Reliance Industries Ltd
NSE:RELIANCE
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Reliance Industries Ltd
Earnings Call Analysis
Q3-2024 Analysis
Reliance Industries Ltd
Despite a global environment rife with challenges, the company's financial resilience shone through with their earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) climbing to INR 44,700 crores, marking a significant increase of 17% year-over-year. This financial vigor cascaded to net profit as well, which ascended by 11% to reach INR 19,641 crores.
The firm’s focus on amplifying digital services reaped tangible results, reflected by a robust customer acquisition during the quarter, which remarkably improved yearly. Further boosting their digital frontier, the company completed an impressive feat—a nationwide 5G rollout, promising to reshape the country's digital landscape.
Despite facing headwinds such as a major planned maintenance shutdown and a generally weak downstream margin environment, the O2C sector displayed resilience. However, the weak market conditions did put some pressure on the segment's performance.
The retail division experienced a vigorous surge with a 23% year-on-year increase in revenue, alongside a significant 31% rise in EBITDA, standing at INR 6,258 crores. This growth is partly credited to an aggressive expansion strategy that saw an additional 1,549 stores introduced to the network, marking an expansion of retail space by roughly 21%. This highlighted a clear strategic advantage gained via operating leverage and indicated strong consumer demand across various segments.
A pivotal technology milestone was reached with the successful and ahead-of-schedule completion of a pan-India 5G network rollout, solidifying the company's position in the telecommunications market. As a testament to the 5G network's attractiveness, nearly 90 million subscribers have already made the transition, leveraging the network's potential to offer high-speed digital services and attract premium customer segments.
The company's net debt remained stable, closely matching the figure from September 2023 at INR 119,372 crores. Highlighting an approach of fiscal prudence, the capital expenditures (CapEx) for the quarter was reported at INR 30,000 crores, reflecting a strategic moderation focused on financial sustainability.
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Good evening, and welcome to the third quarter financial year 2024 business presentation of Reliance Industries.
We have Mr. Srikanth, our Group CFO, first off talking about our consolidated financials, followed by Kiran, who will talk about the Digital Services, Anshuman, who will present the financial performance of our Digital Services business, followed by Dinesh, who will talk about Reliance Retail, Sanjay Roy, who will talk about E&P. And then Srikanth will come and speak about O2C and a summary and the closure.
Thank you, and over to you, Srikanth.
Thanks. Thanks, Srini. So I'll just spend a few minutes on the consolidated results before I hand it over to my colleagues for business-wise.
So starting with EBITDA at INR 44,700 crores, this is up 17% year-on-year, net profit at INR 19,641 crores, up 11% year-on-year. And here, the earnings have been led by very strong performance in Retail and Oil and Gas. Digital Services has been steady and a 1% increase in O2C. In Retail, we have seen very strong momentum. There is expansion of footprint. We are seeing higher footfalls. In Digital Services, we have added the number of customer adds in this quarter and also importantly, on a year-on-year basis has been very strong. We completed the 5G rollout on a pan-India basis.
In O2C, it has been a resilient performance despite a major planned maintenance shutdown that you are aware of and also downstream margin environment, as you know, has been a bit weak. Had it not been for the shutdown, we would have, on O2C basis, been higher on a year-on-year basis, and the performance would have been comparable even to the previous quarter. In Oil and Gas, benefiting from ramp-up in MJ1 production and now KGD6 contributes 30% of India's gas production.
A quick summary of the numbers. As you can see, revenue in Retail is up 23%, EBITDA at INR 6,258 crores is up 31%. So clearly, you can see the benefit of operating leverage kicking in. Overall areas -- area operated in million square feet at close to 73 million, which is about 21% higher. And we saw growth across segments. Footfalls higher by 40%. We added about 252 stores. And when you see on a year-on-year basis, we have added 1,549 stores. And the percentage of Digital and New Commerce revenues as a percentage of total still at 19%. So it's a very, very fast expanding base. So it's a good set of performance there.
In Digital Services, revenue, EBITDA are up about 11.5%. I talked about customer adds, we added 11.2 million net customers in subscribers in this quarter. And for the whole year, it is 38 million, very strong performance there. Data traffic continues to be strong, 32% on a year-on-year basis. And this True 5G is now available across India, and 90 million subscribers have migrated to the 5G network.
On O2C side, revenue is slightly lower. You saw Brent being about 5.5% lower on a year-on-year basis. EBITDA at INR 14,064, 1% percent up. As you know, I talked about the planned maintenance shutdown of our major units. Also, there has been downstream chemical deltas have been weak anywhere between 4% and 17% when it comes to lower deltas there. And clearly, supply overhang is there. Demand has been weak. That's on the downside on the markets are there. But we have been able to compensate it with domestic demand being able to place there because India oil demand is up 2%, polymer is up 10%.
Gasoline has played an important role in compensating. There has been a recovery in fuel retailing and also the benefit of ethane versus naphtha was fully felt in this quarter. On the Oil and Gas side, at INR 5,804, it is the best ever quarterly EBITDA. As you can see from the chart, KGD6 production is almost up 7% and revenue and EBITDA up by 50%. And now KGD6 production is almost 30 MMSCMD. It's, as you know, a significant contributor to the transition fuel availability for the country.
