Good evening and welcome to the financial results presentation for the full year of 2023 and Q4 of financial year 2024. We have Srikanth, who will first talk about our consolidated financials, followed by Kiran, who will give the highlights of digital services business, and Anshuman, who will walk you through the financials for the digital services business.
Dinesh will then take over and speak about the salient performance of Reliance Retail, followed by Sanjay Mashruwala , who will talk about E&P, and then Srikanth will come back to talk about the O2C business, the summary, and he will close out. Thank you for coming on a Monday evening. Over to you, Srikanth.
Thanks, Judy. Good evening to all of you. Starting off with 2023/2024, looking at the full-year picture, a year of milestones. We have crossed INR 75,000 crore in EBITDA, more than INR 100,000 crore in PBT, more than INR 2,000,000 crore in terms of market cap. On JPL side, INR 100,000 crore mark we have crossed, and INR 20,000 crore net profit, and, of course, completed the fastest rollout for our 5G network.
On RRVL, we have crossed the INR 300,000 crore mark, and net profit of INR 10,000 crore plus. And, you know, we have more than 75 million sq ft. So clearly, you know, we are the first Indian company to cross these milestones. On standalone basis, if you were to look, JPL and RRVL at this level, you know, would be among the top 20 and top 30 companies, respectively.
Looking at 2023/24, our EBITDA at INR 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 EBITDA, now close to INR 80,000 crores, you know, which is up almost 17% year-on-year. Five-year CAGR for our consumer business at 30%.
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 subscribers, registered subscribers. On 5G, it is on the back of higher customer engagement, you know, 5G rollout, and FTTH penetration. Our highlight also has been the resilient O2C performance, you know, given what we are seeing in cracks. This has obviously been aided by significant operational flexibility.
You know, focus on feedstock optimization, light feed cracking, and high domestic placement helped us overcome the, you know, the challenging environment. On the oil and gas, led entirely by ramp-up in KG-D6 production, our balance sheet net debt has been falling, and the CapEx trend also has been lower. All in all, we have delivered, you know, our EBITDA has doubled in the last five years. Just key highlights here, you can see that for Retail, our revenue up 18%, EBITDA up 29%.
We have seen margin expansion, as I mentioned, footfalls greater than one billion, which is 36% higher. 300 million registered customers we have now. Our own fashion and lifestyle brands are now driving growth. Three brands have more than INR 2,000 crore of annual sales. On Digital Services, you know, it's been about 12% to 13% across revenue and EBITDA. ARPU at about.
Your EBITDA margin at, you know, 50.2%, is also higher by 50 basis points. 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. You know, we have now 108 million subscribers transitioned to Jio through 5G, so. On O2C side, you know, EBITDA at INR 62,393, 0.5% higher.
The context being the global weak-margin environment globally. SAED also, the environment, you know, when you look at some of the downstream petrochemical deltas, they are all multi-decade lows, on the back of supply overrun. What we have been able to offset this weak-margin environment by focusing on light-feed cracking, on focusing on feedstock sourcing and optimization.
Of course, we are helped by the fact that the domestic demand environment has been pretty strong. You know, 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 crore, 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%. It was to some extent that volume growth was offset by the fact that there has been a 5% decrease in KG-D6 price realization. Bringing these numbers together, the revenue at INR 1,000,000 crore, you know, up 2.6%, and the revenue growth is muted because, as you may have observed, that oil prices declined by 13.5%, you know, on a year-on-year basis.
Overall, when you see EBITDA growth of 16%, it was you saw that other than O2C, the other businesses had strong growth. PBT was about 11.4%. As I mentioned, it was 1 lakh crore 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, you know, we did avail of took avail of all the tax credits that were available, and now we are back to normal tax.
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 a focus on cost, which has helped us reduce some of the unallocable expenses. This is moving to the Q4 numbers standalone.
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. 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, across businesses, and particularly big growth in KG-D6 related EBITDA. Overall net profit profit was muted only because of the fact that, you know, we availed of the tax credits, particularly in the Q4 of last year.
