The context, the first 11 months seemed pretty different from what happened in March. Eleven months, it seemed like fastest growing economy. Domestic activity was fairly robust. From our own telecom point of view, significant growth in tariff in traffic on the 5G network and so on. All the measures taken on GST rationalization, the easing rate cycle, monsoons were good. That gave broadly, consumption tailwinds were decent there. Energy prices also give or take was range-bound, and even growth in both fuel and refined products remained steady. Then you go into March, you know, we all know the numbers, almost doubling of, 70% higher in some cases even, in gas it went up to double.
Of course, the concern for everybody, all of us, is the fact that, the supply shock and its impact on industry and consumer confidence, that is something that, as it is happening, everybody's grappling with it. Rupee depreciation, obviously is an area of concern, 11% for the year and 4% just in March. You know, the bias will be there if this situation were to persist or because on the back of widening CAD. All that, these are concern areas. It all depends on, you know, what is the outcome of the war, when does the settlement happen? But were it not, these are really the immediate concern areas in everybody's mind.
In this context, when I just look at FY 2025-26, the full year and before I go into the quarter, 10% up on revenue, 13.5% on EBITDA. This of course includes the one-time that we had in the sale of listed shares. Now with the consumer businesses contributing more than 55% of EBITDA and PAT growth was also good and have provided the details of the standalone profitability of RIL, JPL and RRVL. So JPL at year-on-year PAT increase is about 15% and RRVL about 12%, RIL close to 24%. This is really the mix. Overall growth 13%, digital very strong, 18%.
Subscribers, 5G related subscriptions, broadband mix, customer engagement, all these metrics is very good, strong numbers. Retail 8% growth on EBITDA. This is, you know, muted because of the scale-up of the hyperlocal commerce. Also, fashion and lifestyle demand was a bit soft. O2C up 10% despite everything. You know, as Shrini will talk through in the presentations about, you know, what happened there. Oil and gas has been more about the fall in overall production, the reserves coming down. This I just thought, you know, just to put a five-year context.
Overall, we are up more than 2x, but digital is again more than 2x. Retail 2.5 times. O2C close to 2. So yeah, in a more broader timeframe, I just wanted to emphasize this more than doubling is something that you know we have been doing and this is again another indication. Just going into for the quarter. As you can see, overall EBITDA growth flat and actually it is about consumer. When I say consumer here, I'm taking both you know Jio and retail. That's up 14%, which really negates the impact of energy, which has been lower.
More on PAT has been on a quarter-on-quarter lower because of depreciation and interest on the back of the capitalization of the 5G assets. More specifically on Oil to Chemicals, down 4%. Actually the 4% doesn't bring the overall context of the how difficult the environment was. One of course, last year, a year back same time, this was the overall numbers were as strong. When you look at what happened in terms of, you know, just the physical inability to get crude. In fact, if you see the throughput for us, it was lower by 4%.
You know, just getting physical crude, the premium which was trading on top of the benchmarks, logistics cost, insurance cost, the share volatility that we saw there and, coupled with, underrecoveries on fuel retailing, the introduction of SAED. There are a million things which have happened in this quarter. That's what I meant by saying that 4% number, really doesn't capture the, what the environment was. In that sense, we are—I'm very happy or delighted to, you know, to look at this performance and, the quality of the performance is very strong. Oil and gas, because of gas volumes. Digital services has been good, 16% on the back of subscriber addition, which was up 7.5%.
The 5G user base has been growing at about 40%. Retail, more broad-based consumption that we have seen. The hyperscale expansion, which Dinesh will talk through you know, in the retail presentation. This is again same five-year perspective I just thought to put that. Overall, still you know, net debt, we have been able to keep that in control or continuing the CapEx vis-à-vis what is the cash profit. All of those trends have remained fairly strong, and these numbers say that. Yeah, net debt has been at about 0.64, which against what we have been talking about 1, below 1. With this, Dinesh. Sorry. Anshuman. Thanks.
Thank you, Srikanth. Good evening, everyone. Update on the Jio platform results for the quarter and the full year. Strong double-digit growth in our digital services business, which is already a global scale business, and then showing double-digit growth. We ended the year with 524 million subscribers. That's a net add of 36.3 million during the year. It's been fairly sustained, picking up over the last couple of quarters. 268 million 5G user base. That's an addition of 77 million during the year of 5G subscribers. That makes us the largest 5G subscriber base, you know, the largest outside of China as a single country operator. Number one in homes as well, 27 million fixed broadband connects.
That was a net addition of almost 10 million during the year. 12.9 million Jio AirFiber homes. Roughly 75% of the connections coming in through the AirFiber, where we are by far the largest globally with our AirFiber product across 5G and UBR. On the financial metrics, the revenue for the year at INR 1,46,885 crore, which was up 14.6% year-on-year. 76,255 crore of EBITDA. That was up almost 19% year-on-year. EBITDA margin of 52%. We saw a 190 basis points improvement there, increase there. One of the metrics we have been tracking is the amount of data consumed on the network. Total data traffic increased to 241 exabytes for the year.
It's around 66 exabytes for this quarter. That's a 31% increase year-on-year. Across all of the operating and financial metrics, we see strong growth and continue to see strong growth on these. I'll just speak a bit about some of the priority areas, focus areas for us currently and as we move forward. Mobility continues. You know, it's we have the largest market share. We're growing that business rapidly. There are a few priority areas, focus areas for us to improve the product offering and gain more market share. On the product side, the 5G premium services with our SA stack we are able to offer. Now, of course, some of this is being done on a trial basis.
We need to ensure that we are fully regulatory compliant. These products are ready for the market. AI first network being used on our network, we have been implementing a whole bunch of intelligence, AI, automations, energy optimization, for example, is being done on our network, and we should see good results coming out of these in the next few quarters. We've done some network innovations. Again, as you all know, we manage our own network. The core has been completely developed by us. We do a lot of innovation on the radio as well. We've been able to do, you know, work on some proprietary beamform cell design, which helps us improve coverage and capacity, especially in specific locations.
You know, if there is a match in a stadium or there is a high traffic zone, we are able to now enhance capacity, which has always been a challenge area for operators, and we've been able to come up with our own proprietary solutions to address improve customer experience in these situations. Distribution strategy on the 5G side, working with OEMs to see how we can improve the experience for users as they take new devices, SIM activation, etc. You will hear about some of this in the market.
Leveraging our distribution to become, you know, as a digital gateway for digital platforms and services coming into the country, be it Gemini, be it JioHotstar, that continues to be a focus area, helps us improve our customer traction, customer engagement and also gets us some more revenues, which is always welcome. It also helps us in improving our ARPU. On the customer experience side, you would have seen some recent third-party reports, which have all rated us as the best network.
You know, multiple awards, including download speed, 1.8 times competition, 99.9% time on the network, and a very important metric, which is 5G coverage experience, where third-party results are showing that our users are able to access 5G services most of the time that they are on the network. Converting network leadership to premium subscriber engagement, and I think just more customer engagement, just more traction with customers as they remain on the network. Homes continues to be a priority for us. We had a good year. We have now reached 27 million subscribers. Almost 10 million net adds during the last 12 months, and 75% of those coming through AirFiber, which is working at scale, working really well.
