Reliance Industries Ltd
NSE:RELIANCE
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Reliance Industries Ltd
Earnings Call Analysis
Q4-2024 Analysis
Reliance Industries Ltd
Hello to all investors. Today, we're diving into the latest earnings call from a major conglomerate, summarizing their performance highlights across various business segments, including digital services, retail, and oil and gas. Let's break it down.
The digital services division has been on a growth spurt. RJIL, the telecom arm, added 10.9 million new subscribers in the quarter, reaching a total of 481.8 million users . The company is offering 5G services on a promotional basis, which means they're not yet monetizing this new technology fully - approximately 30% of the network usage is being provided free . Despite this, they've managed to maintain a healthy ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of INR 181.7. Data consumption is booming, with a total of 40.9 billion GBs consumed in the quarter, up 35% year-on-year .
The retail segment has marked significant milestones, crossing INR 3 lakh crores in revenue and INR 23,000 crores in EBITDA for the full financial year, reflecting 18% revenue growth year-on-year . Segment-wise, grocery saw a 31% growth, fashion and lifestyle grew by 23%, and consumer electronics by 18% . The retail arm continues to expand its footprint, adding 1,840 new stores this year, with a gross area addition of 15.6 million square feet, bringing the total retail area to nearly 80 million square feet .
In the oil and gas sector, the company reported its highest ever EBITDA of INR 20,200 crores, a 49% increase year-on-year . This growth is driven by an upsurge in KG D6 production, which increased by 57% . However, this was offset slightly by a 5% decrease in KG D6 price realization. Despite lower price realizations, higher production volumes have significantly bolstered financial results.
Looking at operations, the company's EBITDA has grown 16% to INR 47,150 crores while net profit for the quarter stood at INR 21,243 crores, remaining flat year-on-year due to tax credit availed last year . The telecommunications segment reported strong figures, with RJIL's standalone full year revenue crossing INR 1 lakh crores and showing a 12.4% year-on-year EBITDA growth . On the balance sheet front, net debt has reduced by INR 10,000 crores to INR 116,000 crores, reflecting strong financial health .
The company continues to invest in growth and strategic areas. For example, they completed an equity fund raise of INR 17,800 crores last year . They are also expanding into fast-growing areas like digital services and retail with new products and partnerships. In the energy sector, they expect gas prices to stabilize due to strong demand and limited new LNG capacity coming online .
In summary, the company's diversified business model and strategic investments have positioned it well for future growth. Their strong balance sheet, continued expansion in digital and retail services, and robust performance in the oil and gas sector ensure a favorable outlook for the coming quarters. This is a resilient company with a clear growth trajectory.
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Good evening, and welcome to the financial results presentation for the full year of 2023 and the fourth quarter of financial year 2024.
We have Srikanth who will first talk about our consolidated financials followed by Kiran, who will give the idea of our Digital Services business and Anshuman will walk you through the financials for the Digital Services business. Dinesh will then take over and speak about the solid performance of Reliance Retail followed by Sanjay Roy who will talk with E&P, and then Srikanth come back to talk about O2C business, the summary and he will close out. Thank you for coming on a Monday evening. Over to you, Srikanth.
Yes. Thanks, Srini, and good evening to all of you. Starting off with '23/'24, looking at the full year picture, the year of milestones. We have crossed INR 1,75,000 crores in EBITDA, more than INR 100,000 crores in PBT, more than INR 20 lakh crores in terms of market cap. On JPL side, INR 100,000 crore mark. We have crossed INR 20,000 crores net profit and, of course, completed the fastest rollout for our 5G network.
On RRVL, we have crossed INR 300,000 crore mark and net profit of INR 10,000 crores plus. And we have more than 75 million square feet. So clearly, we are the first Indian company to cross these milestones.
On a stand-alone basis, if you were to look JPL and RRVL at this level would be among the top 20 and top 30 companies, respectively.
Looking at '23, '24, our EBITDA at INR 1,79,000 crores, up 16% year-on-year. We delivered net profit of INR 79,000 crores, up 7.3%.
When you look at our consumer business, the EBITDA now close to INR 80,000 crores which is up almost 17% year-on-year. 5-year CAGR for our consumer business at 30%. And this has been enabled on the back of larger physical and digital footprint increase in footfalls, the increase in the number of transactions, increase in the number of subscriber, registered subscribers. On 5G, it is on the back of higher customer engagement, 5G rollout and FTTH penetration. A highlight also has been the resilient O2C performance given what we are seeing on cracks. And this has obviously been aided by significant operational flexibility, focus on feedstock optimization, light fee cracking and high domestic placement helped us overcome the challenging environment.
On the Oil and Gas, led entirely by ramp-up in KG D6 production, our balance sheet -- our net debt has been falling and the CapEx spend also has been lower. All in all, we have delivered, our EBITDA has doubled in the last 5 years.
Just key highlights here. You can see that for retail, our revenue up 18%, EBITDA up 29%. We have seen margin expansion at 8.4%, which is 60 basis points higher. As I mentioned, footfalls are greater than $1 billion, which is 36% higher, 300 million registered customers we have now. Overall store addition has been 796 new stores. Area under operation, 79.1, so that's an expansion of almost 21% there. Our own Fashion & Lifestyle brands are now driving growth. 3 brands have more 2,000 crores of annual sales.
On Digital Services, it's been about 12% to 13% across revenue and EBITDA. ARPU at about 182, about 2% higher. We have now 482 million subscribers, which is 10% higher than what it was. And our EBITDA margin at 50.2%, it is also higher by 50 basis points. And overall, when you look at it, we stand out in terms of the net subscriber add of 42.4 million.
