Reliance Industries Limited

Good evening and welcome to the second quarter of financial year 2025 business presentation of our company Reliance Industries Limited. First, Mr. Shrikant Venkateshwari, our group CFO, will walk you through the consolidated performance of the company. He will be followed by Kiran and Anshuman walking you through the digital services business. Then Dinesh will talk about the retail business. Then Sanjay Roy about the ENPP. Shikant will come back with what to see in the summary section. Over to you, Shikant.

Thanks, Shini. Good evening, friends. The performance for consolidated numbers and highlights. So revenues at 2,58,000 crores up about 0.8%. EBITDA close to 44,000 crores. Lower by 2% and PAT at 19,323. Also down about 2.8%. So when you look at the numbers for us, there has been robust growth in digital services and upstream offset by VCO2C, and we'll talk about the specific numbers there. On retail, it has been steady quarter with a focus on enhancing customer proposition and strengthening capabilities. On digital side, benefiting from improved ARPU as well as very good momentum in FTTH. O2C has been impacted by unfavorable demand supply fundamentals, and as you will see subsequently with the cracks being significantly lower. And oil and gas benefiting from sustained volume growth. Also last time in second quarter, FY24, there was a cost related to Tapti Field decommissioning. On the highlights, so revenues down about 1.1% for retail, EBITDA 0.3% higher, and PAT about 5.2% higher. So here, revenue growth impacted by fashion and lifestyle, which is really in line with industry trends. In our case, the growth rate was also impacted by the focus on streamlining of operations. as well as having a more calibrated approach to B2B, which were done with an objective of enhancing margins. And as you can see, we are starting to see some benefit coming through. And as you recall, this was initiated in the last quarter. We talked about that. And we are seeing some of that coming through in terms of if you see the EBITDA margin from operations at 8.5%, which is up 40 basis points. We are also scaling up digital commerce in two ways. One is, of course, scaling up hyperlocal deliveries through our extensive Pan India store network. So that's really what we are doing. Also, we are strengthening our portfolio in Agio through new brand launches, ASOS, HLM, Timberland. Also, we are scaling up our used format, and we have now – Scaled it up to 50 stores, and you will see more rapid growth in this format. Our focus on strengthening of the tech platform, the infrastructure, the streamlining of operations, as well as having a calibrated approach in B2B is expected to work its way in the next couple of quarters. Post that, we expect to revert to our industry-leading growth momentum. As can be seen even in this quarter, because if you see the operational parameters, footfalls are up 14 percent, customer base is up 16 percent, area under square feet at 79 million is up 11 percent, number of transactions are higher. So we do expect, you know, this to work its way over the next two quarters and then come back to the kind of growth rates that I talked about. On the digital services side, revenue and EBITDA up 18%, and benefiting from broader scaling up of digital services and also partial impact of the tariff hike. And we continue to add to customers overall slight churn that we saw in this quarter, but nothing unusual, in fact. lower than what we have seen in the past when there has been a tariff hike. Data traffic continues to be strong, up 24% year on year. About 148 million subscribers have now migrated to 5G. And what I also feel good about is the fact that the strong connect, this quarter has been strong for home connects with our fixed wireless operator, We are adding about 2.8 million geo air fiber connections. So that's been a good rate. On O2C side, revenues are 5%, but EBITDA are down 24%. And the context of big corrections that we saw in fuel cracks, both ATF, gasoline, gas oil, all of them down about 50% year on year. Also downstream petrochemicals have fallen anywhere between 9% and 24%. 24% was actually PVC. Demand has been a bit softer with polymer and polyester down between 5% and 7%. You know, we focused a lot on what we could control, which is essentially, you know, leveraging our operational flexibility. And the fact that ethane prices declined by 47% meant that our ethane cracking economics was strong. We also focused a lot on placing our products through the domestic fuel retailing market, and that was 38 percent higher, and continuing focus on optimizing ease and cost. So for us, the strength of the operating model was very much at play in terms of trying to negate the impact of such a sharp fall in cracks. On the oil and gas side, we have seen production increases both in KGD6 up 1.5% on a year-on-year basis, as well as CBM, which was up about 24%. And, of course, it was impacted by the price in KGD 6, which was down about 7%. And as I was mentioning, in the same time last year, we had the cost related to decommissioning of Taptifi. So when you put that in context, then we're seeing growth in EBITDA of 11% with an EBITDA of 5,290 crores. And all the numbers together, revenues are 2,58,000, up 0.8% on a year-on-year. I talked about EBITDA being close to 44,000 crores, being minus 2%, and PAT at 19,323, down about 2.8%. As I said, overall upstream and digital, you know, supported the growth was impacted by O2C. And also year-on-year PAT was impacted slightly by higher interest and depreciation charges. Overall standalone RIL had a PAT of 7,730. So, again, the operating model that we have and