Good evening, everyone. Thank you for patiently waiting on a Friday evening at 8 P.M. to listen to us. Welcome to the Q1 of financial year 23 financial results presentation. We have Srikanth, Kiran Thomas, Anshuman Thakur, Gaurav Jain, and Sanjay Roy to take you through the performance of Reliance and its various business segments. Let me first invite Srikanth to talk you through about the consolidated results of the company. Thank you, and over to you, Srikanth.
Thanks, Srini, and good evening to all of you. Starting with the highlights for the quarter. It's been a record quarter. Overall EBITDA at INR 40,179 crore, which is up 46% year-on-year. Net profit also up 41% year-on-year at INR 90,443 crore. On the back of strong O2C earnings, given firm demand and the extraordinary dislocation we saw in the energy markets, causing supply constraint. It was just not O2C, when you look at each of our businesses have done well. Record retail revenues and EBITDA. We saw a margin expansion led by favorable revenue mix. We saw normalized store operations. We saw higher footfalls. Similarly, on Jio side, we added about 9.7 million new customers. Strong rebound there.
We're seeing good traction in FTTH, and again, benefiting from improved ARPU. Oil and gas benefited from higher production in KG D6, as well as improved realization. When you look at each of our businesses, as you can see, retail up 52% on revenue and 97% on EBITDA. We added 792 stores, taking the total to close to 15,900. We also crossed an important milestone of 200 million registered users. Digital and new commerce continue to grow, where it was 2x on a year-on-year basis, and now contributing 19% of gross revenues. On digital services, revenues up 22%, EBITDA up 26%. ARPU at close to 176, it's again up 27%.
Our EBITDA margins upward of 50% there, which is an improvement of almost 254 basis points. Overall customer at 420 million customers, and I talked about the addition of customers. Also, data traffic up 27%, healthy growth, with now almost 26 exabytes of data going through our network. On O2C side, revenues up 57%, EBITDA up 64% on a year-on-year basis. So EBITDA almost INR 20,000 crores there, on the back of spike in fuel cracks. We've been tracking the supply disruptions in Europe. On the petrochemical side, PX, PTA and PET deltas, you know, on a year-on-year basis help offset weakness in polymer and polyester delta.
Of course, here segment EBITDA was also, there was an impact of high energy costs and crude oil prices, which we will talk in our O2C part of it. Also, the operating rates were good and volume increase we saw on a year-on-year basis was 13.9 million tons. Oil and gas side, almost 3x revenue, EBITDA up 3.4x. There was a production up on a year-on-year basis, and now overall production at almost 19 MMSCMD that we have. Price realization also saw a jump at, you know, we had $9.72 a million BTU. Overall it is still 64% lower than Asian LNG, but nevertheless, it was an increase on a year-on-year basis.
We are tracking for greater than 1 BCF gas a day, which is approximately 30 MMSCMD of gas by FY 2024. These are the numbers bringing them together. As I mentioned, EBITDA INR 40,179 crores. This is up 46% on a year-on-year basis and up 18% on a quarter-on-quarter basis. We saw a record revenue and EBITDA led by O2C, but as I highlighted, even in retail, footfalls, you know, store rollout, on Jio side, adding subscriber addition and also a ARPU increase by 27%. On KG D6 it was production and price. If all the businesses contributed to this strong growth, these numbers were strong in a...
also in a way offset the increases that we saw on finance cost on the back of increased interest rates, both U.S. and rupee, as well as the depreciation of the currency. It also negated the depreciation impact you know of on the back of both higher capacity utilization in Jio as well as the upstream part of depletion. it helped offset you know the normalized tax that you know we saw in this quarter. with all these despite these increases you know we delivered net profit of INR 19,443 crore, which is 41% up on a year-on-year basis and 8% higher on a sequential basis.
RIL standalone profits were INR 15,096 crore, which is up 76%. This is just a quick one on the bridge between this slide is on year-on-year and the next one is on quarter-on-quarter. As you can see, the big jump coming on O2C, INR 7,657 crore. On the back of the extraordinary energy market that we are seeing on the back of Ukraine conflict and the EU shifting away from Russian energy supplies. It is also a fact that there was very strong demand growth across products, so all that contributing. Oil and gas, INR 1,940 crore, again, on the back of 23% higher KG-D6 production as well as improved price realization.
Retail, almost INR 2,000 crores increase in EBITDA on a year-on-year basis. Digital services, INR 2,439 crores increase on a year-on-year basis, on the back of Jio, on the back of ARPU and subscriber mix and tariff hike that we saw. Overall 46% growth, the traction across all businesses. This is quarter-on-quarter. Bulk of it again coming on the back of O2C and oil and gas that we saw. On oil and gas, there was a 58% improvement in price realization as far as KG D6 is concerned. On retail side, both grocery and fashion and lifestyle did very well and very strong momentum as I mentioned in store addition.
Digital services on the back of subscriber growth and higher ARPU. This is the overall number, net debt at INR 57,655 versus March 2022 number of INR 34,815, primarily on account of higher working capital requirement in businesses, with both increase in energy and product prices. The overall CapEx for the quarter was funded by internal cash generation. The balance sheet is strong and well positioned to support growth, as well as navigate the market volatility that you're seeing in interest rates and currencies and commodities. With this, I'm going to request Akash and Anshuman to take us through the digital services part of the business.