Data traffic is up 31% year-on-year. And we have now 108 million subscribers transition to Jio True 5G. So outside China, this is the largest 5G subscriber base and we're now rolling out Jio AirFiber in 5,900 towns.
On O2C side, EBITDA at INR 62,393 crores, 0.5% higher. The context being the globe, the weak margin environment globally. All of you know that you have seen that fuel cracks anywhere between 20% and 45% has been the fall, and it has been offset by lower SAED.
Also, the environment, when you look at some of the downstream petrochemical deltas, they are all multi-decade lows on the back of supply overhang. What's -- we have been able to offset this weak margin environment by focusing on light feed cracking, on focusing on feedstock sourcing and optimization. And of course, we are helped by the fact that the domestic demand environment has been pretty strong. For example, on polymer side, we have seen a 14% increase in demand year-on-year basis.
Oil and Gas, the story, INR 20,191 crores. This is really the highest EBITDA that we have reported. This is up about 49%. This is on the back of KG D6 production, which in itself was up 57% because to some extent, that volume was -- growth was offset by the fact that there has been a 5% decrease in KG D6 price realization.
Bringing these numbers together, revenue at INR 10 lakh crores, up 2.6%, and the revenue growth is muted because as you may have observed that oil prices declined by 13.5% on a year-on-year basis.
And overall, when you see EBITDA growth of 16, it was -- you saw that other than O2C, the other businesses had a strong growth.
PBT was about 11.4%, as I mentioned, it was INR 1 lakh mark, it crossed. Overall, net profit was up 7.3%, even though PBT was up 11.4% because as you may recall in the last year, we did avail -- took avail of all the tax credits that were available and now we are back to normal tax.
With this, this is the bridge on EBITDA contribution really led by Oil and Gas, on volumes, retail because of categories and margin expansion. Digital Services on the back of strong subscriber growth and operating leverage, and others really reflect contribution from other businesses, higher treasury income and the focus on cost, which has helped us reduce some of the unallocable expenses.
This is moving to the fourth quarter numbers stand-alone EBITDA at INR 47,150 crore, up 14% and net profit of INR 21,243 crore, which is really flat on a year-on-year basis. And as I was mentioning, revenue is up because we saw double-digit growth in both O2C and consumer business. EBITDA, we have seen the contribution from across businesses and particularly big growth in KG D6 related EBITDA.
Overall, net profit was muted only because of the fact that we availed of the tax credits, particularly in the fourth quarter of last year. However, when you see that quarter-on-quarter, you can see there is a sharp increase, and that is primarily coming because of O2C, where post maintenance and inspection, we saw an increase in volumes.
Also, when you look at the individual net profits, you can see that JPL is actually, for the quarter is INR 5,600 crores. RRVL, is about close to INR 2,700 crores. So a strong EBITDA growth, we have a portfolio of very dynamic businesses which are doing well.
This is just the bridge, and you can see that the biggest contribution here is on a year-on-year basis coming from Oil and Gas and all the other businesses have also done well here.
This is fourth quarter versus third quarter. So sequential a big jump, as I was highlighting, INR 2,713 crore, coming on the back of the fact that all units are operational post the M&A turnaround. We also saw sustained performance with marginal declines in volume there. And on the retail side, store rationalization and seasonally affected this performance. Digital Services, we had 11 million customer addition in this quarter, which primarily drove the earnings there.
And on the balance sheet side, you can see that net debt is lower, down by INR 10,000 crores. It was INR 126,000 crores in March '23, now down to INR 116,000 crores. And you can also note that the CapEx for the year is INR 132,000 crores, which is about -- last time, it was INR 142,000 crores. So there has been a INR 10,000 crore reduction in CapEx as well as the fact that the CapEx for the year, if you compare it to the cash profits of INR 1,42,000 crores. So the CapEx is lower than the cash profit that we have. And clearly, this is -- we have talked about keeping net debt to EBITDA below 1, And at these levels, it will be about 0.65. And going forward, this kind of balance sheet provides unparalleled financial flexibility, and we'll continue to keep track of these ratios.
With this, I'm giving it to Kiran.
Yes. Thank you, Srikanth. So let's start the update on the Digital Services piece with our True 5G network. As on date, more than 100 million in fact, 108 million subscribers have migrated to Jio's True 5G services. And if you look at the total traffic, that is now being carried or being contributed by the 5G subscribers. On our 5G network. It is now approaching 30% of the mobility data traffic, cumulative mobility data traffic.
Just keep in mind that it is just about 1.5 years since we actually started rolling out our 5G network, and these are staggering numbers for such a short period of time.
In terms of quality as well, Ookla, who is always monitoring the quality of various mobility services, especially in our 5G services in India. Ookla has rated Jio 5G, the best network in terms of pretty much every metric: availability, latency, normal data consumption, video quality across the board on pretty much every parameter that they monitor Jio is now #1.
As a result, you see on the infographic on the right, India is one of the shining lights across the globe, with 100%, near 100% coverage of the landmass of the country using the most advanced 5G services available globally, which is a stand-alone 5G. And it also means that Jio on its own today as the world's largest 5G subscriber base outside of China. So China obviously has a head start. They have been rolling out 5G for now nearly -- approaching 5-odd years. But in just about 1.5 years, we have reached the #2 position and just behind China.