the execution and the teams that we have have helped deliver a resilient performance because when you see the O2C numbers in terms of how sharp the fall has been in cracks, you know, the performance should be seen in that context. And this is just the bridge, and you can go through it, but this is – Year on year, and you can see the sharp fall in OTC EBITDA compensated by on the digital side, as well as oil and gas offsetting that. Retail has been flat. So when you look at sequential quarter, again, digital services, I talked about benefiting from the partially because of the tariff hike, and also oil and gas continues to add to that profitability. and O2C impacting the other portion. On the balance sheet side, overall September to March, almost flat net debt, and capex at 34,000 crores continues to be covered by cash profits. And most of the capex now is in O2C and new energy with significant decline in geocapex when you see it on a year-on-year basis. With this, I'm going to hand it over to Anshuman and Kiran to take us through on the digital side.

Thank you, Srikanth. So on the digital services side, let me start with our 5G services. As you know, we call the Jio's 5G offerings Jio True 5G because we believe that there's a combination of spectrum assets and advanced technical features, especially things like carrier aggregation and, of course, the standalone architecture, which is quite unique not just in India but globally. And we want to today start by talking about a few of the additional technology innovations that we have been able to incorporate into our true 5G network. And this is over and beyond, obviously, the India scale deployment and the fact that we are rapidly now growing the install base of customers who are using our 5G services. So on the technology front, here are a few of the things which we have been able to incorporate into our network. The introduction of what we call true 5G voice calling, which is called voice over new radio or VONR. We are not only in our network, but we are also working with most of the premium handset OEMs to ensure that their devices are by default choosing VONR to be the primary mechanism of voice calling whenever the users are connected to our 5G network. So this means that most people would out of the box get a voice on 5G experience, which translates into even more superior voice quality, even faster call setup time. And, of course, 5G comes with even more advanced security features. So all of the communications will be even more secure than what has traditionally been possible. Another technology innovation that we have brought in is what we call advanced interference mitigation. Since we have so many different spectrum bands operational between 4G, 5G, and even within 5G multiple bands, and especially in dense situations, interference is always a problem. Typically, the way you manage interference is by making sure one or the other radio backs off so that their signal doesn't interfere with the other radio. But that has traditionally been at the expense of certain loss in capacity. But what we've been able to do with advanced technology time division, duplex interference mitigation is that even without the loss of capacity, now we are able to better manage interference. That means 5G customers will have a much, much superior experience where traditional things like interference won't impact their throughput. Because we are a standalone architecture, now coming to the network slicing aspect, because we are a standalone architecture, we are able to very intelligently create lanes in our network so that each type of traffic we can adequately provision and manage without any impact on the other type of traffic which is flowing through the network. So one example of that is AirFiber, which is our home broadband service for which we are again using our 5G network. So AirFiber and mobility have different requirements. And we want to make sure that those two lanes don't intersect so that the spike in traffic in one of those lanes does not create congestion or degradation in the services in the other lane. So that's one example of these two lanes running. Again, for secure voice and mission-critical services where we may work with people in the safety and health and so on, again, those are mission-critical lanes for which absolutely none of the other commercial services ought to interfere. So, again, we are creating those additional two lanes. And for certain very, very advanced capabilities and low latency capabilities like gaming or real-time collaboration, again, the priority of the packets going through those need to be different. So again, we are creating additional lanes for that. So these are the six virtual lanes with different types of philosophies that we are creating, all on the same 5G network. But we can manage them quite efficiently and differently without any one of them impacting the performance of the other. The fourth thing we want to talk about is what we call layer management. Now layer is a technical term for each spectrum that we have. But now with improved carrier aggregation, carrier aggregation is where you take all of these different spectrums and make it look like one consolidated, unified network. But with layer management, we are able to work with some of the advanced capabilities available now in handsets. to be able to appropriately give the right kind of spectrum for the right use case so that the carrier obligation is, again, very, very efficient and optimal. Again, the smart spectrum management also means that by allocating the most efficient and energy-efficient spectrum for communicating with the UE, one of the indirect benefits, in