So bringing these numbers together, you can see revenue at INR 248,000 crores, up 3%. Lower O2C, higher Retail. On EBITDA side, as I said, INR 44,678, it's up 17%. This is despite the very large shutdown in CDU, in coker, in FCCU and also the off-gas cracker. Had it not been, as I mentioned, EBITDA would have seen a year-on-year growth, and the numbers would have been pretty similar to what it was in the previous quarter. And as you can see, the EBITDA flow-through despite higher finance and depreciation, we have delivered a net profit of INR 19,641 crores, which is up 11%. And when you look at it from entity-wise, RIL almost close to INR 10,000 crores, JPL at INR 5,500 crores, RRVL at INR 3,200 crores. So RRVL, you can see EBITDA growth at 30% and even the net profit growth is almost in the same range.
So a quick one on the bridge. Year-on-year bridge, as you can see, every business has delivered in terms of growth, Oil and Gas, Retail, Digital Services and Others, too. But as I mentioned, O2C has been a stable EBITDA and a weak downstream market environment. We have done a lot to offset some of that market weakness by focusing on crude sourcing, by focusing on ethane cracking, by placing more products in the domestic market.
Oil and Gas, as I mentioned, higher volumes helping deliver 50% increase. Retail is very broad-based and Grocery sales up 41%, Fashion & Lifestyle up 28%, Consumer Electronics up 19%. On Digital Services, healthy subscriber growth and also improvement in the ARPU side, and others reflect multiple factors across other businesses, which have done well, focused on cost improvement and treasury income, all of them have helped deliver the Other segment.
And on a sequential basis, barring O2C that I talked about, you can see a strong growth. On the Oil and Gas side, in the previous quarter, we had costs related to field commissioning and decommissioning, which is not there this quarter. And so that explains the jump there. Otherwise, on Retail and Digital Services, retail earnings, as you know, sequentially has gone up by 7%. And you have seen performance in Digital Services, too.
And coming to net debt, marginal change in net debt to INR 119,372 crores, very similar to what we had in September '23. We have been talking about moderation of CapEx, and you can see that overall CapEx is now for this quarter is INR 30,000 crores. It was about close to INR 39,000 crores in the previous quarter and a year before that too it was there. So clearly, you can see that the intensity has come down. Otherwise, fair to say that cash flows remain strong, balance sheet is strong, and the moderation in CapEx will continue to help value creation.
With this, I'm going to hand it over to Kiran.
Thank you, Srikanth. We had 1 year -- nearly 1 year, in fact, a shade over 1 year into the rollout of our True 5G services. And as Srikanth alluded to in his opening remarks, nearly 90 million subscribers have already migrated to 5G on our network. And another great thing that we can talk about is that this entire 5G deployment and the traffic coming from the 90 million subscribers are all carried on our own core, which has been built and deployed on a pan-India basis.
If you see the graphics on this chart, just a year ago in December of 2022, we can say that India was 5G dark. And if you look now at the situation, as we complete December of 2023 and now we are into the new year, we can truly say that India is now 5G light -- bright. And obviously, this superior network has really strengthened our position when it comes to the mobility service. Our 5G availability on a pan-India basis, on a quantitative basis is nearly 3x that of our nearest competitor. And even in terms of quality, the overall download speeds on our network is nearly 2x that, again, of our nearest competitor.
So I'm glad to say that overall, Jio has completed the True 5G network rollout as promised well ahead of the schedule of this pan-India deployment. This is also reflected in the fact that we are becoming the preferred choice for subscribers. If you look at the graphic again on the right, you can see that as the industry overall has had a nearly flat 0.7% growth on a year-on-year customer base basis. But the stark difference is between the growth numbers delivered by Jio on a year-on-year basis as compared to the rest of the competition. While the rest of the competition actually has seen degrowth of nearly 3% -- negative 3%, Jio has shown a nearly 7.5% increase in its subscriber base.
All of this is a testament to the fact that our 5G service is really pushing the envelope even further. We were already considered of the best quality, highest quality networks anywhere in the world. But now that gap between Jio's 5G network and that of our competitors has increased substantially.
If you look at another number, which is the net port-in numbers, this also indicates the intra-competitor movement, rather inter-competitor movement of customers from one operator to the next. In terms of port-in, again, we have been nearly 2.5x of our nearest competitor in terms of net port-ins. So this is actually all these metrics are pointing to the fact that our 5G network is really positioning us as the preferred choice even beyond what we already were and the numbers, both in terms of subscriber additions and growth as well as net port-in numbers is a testament to the fact that we are now extending that lead over our competitors.
Another initiative that we were consistently speaking about over the last few quarters is the JioBharat initiative. Now this is also a very concerted effort that we undertook to move the 2G base, which is largely a captive base with our competitors, but to bring them on to the 4G base at least to begin with.
So really, the fact that we were able to completely design, manufacture and distribute a 4G device, which is on par or even cheaper than comparable 2G phones from a handset price perspective, and now those are translating into some very, very, very encouraging numbers in the market. If you see that in the less than INR 1,000 price segment, which is really where the 2G phones operate, JioBharat just in the short period after its launch, is now seeing nearly 45% market share in the shipments, which are happening on a month-on-month basis.