In terms of subscriber share as well. So all of these factors, including obviously our 4G network, but now with 5G kicking in, in full gear, we continue to gain subscriber share. If you look at just over the last year or so, if you take March '23 position versus what we have in just a month back, we have seen a nearly 3% increase in subscriber market share. And this is not just in any one part of the country or the other, it is across all circles, whether it's a metro circle, whether it is category A, B or C circled, across all circle categories, we have seen a strengthening in our subscriber market share numbers. And it's largely also driven by the fact that now we have one of the world's best 5G networks working at scale. And of course, the JioBharat ecosystem on the other end is now bringing in what used to be 2G subscribers now onto our 4G network. So that's also increasing adoption.
And of course, there are a number of very interesting partnerships that we've been able to create with premium smartphones because 5G and premium smartphones kind of go hand in hand because the true power of a smartphone is showcased by our 5G network and the other way around. So all of these engines firing would mean that we are strengthening our market leadership, and this is a story that will continue to unfold into the future as well.
Just a small infographic, I think if you can play that animation. This is just showing how our 5G network over the last, like I said, 18-odd months has really come alive. And the real picture to take over -- take from this infographic is the fact that it is not a regional phenomenon. It is not a big city phenomenon. If you look at pretty much across the landmass of India, you can see that now our 5G network is present. And the growth in 5G adoption is largely now dictated only by the adoption of 5G smartphones. Otherwise, our network is now present across the country. We have seen growth in subscriber base, like I said, across all circle categories. So this is just an infographic that we see a visual appeal -- visual feel for what that journey has been.
Now turning to our -- the other dimension of how our 5G network is helping bring broadband to India. This is on our fixed wireless strategy to go after homes and other fixed devices. We used to have what we call the JioFiber story, which has obviously been growing slowly but steadily over the past many years. But again, with Jio AirFiber coming in.
We can -- we are in a position today to offer our fiber-like broadband through Jio AirFiber to nearly 6,000 towns across the country. And again, what is very heartening to see is that the AirFiber availability is really translating into a very, very healthy demand not only in the big cities, but we are seeing that more adoption is actually coming from Tier 2 towns because that has been the area where the demand has been the greatest, but reaching optical fiber to those towns has been time consuming, but now with Jio AirFiber available in thousands of cities. That's really where we are seeing the strongest adoption.
And of course, just like with JioFiber, even Jio AirFiber comes with a suite of digital content bundled with the tariff plan that subscribers signed up for. And all of that is really translating into very strong engagement as well. So not just adoption but usage in terms of almost a per capita monthly consumption of nearly 400 GB. It's like approaching 0.5 terabyte per month kind of a usage on Jio AirFiber. And this increased distribution and presence means that our home strategy will also see now an accelerating momentum into the future.
Coming to small businesses, which is also one of the other segments which has been hitherto underserved because they also are another category of fixed devices. So like we speak about media bundling. When we are going to the small businesses, what we are actually talking about is a whole bundle, which is relevant for businesses. So if you look to the right, everything from connectivity through fiber and AirFiber inside their offices or premises, they are offering an end-to-end managed WiFi service. And in key, 4 key segments, which are very large segments in the country, if you take, for example, hotels, or small manufacturers or schools and colleges and hospitals, these are 4 very specific categories that we have selected, where we are also taking very interesting software solutions to that market on our own and through partnerships.
So for example, if you take hotels in addition to connectivity and WiFi, we are offering an entire hotel management solution, which also bundles in entertainment for the guests who are coming to those hotels.
If you look at manufacturing, we are taking in security and surveillance solutions because that's what's necessary to have governance overall of those activities that happen.
If you take colleges, obviously, again, ubiquitous connectivity and school and college management solutions. And likewise, with hospitals, we are giving them hospital information management solutions as well as again, for the patients who are admitted in those hospitals, providing connectivity in room as well as also entertainment solutions for both -- for the patients as well as the guests.
So putting together some of the proven solutions, but making it very relevant to these verticals is also seeing an increasing adoption, not just of connectivity, but also Digital Services broadly speaking.
Talking about the numbers now turning to revenue. The consolidated revenue for this year, approaching now nearly INR 110,000 crores which is almost a 12% year-on-year growth when you look at this financial year as compared to the previous financial year.
The consolidated EBITDA, nearly INR 55,000 crores, and that's also growing even faster at nearly -- 12.8% or nearly 13% year-on-year.
Looking at the quarter, for the fourth quarter, again, the consolidated revenues were at a higher run rate. If you look at it on an annualized basis, revenues at INR 28,871 crores and EBITDA at INR 14,360 crores.
Today, the subscriber base stands at 481.8 million as on March 2024. And the ARPUs across such a large base is now at INR 181, or nearly INR 182 per subscriber.
The monthly traffic on Jio also now crossed 14 exabytes per month. Total traffic for the quarter at 40 exabytes, up 35% year-on-year. And this is all being driven by, like I mentioned, the accelerating adoption of 5G as well as the growing penetration of home broadband, both with JioFiber and Jio AirFiber. And again, like I mentioned, Jio AirFiber is translating into good demand, not just in the big cities, but also now going towards Tier 2 and beyond.
Looking at the data traffic, just giving you a growth ever since we came out of COVID really, if you see, while there was a very healthy uptick through COVID because that was only lifeline that people had. But even coming out of it, you can see that -- you can see a 2.5x increase. That's 250% increase in annual traffic if we just look at the past 3 years.
And again, like I said, the 5G rollout and the home connect is contributing tremendously to that. And if you look at the per capita monthly data consumption, it is now nearly approaching a gigabyte of consumption per day. Earlier, we used to talk about gigabytes per month. And now I think soon, we'll have to talk about gigabytes per day. So at 28.7 GB, very quickly approaching the 30 GB per month mark.