addition to the performance itself, one of the indirect benefits is also that we are able to reduce the power consumption of the handset. which means that now from the same handset, but working on our network, you are able to get about 20% to 40% extended battery life because of the better energy efficiency that some of these techniques even enable on the handset. One of the other aspects of our 5G network is because there are advanced algorithms like the angle of arrival that we are calculating in our network. That's part of the 5G kind of capability set, which means that now there is better triangulation of devices on our network, and we can get near GPS-like accuracy up to 10 meters if you are connected on 5G. which means even if you don't have visibility to the satellite and some of those situations, we are able to geolocate, which means for anything which is things like navigation or anything which is hyperlocal use cases, they can now start relying on the network to give them very accurate location as compared to what has traditionally been delivered using the GPS services. And, of course, the GPS is also a very energy-intensive operation. So most people are intelligently the handset is connecting only as needed, whereas with the network-based service, you're all the time having accurate location information in a very energy-efficient way. Also, we are bringing in advanced programmability to our network. There are a lot more moving pieces in our 5G network, things like radio beams, traffic steering, and again, very smart algorithms to manage energy efficiency. Only spending energy where needed without impacting capacity. All of these are programmable. That means it is not a one-time static configuration. But as situations evolve, we are able to sense what's happening in our network and then adapt each of these elements appropriately to unlock even more capacity and bring better energy efficiency in our network. And all of this obviously also means that there is much better customer experience. And because of the programmable nature of our network, we are able to sense a lot of these parameters. And in many cases, even if there is a problem in our network, we are able to do automated root cause analysis and root cause fix very, very quickly to mitigate many of these issues. Now, moving on to acquisition, again, on the customer experience front, 5G has created, I would say, an acceleration in adoption and preference for Jio's network. And to help with the overall experience of 5G, Getting on to the Jio service, we have launched a service called Jio iActivate, which is a complete self-service capability that people can have in the comfort of their living room. A simple experience where effectively you can, from our flagship customer engagement app, which is called MyJio, You can start an Aadhaar-based identity verification on a self-service basis. And if you have an eSIM, automatically the service can be provisioned on the phone, even without any help from anybody else. But if you don't have eSIM, then we have also arranged for an efficient delivery of the SIM to your doorstep. very quickly, and then effectively using a simple video and photo experience, we are able to authenticate the user. And then, of course, the user can select whatever plan that they desire and make appropriate payments. All of this is an entirely digitally enabled journey with only one step, which is basically the physical delivery of the SIM where required. And that's even eliminated with an eSIM where possible. So effectively a very seamless experience for somebody to get onboarded. And we are one of the first people to enable this to happen through the Jio iActivate service. Coming to our home broadband, I spoke about how 5G is powering our home broadband service, and it has really accelerated our acquisition rate when it comes to acquiring homes. So you can see on the chart here, in the December of 2023, we were doing 0.6 million, the quarter of points, we were doing 0.6 million acquisitions in that quarter. But now if you look at this quarter ending September, we have tripled the growth in terms of the homes that we are able to add, mainly using geo air fiber. And we are on track, we are already with this rate of acquisition where we have now grown to nearly 3 million geo air fiber connections in a very short while. We are already one of the fastest growing fixed wireless operators globally. And this is not where we want to stop. We see that there's still much more optimization and scale up that we are able to do. And our target now, the next target that we have is to add nearly 1 million homes every given month. So that is the pace at which we are able to grow our home broadband service thanks to Jio AirFiber. When it comes to the in-home experience itself, now we have a great product called Jio TV+, which was a unified experience to discover all of the OTT services which are available, especially on the Jio set-top box, so that from a single interface, users can discover and consume all their favorite shows and movies and so on without having to search and jump across multiple apps and so on. So this particular service, which was till now on the Jio set-top box and a very well-loved offering, we have now also enabled that to be available on other smart TV platforms. So what that means is that if you are a GeoFiber or GeoAirFiber customer, then the same GeoTV Plus application which is available on the set-top box is now also available for additional televisions that you may have in your home without requiring an additional set-top box or an additional connection. So it just becomes an additional app that you can download on your smart TV