It's only Kiran here, Srikanth. Another stellar quarter when it comes to Jio. Market leadership through and through. By a clear distance, we continue to be, by a clear distance, the number one ranked operator in India with nearly 420 million customer base, as we speak exiting out of June. In terms of the customer market share, that would translate to 53% of the total market, which basically means that, you know, we are now the majority. Our market share is more than everybody else's shares put together, so more than half. In terms of the data traffic market share, even a higher lead.
We are now nearly 60%, which means, again, we carry more data on our network than all of the other operators in the country combined. This has been a result of, obviously, a 4G network, an unparalleled 4G network with the widest reach and obviously the depth of distribution and very innovative distribution channels that we have created. All of which also continue to create a superlative experience for our customers, as well as being the most attractive value proposition when it comes to both in terms of the data as well as other value-added services that we deliver to our customers.
I think, Srikanth mentioned earlier that, if you look at it compared to previous year to this year, we have seen a substantial increase, when it comes to per capita data usage, as well as, that has translated, also into a growth in ARPUs. All of these are in the range of between 25% and 27% year-on-year growth. The increased usage obviously has been a result of very focused efforts in increasing capacity and obviously improving the network quality, which has translated into increased usage year-on-year per capita usage. If you look at the total usage across our network on average, across a base of 420-odd million subscribers, we are seeing almost 20 GB per user per month, which is a phenomenal number.
ARPU growth has also been. There's a little bit of a tariff hike effect, as again, Srikanth mentioned earlier, that is still rippling through. We did that a few quarters back, but as people are upgrading into those higher tariff packs, we are still seeing an effect uplift onto ARPU from that tariff increase that we saw. Obviously, the biggest contributor to that has been the per capita growth in data, as well as a much better subscriber mix that we see in that 420-odd million base that we have now. Moving on. Very focused efforts that we are continuing to do across, not just on the network, but also improving every aspect of the customer journey and customer interactions.
In our network, what we have found is nearly 60%-65% of our base perform recharges digitally, just to take an example. Traditionally, even a digital recharge was a multi-step activity where people had to go to the app. Sometimes they have to update the app, multiple steps within the app itself, multiple screens, and up until they are able to complete the journey. Many times it is a push kind of a notification that goes towards the customer. Maybe the customer is busy, the notification is ignored at that point in time, and then the customer moves on to something else and forgets to recharge, resulting in some disruption of service, possibly later on.
What we've been doing, again, to talk about some of the innovative work that we've been doing in this area, working very closely with WhatsApp. Facebook is an investor in our parent company, JPL. Working very closely with WhatsApp, we've been designing this experience, which is just a simple message that you get on WhatsApp and with one click, because now even WhatsApp Pay is a service which has been launched. We were one of the first people to adopt it, so that with a single click, the customer can just recharge their service, if they want to continue or even update and upgrade their service in a few steps.
This is bringing that very familiar messaging paradigm that pretty much every Indian is used to also into this self-service recharge experience as well. This is just an example. Obviously, there are such innovations that we are continuing to develop as well as roll out across the entire life cycle of the customer's interactions with us. Also I think in terms of reliability Jio's network, not just in terms of reach, but also in terms of reliability, has risen to the occasion whenever the need has presented itself. Obviously, we all know what happened through the COVID disruption, where people were more and more relying on 4G network for connectivity.
Also when there are natural calamities, and we've been reading about a few of those in the recent past as well. Whenever there has been a need for people to stay connected, especially first responders, et cetera, to stay connected during these difficult times, Jio's network has risen to the occasion. Not just in terms of supporting our own customers, but we are also allowing, in those difficult times, if and when our competitors' networks are probably not available, we are allowing even their customers to roam, obviously, on our network.
We know that these are difficult times, usually, and we step in also with a lot of support that we provide to our customers with respect to complementary packs, et cetera, so that they can remain connected through all of those difficult times. Again, this is a reflection of a set of values where we've always put our customers first and, while it's a growing business and we are doing well from a financial perspective, et cetera. It all starts with, you know, focusing on creating a superlative engagement and delivering continuous value to all of our customers.
Also the reason why we think we have a differential advantage in terms of network uptime, network reliability, et cetera, is a lot of investment that we've made in creating very strong platform and automation capabilities to be able to very proactively detect any potential service impacting events in our network and being able to close loop it with a response, typically from the field itself. Traditionally, all of these activities have been highly human-dependent. While we have telco NOCs, et cetera, network operating centers, et cetera, a lot of the activities within the network operating center to detect, to troubleshoot and then to marshal the activities back into the field, I mean, those were manual activities, typically. What we have been able to do is take all of those and convert them into highly automated platforms.
The detection of the event, the correlation of that, the troubleshooting and figuring out what are the potential problems which need to be remediated, and then being able to automatically workflow that to the field, where those actions can be done most often proactively, but even where required reactively, those actions can be taken quicker and with higher efficiency than before. What we have seen is a lot of that time saved vis-à-vis the analysis and trying to make sense of what has gone on, has resulted in fewer false activities in the field, as well as almost 2-2.5 times higher productivity on a per agent basis with respect to the events that they can handle.