And again, all of this is largely being driven by the fact that Jio's network continues to be not just a leader in India, but a global leader when it comes to all metrics, including availability, speed and latency.
All of this bodes extremely well to our growing story that we are unfolding for the country in terms of digital adoption.
And with that, I will hand it over to my colleague Anshuman, who will talk about the operating and financial metrics.
Thank you, Kiran. Good evening, everyone. I'll quickly take you through the operating and the key financial metrics for both RJIL, the telecom business and JPL, which is a Digital Services company. For RJIL, Kiran spoke about the subscriber base at 481.8 million. That's a healthy addition of 10.9 million for this quarter at a time when most of the other operators are either losing subscribers or just about maintaining their current base. We have been continuing to add subscribers through this period because of the robust 5G network, the attraction of more users coming on to the 5G network as well as the initiatives were taken at the lower end of the market with JioBharat.
The ARPU was at INR 181.7 for this quarter, given this quarter had lesser day plus I would like to point out here that, at this point, the 5G services are being offered on a promotional basis. We're trying to create the ecosystem for 5G services. We are not charging customers separately for the 5G data offering that we're giving them today, which pretty much means that 30% of the network data today or network usage is being given free of cost. In that context, we've been able to maintain our fairly healthy ARPU and other financial numbers.
The total data consumption went up to 40.9 billion GBs for the quarter. So that's -- if you look at the previous -- at the same time last year, that's 35% higher, and the per capita data consumption at 28.7 GB per user per month.
Voice also continues to grow healthily. We are at 1,008 minutes per user per month. Total voice on the network has crossed between -- close to 1,600 crores minutes per day. So sustained improvement across all of the customer engagement metrics, which has always been a point of importance for us as we try and create this digital ecosystem.
The financials for the connectivity business, that is RJIL. In Q4, it reported operating revenues of INR 25,959 crores, which was a growth of 11% year-on-year. and the EBITDA went up to INR 13,734 crores, which is growth by 11.5% year-on-year with some operating leverage. So EBITDA margin at 53%. Once again, to just remind you that we're not charging for 5G services at this point in time. And despite that, we've been seeing fairly healthy growth in both revenues and EBITDA for the connectivity business.
Moving on to the full year numbers for RJIL. The operating revenues for the full year for RJIL in stand-alone also went up to cross INR 1 lakh crores. So at INR 1,00,119 crores for fiscal year '24. That was a growth of a little over 10% year-on-year. And the EBITDA came in at close to INR 53,000 crores, a growth of 12.4% year-on-year. So almost a 100 basis point increase in margins through this period.
Moving on to Jio Platforms Limited. The operating revenue for the quarter for Jio Platforms Limited at a consolidated level came in at INR 28,871 crores and EBITDA at INR 14,360 crores and PAT at INR 5,583 crores.
Now looking at the full year for JPL, revenue, operating revenue of INR 1,09,558 crores and EBITDA of close to INR 55,000 crores at an EBITDA margin of little over 50%. The profit after tax came in at INR 21,423 crores.
So across the board, fairly healthy growth rate, including in the digital segment of the business for JPL, which saw substantial growth through this year.
With this, I'll hand over to Dinesh to take you through the results for our retail business.
Thanks, Anshuman. Hi. Good evening, everyone. In terms of key performance highlights for retail business, it was a very important year for us. We crossed the milestone of INR 3 lakh crores in revenue and INR 23,000 crores in EBITDA for the full financial year. Our overall revenues grew 18% on a year-on-year basis and 11% on a quarter-on-quarter basis. Sorry, on 18% for full year and 11% for the quarter on a Y-o-Y basis.
In terms of segmental growth, the growth for grocery for FY '24 was the highest at about 31%. Fashion & Lifestyle grew at about 23%, and consumer electronics grew at about 18%.
Our EBITDA margins continue to expand. For the full year, the EBITDA from operations was at 8.1%, which is a 50 basis points year-on-year growth and for the quarter was 8.3%, which is a 60 basis points year-on-year growth. So we are consistently seeing the benefits of operating the average as the infrastructure that we have put on the ground over the last 2 to 3 years. It's yielding fruits. Across channels also and across baskets, the growth is strong. So while the stores are growing, our digital and e-commerce initiatives also continue to scale up nicely and they contributed about 18% of revenue during the financial year '24.
On our operating metrics have a strong upward trend. Our registered customer base grew upwards of 300 million. Both footfalls and transactions were over 1 billion for the financial year. We continue to expand our store footprint. During the year, we added 1,840 new stores, with gross area addition of 15.6 million. Just for reference, this is more than the total retail area for the next largest retailer in the country. For the quarter, we added 562 stores with a gross area of 7.8 million square feet. Our total retail area now stands at up close to 80 million square feet.
We completed a fund raise of equity fundraise of INR 17,800 crores last year. We had earlier announced foundries from QIA, KKR and ADIA and as part of the same round, Reliance Industries infused INR 2,500 crores, taking the total equity capital raised to about INR 17,800 crores.
In terms of overall revenue, if you look at it INR 3,06,000 crores the year, total EBITDA of INR 23,000 crores and profit after tax of INR 11,000 crores for the full year. So pretty healthy growth in all the financial metrics.
Moving on to some of the key highlights across the various business segments. On Electronics, consistent trend that we have been seeing and disclosing in the last few quarters is growth in average bill values as well as improving conversion. So what we see is people are spending more on mobile phones, ACs, et cetera, on consumer durables. So that's showing a healthy growth in average bill values, which is driving the growth for this business. We saw pretty strong sales in ACs, summer's came in March, and that trend continues. We had the Digital India Sales event, which saw a 15% Y-o-Y growth in sales.