without having to take additional efforts to enable that to happen. So what that means is by just getting one connection, you are able to enjoy the Jio TV Plus experience and all the OTT content that you are able to enjoy, not just in the primary TV, which is connected to the Jio set-top box, but also across additional TVs in the home. Coming to the enterprise business, again, Jio is continuing to gain market share. And in addition to connectivity, which, of course, is a very quick adoption that we are seeing across the enterprise landscape, but we are also now able to position and upsell many of our other digital services offerings to the same enterprises. So, for example, we are launching a voice-based, SID-based service to enterprises. Or now we are also introducing what is called managed Wi-Fi so that the entire Wi-Fi experience within the enterprise can also be taken as a managed service without expending resources or even investing in assets to make that happen in every office. So this is a great service as you go for the enterprise. Again, it's a service that we are bringing on top of connectivity to all of the enterprises. And, again, when it comes to multi-location connectivity, I think Jio just shines because the breadth of offerings that Jio is able to provide to an enterprise, especially those who have multiple locations to connect across India, we are becoming by far the technology partner of choice. And, of course, on many of our digital services like connectivity platform as a service, CPaaS, or the enterprise IoT systems and managed Wi-Fi, we are able to add pretty much the leading enterprises, what we call marquee logos, over the past quarter. When it comes to SMB, again, the fact that for a small business, we are able to provide the fastest broadband experience, even up to one gigabit per second through air fiber, means that a lot of the SMBs are now upgrading to these high-speed links, which is great because that's something that only we see Jio being able to provide in the market. So that engagement is very strong there. And more than 50% of the SMBs are choosing to opt for those high-bandwidth options. And, again, that is an exciting dimension for us to deepen our engagement into the SMB segment, which then will be followed by additional digital services that we can upsell and cross-sell to the same set of customers. Now, beyond connectivity, I think very recently we also announced a couple of offerings which are very exciting to us because it marries what is traditionally considered to be an infrastructure play with the next advancement which we see for the country, which is in the area of artificial intelligence, AI. So the first of those offerings is what we call Geo AI Cloud. which is starting by making sure that all Indians, starting with obviously those who are on the Jio network, but certainly extending even beyond that, are able to get a completely new tier or new capacity when it comes to being able to store their content on the cloud. As you know, in most cases in India, you only get tens of gigabytes of storage from many of the other providers without having to pay for it. We are raising the bar by really bringing up that limit all the way up to 100 GB plus and effectively enabling everybody to back up a lot of their content into that cloud storage. But beyond cloud storage, what we are trying to do is really add AI algorithms on top of it so that every artifact that you store in the cloud becomes a smart artifact. Whether it's a photo, whether it's a bill, whether it's a document, there are a whole number of AI use cases that one can layer on top of it. And this is only possible if it is hosted in the cloud, married to advanced AI technologies working all the time. So this is our vision for the future, where customer data and customer AI services, I think we can bring a completely new set of experiences to the Indian market. So watch out for further announcements. We are looking to launch a beta very quickly and then commercial services thereafter. And finally, all of this is being enabled by a platform that we have created internally called GeoBrain. And GeoBrain is an AI development platform. So if you see the inner periphery of this diagram, you can see that all the features which are required by a data scientist to do feature engineering, training, build certain advanced algorithms, including bringing the latest, which is large language models, LLMs, into an AI solution. They're all available for a user to use so that their productivity is extremely high. And then we can deliver a series of services, everything from whether it is intelligent services, like I mentioned in the context of the cloud, or enabling zero-touch operations in an enterprise, or bringing in very, very actionable insights to enable to drive decisions and actions in a company. And, of course, a whole slew of additional AI-driven services, all of this, really can be done in an accelerated way. And what we are doing is obviously applying this to a lot of our own operating companies, everything from manufacturing to telecom, retail, finance, and much, much more. So really proving this platform and A, beyond the services that we will be able to offer to the market through our operating companies, We're also looking to then offer this platform itself as a service to a lot of the enterprises in India so that they can build their own AI solutions as appropriate for their business. So it's a really exciting time, and we believe that there will be much more for us to talk about around AI in the coming days. With that, let me hand it over to my colleague, Anshuman, who can talk about the operating and financial performance.