Again, what we do is, in addition to these platforms, a lot more of the KPIs can be, or the key performance indicators can be directly linked to the efficiency of the field force, which means then we can hold them accountable for that efficiency of the actions that need to be performed in a timely manner. Now coming to the JioFiber network. Again, growing extremely fast. It's an unparalleled bundle of connectivity, content on demand channels and a lot of other value-added applications that we provide, also on our set-top box. All of which comes with, you know, zero entry cost, as we say it, which means no security deposit, no installation charges. You just pay for the pack with no other additional cost for getting yourself connected on the JioFiber service.
Also we have, we've been now rolling out our postpaid offers into the market, very attractive postpaid packages. What we have found is, almost 80% of the new homes who are coming on board are opting for those postpaid packages. What that means is, as you know, postpaid means higher stickiness, especially these long-term postpaid plans, and of course, less disruption, or less need for the customers to recharge on the dot as and when these packs expire. I mean, postpaid gives you that continuity of service.
We find that both from, in terms of the stickiness, the quality of the subscriber base, as well as customer satisfaction, we have seen unprecedented growth in this area, also translating into subscriber growth as well as ARPU growth in the JioFiber area as well. Coming now to some of the work looking beyond the performance of our telecom operating business. If you look to what Jio Platforms is doing in terms of creating digital products. As you know, as we are now gearing up to roll out 5G, everybody's waiting with great excitement for the rest of the year when obviously the spectrum and other enablers would fall in place.
We will see now a roll-out of 5G services, probably very, very soon thereafter in the country. To support that, what we have also done is through Jio Platforms, we have created, as has been announced a few quarters back, a completely indigenous and homegrown 5G stack. This not just is the 5G core network elements, but also moving to all of the other elements that are required to operate a 5G network. Everything from management and orchestration, that we call MANO, to automated troubleshooting. Some examples that I mentioned earlier, but taking it again to the next level, even within 5G, to all the operating systems, especially the fulfillment management systems, orchestrating the network, elements themselves.
As you know, most of the 5G functions are now cloud-native, so even to automate the entire deployment of these services on a continuous basis as new upgrades come in. The tools which are required to optimize and manage the coverage of the 5G network, and obviously the standard fault and performance management as well as security management. All of these aspects, when you put together, it's a total 360-degree 5G solution that we've been able to build in Jio Platforms. Obviously, this will be deployed at scale within the Jio network to begin with. On the back of that success that we fully feel confident about, then these product lines obviously will create a new revenue line as we are able to take this to other markets, even outside India.
Again, all of these elements that I spoke about have been deployed in our network. We have gone through rigorous compliance tests, especially, I mean, in addition to internal testing, and field trials, we have also taken these elements and its use through the regulatory bodies as well as the Department of Telecommunications. They have seen all of the use cases that we've been able to try it on our network already. We have taken a sign-off for this equipment to be now deployed at scale. Some of the use cases that we have...
Of course, this has been done in nine cities in the country, Mumbai and Delhi, and obviously a few other cities also where we anticipate that we'll be introducing these services initially. All these functional tests, everything from the network itself to the security aspects to the performance aspects, and to showcase really a slew of, I would say, next generation applications which take full advantage of the 5G capabilities. All of these have been built internally to a large degree and also trialed and demonstrated to the regulators. In terms of what this means, just to give a snapshot, everybody kind of intuitively understands that 5G might be better than 4G.
In terms of 5G, what is worth noticing is that obviously, in addition to much higher bandwidth and much higher speeds, which is what we call enhanced mobile broadband. If you see this triangle on your screen, the top of the pyramid is still enhanced mobile broadband, which is, you know, higher capacity and higher speed. You see another two aspects of that 5G network, which again will unlock a completely new slew of applications. One is what we call massive machine-type communication, which is really bringing the IoT devices and services to the fore, and again, creating a platform where that can be delivered at scale. On the other hand, we have what we call ultra-reliable low-latency communication, which is able to create services which require extremely low latency.
Things like augmented reality and virtual reality, which we believe will be the new user interface. If you think forward a few years, we believe that will be the next set of experiences that can be showcased on a mobile network. Everything from massive data, superior experience, low latency, highly interactive applications, fixed mobile convergence. Also, 5G obviously creates much higher bandwidth and capacity, which means that it could become a fiber replacement to literally tens of millions of homes way before the deployment of fiber reaches them. They could start enjoying fiber-like connectivity right away, taking advantage of the speed of deploying a wireless network. Like I said, the massive ecosystem of the Internet of Things, which obviously would also be highly automated, using AI and other techniques.
Moving to the radio side, what I mentioned earlier was all of the software components, the network functions. If you look at the radio side, again, we have developed an indigenous design for the 5G radio, which we believe will give us substantial advantage and price-performance advantages in our network. All of these have been deployed in various parts of those nine cities that I spoke about. We have conducted extensive field trials, and we are looking forward to, again, taking this intellectual property, converting them into tangible products that we can first deploy in Jio's own network and obviously showcase these products to the rest of the world in short order. At this point, I'll hand it over to Anshuman, who can start.
Who can talk about the operating and financial performance metrics as well?