Last time I'd spoken about the non-line-of-sight deployment that we had started doing, and that's now working on the ground in practice. With some of these things, you know, when you deploy in the field is when you sometimes face some challenges, and you need to appropriately adjust. We have done those. We have been through that phase. This now further expands the addressable market from our point of view, where there were situations where line of sight was becoming a restricting factor for us. With this now working at scale, we have started upgrading the hardware in most cases. This is enabling us to now connect more sites and more premises with this new technology.
We're very optimistic about this working at scale and will help us, you know, increase the run rate, increase the acquisition rate even more. On the, you know, bunch of activities, a lot of initiatives we've taken on the, you know, quality and assurance side. Rapid technician onboarding, very important because now that we're working at a scale where, you know, 25-30, and there are days when we are adding 50,000-60,000 homes in a day, you need to have scaled technical manpower on the ground. Therefore, this rapid technician onboarding is a very important consideration from our point of view, which we have been able to do. One day installation. Over 90% of the installations are happening within 24 hours.
Of course, we'll strive, we'll target to take this closer to 100%. Most of the times the limiting factor again becomes the availability of a technician. It's not about the network or the infrastructure readiness. AI checks on the key KPIs so that we can keep real-time or we can track those real-time and take real-time action. We've pretty much been near zero complaints from a service quality point of view, be it fiber and also AirFiber. Enterprises, we continue to focus on this to enhance new account penetration. Our proprietary solutions, we have spoken about this in the past, but those are now commercially available in the market being provided to our enterprise customers.
Managed connectivity, where we take care of end-to-end, you know, requirements of enterprise customers, primarily with Wi-Fi, firewall, surveillance, any of their requirements. As we have told you in the past, most of our customers are taking something beyond just connectivity. These kind of managed services, managed connectivity solutions, are very popular with enterprise customers. The high-powered UBR last mile and being able to offer that at a more cost-effective, as a cost-effective solution and in quicker time, again, very popular with enterprises. In case of dispersed locations, a lot of enterprises which have presence across multiple geographies or multiple locations, they are preferring our AirFiber solution because we are able to connect those locations in quick time and give them an integrated standardized solution, which is quite popular.
Our share of large deal wins, it's natural as well now that we are the largest operator. But also the fact that these large deals would tend to take more time to convert. These are longer lead cycles, but we are now seeing an increasing share in these wins. Dedicated terabit level connectivity that we are able to offer on backbone. Again, the integrated solutions that we have spoken in the past about, be it manufacturing, retail, BFSI, government verticals, all of which where we are seeing good large deal wins. Digital solutions, managed Wi-Fi, managed compute are solutions which are needed by not only large enterprises, but SMBs, small enterprises now.
They sold managed compute, JioPC, which we are working in partnership with SaaS players. This is again very popular with SMBs. Something that is a need of the hour because, you know, the computer penetration even now is low. These are AI-ready kind of compute solutions, which are gonna be needed increasingly. In the next few quarters, you will see a lot of need coming up for these, even with the smaller businesses. Large enterprises, of course, can spend a little bit more on cloud and on compute infrastructure, but even for them, this is more cost-effective and more efficient. Coming to the key operating metrics for the quarter. On the connectivity, for the connectivity business, Jio, we ended the quarter, ended the year at 524.4 million subscribers.
That was a net add of 9.1 million subscribers. 54% of the mobility consumers are already on 5G. They are consuming 5G services. As you saw in that, some of the third-party reports, when they consume 5G, they are consuming 5G most of the time. They are mostly on 5G. INR 214 ARPU. Most of you got it right. I saw some of the reports. 4% year-on-year growth in ARPU, but as you all know, this year there was no tariff action. This is mostly coming in from organic routes. Per capita data consumption increased to 42.3 GB per month, and this continues to see very healthy growth.
We are expecting this to keep growing like this with more use cases coming in, now with an AI-enabled use cases. People watching media, of course, continues to be very popular. The monthly churn rate's also reducing. All in all, operating metrics doing quite well, and in line with what we would have expected. You know, the traction is building up more. Financials for RGIL connectivity business. Healthy, steady growth, INR 33,381 crores for the last quarter. EBITDA of INR 18,771 crores. EBITDA margin improving to 56.2%. 230 basis point increase over the year in the EBITDA margin, and revenue growing by 11.2% year-on-year.
Of course, our digital, some of the JPL revenues are growing faster than this, but this continues to show very high, very steady growth, and even without a tariff increase. This is growth coming from new customers and more utilization by the customers. The results for JPL, both quarterly and the full year, are given here. Operating revenues of INR 38,259 crore. That's a 12.6% growth year-on-year. EBITDA grew to INR 20,060 crore, 17.9% year-on-year. And PAT at INR 7,935 crore, 13% growth year-on-year. Full year results on the right column there, INR 1,46,085 crore as revenue. INR 76,255 crore EBITDA, and we crossed 30,000 crore in PAT.
Not necessarily a milestone, but it feels good to have crossed another, you know, 30,000, a number that big. With that, I'll hand over to Dinesh to take you through the results for the retail business.
Hi, good evening, everyone. On the retail business, we had a pretty strong quarter. For the quarter, we had the highest ever revenues of INR 98,000 crore. In fact, normally Q3 is the strongest quarter for any retailer, but this time Q4, our revenue was even marginally higher than Q3, so overall very good performance. 11% growth on a Y-o-Y basis for the full quarter. Now, if you recollect, RCPL business was de-merged out in the last quarter. Adjusted for that, the growth is almost 14%. For the full year, the growth is 12%, and if you exclude RCPL de-merger, the growth would be even higher. EBITDA came in at INR 6,900 crore. EBITDA margin is at 7.9%.
Hyperlocal commerce continues to grow pretty steadily. We had a 30% growth in average daily orders on a quarter-over-quarter basis, and 300% growth on a year-over-year basis. The number of registered customers continues to show healthy trend with 11% growth year-over-year. The transactions have grown, you know, 1.93 billion for the full year, which is a 39% growth. If you look at the 12% growth in revenue versus 39% growth in transactions, that is because of the high frequency quick commerce orders. We opened 333 total new stores during the quarter and crossed the milestone of 20,000 stores during this quarter. Overall revenue, as I was saying, the highest ever revenue in EBITDA in the history of the company.
Revenue was at INR 98,000 crores, EBITDA at INR 6,900 crores, and PAT at INR 3,500 crores. Across consumption baskets, just to highlight, we had pretty strong performance. I would say grocery and fashion were the standout with good strong double-digit growth. Across all segments, the LFL growth was in the mid-to-high single digits. If we look at grocery specifically, we crossed the milestone of 1,000 big box, you know, hypermarket, supermarkets. In our understanding, this is the fastest ever rollout any retailer globally has reached to the milestone of 1,000 big box stores. The growth is quite broad-based across categories. There are some categories which are emerging out there, especially with the focus of health and convenience.
