chain margin, if you have to see it is down 23% year-on-year. Onshore this quarter was slightly lower on the throughput side and in this quarter, we continued to see a SAED charge of close to INR 1,900 crores.

When you look at the performance from a Q-on-Q perspective, overall strong growth there, despite the weakness that we have seen on the chemical side, again, middle distillates holding pretty well there. And also from our point of view, we did well in terms of using the flexibility that we have with the fuel and feedstock management as well as in the broader yield optimization that we have.

This is the broader context, if you were to see, you can see global oil demand at about 100, marginally lower. In some way, there is lower demand in OECD countries, offset by -- we are seeing some increase in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, of course, without China.

And when you look at it from a product perspective, in a higher demand for gas oil and offset and also demand was there for jet fuel also and offset by gasoline. Otherwise, when you look at it from an India perspective, India oil demand, polymer India, polymer demand and India polyester demand pretty strong, polyester being up 11%, polymer at about 8% and overall oil demand made 7%. So there it is on the back of enhanced economic activity, which we are seeing infrastructure rollout, we're seeing in all those as the reasons for this kind of demand.

Operating rates globally have been slightly lower, and it's because of the winter storm in U.S., Canada in December, which was -- there was also a strike in EU, but it was offset by some of the ramp-up in new capacities. On the cracker side, they're slightly lower on the back of plant shutdowns.

So just a bit more elaboration on the oil demand side. So when you look at the overall product point of view, gasoline up almost 8% year-on-year on the back of automobile sales increase in tourism, mobility, we are seeing all of that on the high-speed diesel demand up 10% on the back of industrial side, meaning activity side, you're seeing demand also France side has also been pretty resilient.

ATF 24% again there is a strong growth with the complete -- now domestic air travel is effectively a more pre-COVID level also international flights are coming in. So in a way, all these are the drivers for the 7% growth that we are seeing.

Individual product side, if you were to see volumes are up 8% year-on-year and then I would definitely flag the PVC, that's a sharp growth of 25% on the back of demand from both agriculture and infrastructure for pipes. PE and PP also saw 4% growth across sectors. On the polyester side, 11% up again there, 2 products, PSF and PT. PSF up 16% on the back of higher cotton prices as well as seasonality there. PT, we are seeing a lot of higher demand on the [indiscernible] side, but also, it did benefit from the -- from having a low base to compare.

Now when you move to the -- on the delta side, you can see this chart is actually from -- it's falling to the right, which effectively year-on-year has been lower quarter-on-quarter has also been lower. So when you look at it from a quarter-on-quarter point of view, again, anywhere between 5% and 18% lower. So in this case, it's been more about polymer prices declining between 7% and 15%, but the naphtha as a raw material there, and that has been -- has seen a fall of only 4%, which has really from the margins.

We continue to optimize naphtha and ethane given the flexibility that we have and therefore, we are able to extract more. On the polyester side, overall, 19% fall from a quarterly basis. Clearly, PX and MEG has a significant pressure because of capacity additions as well as lower demand in China. PTA was range bound and overall polyester downstream, that was fully attributable to the COVID situation in China.

Moving to the transportation fuel side. You can see on the first graph, gas oil, almost $41 a barrel, which is almost flat there, but demand was higher by 0.5 million barrels per day. And it remains -- essentially the cracks remains pretty elevated. The margin, the strikes also push gas oil prices up. And while the inventory levels at 536 is higher, but yet it is below 5-year averages and to some extent, the China export put us and new refinery capacity additions, which capped the rise there.

On the ATF side, demand has been essentially flat, but cracks we improved marginally on a quarter-on-quarter basis on the back of air passenger demand in Asia Pacific. It was, to some extent, offset, but that's what we'll attribute that. Also, jet yield in favor of Kerosene for winter heating season that also kept the -- had its impact on the management.

And finally, moving to the gasoline side. As you can see there, the market if you're seeing the cash that's coming off on the back of higher supplies coming from China and Middle East and also there has been a buildup of gasoline because it's a core product of -- as you produce gasoline. So you're seeing that effect coming through. But overall, India -- we saw the India demand that remains pretty possible there.

This is the operating highlights. Throughput essentially normalized after the planned maintenance shutdown in September, October that we saw and from our point of view, we continue to maximize gas oil exports. What we all said it was given that there was strong reforming margins, the -- we did 2 things: one, we sourced our external feedstock and for that and then converted them.

Also, we also optimized aromatics production given the fact that the PX naphtha deltas were lower. So we are able to use it for a better gasoline blending economics. So we did that. Also, we did well in terms of optimizing our cracker on the feed versus fuel economics that I talked to you about.

Overall, coming to the broader business dynamics, starting with the demand side, demand is expected to grow in 2023, we're at 1.9 million barrels. And we think that China demand is that will improve with the relaxation in the COVID-related restrictions. And polyester, polymer will crack Indian economic growth.

On the margin side, so margins will be, to some extent, will support margin, but there is a limit because we are expecting some additions coming on the refining capacity side. And overall, I think middle distillate cracks will remain firm because, as I mentioned, lower inventories, it's lower than the 5 years that we talked about. And there is this whole impending loss of mid-teen planned expecting from volumes expected to [indiscernible] in the back in the U.S. so they are a challenge or converts rates [indiscernible] et cetera, but those things are there.

And also, yes, the possible challenges in China export [indiscernible] become higher, yet and can offset it from a margin it can have. So how is it.

Coming to the last slide, this is [indiscernible] early what the stronger operating wins have been a [indiscernible] the -- from a point of view of overall, the consumer has been obtained by assisting from e-commerce, and we saw slides on every apparent of the number of registered customers. The number of tickets are all growing very well at about 20%.

On the Jio side, continuing to see increase in the number of customers and also ARPU on the back of higher usage a true 5G update that Kiran talked about more than 100 cities and our target to complete the rollout by December of '23.

And production at KGD6 fourth quarter that we are expecting to complete, and which means that that can increase the overall production to the 30 MMSCMD in FY '24 and we have a lot of effort going on in the green energy side and the fasttrack implementation of the Mega factories. And in the coming quarters, we will continue to update on the progress there.

With this presentation to an end. Thank you so much for being with us here. Thank you.