Across categories, whether it's mobile phones, whether it's consumer durables, the growth is quite robust.
resQ, which is a key differentiator, continues to expand its service network. We opened 24 new centers during the quarter. We have over 1,000 centers overall across the length and breadth of the country, and we serve 1.2 million customers with the resQ offering. We've also launched out of warranty services, and we are scaling that up pretty nicely.
Our product business as well as our B2B, B2B2C business JMD continues to scale up well. We continue to add new merchants in the JMD business. We continue to expand the distribution footprint for our products, getting our products available at new and new counters and keep adding new SKUs to expand our product offering. During the quarter, we also launched a new brand, WYZR, where we introduced a range of coolers and we'll be expanding it to other categories.
Fashion & Lifestyle, we had a few festivals during the quarter as well as the winter wear which drove sales and customer engagement, especially in the cooler parts of the country. Some of our new formats, which we had launched last year, specifically Yousta, Azorte and GAP, they continue to do very well. We are seeing very strong customer reception for these formats, and we are scaling up these formats to set up in more stores across the country.
Our own brands in the Fashion & Lifestyle business, bulk of what we said is our own brands, and they continue to drive the growth. 3 of our brands crossed the milestone of INR 2,000 crore annual sales, which puts them amongst the largest fashion brands in the country.
We also continue to work on building a fast fashion supply chain ecosystem and increase the number of options that we launch because this helps us increase the freshness in our stores as well as reduces the inventory across the stores and some of our formats like Yousta, et cetera, which are more younger focal or younger desi focus, they require a lot of new options getting launched every week. So that's something that we are working on, and it's scaling up pretty nicely.
On AJIO B2C, we continue to focus on improving the customer experience. We look at launching new product features. So this quarter, we launched the product rating feature, which we started with a pilot and then, now it is available for all products across the platform. We are also working on storefront personalization. So if I open AJIO app versus somebody else opening, depending on preferences, past behavior, past purchase behavior, what have we browsed in the past, the recommendations that come and what will be visible will be very different. So that does improve a lot of relevance and customer experience.
Our focus is on exclusive brands and new brands on the platform. So we continue to strengthen our portfolio. We grew the category of 30% on a Y-o-Y basis.
The All Stars Sale, which is a March 1 event of which we do every year. In fact, most of the fashion retailers were -- had some event at that point in time, but we were able to demonstrate very strong traffic growth and a lot of customer additions during that period. We did outperform most of our peers.
Premium brands business continues to do very well. In fact, that's a trend that we are seeing across consumption baskets where there is a customer focus towards premiumization. So premium brands, premium products are doing better than their peers in the value side. In our premium, in our partner brands business, we had a 20% growth during the year.
Ajio Luxe, which is the luxury part of our AJIO platform, that is doing while still small compared to the overall size of our AJIO platform continues to do well. We added 20 just new brands. We have over 600 brands available on the platform, and we continue to increase the option count. So options were up 44% on a Y-o-Y basis.
Hamleys, we continue to grow its international presence. We entered that in market and launched the first store in Italy.
Jewels had a reasonably steady quarter in spite of a steep rise in gold prices, which has impacted sales across the jewelry industry. The business model focus continues to focus on growing the diamond share, which was up 100 basis points year-on-year. And as all of you would be aware, our diamond drives profit gross margin and profitability to a large extent for the jewelry business.
Our focus in the business has been doing exclusive launches, which are occasion-specific. And during -- in that theme during this quarter, we launched the Makar Sankranti, Valentine's Day and Women's Day collection, which was reasonably well received by the market.
Grocery, we had another quarter of very steady performance. Our Smart & Smart Bazaar continue to drive the growth of the business. What we are seeing is average bill values are going up, driven by premiumization, which also drives better margin as well as the share of non-grocery is increasing. That is driving the margins for this business.
Full Paisa Vasool Sale, which is our flagship event had a pretty strong 21% growth on a Y-o-Y basis. And what you would see is it's led by new categories, HPC, confectionery and snacks.
Another interesting trend that we are seeing is that as we are going deeper and deeper, we are building the deepest regional network of stores in the country. There are regional nuances which are coming into play, which offer strong opportunities for growth. So providing regional assortment, combined with national assortment provides a very strong value proposition for the customer. Just as an example, in certain markets, the sale during the runoff period to Holi exceeded the runoff period to Diwali. Now as you know, Diwali is the biggest consumption period in the country. But for the first time, we saw that the sales during the pre-Holi period was very strong in a few markets, and that's driven by regional insights that we have around assortment as well as the communication that we do regionally, and that's where local influencers, digital marketing, your ability to communicate digitally to the right customer segment in a localized manner helps a lot.
We are also focusing on growing new categories. So example, international food, body mist, serums, these are some of the new categories, which are growing very well. As consumers' preferences are changing, we continue to refine our assortment, our merchandising strategy so that we catch the new trends and are able to attract customers to our stores with what they are looking for, which are new options as well in addition to what they're used to buying.
On the B2B Metro business, we continue to see good traction. The Metro Kirana Utsa was a key event which we executed during the quarter to drive onboarding of new kiranas, as well as in addition to growing the kirana business, we are also focusing on growing the HoReCa segment, which provides a very large opportunity. And that very strong and small restaurants to large hotel chains, there's a wide opportunity, which is there in the HoReCa segment as well, which we are looking to tap.