However, when you see the quarter-on-quarter, you can see there is a, 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, INR 5,600 crore. RRVL is about close to INR 2,700 crore.
S trong EBITDA growth, you know. 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. The fact that all units are operational post the M&I turnaround. We also saw sustained performance, with marginal declines in volume there.
O n the retail side, store rationalization and seasonality affected this performance. Digital services, you know, we had 11 million customer additions in this quarter, which primarily drove the earnings there. O n the balance sheet side, you can see that net debt is down by INR 10,000 crore. It was INR 126,000 crore in March 2023, now down to INR 116,000 crore.
You can also note that the CapEx for the year is INR 132,000 crore, which is about, you know, last time it was 142,000, so there has been a INR 10,000 crore reduction in CapEx, as well as the fact that the CapEx for the year, you know, if you compare it to the cash profits of INR 142,000 crore. So the CapEx is lower than the cash profit that we have.
C learly, this is, you know, we have talked about keeping net debt, EBITDA below one, and at these levels, it'll be about 0.65. And you know, going forward, this kind of balance sheet provides unparalleled financial flexibility, and you know, we'll continue to keep track of these ratios. With this, I'm giving it to Kiran.
Yep. Thank you, Srikanth.
Yeah.
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 in subscribers have migrated to Jio's True 5G services. I f you look at the total traffic that is now being carried.
Being contributed by these 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 a year and a half 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's always monitoring the quality of various mobility services, especially now 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 number one.
As a result, you see on the infographic on the right, India is one of the shining lights across the globe with a near 100% coverage of the landmarks of the country, using the most advanced 5G services available globally, which is the standalone 5G. And it also means that Jio on its own today has the world's largest 5G subscriber base outside of China. China obviously has a head start. They have been rolling out 5G for now nearly approaching five-odd years.
In just about a year and a half, we have reached the number two position, 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 2023 position versus what we have in just a month back, we have seen a nearly 3% increase in subscriber market share.
T his 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 a category A, B, or C circle, across all circle categories, we have seen a strengthening in our subscriber market share numbers.
It's largely also driven by the fact that now we have one of the world's best 5G networks working at scale. O f course, the JioBharat ecosystem on the other end is now bringing in what used to be 2G subscribers now onto our 4G network. T hat's also increasing adoption. O f course, there are a number of very interesting partnerships that we have 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.
A ll 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, 80-odd months, has really come alive. T he 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 landmarks of India, you can see that now our 5G network is present.
T he 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 gives you a visual appeal, a visual feel for what that journey has been.
Now turning to our, the other dimension of, how our 5G network is helping bringing broadband to, India. This is on our fixed wireless strategy to go after homes and other fixed premises. We used to have a what we call the JioFiber story, which has obviously been growing, slowly but steadily over the past many years.
A gain, now with JioAirFiber coming in, we are in a position today to offer our, fiber-like broadband, through JioAirFiber to nearly 6,000 towns across the country. A gain, 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, big cities, but we are seeing that more adoption is actually coming from tier-two towns, because that has been the area where the demand has been the greatest.
Reaching optical fiber to those towns has been time-consuming. N ow with JioAirFiber available in thousands of cities, that's really where we are seeing the strongest adoption. And of course, just like with JioFiber, even JioAirFiber comes with a suite of digital content bundled with the tariff plan that subscribers sign up for.
A ll of that is really translating into very strong engagement as well. N ot just adoption, but usage in terms of almost a per capita monthly consumption of nearly 400 GB. It's like approaching, you know, half a terabyte per month kind of a usage on JioAirFiber. 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 premises. L ike we speak about media bundling, when we are going to these small businesses, what we are actually talking about is a whole bundle which is relevant for businesses.
I f you look to the right, everything from connectivity through fiber and air fiber inside their offices or premises, we are offering an end-to-end managed Wi-Fi service. In four 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 four 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.
For example, if you take hotels, in addition to connectivity and Wi-Fi, 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 over all of those activities that happen.
If you take colleges, obviously, again, ubiquitous connectivity and school and college management solutions. L ikewise 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 entertainment solutions for both the patients as well as their guests.