Thanks, Kiran. Good evening, everyone. Quickly going through the highlights of operating and financial performance for the quarter for Jio Platforms and our connectivity business. Very strong financial performance across connectivity and the digital platform services. JPL consolidated revenue came in at INR 23,467 crores. That is a growth of almost 24% year-on-year. The EBITDA growing a bit faster with operating leverage coming to INR 11,424 crores. On the operating side, we've continued to add. Our gross adds continued to remain very strong, 35.2 million for this quarter. This quarter, we saw a rebound in the net subscriber addition as well, with 9.7 million net adds during the quarter.
We ended the quarter at 419.9 million as of June 2022, with increased focus on all of the key customer metrics and the SIM consolidation and active customer engagement. There was very good traction in the fiber business as well, where we are gaining new subscribers every month at a faster pace and gaining a significant market share of the net new subscribers in wireline segment. ARPU increased from INR 167.6 to INR 175.7. This was again on account of more engagement. As you can see in the last point, the average data consumption per user crossed 20 GB per user per month, and the overall data traffic crossed 8.5 exabytes per month. Also because of the customer mix.
A combination of those things resulting in the ARPU going up to INR 175.7 for this quarter. We basically establishing leadership across all of the market segments. Moving on the key operating metrics, total customer base, as I said, 419.9 million, at the end of the quarter. That was a net addition of 9.7 million. ARPU coming in at INR 175.7. Both data as well as voice consumption growing very significantly. On data, we've crossed 20.8 GB, so crossed 20 GB per user per month. On voice, we've now crossed 1,000 minutes per user per month of voice consumption as well on the network.
Significant growth on the customer engagement matrices and, equally good across all of the digital platforms that we offer them. Moving to the RJIL, the connectivity business financials. The operating revenues came in at INR 21,873 crore, so that's a growth of 21.6% over the same quarter last year. It's been growing fairly steadily as you can see on the chart on the left. And then on the right, EBITDA grew to INR 11,046 crore. Again, a fairly steady growth, faster than the operating revenues because of the operating leverage that we have. EBITDA margin came in at 50.5% for the quarter. A summary of the Jio Platforms Limited key financials.
Operating revenue for the quarter at INR 23,467 crores, and EBITDA at INR 11,424 crores. Net profit growing to INR 4,530 crores for the quarter. Overall, very strong growth in revenues and profitability. Margins improving on the connectivity business with operating leverage. In JPL, we are now expanding the business more, investing more on the platforms, as Kiran spoke about. A whole lot of traction across all of the business segments that JPL is involved in. With that, I'm going to hand over to Gaurav to take you through the Reliance Retail results.
Thank you, Anshuman. Good evening to all. Let me start my presentation by talking through the operating context to give the perspective of the environment in which we operated our business in this period. It has been a fully normalized quarter since the onset of COVID two years back. During this period, all our stores have fully been operational. That has also resulted in regaining of footfalls across the nation through all our formats and geographies. We got to about 119% of footfalls to a pre-COVID level comparison resulting in about 175 million walk-ins across all our formats. The growth activity on the consumer side was led by opening of malls, resumption of offices, schools.
Festivities and the wedding season also contributed to all of the consumer activities. Consumer sentiments remain positive, though a bit cautious on the discretionary spend due to the inflationary concerns. With that said, let me just talk through the key highlights for the quarter. It has been, you know, another quarter of our all-time high revenues despite the macroeconomic headwinds that we faced on the inflation side. Record highest ever operating EBITDA, and that operating EBITDA also saw a strong margin improvement led by the operating leverage and the efficiencies that drove our business. Our customer base for the first time registered crossed 200 million benchmark. That's a major milestone for us. We ended the quarter with 208 million registered customers.
To also give you the scale at which we operated the period, we undertook over 220 million transactions during the period. That results in over 2.5 million transactions on a daily basis. That's over 60% growth over the pre-COVID period. Our business is really growing on a strong note during this period. Our efforts to expand our store presence continues. We opened 792 stores across geographies and also added 3.3 million sq ft of warehousing and fulfillment area to enhance our service capabilities. Our digital and new commerce footprint that continues to remain strong. Our daily orders on our digital platforms grew 64% year-on-year.
Our merchant base on the new commerce side also scaled up over three times since last year. We continue to further strengthen our portfolio of partners through new partnerships and acquisitions that we did during the course of the quarter. Talking about the growth for the business, we delivered a revenue of INR 58,554 crores at gross level, which is a growth of 52% year-on-year. Our fashion lifestyle business really grew three times as the consumers came back to stores and also refreshed their wardrobes as the COVID impact reduced and schools and offices and restaurants, malls all came back to pretty much pre-COVID levels of activities.
Grocery, consumer electronics and pharma businesses also nearly doubled during this period. Our digital and new commerce business grew double over the last year, and the contribution of these channels now are at 19% of the gross revenue. While the revenue remains strong, profit has actually been much stronger. Our EBITDA delivered at INR 3,837 crores up against INR 1,941 crores last year, up 98%. EBITDA margin saw a strong improvement of 160 basis points year-on-year at 7.4%.
EBITDA margin from operations was at 7.6%, which was a 350 basis point year-on-year improvement, which was led by just the mix of business as we saw fashion and lifestyle and consumer electronics and even grocery coming up, build in as the markets opened up, and also the operating leverage that we saw with strong like-for-like across the consumption baskets. Our store footprint remains on track. We opened 792 stores compared to 793 stores that we opened last quarter, taking our total store count to 15,866 stores. About 46 million sq ft of space. We added about nearly 4 million sq ft of space this quarter.