Some of the health-related categories are continuing to outperform. Metro, which is our B2B business, again, had a very good steady quarter. There is growth in average bill values, driven by, you know, various programs, bill buster programs that we are running. Also, the digital platform, which is a self-serve platform, with the enhancements we are doing on the consumer experience, the digital platform continues to scale very rapidly. JioMart, which is our hyperlocal commerce business, it has the widest reach. We are serving, you know, 1,200+ cities with 3,100+ stores. This is a combination of dark stores and walk-in stores. This is the widest network that any hyperlocal player has in this country.
The other advantage that we have is these are just grocery stores. In addition, we are doing, you know, we have also put all our electronic stores and 1,700 plus fashion stores onto the platform where we are able to offer two-hour delivery. Now, that's pretty unique to us because nobody has the kind of network density to be able to offer this service. Most people do multi-categories through their dark stores, but the assortment is very limited. In our case, we are able to offer the entire full store assortment on a hyperlocal basis. In addition to having our 1P catalog, we are also expanding through 3P sellers so that, you know, wherever there are gaps in our offering, the customers see a comprehensive proposition, and they're able to shop for everything.
We also launched the new version of the app during this quarter. Most of you who might be using it would have seen the new app. It is. The feedback is quite good, the conversions are better, and the bill values are also better. On the fashion and lifestyle business, we have a healthy double-digit growth overall in the business with mid-single digits, you know, like-for-like growth. We did 1,500 stores, which we refreshed during the quarter. We have added a lot of tech features like self-checkout, you know, RFID-based checkouts, et cetera, into these stores to make them more appealing.
Even, you know, the brightness of the stores, the way they are presented, the way the assortment is displayed, all of that has been upgraded to make them more appealing, especially for the Gen Z. We are using AI operating model across the entire value chain, embedding intelligence right from, you know, design selection to what is likely to sell the most, to having an assortment which is more scientific in nature, a tech-enabled supply chain and omni-channel fulfillment. We're using AI across the value chain. We are also launching several campaigns and, you know, tying up with celebrities to make sure that we're able to connect with the larger, you know, with trend which is our flagship format has been more a family store. Yousta is our Gen Z store.
Azorte is our premium store. Across those, we are trying to connect more, with, you know, the target customers, especially the younger customers, to get them to experience our proposition. On the online side, Ajio had a pretty steady quarter. The average bill values continue to grow in a pretty healthy manner. We have an industry-leading average bill values. Our own brands, which is our big differentiator because, you know, because these brands and many of these are pretty large in brands, including international brands that we have in our portfolio. They continue to gain traction, and they're a big differentiator because these brands are not available anywhere else on any other platform. Ajio Rush, we have expanded pretty significantly.
This is a four-hour delivery promise, and that is now available in 600+ cities. This is a curated assortment in each micro market, and we are able to deliver whatever you order within four hours. Shein continues to have strong momentum. The app installs continue to scale pretty rapidly. We've already scaled the number of options to we are launching 1,000 new options per day. These are small drops, high, you know, high width of options. Now we have achieved critical scale. We are also kind of, you know, investing now in promoting the brand, and this is showing good traction. Premium brands, again, had a pretty healthy quarter with pretty strong, high single-digit, you know, same-store sales growth. Multiple categories were driving the performance, including premium menswear, eyewear and kidswear.
We entered into an exclusive partnership with Kurt Geiger. It's a premium British footwear and accessories brand, so it adds to our portfolio. We have the largest portfolio of international premium brands in the country, and there are several other exciting opportunities in the pipeline. Ajio Luxe had, again, a pretty healthy growth. The brand portfolio grew 24% on a YOY basis with option counts going up 11%. Many of the brands which are available on Ajio Luxe are brands where we have you know exclusive rights, and they're only available on Ajio Luxe, so that's a big differentiator for the platform. These are brands which are very well sought after by customers.
Jewels business had a pretty healthy quarter with average bill values going up by 53% on a YOY basis. The grammage has gone down a little bit, but not substantially, which means that the business is seeing pretty strong growth. The design-led diamond jewelry continues to gain traction. We've been, you know, trying pretty hard and over the last few quarters, the share of diamond has been increasing, which does help in improving margins as well. On the consumer electronics business, again, we've had a pretty healthy quarter. The Digital India Sale, we had our first-ever INR 500 crore sale in a single day. The overall 30% YOY growth during that period.
The growth was again quite broad-based across laptops, mobiles, televisions. resQ, which is our big differentiator, we have now presence across 1,600+ locations, where we are able to fulfill the promise of, you know, most cities, same-day installation and delivery. Otherwise, same-day delivery and next-day installation. Our B2B business, JMD, again, we've got to a critical mass of our retailers, where we are present, and the focus is on, you know, improving the wallet share there and, you know, the number of times they purchase and how much of their demand we are able to service. Mobiles continues to be the mainstay for this, but other categories, especially TVs and IT-related categories, also continue to do well. Beyond mobiles, we've been able to expand the offering.
Yeah, that's a quick update on the retail business.
For the FMCG business, we have Ashutosh Goyal, who is CFO for Reliance Consumer Products.
Thank you, Hemant Ji. Good evening, everyone. From an FMCG business perspective, we closed our revenue of INR 22,000 crore in 2026. For quarter four alone, we delivered a revenue of INR 7,350 crore. Both these are 2 times growth on the similar period for the last year. In terms of Campa brand, we delivered a revenue of INR 4,700 crore, making it fourth largest carbonated soft drink brands in the country in a very short span of time. Independence as essential brand delivered a revenue of INR 2,600 crore for the year and became one of the most promising and trusted brand in the country.
Our packaged drinking water business is growing and scaling up very fast right now, and we have become third-largest water player in the country. We started foraying into our international business last year, and this year we have our presence in 40 countries. In terms of the category performances, so we saw categories growing across the board. Beverages grew by about 3.2 times over the last year, and this was primarily led by the supply chain expansion and strong execution in the market. In terms of the daily essentials,
We grew by about 1.6 times over the last year, led by our brand Independence and certain new acquisitions like Udhaiyam and Manna. On HPC categories, we have launched new products under brands like Velvet and scaled up brands like Glimmer under the soaps category. Our foods saw good to positive tractions across the subcategories like biscuits, confectioneries, snacks, and other processed foods. To really scale up the business, we are investing into manufacturing capabilities, and we intend to become one of the largest manufacturers of cool drinks in the country. We are continuing to expand and have almost 12 plants across India, and we will continue to expand as the business grows.
From a food park perspective, we are setting up certain integrated food parks which can manufacture multi-category products, which will help us in driving cost efficiencies and integrated operations. None of this scale would have been delivered without our distribution depth. We are now servicing the Indian market through 5,000+ distributors and about 3 million outlets. We are also expanding our category presence in newer markets like packaged foods. We have entered into Northeast, West Bengal and Bihar, etc. While we entered into the international markets last year, we would like to continue to expand our presence into the international markets by foraying into the newer markets, as well as expanding our reach into the existing markets.