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 crore. T hat's also growing even faster, at nearly 12.8 or nearly 13% year-on-year. Looking at the quarter for the Q4, again, the consolidated revenues were at a higher run rate if you look at 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.
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. T his is all being driven by, like I mentioned, the accelerating adoption of 5G as well as the growing penetration of home broadband both through JioFiber and JioAirFiber.
A gain, like I mentioned, JioAirFiber is translating into good demand not just in the big cities but also now going towards tier-two 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 the only lifeline that people had.
A gain, like I said, the 5G rollout and the Home Connects is contributing tremendously to that. 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. 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.
All of this is largely being driven by the fact that Jio's network continues to be not just a leader in our growing story that we are unfolding for the country in terms of digital adoption. 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, you know, the 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 onto the 5G network, as well as the initiatives we've taken at the lower end of the market with JioBharat. The ARPU was at INR 181.7 for this quarter, given this quarter had a 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 are 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. T hat's, you know, 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 15 or close to 1,600 crore minutes per day. S ustained improvement across all of the customer engagement matrices, 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.
T he 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. D espite 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 standalone also went up to 1,00,000 or cross 1,00,000 crores. A t INR 1,00,119 crore for fiscal year 2023/24, that was a growth of a little over 10% year-on-year. T he EBITDA came in at close to INR 53,000 crore, growth of 12.4% year-on-year. So almost a 100 basis points 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 crore and EBITDA at INR 14,360 crore and PAT at INR 5,583 crore. Now, looking at the full year for JPL, operating revenue of INR 1,009,558 crore and EBITDA of close to INR 55,000 crore at an EBITDA margin of a little over 50%. The profit after tax came in at INR 21,423 crore.
Across the board, fairly healthy growth rate, including in the digital segment of the business for JPL, which we 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 3,000,000 crore in revenue and INR 23,000 crore 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 on, sorry, on 18% for full year and 11% for the quarter on a YOY basis. In terms of segmental growth, the growth for grocery for FY 2024 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. 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 leverage as the infrastructure that we have put on the ground over the last two to three years, it's yielding fruits. Across channels also and across baskets, the growth is strong.
W hile the stores are growing, our digital and new commerce initiatives also continue to scale up nicely. T hey contributed about 18% of revenue, during the financial year 2024. All 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 ft. Our total retail area now stands at up close to 80 million square feet. We completed an equity fundraise of INR 17,800 crore last year.
We had earlier announced a fundraise from QIA, KKR, and ADIA. And as part of the same round, Reliance Industries infused INR 2,500 crore, taking the total equity capital raised to about INR 17,800 crore. In terms of overall revenue, if you look at it, INR 3,006,000 crore for the year, total EBITDA of INR 23,000 crore, and profit after tax of INR 11,000 crore for the full year.
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. W hat we see is people are spending more on mobile phones, ACs, etc., all consumer durables.
T hat's showing a healthy growth in average bill values, which is driving the growth for this business. We saw pretty strong sales in ACs. Summers came in in March, and that trend continues. We had the Digital India Sales event, which saw a 15% YOY growth in sales. Across categories, whether it's mobile phones, whether it's consumer durables, the growth in sales is quite robust.
resQ, which is our 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. We served 1.2 million customers with the resQ offering. We've also launched the out-of-warranty services, and we are scaling that up pretty nicely. Our product business as well as our B2B, B2B2C business, GMD, continues to scale up well.
We continue to add new merchants in the GMD 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 and lifestyle, we had a few festivals during the quarter as well as the winter wear drive, 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 more stores across the country. Our own brands in the fashion and lifestyle business, bulk of what we sell is our own brands, and they continue to drive the growth. Three 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. Some of our formats like Yousta, etc., which are more younger-focused, require a lot of new options getting launched every week.
T hat's something that we are working on, and it's scaling up pretty nicely. AJIO B2C, we continue to focus on improving the customer experience. We look at launching new product features. T his 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.