On JioMart, again, this is something that we've talked about in the last few quarters. Our focus has been on improving the average order values, which were 30% on a year-on-year basis as well as increase the number of units per order, which is up 37% on a Y-o-Y basis, while a lot of our selection is driven by 1P, given the wide breadth of categories that we are presenting, whether it's electronics, whether it's on grocery, whether it's fashion, but in order to fulfill the -- increase the assortment and provide customers with a wide variety of choice, we are also bringing 3P sizes onto the platform. We -- our seller base was up 94% on a Y-o-Y basis, and the 3P selection available on the platform was up 32% on a Y-o-Y basis. So we are providing wider in wider choice to the consumers in addition to our entire assortment, on our own store assortment, which is available on the JioMart platform.
We continue to look at a key events like Holi Ready sale, the Republic Day sales to drive customer engagement and grow the business. These events act as good points to acquire new customers as well as get them to try new categories, get them to build -- buy more from us. We use a lot of basket builder initiatives to drive growth in customers' engagement as well as new categories during these events.
We also continue to enhance the functionalities on the platform to improve the shopping experience for the customer. So Buy Again is another one widget, which we launched during the quarter. We also have customer ratings for products, so independent customer ratings, which is available on the platform and we incentivize customers to provide genuine reviews.
Consumer brands business, which is one of our newer businesses had -- last year was the first full year of operations. The business continues to scale up nicely. We had a 3x Y-o-Y growth in general trade channels in addition to selling through the network of our own stores and our B2B network. We -- you would have seen a lot of new brands, new products getting launched from our Consumer Brands business.
Two key brands that we launched last year was Campa in the beverage space and Independence in the staples space. Both of them had very strong traction and got very strong customer acceptance. The products were liked by the customers and the price points were quite attractive. We are building the supply chain for these products so that we have a localized supply chain in different parts of the country and looking to scale up these businesses.
We launched several new products during the quarter. We launched an energy drink called Campa Runner. We launched Necto, which is an aerated beverage. We also launched brewed tea, which is a growing category and has substantial potential, and there are a lot of other substantial other interesting products in the pipeline as well.
Acquisitions and partnerships continues to be a core part of our strategy for our Consumer Brands business. During the quarter, we completed the acquisition of IP rights and including trademarks and recipe for Ravalgaon. As many of you may recollect, at one point in time, they had very well-known confectionery brands, and they still do. We did some research, and these brands still have a very strong brand recall amongst consumers. So we acquired these brands as well as the recipe and this will be a key part of our confectionery strategy.
We've also partnered with Elephant House of Sri Lanka, where we will manufacture and sell their beverages under the Elephant House brand in India. It's a very popular brand in Sri Lanka. And we've also given them reciprocal rights to sell Campa in Sri Lanka. So among that, we are able to target markets beyond India as well. So that's a quick update on the retail business.
Thank you, Dinesh. A very good evening to all on the call. So we ended the year FY '24 on a high note. As you can see, we registered an EBITDA of over INR 20,000 crores, INR 20,200 crores, which is 1.5x that of the previous year. And this is mainly on the back of higher production from the fields. The fields have now ramped up. They're performing as per expectations, and we're producing up to 30 million standard cubic meters at the current juncture with about 23,000 barrels of condensate.
Price realizations were slightly lower during the course of the year, but that has been more than offset by the higher production.
We just recap what we've seen in the quarter going by. So having ramped up the fields overall in terms of production, it's more or less flat. Even if the price realization more or less flat.
One good aspect of this quarter gone by was that we had an incremental development plan approved by the government. This has the potential to deliver incremental production of 4 million to 5 million standard cubic meters in a few years to come, which would augment the production that we have.
Also, in terms of CBM, we have successfully now contracted 0.9 standard cubic meters of gas but they -- and we've got a realization of 12.67% plus $0.78 for the next 2 years.
There were 5 successful bidders overall, this is a good outcome given the contracts that we are currently seeing just slightly over 12% of Brent. So clearly, a good result for us.
So overall, when we look at the production, we can see clearly, there's been a sharp increase in production since FY '21. And although overall domestic production besides KG D6 has been flat, KG D6 has been the key trigger for incremental domestic production, almost 90% of the incremental production has been from the fields in KG D6.
So overall, when we look at the outlook for the gas markets, clearly, there were -- we've seen 2 consecutive winters that have been mild. Consequently, you're seeing a buildup in the storages, which is higher than previous years. In fact, almost 59% versus the 42% that we've seen in 5-year averages, that is with the storages.
However, we've seen that there are some -- there has been some price support, particularly at lower prices. We've seen the viable of demand from China, India and Southeast Asia. And we have also seen prices come back from earlier lows of $8 per MMBtu to currently around $10.5.
In the near term, we feel there is a support for the demand. And that mainly on the basis of strong Brent brand prices which implies that alternate fuels will be more expensive and also support coming in from Asia, the mass of Asia.
Also, this potential uncertainty of Russian supplies going forward with the expiries expected in September '24. Further, we don't expect any substantial LNG capacity addition, at least until the winter of 2024. So overall, we expect gas prices to be more stable going forward, supported by the higher demand and the current price outlook.
So in Indian gas market scenario, we have clearly seen demand coming back in a big way, particularly in the city gas distribution, fertilizer and refinery sectors. We've seen a 12% growth year-on-year. Clearly, we see that this should continue to sustain mainly on the basis of price has been far more competitive as compared to alternate fuel prices, which are driven by high Brent levels. Also, policy framework being much more positive. Essentially, there are 2 areas. One is the uniform price tariff, which enables customers which are further away, can't get gas, the transportation of gas will be far more economical.