We also added 79 new warehouse and fulfillment centers to enhance our service capabilities to both our consumers as well as our channel partners and all the deliveries that we do on digital platforms. We added 17,000 new jobs, taking our employee base to over 3,79,000 people across all our offices and store locations. We talked about how we have been strengthening our portfolio of brands, offerings. We announced our franchise relationship with Gap, and Gap is the leading American fashion brand. We also entered into a franchise relationship with the Italian luxury brand Tod's. The relationship with Pret also helps us to enter into the F&B space, as they are one of the leading players in the food and organic coffee chain business.
We acquired the Catwalk brand, which is a leading footwear player in the Indian market. Also took over the franchise rights for Sunglass Hut, which is a multi-brand premium eyewear retail chain in India. Also formed a JV to manufacture toys in India to help strengthen our play in Hamleys business. Strong outreach to various brands across various verticals. On the financial performance side, gross revenue, as I talked through, INR 58,554 crores, up 52%. EBITDA from operations at INR 3,897 crores, up 180% from INR 1,390 crores. It's also up 9% on a sequential basis from INR 3,584 crores.
EBITDA margin from operations, margin expansion of 350 basis points, from 4.1% to 7.6%. Our EBITDA at an overall level at INR 3,837 crore, up 98%. Profit after tax at over INR 2,000 crore now, which is more than double from INR 962 crore last year. Very strong revenue and profit performance that we have delivered in this period. Talking through the key businesses. On consumer electronics, our revenue has doubled, as all our stores, especially the mall stores, performed very well, as with higher traffic and also higher bill values that we could deliver. The growth was not only just due to some key categories, but it was very broad-based. We saw uptick in phones, air conditioners, laptops, high-end TVs.
All of these categories grew more than double year-on-year. Our relationship with the brands helped us create specific launches, events, models that we could retail across all our stores on exclusive basis. And also relationships with the banks, which also helped create a lot of excitement and offers activities that help create more footfalls into our stores and help customers come back to our digital platforms for shopping. Various events that were centered around seasonal events, festivities, and also occasions like IPL, which helped us to push TV sales. Back to school, which also helped us to push categories like laptops, calculators, headphones and many accessories around such events. Our own brands business that has scaled up six times year-on-year.
We continue to look at wider and deeper geographic penetration across geographies, and also undertaking nationwide campaigns to build these brands across the geographies. The JioMart Digital business that was launched Q2 back had a 3x growth quarter-on-quarter. It's yet not a comparable business on a year-on-year basis, still new, but well settling down. The merchant base has grown twice on a quarterly sequential basis. On fashion and lifestyle, talking on the apparel business, which is led by Trends, and also various extension formats of Trends. That business posted its best ever quarter. Business is up 3x year-on-year, largely driven by festivities, wedding season, and opening up of mall stores.
We delivered very strong growth over pre-COVID levels, strong double-digit growth, largely relying on festive celebrations and also customer engagements. Plus, the traction on small towns remained very strong. We talked about crossing the milestone of 600 stores last quarter. We still continue to see a lot of traction from small towns in our apparel and footwear business. The men's formal, women's western wear and footwear categories registered very strong growth as travel and offices resumed. We saw also uptick in sarees business. We entered into the sarees business through Kalanikethan and also Avantra by Trends, there's two formats. With festive and wedding season, we saw that big uptick in the saree sales as well. On AJIO, the AJIO business continues on the roll.
The momentum of growth continues. That business doubled year-on-year, registered its highest ever revenues this quarter as well. The increased customer experience is really about how we are able to personalize and also get more intuitiveness into and better experience on the app and the site, which is also helping us to bring back our customers, and we see that the customer loyalty is really improving. We saw an improvement of 500 basis points on repeat shoppers, and these are our loyal customers who have been now spending more than twice than the new customers who are coming onto the platforms. On New Commerce side, our presence is across 3,500 cities. We continue to strengthen our portfolio of offerings.
We added over 32% options on to our platform through addition of over 660 new brands across various VOs. Our share of own brands grew to 30%. We launched 14 new brands during this period, which has helped us to grow over 300 basis points on the own brand share into overall performance for the business. Our relationship with merchants remain extremely strong. Merchants who have been now using the benefit of our larger sourcing and offerings, they are spending over three times as compared to the newer merchants and customers who are now coming who have just joined at maybe about a month period or so. On the partner brand side, our revenues have grown 5x over last year.
This is a period when we saw new collaborations coming to life. We're seeing a lot of activities within the stores that grow footfalls. Malls are back to full operations. A lot of growth in the partner businesses that we saw across brands. AJIO LUXE, which is the luxury segment on AJIO, that is also an authority for consumers who are looking at premium and luxury brands. That part of the business grew 6x year-on-year. We have now over 400 brands and 38,000 options live on the platform. Jewelry business grew three times year-on-year, which is led by festive sales as well as the expansion of new stores and also SIS locations across geographies.