If I open the Jio 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. T hat does improve a lot of relevance and customer experience. Our focus is on, you know, exclusive brands and new brands on the platform.
W e continue to strengthen the portfolio. We grew the catalog 30% on a YOY basis. The All-Star Sale, which is a 1 March event, which we do every year. In fact, almost all of the fashion retailers had some event at that point in time. W e 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. Premium brands, premium products are doing better than their peers in the value side. In our premium 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 nicely.
Small compared to the overall size of AJIO platform continues to do well. We added 20+ new brands. We have over 600 brands available on the platform, and we continue to increase the option count. O ptions were up 44% on a YOY basis. Hamleys, we continue to grow its international presence. We entered the Italy 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. As all of you would be aware, diamond drives a profitable gross margin and profitability to a large extent for the very jewelry business.
Our focus in the business has been doing exclusive launches, which are occasion-specific. During, in that theme, this quarter, we launched the Makar Sankranti, Valentine's Day, and Women's Day collection, which was reasonably well received by the market. Grocery had another quarter of very steady performance. Smart and Smart Bazaars 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 versus sales, which is our flagship event, had a pretty strong 21% growth on a YOY basis. W hat you'd 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. P roviding 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 run-up period to Holi exceeded the run-up 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 few markets. T hat's driven by regional insights that we have around the assortment as well as the communication that we do regionally.
T hat's where, you know, 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. E xample, international food, body mist, serums; these are some of the new categories which are growing very well.
As consumer 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 used to buy. On our B2B metro business, we continue to see good traction. The Metro Kirana serve 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, you know, 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 up 30% on a year-on-year basis, as well as increase the number of units per order, which is up 37% on a YOY basis, while a lot of our selection is driven by 1P, given the wide width of categories that we are present in, whether it's electronics, whether it's a grocery, whether it's a fashion.
I n order to fill, to increase the assortment and provide customers with a wide variety of choice, we are also bringing 3P sellers onto the platform. Our seller base was up 94% on a YOY basis, and the 3P selection available on the platform was up 32% on a YOY basis.
We are providing wider and wider choice to the consumers, in addition to our entire assortment on our store assortment, which is available on the JioMart platform. We continue to look at key events like Holi Ready Sale, Republic Day Sale 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, you know, build up a 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 customers. B uy 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 YoY growth in general trade channel, in addition to selling through the network of our own stores and our B2B network.
We 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 beverages 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 Cricket. We launched Necto, which is an aerated beverage. We also launched Gruti, which is a growing category and has substantial potential. And there are a lot of other substantial interesting products in the pipeline as well.
Acquisitions and partnerships continue to be a core part of our strategy for our consumer brands business. During the quarter, we completed the acquisition of IP rights and trade, including trademarks and recipes for Ravalgaon. As many of you may recollect, at one point in time, they had very well-known confectionery brands, and they still recipes.
This will be a key part of our confectionery strategy. We've also partnered with the 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 also gave them reciprocal rights to sell Campa. That's the quick update on the retail business.
Thank you, Dinesh. Very good evening to all on the call. We ended the year FY 2024 on a high note. As you can see, we registered a bit over INR 20,000 crores and INR 20,200 crores, which is one and a half times that of the previous year. 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 they're producing up to 30 million standard cubic meters at the current juncture with about 23,000 bottles of condensate. Price realizations were slightly lower during the course of the year, but that has been more than offset by the higher production. If we just recap what we've seen in the quarter gone by, so having ramped up the fields overall in terms of production, you know, it's more or less flat.
Even in the price realizations, it's been more or less flat. The 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 4-5 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 million standard cubic meters of gas per day. And we got a realization of about 12.67+% $0.78 for the next two years. There were five successful bidders. O verall, this was a good outcome given the contracts that we are currently seeing, which is slightly over 12% of Brent. C learly a good result for us. O verall, when we look at the production, we can see clearly there's been a sharp increase in production since FY21.
A lthough 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 we've seen two consecutive winters that have been mild.