Also if you see the growth that we are seeing, the Jio leadership growth that we are seeing in the rural markets, again, the market where I think this product has been targeted at largely, since the JioBharat launch, we have also seen the growth in our subscriber base coming from the rural markets, the net additions that are happening in these rural markets have now grown to become nearly 5.5x of our nearest competitor. So our net adds are 5.5x that of our nearest competitor.
And even within our own network, if you see just before JioBharat launch, again, the graphic on the right, we still had a lead, but the lead was, you could say that while the net adds in millions by our competitors who are adding about 3 million net adds, you could see that we were adding nearly double of that, 5.6 million customers. But post JioBharat launch, if you see, the real drop-off in the net add picture coming from our competitors, while our numbers have really strengthened even further. That's really the 5.2x the nearest competitor number that I was speaking about.
Also in terms of engagement, almost all of those features, including Live TV Playback in Jio Cinema, which is a hero use case because people could never imagine that kind of a service of live television being available on such a handset. So that's really picked up the JioBharat users because financial transactions and UPI payments were another strong use case that we were promoting with such a device and nearly 60% of the total UPI123 Pay transactions, which are really those transactions originating from these low-end handsets is now contributed by JioBharat.
Coming to the home. While we had a market leading service in JioFiber, but using our 5G service, pan-India 5G service, we are really now supercharging our home broadband delivery as well through what we call AirFiber. And really, you could argue that the big cities were reasonably well served through our optical fiber network. But as soon as JioAirFiber got launched, we are seeing really demand getting unlocked from the Tier 3, Tier 4 towns and rural markets, where this is a completely unique service. There is no other competitor to speak of. And the fiber quality broadband service powered by our 5G network is really finding traction in those markets. And also the fact that we are using our own technology, our own 5G core to carry traffic, the real heavy traffic that is really coming from the homes, also means that we are able to do it extremely cost effectively.
I mean, obviously, like I said, in many of these markets, we are the only name in town. But even if you look at global comparables, we are among the cheapest anywhere in the world. Also I mean this is quite a pleasant surprise for us. But we had a rich bouquet of content that we are also bundling to encourage adoption, especially when we go to these markets where people don't have a habit of or even awareness of having used these kind of services.
But what we are really seeing is that JioAirFiber is actually on a like-to-like basis against our JioFiber Service. We are seeing a per capita usage, which is nearly 30x more than our optical fiber service, thanks to a lot of that, thanks to the content, that is also bundled with it. But really, this habit formation and adoption is really encouraging as we are really picking up the pace when it comes to rolling out AirFiber across the country.
Talking about enterprise, again, very strong growth that we are continuing to see. I think almost more than 80% of the large enterprises are already Jio customers. But if you look at it, 33% of the large named enterprises now have graduated beyond connectivity. So they are using 2 or more of Jio services, that means basic connectivity service and one or more of our Digital Services, which we are also vertical and horizontal digital services are now increasingly getting bundled along with our connectivity service as we serve these customers holistically.
Just to give an example of penetration in some of these critical industries, if you look at the top 10 banks in India, nearly 50% of the branches of the top 10 banks today run on Jio Network. And that gives us a foot in the door to even bring some of these additional digital services also to grow that engagement with these large enterprises.
In fact, in many of the cases, now the situation is looking to reverse. Earlier, network was the driving force and Digital Services was an add-on. But now if you see the recent trends, nearly 20% of the new deals -- deal wins that we are winning in the enterprise is actually driven by a non-network service, which also shows that the digital services are truly coming into its own.
And again, like-to-like, if you see over the last year, there has been a 1.3x increase in revenues. If you look like-to-like from the top 100 accounts that we have had, there's been a 30% growth. If you look at the number of accounts who are actually contributing to more than 5 crores, that's like a watermark, that number has also increased to nearly 50% more than what it was last year. So 1.5 -- 1.5x increase in the number of accounts there. And obviously, professional services and retail and education, these are 3 key sectors, which are beyond the large enterprises when we get into the SMBs.
Again, we are seeing a lot of demand coming from these sectors, so schools, training institutes and so on. Professional services being the people like lawyers, [ chartered ] accountants and so on and obviously, small retail. I think these are 3 large sections within the Indian economy, and we are seeing a lot of adoption and a lot of demand coming from these sectors.
So when I was speaking about the digital service and the growing portfolio of services that we are now well positioned to offer looking into the future. On this slide, we are just showcasing a few of those, which we had introduced and unveiled during the India Mobile Congress last year in 2023, everything from what we call JioSpaceFiber, which is the gigabit satellite connectivity that we are bringing to India; JIoCloud, which is our compute platform, which is now built and being offered to enterprises, increasing adoption of AI, so some of the SMB and skill development type of applications, again, that we showcased; gaming, which is, again, augmenting the fact that we have a very strong home play, but how do we bring cloud gaming, which is doing away with the need for expensive consoles and therefore, creating mass scale adoption of games into Indian households, and we have a very young population, who would absolutely allow to engage with these kind of offerings, assuming it is affordable and that's what we are able to do with a cloud approach towards delivering this.
Connected vehicles, again, we are becoming a partner both to connect and also to bring digital automation to a number of vehicle brands and some of those examples also we showcased. As 5G is getting rolled out across the country, some of the large manufacturing locations and large enterprises would like to have what is called Private 5G, which means a dedicated installation just to power a factory location or a large campus, and that's also something that is showcased in a very small server. We can actually plug it into their data center, and they can really be up and running with the 5G network in their campus.