The period is also led by presence of Akshaya Tritiya, which is a big event for jewelry, and we had good traction in this quarter on that particular event. Our capabilities in design is really coming all together as we continue to launch new collections, and that is also helping us improve our share of diamond jewelry and diamond collections in overall sales. We saw that improvement of 600 basis points over last year in its contribution. On the lingerie side, I think we have now you know, full play across segments starting from Clovia, which is on the more value side, to Zivame mid segment and Amante more upper mid segment to premium segment.
Also have got Marks & Spencer and Hunkemöller, which takes the more premium side of the offering. These brands have contributed up over 5x year-on-year in sales. It is contributing also coming from its digital platform, which seems to be a destination for customers looking at innerwear, and that continues to grow. Talking on the grocery side, our offline business led by Reliance SMART that grew 2x over last year. It is supported by a lot of impactful omni-channel activities, which is integrating JioMart with our physical stores, which is leading to better footfalls as well as more uptake on the digital platform.
Our daily subscription business through Milkbasket is also on a growth path, and that has been doubling over last year. Our catalog size has also improved by 44% during this period as compared to last year. That is helping us to offer a much wider set of products on JioMart as well as our stores to complete the shopping mission for our customers. Our grocery business is vertically integrated, which allows us to source our products from small and large suppliers and manufacturers directly, and that helps to keep the prices low. During the times when consumers are facing inflationary pressures, our sourcing efficiencies have helped us to pass on the price benefits, especially in the key value items to millions of consumers, helping them buffer the impact of the inflationary pressures.
That's really where all our efforts in backend supply chain and sourcing really comes to play, and there we have really helped our consumers to buy at the right prices and also get the benefit of, you know, the right pricing from all our formats. Performance in our tier two cities has been very strong for grocery business. The growth in these cities has been more than twice than what we have been seeing in tier one markets.
Events like Dhamaka Sale, which is one of our largest events, during this particular period, that has created a lot of excitement for customers to come back to stores. When we look at the contribution of non-food within the stores, I think all of these make a lot of impact on consumers shopping. With very concerted efforts, we have been looking at increasing the share of non-food into our overall offering. That went up by a full 70 basis points. Categories like general merchandise, apparel, stationery, toys, the lot of categories that perform under non-food, and that completes the entire shopping basket for our households when they come to our stores. We continue to strengthen our own brands play as well.
We launched Bubbles soft drink as well as Bubbles & Confectionery during this period. New commerce, we added over 4X merchant partners on a year-on-year basis. Our play has been not only just to partner with the kirana stores, but also onboard HoReCas and small institutions. We have been investing immensely in putting together the supply chain capabilities to service them. During this period, we have launched 33 new facilities, including four cold chain facilities and also creating very specific offers and catalogs for our HoReCa institutional customers. On pharma side, business doubled over the period, led by better footfalls into our pharmacy stores as well as digital commerce orders on the Netmeds platform.
80% of our stores are hyperlocal enabled, which allows us faster delivery performances to our customers. On merchant base, which is really where we partner with smaller chemists and drug retailers, that is up 50% quarter-over-quarter, again not comparable on a last year basis. Our presence for our merchant base is now spread in more than 2,000 foreign cities. Urban Ladder , which we acquired over last year, that business has also doubled over last year with some of the key big events like the Full House Sale, which creates a lot of customer engagement activities resulting in uptick in footfalls and web visits. One of the big focus areas for the business has been to strengthen its product offers.
During the course of this quarter, the business launched products like Create, which is about custom sofas, La-Z-Boy, which is on recliners, Aracraft and Gypsy Trunks, which is on furniture and decor product categories as well. As we look ahead, our focus remains clearly defined. Our intent is to continue store expansion across all our businesses. Digital commerce and omni-channel capabilities has been resulting into you know, much stronger engagement with our customers as they shop between the stores as well as our platforms. We continue to strengthen that part of our channel. Our new commerce business is accelerating with onboarding of new merchants, and we are now looking at how we further increase the share of wallet in partnership with our merchant partners.
We look at strengthening the entire supply chain infrastructure as well as the product and design capabilities. Of course, looking at how do we further scale up all the businesses that we have acquired and also partnered over the period of time. With that, I hand over back to the team.
Good evening, everyone. Thank you, Gaurav Jain. On the oil and gas performance, look at the EBITDA performance and the revenues, we did significantly better quarter-on-quarter, primarily driven by marginal growth in production. In KG D6, we're at about slightly over 19 million standard cubic meters production, which is about 20% of India's current gas production. In CBM, we've been able to sustain the production at about 0.76. Apart from this higher gas price realizations contributed to the stronger revenue in EBITDA. As you can see in KG D6, we realized $9.72 on a weighted average basis. That is primarily because of the ceiling prices were raised from $6.13 to $9.92 during this half. Similarly in CBM, we had stronger realizations, 22...
Nearly $22.5. That these are key drivers to the growth. Now we are also expecting the MJ field to be on stream by the Q3 of this year, of this fiscal year. That should add further growth in EBITDA and value in the quarters to come and the years to come. Just to give you a recap on where we are on the MJ gas and condensate field, it comprises of three major components, the subsea production system, the risers that connect it to the FPSO, which is a floating production storage and offloading vessel.