In terms of the marketing, we had a 360-degree approach in terms of marketing campaigns across activities. We had mass media activations, which is led by certain activations like IPL 25 and T20 World Cup. We have also partnered with some of the influential celebrities to amplify our brand presence across India. On digital side, we are using certain categories for social media-first campaigns, and this is helping us to reach consumers faster. We are also investing in activating our outlets at the ground level to make the reach and presence visible to the consumers. In the last quarter, we made certain investments and M&A acquisitions. This is primarily two categories. One was Goodness Group, which is an Australian-based company. They are into functional beverages and health-based drinks.
This is really helping us in terms of foraying into a category which is growing at a very fast pace. We also acquired 100% stake in a company which is Tamil Nadu-based and which has a brand called Manna. They are into millet-based products, and again this is a fast-growing category and will help us and complement our current portfolio. Thank you.
For the media business, we have today Ishan Chatterjee, who is Sports CEO for JioStar.
Hi, everyone. I'll walk through the details of the JioStar business now. We had a very strong Q4, and I'd like to call your attention to maybe two things on this page. The first is the sheer scale that JioStar is now operating at. As you can see from the slide, we achieved a monthly active user reach of 550 million people in March. That was driven by a very strong lineup of sports, but also on the entertainment side. On the sports side, the big property that we had, as you can see on the right-hand side, is the T20 World Cup. We also, in the T20 World Cup, broke a world record for the maximum number of concurrent streams at the same time at 72.5 million.
The previous record was held by a global company that the record was 65 million across the globe, across multiple markets. We did 72.5 million in India alone during the World Cup. The other thing I wanted to call out was if you look at the platform MAUs, the chart that you see in the middle of the page, even when we don't have marquee cricket like World Cup, you can see that we are hitting on average now a steady number of over 400 million MAUs, which is a reflection of the scale of our platform. The second thing that I wanted to call out from this last quarter is that we made foundational bets on technology and on AI-driven technologies in particular, to make sure that we are competitive in a very increasingly technology-led marketplace.
I wanted to call out three examples like this. All three are currently available on JioHotstar, so if you haven't tried these three things, please try it whenever you have some time. The first one is called Tarka. That is our launch of micro content. We've launched with over 100 shows. We are one of the few platforms globally that has both horizontal content as well as vertical content in a way that meets multiple consumer needs. The second is a deep product integration that we did with OpenAI's ChatGPT, which has transformed the search functionality within the app. Earlier on, if you wanted to search, you would have to go in and type something.
We have now switched that to voice, and the integration that we have done with ChatGPT is also very good at recognizing Indian accents and especially regional languages and regional dialects. The third one that I wanted to call out is actually live today and live right now, as an IPL game is going on, and that is an in-app commerce integration with Swiggy. This is our first ever content commerce integration at this scale. The idea is while you're watching a game, especially if it is happening at around 7 to 10 o'clock at night, you can also order food, get the food delivered, and complete the entire transaction within the app itself without ever leaving. These are three big initiatives that we launched in the last quarter.
If I look at what was driving some of that performance, I'll start with sports. These are the three big properties that drove a lot of our engagement through the quarter. We started off with the Women's Premier League on the right-hand side. This is on the back of a very successful women's World Cup that our team went and won. You'll see a growth of 20% in overall reach and a watch time growth of 80% over the previous WPL. That gives you an idea of the momentum that the women's game is seeing. That was followed by the T20 World Cup that I just covered.
In addition to the peak concurrency record that I spoke about briefly, we also achieved an overall platform growth of 30% growth in reach over the previous World Cup that was held in the U.S. A lot of that momentum flowed into IPL. For IPL, the opening weekend was the largest viewership weekend we have ever seen on IPL. And as of yesterday, this is up till yesterday's CSK-MI match, we are seeing a 15% growth in our overall reach and a 27% growth in connected TV reach. This is where you consume the JioHotstar app on your smart TV. On the entertainment side, we also had a lot of success across the various content portfolio that we took to market. The first, of course, was Bigg Boss itself.
We saw a 40% growth in digital watch time over the last season across all the editions. We had a very strong slate of originals as well. Chiraiya, for example, turned out to be the most viewed short-run show in Q4, and it's since then become one of the most watched shows on our platform. From an unscripted or reality TV perspective, if you look at those two titles over there, Splitsvilla is in its 16th season, and despite that, we were able to double watch time this year over the previous season. We also launched a new reality TV format called The Fifty, which delivered the biggest ever season premiere on JioHotstar.
If I was to summarize the highlights of JioStar's business in Q4, as I already covered, our overall reach is now at approximately 500 million, growing 10% quarter-on-quarter. We also had a very strong paid subscriber growth driven primarily by Marquee Sports, which is originally the WPL, and then, of course, the T20 World Cup. I already covered some of the new initiatives that you saw or that you can see on the app. On the sports piece itself, in addition to the World Cup becoming the most watched T20 tournament ever, we also recorded the highest ever monetization of the T20 World Cup, driven by strong advertiser depth as well as expansion into multiple categories.
This is despite the RMG ban, Real Money Gaming ban, that we saw during the previous calendar year. We had continued momentum going into IPL, where we delivered, as I said, the biggest ever opening day weekend in terms of viewership. In entertainment, our linear TV share now stands at 34.7%, almost in line with the next three networks combined. Our digital watch time, entertainment watch time grew by 35%. On the back of that, we also saw record growth in digital entertainment ad revenue, driven by a much wider client base as well as very strong monetization on some of those impact properties that I shared with you. Finally, in terms of the financials, as you can see, we had a strong revenue growth this year.
A lot of that was driven by subscription revenue momentum across the board. In terms of the ad revenues themselves, we saw very strong ad revenues in the sports business overall, and also specifically in the digital ad revenue business. The TV entertainment ad revenue remained under some pressure, especially due to spend cuts that we saw on the FMCG side. But through careful cost management of the P&L, we were also able to deliver an industry-leading annual EBITDA margins. With that, I'll hand over to Hemant. Oh, right. Sorry, I'm also going to cover JioStudios. The point that I'd make over here, this is just an example of the slate that JioStudios has brought to the market.
I'm sure many people over here would have seen Dhurandhar, which is the biggest movie now, not only from the studios, but in the industry overall. We also wanted to call out some of the other marquee titles, all of which have been performing very well. Okay.
Still have more to see more.
Oh, is it?
Most of them haven't watched. We are research analysts. They both very.
Dhurandhar, as you would have read in the press, is now INR 1,000 crore+ franchise per film, crossing 40% of India's overall box office, and it's also the highest ever grossing Indian film overseas. If what Anshuman is saying is true, I please encourage all of you to see it. It's a fantastic movie. In addition to the movie itself, it also was one of the biggest music albums of 2025. The sequel is now the biggest music album of 2026. You can see some of the performance that you see across the global music platforms, including Spotify. In terms of the number of views, that's 40 billion+ views, which is a lot.
Finally, on the back of that, Jio Studios is now the largest content studio in India by revenue, by catalog size, as well as with box office share. You can see here the number of the different blockbuster hits that the studio has presented. The industry also has rewarded the studio with over 500+ awards across its content slate, including Oscar nominee Laapataa Ladies from a couple of years ago. Okay.