Again, thanks to the fact that this 5G core is something that is homegrown. We are able to package that in very interesting ways to even support Private 5G use cases. And beyond that, obviously, things like health care, agriculture, these are some critical sectors of the economy. And again, we were able to showcase certain IoT-type solutions, again, taking advantage of both our 4G and 5G network, which is now ubiquitous across the country.
And beyond the products, I think we are also entering into what is called managed services. And here, basically, what we are trying to do is helping our customers, enterprise and small medium -- small and medium customers with everything from advisory to implementation as well as ongoing management of the entire digital set of services that they would need. And that's also unlocking a lot of service revenues for us going -- looking into the future.
So I think the network story is unfolding well, both in the mobility, the home and the enterprise segment, and the Digital Services contribution towards -- the contribution towards both account wins as well as the year-on-year growth in the per account revenues. All of that is now looking in a pretty good shape as we head into the new year.
I think on the operating and financial highlights, I'll request my colleague, Anshuman, to step in here.
Thank you, Kiran. Good evening, everyone. I'll take you quickly through the financial and operating performance highlights for the quarter. The -- both revenue and EBITDA during the quarter grew by double digit on a Y-o-Y basis. Revenue grew to INR 27,700 crores, 11.3% growth, and EBITDA touched almost INR 14,000 crores for the quarter with a growth of 11.5% year-on-year.
Sustaining the outperformance and subscriber additions as Kiran spoke about with the superior network, deployment of 5G, we're attracting a lot of the premium customers as well. We saw a net addition of 11.2 million subscribers during the quarter, taking the subscriber base to 471 million. ARPU for the quarter was at INR 181 -- INR 181.7. Now while there was some increase in the ARPU due to the subscriber mix, the fact that we are currently offering 5G services on a trial basis impacted the ARPU because people don't have to recharge for additional data usage at this point in time. So therefore, there was a counterbalancing impact on the ARPU during the quarter.
Customer engagement continues to be very strong. 31.5% year-on-year growth in the data traffic on the network. That's also happening because of the 5G deployment users. 5G consumers are consuming significantly higher amount of data than they were consuming on the LTE network, obviously. So that's causing the increase in the data consumption. And again, as Kiran said, JioAirFiber is expanding in the addressable market -- we are expanding the addressable market with the deployment that we are currently doing. It's already now present wide and across in the country. And the customer engagement signs have been very encouraging with the early set of customers that are on the JioAirFiber.
The key operating metrics for RJIL, our connectivity business, the subscriber mix. The customer base at the end of the quarter was 471 million, net addition of 11.2 million, which has been actually the highest for the last several quarters. So we're seeing that uptick in the subscriber addition over the last several quarters. ARPU at INR 181.7. The per capita data consumption increased to 27.3 GB per user per month during the quarter, and that's shown -- continuing to show an increasing trend. And even the voice traffic was increased during the quarter. So 7.9% Y-o-Y increase in the voice traffic.
Moving to the key financials for RJIL, again, the connectivity business. The operating revenue for the quarter was at INR 25,368 crores and that was a 10.3% year-on-year growth, primarily driven by increase in the customer base. EBITDA was at INR 13,422 crores for the quarter. The EBITDA margin increased for the close to 53%, and this has been fairly steady. Please note that at this point, we are not charging for our 5G services. And this is really coming out of the existing set of subscribers using the recharging on the LTE network.
Moving on to the financials. Consolidated financials for Jio Platforms Limited. We ended the quarter with INR 27,700 crores of operating revenues, that's 11.3% year-on-year growth, EBITDA close to INR 14,000 crores. EBITDA margin improved to 50.4%, and that's also been showing an increasing trend. And the profit after tax increased to INR 5,445 crores, with a growth of 11.6%. So healthy double-digit growth in all of the key financial metrics. At this point in time, more of steady state as several things 5G monetization, the AirFiber, et cetera, are still going to get monetized.
I will now hand over to the Dinesh to take you through a summary of the Reliance Retail results.
Thanks Anshuman. Good evening, everyone. Over the next few slides, I'll take you through the performance of our Retail business.
Our gross revenue crossed INR 83,000 crores, revenue growth of 23% on a Y-o-Y basis. EBITDA grew at a healthy 31% and came at INR 6,258 crores, while profit after tax grew 32%. Digital and New Commerce continues to grow well and contributed 19% of our total revenues during the quarter, increase of 100 basis points over -- on a Y-o-Y basis. We continue to invest in infrastructure. Retail stores has increased by 9% on a Y-o-Y basis. We added 250+ stores during the quarter, our Retail space stands at 72.9 million now, a 21% increase on a Y-o-Y basis. We continue to invest in infrastructure up front end as well as back end infrastructure as well as the technology platforms in order to the length and depth of the country as well as provide consumers with a true omnichannel experience, provide them a good shopping experience as the consumers are also evolving.
[Audio Gap] million. Our total transactions grew 20% and crossed 300 million transactions. It actually came in at 320 million during the quarter.