Consequently, you've seen a buildup in the yield storages, which is higher than previous years. In fact, almost 59% versus the 42% that we've seen in five-year averages. That is the growth in the storages. However, we've seen that there has been some price support, particularly at lower prices. We've seen a revival of demand from China, India, and Southeast Asia.
W e 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 will be support for the demand. And mainly on the basis of strong brand prices, which implies that alternate fuels will be more expensive and also support coming in from Asia, demand support from Asia. Also, there's potential uncertainty of Russian supplies going forward with the expiry expected in September 2024.
Further, we don't expect any substantial LNG capacity addition, at least till 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 the 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, you know we see that this should continue to sustain mainly on the basis of prices being far more competitive as compared to alternate fuel prices, which are driven by high Brent levels. Also, you know policy framework being much more positive. Essentially, there are two areas. One is the uniform price tariff, which enables customers which are farther away from, can 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 low hydrogen generation during summer is a good sign. Further, with infrastructure pipeline infrastructure projects currently underway, we expect the current 24,000-odd would give more reach with respect to customers. O verall, 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 FY24. The [EBITDA] marginally higher than what it was last year at INR 62,400 crore. You know 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, to some extent offset by lower SAV. On the petrochemical side, you know 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, you know by focusing on light feed cracking economics, which, as you know, given that almost two-thirds of our cracking happens on light feed, which is an advantage for us given where the prices of ethane are versus naphtha. Also, the focus on optimizing crude procurement. Also, we were helped by the fact that the demand environment was good as far as domestic is concerned, so a lot of placement done domestically.
Given this context, you know, this is a it's a good outcome to have, you know, maintain, 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, you know, the environment margin environment has been weak.
However, as I mentioned, the set of actions, be it 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, that 19% growth, because you know 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%-7% higher, 6% and 7% respectively. Just the context about overall, you know the key takeaways here are that global for the Q4, oil demand up 1.6 million barrels per day. You 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 gasoil, 0.26.
Overall, from a quarter point of view, polymer demand was stable, polyester marginally weaker. However, I will show you in the subsequent slides that 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 260 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 global demand trend has not been good. This is the oil demand as far as India is concerned. 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. 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.
S trong numbers that you are seeing, almost mirrored when you look at it from a quarter-on-quarter point of view. And you know 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.
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 having about 9%.
PE, you know we have seen this growth, this trend about demand for PE coming on the back of you know infrastructure pipes and also the packaging sector, be it FMCG and retail. PP is up on the something that we 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 the Q4 of FY 2023, there were significantly higher imports because as EDC prices collapsed in the U.S. and there was a lot of imports. O ther 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 you know the beverage segment has been doing well. You know increase in tourism, Cricket World Cup, you have seen that kind of growth. Overall, the PSF demand has been weak due to the weakness in the textile export market. Same thing mirrored in the Q4 also.
You can see that PET demand up on the back of the summer that is coming, and you know yarn and fiber have 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 Q4 is concerned, PE, PP went up, PVC lower by 7%. Of course, the ethane prices falling 16%. You know deltas fell anywhere between 8% to 21%.
T his is coming on the back of commissioning of new capacities, you know demand I talked about. I n a way, market was very well supplied. Overall, the product prices also decreased significantly more and well between 10%-19% while 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%.
You know there was an improvement in PX deltas led by tight supplies. Of course, if you're an integrated producer, you continue to optimize production based on PX versus gasoline economics. That's what we did. PET margins there were affected by the capacity expansion in China. On a quarter-on-quarter basis, broadly stable.
You know MEG deltas did improve because of higher freights, and PX deltas were lower. Moving to the transportation you know cracks on gasoil, you know demand, as I mentioned, up 0.26 million barrels per day, led by really Asia-Pacific and to some extent offset by Europe. 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.
You know of course, the fall is really more to do with seasonal weakness in demand, new supply from new refineries as well as those coming from maintenance. Russian diesel exports continue to be resilient, which weighed on the cracks. Y ou can see from the inventory levels, there has been a gasoil drawdown from the inventory. J et kero demand you know up by 0.7 million barrels per day, more led by Asia-Pacific.