Now just to give you an update, in terms of the subsea installation of the subsea production system, this has been on track, and we expect to complete all the activities by the Q2 . Similarly, the FPSO is expected to arrive in India by the Q2 . Once both of them come together, then the activities to connect the subsea production system to the FPSO will be undertaken. Meanwhile, we are looking at the lower and upper completions to be done for the wells. We're already currently we are on the first well, and you know, we are progressing towards commissioning each of these wells within subsequent months. In KG-UDW1, this is a block which is contiguous to KG D6.
We are pursuing infrastructure-led exploration over there. The whole idea is any resources that we can accrete, we can monetize with the existing infrastructure. The prospect maturation is underway, and we expect to undertake an exploration well next year. Overall, the outlook is, you know, once the MJ field is commissioned, we should be progressively moving towards delivering more than a BCF per day by FY 2024. Just to give you a perspective on the global gas markets, as you all know, the gas prices continue to remain elevated. There are two major drivers to it. One is the European demand is now shifting from Russian gas to LNG supplies, and which also impacts the Asian consumers. Also, there's been supply disruption.
We've seen the Freeport LNG terminal in the US, as well as the Nord Stream one pipeline disruptions. That's a substantial amount of volume that has been impacted. As you can see, the prices even at current day is, you know, at about. In terms of the TTF, which is reflective of the European market prices, it's, you know, here we see 31.59, but currently it's at about $45. Similarly, JKM is at about $38. Prices continue to remain elevated and are expected to, given the challenges that are there today. In terms of the Indian gas market, the outlook remains robust, and one of the big reasons is the availability of domestic gas.
Because that's, you know, the domestic gas, particularly like in KG D6, where there is a price ceiling, that is much more in demand as compared to the market prices, particularly the JKM prices that are currently prevailing at these times. In terms of selling, as you are aware and earlier, prices have been higher realizations expected on higher prices across the other route. We'll see that the main trade, you know, which is when elevate prices in the area compared to market prices. Overall we expect gas realization in the interim to come. Thank you much.
Going to this presentation as the O2C. This quarter is about the dislocation in the energy markets, and we saw supply of crude refining impact in Russia. We can also try and handle more gas to switch tighter fuel margin. Sanjay Roy talked about LNG pricing limited, not only because of the Asian issue, also because of, you know, disruption at Freeport LNG. All that meant that LNG price continued to remain firm. Ethane, in a way, tracked LNG for most of the quarter. Also, with this kind of dislocation, meant that, you know, there was significant increase in logistics costs and, you know, energy prices itself does drive up the overall operating cost.
When you look at the performance, both the revenues are higher. EBITDA that I talked in the first part of my presentation, almost INR 20,000 crore, you know, which is 63% higher on a year-on-year basis and 40% on a quarter-on-quarter basis. This is the highest ever O2C EBITDA on the back of strong fuel cracks and stable downstream contribution. Many focus saying that, you know, fuel cracks more than double. They do also miss the multiple offsets that were to that environment.
For example, if you were to look at Asian OSPs from the Middle East, now in just this quarter, the OSPs were $4-$5 higher than what it was in the previous quarter. That is a significant, you know, change when you look at quarter-over-quarter costs. Similarly, of course, in this quarter, we all know about the domestic fuel retailing losses because of cap realization. Also, in this quarter, you know, there were lower volumes for us on the back of cracker turnaround at Hazira and also the diesel hydrodesulfurization plant that has also went into a plant turnaround. Overall, you also see that, you know, the OpEx does go up in the back of high energy and freight costs.
A very strong performance when you look at the numbers, but I just wanted to highlight that there are offsets that you know people miss while just focusing only on the fuel cracks. This is on the margin strength. You know, we talked about transportation fuel. You can see the actual cracks on the right, gasoline, gas oil, ATF. This strengthens on the back of both strong demand because of reopening, higher travel restrictions from China, and importantly, lower Chinese exports, and the fact that there has been low global inventory. That's one clear set of reasons for the transportation fuel being high.
We saw a sharp fall in naphtha cracks on a quarter-on-quarter basis on the back of lower cracker operations in Asia. We also saw that the LPG cracks declined sharply on weak propane economics. Overall, of course, polymer margins, you know, benefited from lower naphtha prices and stable product prices. Also, we did see a sharp rebound on PX margins, you know, which supported the polyester chain. When you look at the demand levels, clearly when you look at India, Indian oil demand, polymer demand, and polyester demand, you can see that on a year-on-year basis, you know, up very sharply. Of course, in Q1 we had the, you know, impact of COVID Q1 FY 2022. That was clearly one factor.
When you look at on a quarter-on-quarter basis, we do see that it was soft. Similarly, when you look at oil demand, up 1.6 million barrels per day on a year-on-year basis. When you look at it on a quarter, it is sequentially lower by 1.5 million barrels on the back of both the Russia-Ukraine conflict and also the stringent lockdowns that we saw in China. Refinery operating rates declined to 76.1, which is 140 basis points lower on the back of severe lockdown in China and also there were constrained runs in Russia. Operating rates in the cracker operating rates were also impacted by fresh lockdowns, you know, as well as planned shutdowns that we saw.