Just a few quick highlights across the business. All the major consumption baskets did well. Grocery grew at 41% year-on-year growth. Fashion & Lifestyle grew at 28% on a Y-o-Y basis. And this is the context where on the apparel side, the market has been weak and you would see it for the other players as well. But we have done exceedingly well. Consumer Electronics grew 19% on a Y-o-Y basis. So healthy growth across all our larger consumption baskets, all our -- all the businesses are doing extremely well. We had a very good festival season. We saw good engagement from customers and healthy growth during the festival period across the businesses.
Our EBITDA margin continues to expand, up 40 basis points on a year-on-year basis at 8.1%. We see the benefits of operating leverage continue to accrue as we have set up the entire infrastructure and now as we are growing our business. The benefits of operating leverage and margin improvement are flowing through.
We spoke about our store expansion. We continue to invest in new formats, which are either to the requirements of different customer segments. We spoke about Yousta the last quarter. This quarter, we launched Swadesh, which is a format which promotes Indians traditional art forms. We opened our first store in Hyderabad, and we have seen a very good response from customers and a few more stores are in the pipeline. We launched AjioGram, which is a D2C focused content-driven platform on AJIO. It promotes D2C brands and gives them reach to the entire customer base that we have on AJIO. So we are championing the growth of various D2C brands and giving them the benefit of the platform and the customer reach and the traffic that we have built over a period of time.
We launched a co-branded credit card with SBI. It offers significant benefits to consumers for shopping across the Reliance Retail ecosystem. So depending on your needs, whether it's a grocery, whether it's electronics, apparel, there's a lot of benefits that are offered on the card both from Reliance as well as from SBI.
We continue to strengthen capabilities through looking at acquisitions and partnerships. We acquired the Sephora India franchise business from Arvind during the quarter. And we signed exclusive distribution agreement with SMPC (sic) [ SMCP ] for 2 of their brands, Sandro and Maje.
Steady growth. If you look at year on year, our revenues are growing pretty strongly on a large base. For the first time, we crossed INR 80,000 crores, EBITDA, again, pretty healthy growth INR 6,258 crores. So every quarter we are hitting a new milestone. 23% revenue growth on a Y-o-Y basis, 8% on a quarter-on-quarter basis. So both -- whether you look at quarterly, sequentially or annually, very healthy growth, strong operating EBITDA performance, margin expansion, which is driving growth in profit after tax as well at a healthy 32% and 13% on a quarter-on-quarter basis.
Now just to take you through some of the highlights across our consumption baskets, so grocery as we as we spoke about 41% growth. We had a very strong festival season where we saw a lot of traffic in our stores. The Bestival Sale that's an event, that's a flagship event where we've given the name for this period. We had record footfalls in the stores, various categories, weather its confectionery, snacks, dry fruits, all of them that the festive demanded did very well. We registered the highest ever single day sale in the history of this format during the campaign period.
As we've been saying we've been focusing on growing the non-food category that helps improve margins in the supermarkets and hypermarket formats. Both general merchandise and home and personal care are seeing very strong growth and driving the share of nonfood growth, which is helping our margins. We continue to add new categories so that consumers can come to our stores as a one-shop stop destinations.
We have made notable additions in various categories, including home, travel, occasions, celebrations, pooja needs across categories we have we've added and will continue to add new categories to make these attractive destinations for shoppers to come to our stores across various shopping missions.
On the B2B side, the Metro India acquisition -- integration is on track with our B2B business. So we are aligning the 2 businesses, and that's working out well. Post the acquisition October to December quarter, Metro had the highest ever quarterly sales. So we are able to -- from the same stores, we are able to drive good growth, good growth, much better throughput and performance than it was earlier as well as leveraging the metro omnichannel capabilities for our broader B2B business.
JioMart, we continue to see steady growth both in traffic as well as average order values. We have seen a pretty healthy uptick in our order values for our grocery specifically. We are also focusing on increasing the share of non-grocery categories. Fashion & lifestyle and Electronics, both have really outperformed and while still a relatively small contribution to the overall GMV, but they are growing exceedingly well. As the adoption by consumers of these categories is increasing.
The JioUtsav event, which was our flagship event during the quarter, saw a significant growth both in terms of traffic as well as orders. We continue to invest in the platform to improve the product features. Enhance -- during the quarter some of the notable enhancements that we did include the product search, return doorstep delivery for fashion. And a lot of other interesting features, exciting features are in the pipeline.
We continue to expand the catalog and offer more, expanding more options to our consumers. The option count was up 84% and the seller base was up 3x on Y-o-Y basis. And this growth will continue as we add more and more options to make it a truly horizontal platform.
On the consumer brands business, we are pretty excited about this business. It's showing very good growth. The revenue was up 3x on a Y-o-Y basis as well as we are increasing the distribution reach substantially. So, this is a business where it has a big advantage in terms of our in-house channels as well as the B2B Kirana network that we have. But in addition, we are building a broad distribution network to reach a large number of Kiranas across the country as well as modern trade to build and grow these brands.
Some of the notable categories, which did very well during the quarter, were beverages, general merchandise and staples. As you are aware we had launched Campa and Independence brands in the earlier quarters. [Audio Gap] growth in both these brands. We had launched bugles and potato chips under Alan's, and that, again, is doing extremely well. And then there are no further exciting products in [Audio Gap].