Good evening to all of you. I hope I'm audible. We'll talk about the O2C, the operating environment-wise. All of you, I think, in fact everyone, is seeing the oil market closely and reading about it. Crude market. Now, this probably slide would sound a bit, you know, anachronistic in the sense what are you talking about Brent crude of $70.3 or gas oil crack of $23.6 and all that. This is the average for the year, so that's why it looks like this. Otherwise, all of you are familiar. We'll get to that as well. During the last year, of course, the crude market remained oversupplied most of the year. Both U.S. and E.U. sanctions on Russia have been tightened throughout the period.
If you look at the refining part of it's been structurally tight, of course, and the demand has been pretty strong at about 0.8. On the downstream sector, of course, more will be covered in the later slides by Mr. Amit Chaturvedi, but ethane economics were one bright spot. They remain favorable. There are a lot of challenges around the Middle East conflict, but that's towards the fag end of, you know, the year that we have seen this happen. To sum up, strong fuel cracks because of supply tightness is what we've seen throughout the year in terms of the refining business and downstream margins, they remain under pressure. Impact of the Middle East conflict and what actions RIL has taken is covered in this slide.
Supply, of course, we know that SOH is pretty important, maybe more than 20% of the world's oil actually comes from through the Strait of Hormuz. That's been hit. There are few countries which have outlet, like Saudi Arabia from Yanbu. Not the entire volume, but part of the volume can move out from the west, which they have implemented. UAE, about half of its production, it has a pipeline from Fujairah, where you can actually load. It's technically outside the Strait of Hormuz. The other Middle Eastern countries which have some outlets, of course, Oman is completely outside the Strait of Hormuz, that route flows. Iraq has some from the Port of Ceyhan in Turkey.
Those are the countries which have an outlet, otherwise the rest has to come through Straits of Hormuz. Other than their own refining and all that, people have had to, you know, close down their, you know, production or regulate it rather, I would say. The cut is estimated at about 10 million barrels per day now. Some people say 9.1. Different analysts have different numbers, but that's the order of the supply cut that's happened. How have we made up this cut? Because there's not so much of oil coming from the rest of the world. I think IEA has released something like 400 million barrels. They've announced a release of 400 million barrels.
That's over a 3-4-month cycle, so maybe about 3.5-4 million barrels per day getting made up from there. Significant shortage of oil in the market. In terms of transit, because ships which are already there, this includes crude and product, so the transit-wise is down from about 20 million barrels earlier to about 4 million barrels. Sometimes this may not be absolutely accurate because earlier we were calling something the flat shadow fleet, where they were putting off their AIS and coming through. Now, even legitimate tankers are doing that to avoid the Iranian hits. Sometimes it's accurate number may not be there, but this is the kind of estimate that we've seen. Dubai crude has surged to $168, never before kind of a price.
I was talking about the earlier slide, we were talking about $70, which people would laugh at, actually the price actually went up to about $168. LNG price also went up to about $27 per MMBtu for a few days. These are the kind of situation which we've never seen, totally unprecedented in the world. Never have we seen even during the Iran-Iraq crisis or anything like that, this kind of a shortage in the market. What is the refining capacity offline in the Middle East? It is about 3 million barrels per day. All of you know that even in the East, a lot of refineries, because they're not having adequate crude and all that, have cut back some of their capacity. That's another 3 million barrels of capacity closure.
This is the Middle East particularly, and then there's a little more capacity outside. Again, naphtha, large amounts of naphtha actually flow out of the Middle East to the crackers. That's a crisis which, Amit will cover in more detail. On the utilization also he'll cover, so I'm not getting into it. Fine, this is the situation everyone knows about. What have we tried to do differently? One is, we've been, pretty agile. We've lost a significant volume, maybe 40%-50% of the volume which is required for the refinery was incidentally coming from, you know, the Middle East. Not everything from SOH, but a significant volume coming through the SOH. We had to quickly, you know, work on this to overcome this limitation so that we don't have a sharp cut in our refinery throughput.
We've been able to, I would say, successfully get a lot of the cargoes from different places, and these include Venezuela, Russia, Brazil, Mexico. We've been talking in for several years that we have processed more than 200 grades of crude oil in our refining system. That's the kind of flexibility which we've had. That stood in good stead, I would say, in this particular incident, because we've had relationships right from Canada, South America, then Middle East, West Africa, all the places. We could actually get that crude in, and we could ensure that more or less we were running our refinery at close to capacity. There was some minor equipment issues and all which we faced in the refinery, so little bit of throughput here and there, but I would say fairly there on top.
On ethane feedstock, of course, Mr. Amit will cover that. We also placed the petroleum products into the domestic market. We've increased our LPG supplies to the domestic market almost fourfold, and also on R-Series gas, which Mr. Sanjay Roy will cover. He will advise on that. We've also increased the gas availability to the domestic market. Financial performance-wise, for the year 2025-26, again, strong performance. Revenue growth of close to 5.7%, and EBIT growth of 10%. This is again despite the geopolitical and trade pressures that were there. Geopolitical issues in March we know, but actually there have been geopolitical issues around the year. We are familiar with that. The reason why the EBITDA is up is largely the cracks, okay?
They're up significantly. Feedstock and product placement, I've given you some examples of what we've done. We have done it round the year, but it was very critical during March to really make things happen, and we've managed to ensure that refinery is supplied fully. Downstream margins were a bit weak. We'll be covered a little more in the next section. Domestic demand has been pretty stable. Of course, all of you know, and probably there'll be questions around a lot of underrecoveries there, but gasoline at 6.5% growth, gas oil 3.6%, and the petrochemical products also reasonably strong growth. For the quarter, largest energy shock, I've already mentioned about it. Availability was a challenge. We did many things to ensure that the market, the refineries are supplied the full crude oil.
Now, most of the people may be just looking at, yes, the cracks have gone up. It's very important to note that the premium on the crude, the freight, and the insurance costs have probably skyrocketed, okay? If you look at the price of, let's say, the freight costs, easily 10-50 times, 10-15 times the freight that you normally see, okay? That's the range to which the freight has gone up. Premiums, what typically OSPs and all of you are monitoring, a couple of dollars here and there for Saudi Arabia over the benchmarks. They have sold cargoes themselves, we hear, anywhere between $20 and $30 a barrel, and for May, they have set the price at $20 premium. That's the kind of increase that has happened in the premium.
Insurance, because of the warlike situation, it's been all over the place. Maybe $25,000-$30,000 is what we were paying earlier, has gone all the way up to, you know, $65, a little more also, depending upon which insurance company you're dealing with. That's the volatility kind of insurance premium. Practically from a few thousand, it's gone all the way to millions of dollars. All these have been a bit of a, you know, drag in terms of capturing the entire margin that one would have liked to. SAED, of course, at the fag end of the year, we've had introduction of SAED. Effective 27th March, we have the SAED also which is coming.