Also, the recent initiative by the government to ensure that gas-based power is available as compared to more hydro generation during summer is a good sign.
Further with infrastructure, pipeline infrastructure projects currently underway, we expect the current 24,000 kilometers that we have a pipeline in the country to be augmented by another 10,000 kilometers, which will get good reach with respect to customers.
So overall, there is a strong growth visibility for the Indian gas market. So this bodes well for the overall outlook for E&P and particularly gas. Thank you.
Thanks, Sanjay. Moving to the O2C side. Full year FY '24 EBITDA marginally higher than what it was last year at INR 62,400 crores. I talked about the margin environment remaining challenging, and you have seen that in fuel cracks, which fell anywhere between 20% and 45%. Of course, they were from elevated levels, some extent, offset by lower SAED .
On the petrochemical side, the decline was also sharp, anywhere between 8% to 21% for polymers. And when you look at the chain delta, it's about 6%. Individual products were significantly lower.
We were able to offset that by focusing on light feed cracking economics, which as given that almost 2/3 of our cracking happens on light feed, which is an advantage for us, given where the prices of ethane is versus naphtha.
Also, the focus on crude -- optimizing crude procurement. Also, we were helped by the fact that the demand environment was good in as far as domestic is concerned, so a lot of placement done domestically. So given this context, this is -- it's a good outcome to have maintained, if not slightly, grow the EBITDA for our O2C business.
Just for the quarter, you can see that INR 16,777, up 3% year-on-year and up 19% on a quarter-on-quarter. Overall, as I mentioned, the environment, margin environment has been weak. However, as I mentioned, the set of actions based on crude processing or light cracking advantage that we have and the fact that there was also a slightly marginal increase in volumes.
On the quarter-on-quarter side, that was much sharply higher at 19% growth because all the units were available post the planned maintenance and inspection activity in the last quarter. Also, we did see some rebound in gasoline cracks. Also, PE and PP deltas were also 6% -- higher 6% to 6% and 7%, respectively.
Just a context about overall, the key takeaways here are that global for the fourth quarter. Oil demand up 1.6 million barrels per day. We look at it geography-wise led by China at about 0.8 million barrels per day and then the other Asian countries.
Product-wise, if you see led by really jet up 0.7 million barrels per day and gas oil, 0.26.
Overall, from a quarter point of view, polymer demand and more stable polyester marginally weaker. However, I will show you in the subsequent slides that the -- when you look at it from a year-on-year point of view, the demand has been pretty robust.
Operating rates lower. Refinery operating rates down by almost 60 basis points because of unplanned refinery outages and maintenance on the cracker side, lower by 340 basis points because of new capacity additions mainly in Middle East, Asia and also the demand -- global demand trend has not been good.
This is the oil demand in as far as India is concerned, and I'm just focusing on the lower part of the box, which is the year-on-year. You can see that overall demand for oil at 4.6%, strong growth. And if you look at the components, you can see that ATF has been close to 12% growth, diesel about 4.5% growth, gasoline about 6.5% growth. So strong numbers that you are seeing. Almost mirrored when you look at it from a quarter-on-quarter point of view. And gasoline, obviously led by the trends in personal mobility, diesel on the back of demand for agri as well as mining activities, industrial activities growth and ATF on the back of passenger traffic. And you can see that passenger traffic at 39 million passengers is up about 4.5% year-on-year.
On the polymer side, again, looking at the lower part of the box, this is what I was referring to, year-on-year growth in polymer up 14%, of which PE has been very strong 20%, PP and PVC also have been about 9%. And PE, we have seen this growth, this trend about demand for PE coming on the back of infrastructure pipes and also the packaging sector, bet it FMCG and retail.
PP is up on the back of demand for consumer durables, automotive and household appliances. PVC up driven by agriculture and infrastructure and a lot of government projects, and that's something that you would have seen.
In the quarter-on-quarter basis, the aberration in PVC is really more to do with the fact that at the same time, in fourth quarter in FY '23, there was significantly higher imports because as EDC prices collapsed in the U.S. and there was a lot of imports, but other than that, you can see that PE and PP grew by 6% and 7%, respectively.
Polyester side, again, lower part of the box, 4% growth, really led by PET and the beverage segment has been doing well. It increased in tourism, Cricket World Cup. You have seen that kind of growth. And overall, the PSF demand has been weak due to the weakness in the textile export market.
And same thing mirrored in the fourth quarter also, you can see that PET demand up on back of the summer that is coming and yarn and fiber has been on the back of weak textile export demand.
Overall, when you see the quarter-on-quarter trends a bit mixed in as far as fourth quarter is concerned, PE/PP went up, PVC lower by 7%. Of course, the ethane prices falling 16% and quarter-on-quarter did help improve the ethane versus naphtha cracking economics.
On a year-on-year basis, you can see that delta fell anywhere between 8% and 31%, and this is coming on the back of commissioning of new capacities, demand I talked about. And so in a way, market was very well supplied.
Overall, the product prices also decreased significantly more and while between 10% and 19% where naphtha prices decreased by only 11%. So that's the weakness you saw there.
Polyester chain that year-on-year basis has been lower by 6%. There was an improvement in PX deltas led by tight supplies. And of course, if you're an integrated producer, you continue to optimize production based on PX versus gasoline economics. That's what we did. And PTA margins there, it was affected by the capacity expansion in China.
On a quarter-on-quarter basis, broadly stable, MEG deltas did improve because of higher freights and PX deltas were lower because of firm feedstock prices there.