Moving on to Fashion & Lifestyle. Apparel and footwear had a good steady quarter driven by footfalls as well as improving conversions. Multiple formats delivered highest ever revenues during the quarter, and this is in the context where the market has been on the weaker side. Broad-based growth across categories, so we're not dependent on one category, like some of our other competitors and international peers, who are more focused on 1 or 2 categories. We are present across multiple categories, and many of them are doing exceedingly well.
[Audio Gap] and more products, option was up 38%. The whole strategy here is focused on offering more and more and more differentiated products, good quality products to the consumers, and that is being valued, and that's why we are seeing very strong growth on this platform. We continue to launch new brands partner with designers as well as launch our in-house brands as well as external brands on to the platform every quarter. Some of the notable ones we did during this quarter was IndiePicks. We launched Dhruv Kapoor, the Champion brand. So multiple brand additions during the quarter.
We spoke about AjioGram earlier, pretty excited about this initiative. There is a lot of very interesting D2C brands, which are coming to market, and we are creating a forum and a platform to grow these brands and take the help with these brands scale up quickly or take them to the consumers. And customer remains at the center. We continue to enhance new features to improve the customer experience, several new features added during the quarter and more are in the pipeline.
On our partner brands, which is our luxury premium and luxury brands portfolio, we continue to lead the market. We have the widest portfolio of brands, and we are the partner of choice for any international brands looking to come into India. We spoke about the Sephora and SMPC (sic) [ SMCP ] partnership agreements earlier. [Audio Gap] continues to do very well and grow from strength to strength. We have a portfolio now of over 660 brands. And every quarter, we are bringing new brands onto the platform.
Jewels had a been very, very good quarter, driven by the festive and wedding buying season, Dhanteras, which is one of the key occasions and big driver of sales for jewelry. We had the highest ever sales during that day. While we are very strong in Metro and Tier 1 cities, we are also seeing very strong growth in Tier 2 and beyond cities. In fact, they're growing faster than the overall rate of growth of the business. So our proposition is getting very widely accepted.
We are focusing on launching new exclusive design collections that help us differentiate some of the notable ones. Swarn Banga was a regional collection. Vivahum was a wedding collection that we launched during the quarter. So these really help us create themes and bring differentiated products to the market. Lingerie, which is one of the newest segments, we are the largest player in this segment now across the host of brands, the D2C brands, Clovia, Zivame, Avante that we have we sell lingerie in our apparel stores.
We have joint venture with Marks & Spencer and Hunk Moller franchise. So across all those we are pretty large players. We are looking at expanding the reach both within the Reliance Retail formats as well as take these or take our D2C brands to the physical distribution network as well as the exclusive brand outlets as well as add -- continue to add new categories, new products within each category to really expand the range for these brands. We also executed several co-brand promotional tie-ups during the quarter, and we saw pretty good cross-pollination on these partnerships.
Urban Ladder, which is our furniture offering, the focus continues to be on ramping up the store network and expand the business across cities.
We are also leveraging our Smart Bazaar formats, where we are launching SIS's for Urban Ladder in these stores, typically focused on grab-and-go items, which work very well in these. So these get more doors as well as customer footfalls increases brand awareness and direct traffic to our online offering as well as the experience centers from these stores.
[Audio Gap] we are very excited and seeing very good results in the initial days. We are also including many new launches, many new brands we are bringing to India, some of the notable ones that we signed up for online as well as offline during the quarter are Laura Mercier, Allies of Skin and Blessed Moon.
Moving on to our Consumer Electronics business. Again had a pretty sustained 19% Y-o-Y growth. We see growth -- healthy growth in average bill values as well as the conversions are improving. The growth has been quite broad-based across phones, large appliances as well as TVs. In fact, we saw a strong surge in demand for large screen TVs during the World Cup. So the large screens TVs, 55, 65-inch TVs did very well. We had a number of flagship mobile phone model launches during the quarter and that contributed pretty significantly to the performance of phones as well as other categories. We continue to increase the assortment, including ACs, refrigerators and launching -- working with brands to launch exclusive products for our stores.
ResQ, which is our biggest differentiator in Electronics segment. We continue to increase the geographic footprint as well as increase the proposition, continue to add new services, new plans into that business, also targeting the out-of-warranty opportunity there. PB on our product brands group, we are launching new products across categories to see where the wide gaps are in the market and bring products which are high on quality and a very disruptive pricing.
We continue to expand new doors. Our merchant base is up 2.66% on a Y-o-Y basis. Now we have pretty significant depth in terms of the reach where our products are present.
On our JioMart Digital business, the focus is on expanding the merchant base, which is up 34%, as well as improve the participation of merchants. Ultimately, how many categories are the merchants buying from you? And how many -- how frequently are they buying? Those are the 2 most important metrics to ensure that we are relevant, and they find a proposition attractive, and both those metrics are month on month. Month on month, we are seeing very strong growth.
That's it on the Retail side. Now I'll hand over for the update on Oil and Gas.
Thanks, Dinesh. Good evening, everyone. To do a recap of the quarter gone by. So this was the highest ever quarterly EBITDA for the Oil and Gas segment. [Audio Gap] INR 5,800 crore, largely driven by higher volumes. With 19 wells in production from the 3 wells -- from the 3 fields. We have seen production increase. This we expect will sustain. Currently, we're producing about 30 million standard cubic meters and oil and condensate of about 21,000 barrels per day.