Now, we've had to, you know, because the requirement of LPG in the country is pretty high, and we are very import dependent, we actually had to increase our LPG fourfold, as I mentioned, and Mr. Sanjay Roy will cover a little more on this. Polymer deltas have been a little weaker because of the very elevated feedstock price. So the margin capture, I've already mentioned that the premiums on crude and other things need to be reckoned. Freight also generally has been very high. Ethane has been kind of a robust feedstock. I think it's been mentioned repeatedly in this forum over several quarters. That's stood us in, you know, good position, and the high polyester margins. This is some of the physical parameters that we look at.
Throughput-wise, I told you 20.3 is what we did in the previous year. Now it's about 19.5, and this was possible through agile sourcing, the way we went around the world, scouted, scrambled around, and got the cargoes. Operationally, we have done the maximum kind of gasifier output. In a situation where there is, you know, fuel costs have skyrocketed, this is a pretty important point that it helped us, you know, in reducing our external purchase of fuel. Transportation fuels, again, corresponding to 12, it is about 11. We have a lot of time charter vessels in our fleet, both for crude and products. That has helped us somewhat, you know, dampen the impact of the very high freight rates. Aromatics production, where possible, we have tried to increase it to capture the higher margins.
These are again some figures on the cracks. If you look at the Brent price, again, this is year-on-year about 7% up at $80.6. Gas oil cracks has gone up to $35.4. Gasoline cracks are down $5.6, and ATF, again, up at $36.3. I think reasons are pretty obvious. Refinery run cuts happened, Middle East refineries were shut down. We've actually had a situation where product was actually coming from. Typically, most of the Middle East net flow from Asia to, and the Middle East to Europe, but we've actually had flows coming towards Asia Pacific all in the last few months of the quarter. Those are the few changes which have happened, and that's the reason why these cracks are so high.
Demand-wise, between the last quarter of Q4 2025 and Q4 2026, demand is slightly up 102.7-103.4. If you look at the gasoline demand, it is 26.9-27.1, slightly up. Diesel is more like 28.9 to remain flat, whereas ATF slightly down from 7.9 to 7.8. Definitely, there is an impact of what happened in March in this picture. Domestic market, of course, we are all insulated from price volatility. Not actually insulated because we import 80% of our crude oil, but the policy is such that we are insulated because of which demand's pretty robust. It's grown at 2.7% year-on-year.
Gasoline demand is up by 7%, diesel demand by 5%, and ATF demand by 3%. Demand has grown here in the country. Of course, the impact was more only in March. Maybe we will see the impact as we go forward. RBML, again, a good story of growth. We've been presenting every quarter that they've been growing pretty strongly. Volume growth is almost 27% up. Market effectiveness also improved, 1.99 and 2.67 for gasoline and diesel. Retail outlets are up, I think 50 or 60 outlets up from last quarter. Charge points are up. E-mobility also about increase of 5%. CBG and CNG is another area we are focusing on, and it's up by 65%. ATF is stagnant, one can say, at about 5.9%.
These are largely what has happened on RBML, which is our JV for retailing. Just to give, I mean, to conclude and talk about this once. What do we see going forward? I think there's been damage to infrastructure. The extent of it probably will be assessed when things calm down a bit, but there is definitely infrastructure that has been hit. Going forward, we expect to see lower capacities on production as well as on refining, both is what we understand based on the situation. Demand because of the high oil prices, though we have not increased prices yet in, I mean, we've not increased the prices of fuels. About 50, 60 countries in the world have increased prices.
Refining infrastructure is constrained, like I mentioned, because of this, refineries being hit also in the Middle East. Fuel cracks, this situation being what it is and the fear. Like see, Red Sea navigation has been affected long after the Houthis have stopped actually attacking ships. Once there is an attack, there is always this fear and, as far as the merchant ships are concerned, they are very concerned. Insurance companies are very concerned. There will be some impact of all these factors. Market also will be considering these factors. We think cracks may remain strong for some time to come, with damage to refinery as well as all these concerns being there. Reintroduction of SAED is something which we have to reckon with.
It was there during 2022 also, and they have reintroduced it, and two tranches have also been announced. That's some risk that is there in the business, which we will have to take. What are our strengths under the circumstances? High complexity. We're able to process, like I mentioned, more than 200 grades of different feedstocks we have been able to source and process. I mentioned about the kind of spread in terms of the geography, starting from Canada all the way up to Middle East, Africa, Europe, all the places we're able to acquire crude. Asset operation, excellence in operations, all that also ensures that we have a very high utilization and reliability. We have an end-to-end value chain in a sense. We have a footprint overseas too.
All these, you know, help us capture the value in the supply chain. With this, I will conclude, and I'll ask my colleague, Mr. Amit Chaturvedi to take over. Thank you.
Thanks, Shrini. As Shrini mentioned, quite a topsy-turvy quarter, the last one, especially the last month of the quarter, last month of the financial year, March, when Hormuz, Strait of Hormuz got blocked. Middle East typically accounts for 13% of the ethylene capacity and 25% of the global commodity chemicals exports, which is like polyethylene, styrene, polypropylene, a whole lot of methanol, whole lot of chemicals. The main things, the two major most important things, 3.8 million tons of naphtha flows out of this strait every month, and about huge amount of polyethylene also comes out from the ports of Jebel Ali, from Kuwait, from Abu Dhabi, a lot of ports. All this actually got blocked.
Several Middle East and even Asian facilities, because most of the beneficiaries of this naphtha flow are the Asian industry, Asian crackers all over the place in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore. They all got badly impacted because of the feedstock shortages and also the gas, the fuel gas shortages also. Because QatarEnergy, one of the largest suppliers of LNG in this part of the world, declared a force majeure. It got hit by the missiles from Iran, and it declared a force majeure on entire 77 million tons of LNG operation. Crackers, of course, as I said, they got starved, started starving for feeds, Taiwan, Singapore, PCS, and many others actually. These three are just the three names, but a whole lot of industry got impacted because of this naphtha shortage.
The operating rate, ethylene operating rate in this part of the world dropped from 80% to 60%. This happened sometime around later part of March, because initially whatever had started to flow on 20th of February from this part of the world and had crossed Hormuz, it was reaching Far East Asia until the middle of March. Asia imports, as I said, about 50-60% of naphtha and 55% LPG from Middle East. Talking annual numbers, and as Srini also mentioned, these numbers look a little odd because these are all annual numbers. Naphtha prices, $726, they were up 13%, year-on-year basis. Ethane prices were more or less flat, slightly lower, 14% down, $0.23. The base is low, so that's why I said slightly. It's about 14% down.
Polyethylene and PP deltas with naphtha were weaker because of the very firm naphtha prices. PVC was up about 2% because of flattish EDC. Polyester chain was up 16% primarily because paraxylene was doing very well in this quarter compared to the same quarter last year. That resulted in the polyester chain deltas, and we counted starting from the paraxylene and MEG right up to the three polyesters that we make. Ethane prices were pretty flat because while this part of the world was in complete turmoil, the U.S. was sitting pre-quite pretty peaceful. Ethane being a commodity which is very hardwired, so it is not driven by demand pulls because of supply disruptions. There are people who are designated buyers, there are people who are designated sellers, and a very tight infrastructure supply chain is established.