Quarter-on-quarter, cracks moderated with Chinese exports. It's also seasonal demand being lower. And year-on-year, cracks came off from 26% to 21.2%. C learly, you can see the increase of the inventory levels building from 101% to 117% 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 the U.S. and Asia. We also saw lower inventories and also lower exports from China. T he part about you know 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. When you see a full-year picture, all of them, year-on-year, you can see FY23 versus FY24, all of them coming off historic highs because FY23 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.
Also there has been you know rising demand in China, which supported to some extent the cracks. Otherwise, it would have been significantly lower. ATF has moderated in line with gasoil cracks. The fact that there is continuing recovery in global oil travel has also kept the cracks well supported. Yeah, the takeaway from this slide is the fact that you know production meant for sale you know went up from 16.4% to 17.2% as we came out of the major M&I activity in the last quarter.
The other points about you know clearly you can see focus has been on crude and ethane sourcing, you know focus on domestic fuel sales, optimization of gasoline versus PX, focus on gasoline in the U.S. markets, and you know really sustaining our gasifier operations so that we have very minimal dependence on LNG sourcing.
The broader dynamics here, when you look at it, you know the point being that oil demand still in 2024 is expected to be 1.2 million barrels per day, and it is coming after you know the growth of 2.3% that we saw in 2023. The domestic demand continues to be strong for fuel and downstream chemicals given the emphasis on infra mobility being there and you know the whole consumer sentiment so leading to buoyancy there.
Gasoline cracks, you know we think, are expected to be supported by strong seasonal demand, the fact that there is lower inventory. Middle East lifts will be likely remaining firm given the disruptions and refinery vulnerability in conflict zones. D ownstream chemical margins, you know 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 you know OPEC+ members extending voluntary production cuts, geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, and you know the whole Russian-Ukraine aspect and its impact on oil prices. You know any attack on energy infrastructure, you know like we saw, you know does result in loss of refining capacity.
T hese kind of things are you know challenges, which also impart a lot of volatility. Geopolitics, you know you're seeing it in higher voyage time, you're seeing it in bunker consumption increases as well as the increase in freight rates. The newer refineries starting up in China, Middle East, and West Africa you know will pose a challenge in the sense that you can have incremental product supply outpacing demand in major markets.
The point here is, you know, there is the whole play of geopolitics, there is this incremental supplies, production cut, these can influence energy and commodity prices. O verall, you can see that transportation fuel, given the more broader construct, you know it does look healthy from a broader demand point of view. D ownstream really is slowing down.
Y ou know we do hope that for a more gradual recovery in as far as Petchem deltas are concerned. Yeah, just to summarize, you've seen the operating performance very strong, very robust on the back of you know strong execution. We have doubled our EBITDA in a 5-year period. Consumer EBITDA particularly is up 4x in the same period.
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 do show very, very subdued volatility when you look at the whole portfolio, take the portfolio as a whole.
On the energy business for us, you know the next phase you know will be led more by India-centric capacity expansion, the vinyl chains we have talked about, you know customer centricity, the whole focus there and circularity.
Our focus on green energy investment you know involves integrated managing ecosystem and the ability to deliver round-the-clock power, you know both at a lower cost as well as cost and with low least amount of volatility and as far as energy costs are concerned. KG-D6 coming in at the right time, providing valuable transition fuel for the economy.
On the Retail and Jio side, you know we have a clearly cut strategy as some aspects that Kiran talked about, 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.
As Anshuman you know, you know highlighted, you know today's capacity, almost 30% of the 5G, the network is on high, is the 5G traffic is almost 30%. T hat and if you think about it from a broader monetization point of point, you can see a larger runway for growth there.
Overall, where we have come is to have a very robust balance sheet. You saw the CapEx intensity being lower. You were seeing that the CapEx spend is lower than you know the cash profits that we are making.
The heavy CapEx in as far as Jio is concerned, you know a lot of that is you know that got completed in the last financial year. O verall direction looks good. Balance sheet looks strong. Businesses are delivering strong results, and the outlook also remains pretty robust. Thank you so much.