In terms of prices, yes, we've seen prices come off a little bit. In fact, as you may be all aware that ceiling prices had come down from $12.12 to $9.96. And with global factors impacting demand and high inventory levels impacting prices, we've seen a slight pullback in gas prices which, to a certain extent, off-setted the gains made in production.
So, at KGD6, the main focus now is on how to sustain the production from these fields. All 19 wells are producing. The fields are producing as per expectations. In CBM, we've launched the 40-well multilateral campaign, the first in India. This is to maximize and improve the productivity from these fields. We expect results to come in over the next 2 quarters. Further, in KG UDW1, we are currently doing an exploration well in the block.
So as you can see in this graph, we've had sustained increase in production as we commissioned the fields from FY '21 onwards and comparatively between the 9 months of this fiscal versus FY '23, can only see a 6 million standard cubic meter increase. And this will continue to increase in the quarters to come with a plateau of about 30 million standard cubic meters. So currently, we are contributing about 30% of India's domestic gas production.
So we completed the auction for 4 million standard cubic meters of gas from KGD6. This was the sixth auction. And this way, we have now managed to sell all the gas that we are producing. So the offtake is all tied up. For this specific round, there was significant participation. We had 38 successful bidders, largely from fertilizer and refineries and to some extent from CGD and aggregators. So the main contributors were CGD and fertilizer. And as you are all aware, this was -- the price realization will be subject to a cap of $9.96 per MMBtu.
[Audio Gap] resulted in higher inventory levels and lower demand. As you can see, the storages are at about 82.6% at the current juncture versus 5-year averages of 70.4%. So clearly, that has had an impact on the prices. The sense is the short-term prices will be guided by the severity of the winter. There has been some pickup in demand from China. There's also been some cold [ spurs ] in China that has spurred the demand, apart from the economy showing some signs for higher demand.
In Southeast Asia, again, the demand is price sensitive. So at lower prices, we are seeing higher demand. So overall, there is a little bit of pressure on gas prices. And again, this is going to be dependent on the winter.
Thank you, and over to you, Srikanth.
Okay. Thanks, Sanjay. So moving to the last section, which is O2C. Year-on-year revenues have been lower on the back of reduction in prices of Brent. Otherwise, when you look EBITDA, as I mentioned, up 1% in a fairly challenging environment. We focused a lot on product placement in the domestic market, given that the demand was good, also a lot more of fuel retailing volumes we saw. Overall, trends in margins have been mixed. Mid-distillates were lower. When you look at it on a year-on-year basis, but of course, that was also offset by lower SAED. Our gasoline cracks were better when you compare it on a year-on-year basis.
Downstream polymer margins lower anywhere between 4% to 17% on the back of muted demand and also excess supply. So you're seeing that. On the polyester side, margins have been -- on an integrated basis has been stable as some of the PX improvement has been offset by weaker polyester delta. Then also the environment was -- there was oil sourcing market has been fairly tight, in that sense [indiscernible] some of the arbitrages have been lower.
Q-on-Q performance was lower on the back of maintenance and inspection shutdown, I talked about it earlier on, which impacted yields and profitability, given the fact that reduced fuel production and lower like feed cracking. But it was fairly extensive in terms of the maintenance part of it. It was across units, across CDU, across FCCU, coker and ROGC.
So it was a large M&I, and had it not been for this M&I on a year-on-year basis, clearly, the numbers would have been higher and absolutely comparable to last quarter if all these units were available during the whole quarter. Just a quick snapshot of the overall environment. Clear highlight, you can see global oil demand at 102 million barrels per day, it's about 1.7 million barrels. So if you see geography wise, China is really 1.5 out of 1.7. Demand has been good even in the Americas and Asia. When you look at it from a product cut, you can see that Jet demand has gone up by 1.1 million barrels per day and gasoline 1.1. So, you can see that kind of demand and why both the geography and the product cut.
On the Polymer side, India demand was up 10%. Polyester was more muted at about 1%, but very broad-based demand if you see across agriculture, across infrastructure and packaging. Operating rates clearly down as you can see 78.5%, down 120 basis points. A lot of refinery maintenance we saw globally. On cracker operating units also have been -- lowered to 80.8%, almost 4% lower on the back of weak demand and on the back of excess supply in the market. This is the Indian oil demand, of which we have picked up the 3 important ones, gasoline, HSD and ATF. So overall demand up 2.1% year-on-year and if you see on a quarter-on-quarter, it is up 5.5%.
Gasoline. Clearly, travel has played a part. Auto sales, you can see booming growth there, reflecting in demand for gasoline. HSD more muted, but clearly, there is a very positive momentum in mining and in the industrial sectors. ATF, very strong growth, 11% growth. You can see the recently released data on air passenger traffic 39.2 million in this quarter, it's up 9%. So explaining why demand for ATF has been strong.
And when you come to the polymer market side, clearly, 10% when you look at polymer in aggregate, but in the components PE 13%, PP more muted at 3% and PVC 19%. So PE specifically led by infrastructure pipes. On PVC, the continuing focus by the government on schemes for agricultural and infrastructure. So that really explains why that the demand continues to be pretty strong. In the polyester side, clearly, it is PET up 9%. Beverage consumption was pretty strong during World Cup and the fasting season. On PSF and PFY, which recording [Audio Gap].