This remained quite stable. Naphtha prices, of course, increased 13% year-on-year, and the effect of that is shown in this slide, where in this quarter, calendar 2026 first quarter, while the ethane to ethylene margins remain pretty healthy, but ethylene to naphtha margins actually went severely negative because of very high strong naphtha prices. Of course, as I've said earlier also in these meetings, our feedstock is roughly about 75% of the ethylene comes from non-naphtha sources. This situation was pretty good situation for us. In terms of demand growth, polyethylene and polypropylene grew 3%.
PVC was down 10% primarily because a lot of PVC goes in pipe applications, and as we all know, almost like 65% of PVC in the country is imported, and these are special pipe grade material which used to come from Middle East beyond Hormuz, which got disrupted, and therefore the demand was impacted because of that. Fiber was more or less decent at 5%. Polyester overall was 1%. Filament was slightly weaker, but staple and PET demands were pretty healthy in the last quarter. PET, of course, it's the beginning of the summer season, so the bottle industry starts asking for the demand, and that's what remained healthy. Talking about business dynamics, feedstock availability and logistics constraint disruptions, we are still in the state of shock. Shrini also mentioned about it.
A lot of fuel and a lot of feed supplies are under disruption. Non-integrated plants across Asia and EU have been both vulnerable, and we have seen sharp reduction in operating rates in both regions of the world because of this vulnerability. This could result in accelerated recovery of the cycle, which last couple of years and last couple of quarters, we've been talking that naphtha cracking margins have been under severe stress. Exemption from customs duty on key petrochemical products, which was announced by government, and this is for this quarter because of the sudden sharp rise and to ensure that the end sector demand is not impacted. It was done, it is valid till end of this quarter.
Now since the prices are slightly getting moderated from the peaks that they had seen, this is likely to get revoked in the second quarter, hopefully. Domestic demand for downstream chemicals continues to be influenced by availability and price, because even today as we are talking, there have been a lot of disruptions, not only in the region, but also within the country itself. Quite a bit of capacity today remains impacted because of the feedstock and the fuel shortages. Talking about our strengths and priorities. Deep integration with the refinery streams, and as Srini showed, our refineries have been operating pretty close to their capacity levels. As far as our petchem feeds are concerned, we have been pretty secured in that term.
On naphtha, of course, our capacity of producing naphtha is significantly higher than what we consume. We haven't had that concern. Off-gases we continue to receive them from the refinery. Ethane, which comes from U.S., has remained unimpacted because of all these disruptions. Virtual ethane pipeline remains intact. Our VECs continue to operate. Of course, last couple of quarters, they've all been coming through Cape of Good Hope because of the Suez Canal remaining blocked. That remains intact, and it has been as per last four, five quarters, or a little more actually. Priority, of course, our key priority is going to be accelerated project execution. We are in the midst of two very large projects, the vinyl project and the PTA project.
Their timely execution is a key priority for us. We believe demand is likely to be resilient for the products, considering the fact that a whole lot of the products they get consumed in end applications, which are quite price inelastic. I'll request Karan to cover the last slide.
Yeah. Thank you so much. For the new energy, let me actually this time start from the revenue first. We had a very significant event in the last quarter where we have signed probably one of the world's largest green ammonia supply contract with Samsung C&T. This effectively demonstrates the confidence that the off-takers have in our integrated green energy and green chemicals ecosystem, and the development work which is already happening on the ground. This is one of the very first supply contracts that we have signed, and obviously we are in advanced discussions with a number of off-takers from Japan, Korea, and Europe. You will see more announcements.
Working backwards effectively from revenue, there is a significant work which is now happening on our generation side. At the Kutch, where we are developing this solar generation around-the-clock renewable energy generation complex, which is progressing rapidly. The entire land development, project development work is progressing. The detailed engineering work is already at full speed for the entire 12 parcels of 5.3 lakh acres of land. On the transmission side, as many of you may already be aware, we have already awarded the EPC contracts, and the construction is progressing on both lines. First is from Kutch to Lakadia substation, and the second is Kutch to Jamnagar captive line that we are setting up 765 kV.
We also started work at rapid pace at Jamnagar for the green chemicals complex, where detail engineering, fabrication, modularization work is happening at good speed for green hydrogen, green ammonia, trains. Walking backwards to the gigafactories and where I have been continuously giving you update over last few quarters. The commissioning of various factories, both solar and battery, again, are progressing at good pace. Module and cell, which has already been commissioned, number of lines. We have achieved the ALMM listing for both the module and the cell, the first for HJT lines, in the country. The work on commissioning of polysilicon ingot wafer, solar cell, and glass continue to progress well, and we aim to commission these factories in next few quarters.
As I had already mentioned the last time, we have expanded the capacity to 20 GW fully integrated capacity. All the commissioning work, the gigafactories are progressing towards achieving that capacity. On the battery, as again, I'd mentioned last time that we are now scaling the capacity to 100 GWh, where the equipment, the production line equipment orders have already been placed. That effectively makes us one of the largest, non-China LFP manufacturer globally, which is, significant in this, current environment, especially when there's been a significant volatility in lithium carbonate price leading to the battery price volatility. The first phase of 40 GWh, manufacturing of, BESS and the battery cell, again, is progressing at a rapid pace. We already got the equipments, on site. The building construction is progressing rapidly at, different stages.
Progressively, we will start commissioning this capacity during the year. I have certain incredible photos this time, especially from the manufacturing, but I thought that maybe next time we'll present a much more comprehensive view with the pictures from Jamnagar and the Kutch for the analyst. Thank you. With that, I'll hand it over to Sanjay.
Good evening, everyone. Let me just give you a recap of the quarter gone by. The production was pretty steady. Essentially, we are still managing the decline. It's much lower than what we had envisaged, but there is a decline. We had expected about 12%-14% decline as against that we are getting about. We are being able to manage it to 8% decline. That's reflected in the production figures. Overall, if you look at it on the EBITDA numbers as well as EBITDA margins now, EBITDA margins are slightly lower than the previous quarters only because in terms of the operating costs, they've been slightly higher. There are two components.
One is, we are doing refurbishment activities for asset integrity purposes, so painting of the CRP and offshore platforms and so on. Also, to some extent, the government levies have been slightly higher this time around. As we continue to invest in workovers and in additional wells, and further in both the R Cluster and the MJ field for which we expect the rig to come later this year, this should all even out. Overall, we see the CBM field continues to grow in production, so we see that in the CBM production figures. Price, again, you know, the ceiling price is applicable. Now they've revised the price this time around.
Overall, we see that with the changes that are in the global scenario that we are seeing, you know, the prices, if not in this half, but the latter half, we will see the impact. I'll talk about that in detail. All right. Just, you know, again, we spoke about the overall annual, but also in terms of the quarterly performance, we can see the consistent production decline in KG-D6. Again, you know, we are making the efforts to stabilize that decline and with further activities that are planned for augmentation of production, we should be able to offset that decline to some extent.