Moving to the transportation cracks on gasoil. Demand, as I mentioned, up 0.26 million barrels per day led by really Asia Pacific and, to some extent, offset by Europe. And on a -- both on a quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year, you can see that the cracks have moderated from the high, but yet at $23, it does remain in the healthy category. Of course, the fall is really more to do with seasonal weakness in demand, new supplies -- supplies from new refineries as well as those coming from maintenance.
Russian diesel exports continue to be resilient, which weighed on the cracks, and you can see from the inventory levels, there has been a gasoil drawdown from the inventory.
Jet/kero demand up by 0.7 million barrels per day, more led by Asia Pacific. Quarter-on-quarter cracks moderated with Chinese exports. It's also a seasonal demand being lower. And year-on-year, cracks came off from 26 to 21.2. And clearly, you can see the increase of the inventory levels building from 101 to 170 on a year-on-year basis.
And gasoline cracks, overall you have seen about 0.2 million barrels per day across North America and Europe. Quarter-on-quarter, you saw a sharp jump in cracks from 7.6 to 13.3 on the back of unplanned refinery outages, maintenance in U.S. and Asia. We also saw lower inventories and also lower exports from China.
And then the part about the anticipation of the U.S. driving season, which drove quarter-on-quarter cracks. Year-on-year, you can see 15 in last year and 13.3 now, so it's basically stable there.
Overall, this is the fuel cracks where you see a full year picture. All of them year-on-year, you can see '23 versus -- FY '23 versus FY '24, all of them coming off historic highs because FY '23 was the year of significant dislocation in the energy markets. As I was mentioning, gasoil impacted by the resilience in Russian supplies and also higher supplies from new refineries, gasoline declined again coming from new refineries and also there has been rising demand in China, which are supported to some extent, the cracks otherwise, it would have been significantly lower. And ATF has moderated in line with gasoil cracks and the fact that there is a continuing recovery in global oil travel has also kept the cracks well supported.
Yes. The takeaway from this slide is the fact that production went for sale went up from 16.4 to 17.2. As we came out of the major M&A activity in the last quarter. The other point about -- clearly, you can see focus has been on crude and ethane sourcing, focus on domestic fuel sales, optimization of gasoline versus PX, focus on gasoline in the U.S. market. and really sustaining our gasifier operations so that we have very minimal dependence on LNG sourcing.
So the broad dynamics here when you look at the point being that oil demand still in '24 is expected to be 1.2 million barrels per day, and it is coming after the growth of 2.3 that we saw in '23. The domestic demand continues to be strong for fuel and downstream chemicals, given the emphasis on infra, mobility being there and the whole consumer sentiment, so leading to buoyancy there.
Gasoline cracks we think is expected to be supported by strong seasonal demand. The fact that there is lower inventory. Middle East splits will be likely remaining firm given the disruptions and refinery vulnerability in conflict zones. And downstream chemical margins is we do expect it to recover gradually with the slowing pace of capacity addition.
Overall, when you think of it challenges from a volatility standpoint really is the whole OPEC+ members extending voluntary production cuts, geopolitical tensions in Middle East and the old Russian/Ukraine aspect and its impact on oil prices. Any attack on energy infrastructure like we saw does result in loss of finding capacity. So these kind of things are challenges, which also impart a lot of volatility.
Geopolitics, you're seeing it in higher voyage time. You're seeing it in bunker consumption increases as well as the increase in freight rates. And the new refineries starting up in China, Middle East and West Africa will pose a challenge in the sense that you can have incremental product supply outpacing demand in major markets.
So the point here is there is a whole player of geopolitics. There is this incremental supplies production cut. This can influence energy and commodity prices. But overall, you can see that transportation fuel, given the more broader construct does look healthy from a product demand point of view and downstream chemical, demand will post all the increases that we have seen in capacity in China and elsewhere. That pace is really slowing down, and we do hope that for a more gradual recovery as far as petchem deltas are concerned.
Yes. Just to summarize, you've seen the operating performance very strong, very robust on the back of strong execution. We have doubled our EBITDA in a 5-year period. Consumer EBITDA, particularly is up 4x in the same period. And when you think about each of the businesses, in our minds, there is strong visibility of continuing growth trajectory, as well as the -- overall, when you put the numbers together, our earnings, it does show very, very subdued volatility when you look at the whole portfolio, take the portfolio as a whole.
On the energy business, for us, the next phase will be led more by India-centric capacity expansion. The final change we have talked about. Customer-centricity, the whole focus there and circularity.
Our focus on green energy investment involves integrated managing ecosystem and the ability to deliver around-the-clock power both at a lower cost as well as cost and with lower lease amount of volatility and as far as energy costs are concerned.
KG D6 coming in at the right time, providing valuable transition fields for the economy. On the retail and Jio side, we have a clearly cut strategy as some aspects that Kiran talked about. The strategies in terms of for individuals, for homes, for enterprises and digital platform.
Retail, the whole focus is on expanding the omnichannel offering. The focus on logistics, product development and premiumization.
And as Anshuman highlighted, today's capacity, at almost 30% of the 5G, the network that is on -- 5G traffic is almost 30%. And that -- and if you think about it from a broader monetization point, you can see a larger runway for growth there.
Overall, where we have come as to have a very robust balance sheet. You saw the CapEx intensity being lower. You were seeing that the CapEx spend is lower than the cash profits that we are making and the CapEx in as far as Jio is concerned, a lot of -- that is that got completed in the last financial year.
So overall, direction looks good. Balance sheet looks strong. Businesses are delivering strong results and outlook also remains pretty robust. Thank you so much.