Overall, the demand held, but it did look soft for the quarter. When you go to specifically on oil demand, and you can see that overall year-on-year HSD demand up 20% on a year-on-year basis on the back of improved economic activity, tourism, transportation demand, and also harvesting season, which aided rural demand. We also saw ATF going up very sharply on the back of very sharp increase in domestic air traffic, which was higher by 3x on a year-on-year basis. Gasoline demand also strong again at 29% on the back of preference for personal mobility. Moving to the polymer and polyester side, you can see that year-on-year polymer demand up 9%, polyester demand up 44%.
When you look at polymer demand across the board, we do see demand being strong, be it agriculture, food packaging, infra. We are seeing that. Very strong demand, of course, when you look at PVC at 29%, on the back of softer prices and also pre-monsoon agricultural demand. Overall PE demand has been muted, but we saw a lot of downstream pre-buying in Q4 because of the plant shutdowns that we saw from major producers. On the polyester side, as I mentioned, 44% growth year-on-year, but flat on a quarter-on-quarter basis. Polyester, we saw a big impact in Q1 of FY 2022. Also of course, on a broader sense, cotton, polyester prices, deltas, you know, are high with supported PSF.
Also when you look at PET, very strong growth that we saw on the back of summer demand for PET that we see. On the chain delta side, polymer deltas up between 2%-28%. PE especially up 28% on firm product prices and benefiting of course from lower naphtha that we saw. PP deltas over naphtha that was you know marginally higher by about 2%. PVC showed we saw a sharp jump again, 28%, and that was on the back of sharp fall in EDC prices, which fell by almost 20%, and the fact that demand continued to be strong. Overall, polyester chain deltas were 6% higher. Actually, downstream polyester demand was impacted by China lockdown. MEG was also weak, minus 54%.
The overall chain delta has improved because of PX delta improvement. PX went up by almost 76% on a quarter-over-quarter basis, led by gasoline blending. Moving to individual transportation fuels. As you can see from this graph, gasoil demand remained broadly flat at about 28.3, but the cracks surged on the back of EU embargo on Russian products and gasoil switching that I talked about, and lower inventories and limited exports from China. This aspect of lower inventories and limited exports from China, you know, cascades in many other products also.
If you see, jet kero again, overall increased by 0.1 million barrels, in terms of demand, but the cracks, again, more than doubled, because of, you know, prioritizing of gasoil, or jet kero because of the economics. Also, rising air travel demand meant that, you know, cracks went up very sharply. On gasoline, the year was the case where demand also went up, sharply, one million barrels per day, of which 70% was in North America. Again, apart from demand, lower exports from China and, of course, India demand, 11% higher. All of them played a part in terms of, how we saw cracks behave in, gasoline.
When you look at the operating performance, clearly for us, we absolutely maximized the primary and secondary units. We focused on gasoline grades. You know, we did the yield adjustments to benefit from the high gasoil, fuel oil deltas as well as gasoline naphtha spreads. We focused a lot on extracting every bit of value from the refinery. Also, the fact that we further saw increased improvement in gasifier utilization meant led in terms of high-cost liquid fuel firing, as well as there being no need for high-cost LNG imports. Of course, fuel production was lower, as you can see, 10.5 versus 10.7 because of the DHDS shutdown.
Also, when you look at the polymers, 1.4 versus 1.5, and you can see that that is on the back of the planned turnaround that I mentioned at Hazira. Overall, this just brings the various factors at play. You know, just to touch the main one, macro, we do expect oil demand to go up to be at about 99.2, which is 1.7 million barrels per day. Impact of the EU decision to phase out oil and gas by year-end is a clear factor in terms of how it plays out.
It also means that, you know, demand for mid-distillates, especially, and therefore demand for export to EU, both from Asia as well as from the Middle East. On margin side, you know, that's been well talked about. There is limited spare refining capacity. The strong oil demand, you know, can keep refining margins higher. There is clear recovery in aviation demand down because of and also because the pandemic woes are subsiding. The fact that, you know, there are lower exports from China are supporting margins. Though, of course, on specific products, PX, PTA and MEG, we do expect it to be range bound due to the overall capacity overhang that we see there.
Demand drivers, again, you know, it's transportation fuel, and you know where the lockdowns in China to be eased, you'll see demand coming there too. Overall, polyester polymer demand, we do expect to see some improvements in the coming fifth season. On the challenges side, you know, we have been seeing the whole concern of recession, slowdown, on the back of both higher prices as well as, you know, the responses by various central banks all over the world in terms of, you know, wanting to take interest rates up to curb inflation. You're seeing the impact of that.
Those factors definitely fall in the category of challenges when you look at what will be the outlook over the next three to Q4 . Of course, any duty on exports will have an impact on overall realizations that we have. Just to bring together the overall performance, a very strong earnings growth that we saw both on EBITDA as well as net profit and as we had highlighted right through, led on the back of O2C, but also every business, retail, Jio, as well as upstream, have contributed meaningfully in terms of the year-on-year growth. Sanjay talked about being on track to deliver 1 BCFD per day of gas in FY 2024.
Retail, you know, the focus continues to be on onboarding merchant partners, new store addition and scaling up of our omni-channel capabilities. On Jio, you know, both the leadership and connectivity, be it mobility as well as the FTTH, as well as the broader 5G deployment that Kiran had talked about. Overall, you know, we have a strong balance sheet and multiple growth drivers to deliver value creation. Thank you so much. Appreciate you all being on this call.