Delta side, you can see PE, PP, PVC, all the 3 are lower both on a year-on-year basis as well as on a quarter-on-quarter basis. Polymer demand particularly has been lower. You can see the fall year-on-year PE is down 11%, polypropylene is down 4%. Demand has been fairly subdued, particularly in China. There has been significant oversupply. And the fact that feedstock has -- prices have been firm has meant that both the deltas have been lower. PVC particularly has seen a much sharper margin correction, down 17% on lower price realization and particularly because of the fact that EDC prices have been up 25%. So there has been that kind of compression.
Same story when you look at it on a Q-on-Q basis also, where PVC delta was down 26% on the back of 8% decline in product prices and 20% increase in EDC prices. However, for us, soft ethane price environment supported ethane cracking. As you know, ethane prices came off pretty sharply on a year-on-year basis. It was lower by 41%. So some part of the economics for us on ethane cracking was pretty helpful.
Polyester chain, as I said, $488 a tonne flat on a year-on-year basis, though sequentially a little weaker. While we saw significant improvement in PX delta, we also saw that it was offset by PTA deltas being weak. MEG deltas were better, but it was on a lower base. Q-o-Q was more to do with PX margins being weaker. And these margins were reduced because of higher supply on lower gasoline cracks. Overall polyester prices declined given subdued China demand.
Moving to the transportation fuel. On gasoil side, demand actually was a little bit weaker by 0.18 million barrels per day. So total demand for gasoil is about 29 million barrels per day, so it was lower. But you can see the demand for India and China was much higher and decline in Europe and Africa. The cracks did moderate both year-on-year basis on Q-o-Q on the back of Chinese exports because they released their third batch of export quota and also supplied from refineries as they came out of maintenance.
Also it's fair to say that inventory levels are continuing to remain high. So while deltas are definitely lower, but you can see at absolute levels, they are -- they still remain, in some sense, healthy. And overall outlook also for gasoil remains good.
On Jet Kero, again, you are seeing the both year-on-year and sequential fall, but absolute levels of deltas are at $24 are strong. Here, there was a increase in demand, 1.1 million barrels per day. And you can see that it is primarily on account of Asia Pacific demand, which accounts for most of it. Also by the cracks declined, as I said, both year-on-year and Q-on-Q, and this really followed trends on gasoil cracks.
[Audio Gap] for us, this is the operating trend throughput at 18.7 million tonnes lower than what it was in 2Q FY '24. And that there is -- the aspect of M&I shutdown, as we have detailed, which are the units which went into shutdown, the CDU, the cocker, and FCCU and ROGC. From our part, we continue to focus on maximizing the arbitrage barrels as the official OSPs remained high. So that was important for us to keep that focus on to minimize feedstock costs. We focused a lot on getting on alkylate and high RON gasoline exports given that the premiums and netbacks are pretty good.
Aromatic margins remained subdued, and we optimize our production to capture the overall chain margins. And for the first time, we -- there was a dispatch of Circular Polymer, which is CircuRepol, which is really about minimizing plastic waste through chemical recycle, that's part of sustainability initiative.
On overall perspective, [Audio Gap] clearly, this market is going to remain volatile on the back of OPEC actions as well as the war. When you look at overall demand environment, you know, last year it was 2.3 million barrels per day, even '24 calendar year, you should -- people are forecasting about 1.2 million barrels per day, and China will continue to be a large component of the increase.
Also, overall, we do think that jet fuel cracks demand remains good. Gasoil cracks also expected to remain firm given the demand for jet fuel as well as the fact that there is limited availability of heavy crude. So the context, therefore, is that in this environment, it's fair to say that one can be constructive on refining margins in this environment of continuing demand for these products. However, on downstream side, on the chemical side, clearly, market is expected to remain well supplied in the near term. And overall, of course, the offset is the fact that domestic demand remains resilient in line with the kind of economic activity that we are seeing in India.
So just to bring it together, overall, while the environment was what it was, I think our focus has been on operational discipline. And despite all the dynamics in all the markets done well to be where we are. And when I refer to operational discipline, it is across businesses and you saw Dinesh talking through each of the parameters there in Retail. Overall, we do see a strong domestic demand, and this is in both consumer as well as energy market, so that's pretty positive for us.
Overall O2C earnings is going to remain a bit volatile because of volatility because of market disruptions. But I think overall, refining margins given the context that I described is favorable in that sense for some of the cracks there. However, downstream margins do remain a bit pressured on the back of feedstock prices being higher as well as demand from China still being tepid.
Overall, from our -- when you look at how we have seen -- when you look at revenue growth, you look at margin expansion, we are seeing it across our businesses, Jio, the 5g infrastructure rollout, the customer adds, the growth in data traffic and the fact that many of these things are yet to be monetized. So there are positive drivers for growth. Retail is in a good place with the kind of -- when you look at each of the verticals and the dynamics and our own strategy against each of those formats holds well for us. And, you know, we are on track to commence the New Energy facilities in phases, starting end of this year.
So, overall, I think cash flows remain strong, balance sheet remains strong and moderating CapEx. You may have seen that CapEx in this quarter at about INR 30,000 crores is significantly lower than the previous quarter as well as what it was year-on-year. And actually our cash CapEx -- cash profits are higher than what is the CapEx that we are spending.
With this, you know, thank you so much for being on the call.