Again, if you look at CBM, it's higher in production, and we'll continue with the 40 multilateral wells that we've been drilling because they've been giving us the higher productivity as we have seen. In terms of price realization, yes, it's slightly lower year-on-year because, again, because of the ceiling price largely, and which is both in the KG-D6 and CBM, yes. Again, it's market-driven. CBM does not have any ceiling price. Just to give you a perspective, I think everybody's heard about the Strait of Hormuz by now and the impacts that we are having on the global supplies as well as the price outlook.
Now, as you've been seeing, you know, the LNG prices have been hovering around before the escalation, before the war broke out, around $11-$12 or maximum up to $13. With the impact of the war on the Qatar field, the Ras Laffan, and the 2 trains being impacted out of the 14 trains, that's affected 70% of the capacity. What that implies is that, from, as the Qataris are mentioning, that it may take them almost 5 years to bring that back. That's capacity that is not there. Meanwhile, we were always aware that in-
The current global capacity is about 400 million tons, 450 million tons. However, we are expecting to see capacity additions based on the FIDs that had taken place in the U.S., of about 200 million tons planned over the next 7-8 quarters. Now, this would offset that and what we expect is that in the near term, prices will still remain elevated. Again, the overall, as new capacity comes online, you would offset that elevated prices. Overall, we still see the trend would be towards not being as impacted as what was envisaged earlier. We still believe that the capacity that has gone down to some extent will offset the impact of the glut.
Indian gas market, as you're all aware, you know, the energy, LNG imports are anywhere in the range of 50%-55%. 60% of that comes from Qatar. Now, with the trains, with 2 trains not being available, certainly that impacts Indian markets. As far as KG-D6 is concerned, there was a notification by the government to reallocate it to the city gas distribution, which we've done in the interest, in larger public interest. So currently, as far as prices are concerned, we are getting near to maximum of the ceiling price. Ceiling price itself has been revised to about $8.9 per MMBtu.
Overall, just to give you a sense, because of the war, we expect prices to be a little bit better than what we had envisaged prior. We are also making all the efforts possible to augment the production both from KG-D6 and CBM. Thank you.
Thanks for the opportunity, sir. A couple of questions with respect to the refinery operation first up. Now, my understanding is if alternate crudes continue to be sort of the only option that we have, the disputes seem for a while longer than now. The chemical composition of crudes from, yes, from the U.S. and Africa and even Venezuela are markedly different in terms of sulfur content, API, and others. How much of distillate yield can actually change? Because obviously, U.S. crudes and Venezuelan crudes are geared towards more of light distillates. I think Russian and Middle East crudes are obviously something that are more optimal from an Indian distillate yield perspective. Do you see that as a risk at all if, you know, those are the only crudes that are available for us?
Availability-wise. I'm audible.
Yeah.
Okay. Venezuelan crude typically tends to be very heavy. It's very heavy oil. U.S., of course, is lighter crude. Canadian is heavy. We have South American crudes from, let's say, Colombia, Ecuador, which are heavy. We have mentioned in the past that one of the unique features of our refinery is actually processing heavy crude oil. The re-entry of Venezuela actually is, at one time, we were taking a lot of Venezuelan crude, so that's actually a positive for us. Now, what is the main lookalike for the Middle East grades is actually Urals from Russia. It's a grade. From the East, there are also some lighter barrels which come from the Russian, you know, pack.
I think we do not foresee too much of a problem in terms of the composition of crude. What we do in the refineries, we blend the light, medium, heavy, and then process it. We do not see that as a constraint because Russia is very much like a lookalike to the Middle Eastern-
Yeah
...crudes. Sulfur-wise and gravity-wise, we are okay. We have a preference for some of these heavy barrels, so we kind of designed to take care of that. I hope that answers.
Yeah. The second question that I had, sir, was with respect to the fuel retail, where I think it was mentioned very clearly that we have, unlike earlier occasions when margins were turned negative, operations would be curtailed. We have managed, you know, continue our operations. Is there some sort of a level at which we sort of look at then, you know, sort of price increases? Because obviously losses are significant even for us, I would presume, in this quarter. How are we looking at that business in terms of, you know-
I think we have actually increased our sales substantially when you look at previous year versus current year. We're talking of, you know, double-digit or even 20-type of growth. The pain is definitely there. We are about 4%-5% of the market, like I was showing, market share-wise. There is some pain, but we have to look at the long-term picture. What we've done is, we said that there would be phases when it's kind of not so good, and then there would be phases when it is growing. What we have to look at is slightly longer-term rather than just from quarter to quarter. While there is some pain in domestic marketing of fuels, the PSUs take a fairly large burden of that because they have-
Sure
95% of the share. We have a lesser share. Then if we just step away from a quarter-to-quarter and look at long-term, probably this is a market which will continue with the fossil fuels for maybe a longer period, let's say, than Europe or some other places which will be there. It's a kind of a view that we continue to, you know, supply products to domestic market.
Sure.
We will not be making any curtailments there.
All right, sir. Thanks for your time.
Yeah. You can go on.
Yeah. Hi, good evening. Thanks for the opportunity. My question is again on the refining side only. As you had indicated that in the month of March and in the fourth quarter, we did see some volatility in terms of procurement, freight, and other factors.
How is the situation now in the first quarter? How comfortable we are in terms of managing our procurement, freight and other costs? How should we see the margin environment panning out for us, particularly on both refining and petrochemical side for rest of the year?
Situation is still maybe I would say from worse to worse. Okay? It's a degree of change which is happening gradually as things return to some degree of normalcy. Having said that, we have seen cooling off. If you look at the market, the cracks have cooled off significantly from what we've seen. Same way the... What should I say? The war risk, then, the freight rates, and also the premium on the crude. Like, there were instances when it went up to. Generally, I'm talking about, not specific grade or something. It went up to about $40 a barrel. Now people are talking about something which is more reasonable, maybe half that. There is some improvement, but I think the situation is very fluid. Nobody really knows what's gonna happen.
In a lighter vein, I do not know if I have to pray to God or I have to pray to Trump, that if this cools down, maybe things will start improving. Having said that, situation is slightly better, but it can just change. We are seeing that every day it changes. My guess is as good as anyone's guess here. The way we would look at it is refining is tight. The market has apprehensions of availability of product. We think structurally it's likely to remain reasonably strong. I would tend to say that.
Thanks, sir. Sir, one more, if I may. What percentage of our production is impacted by SAED?
See, I think, the entire DTA refinery is exposed to the SAED. Whenever SAED was introduced, like in the past, on gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and things like that. Like I mentioned, most of the product is getting sold domestically. The SAED takes a different form of a discount to that. There is an impact on the price, which is the domestic territory.
The impact was in that, I mean, like in some way or the entire production in DTA would be impacted?
No, it's not the entire. Like I told you, no, the two or three products. Right now it's only diesel, gasoline and the jet. Jet is of course small. We hardly produce anything. It's mostly on the diesel that we are experiencing it.
Yeah. One question on telecom. Anshuman, in your statement, you talked about differentiated services through network slicing. What are we looking there, and what is the opportunity in terms of increase in the realization or increase in the subscriber? How are we looking there?
As you know, we are with our SA technology, we are able to create network slices. We are already doing that for our fixed wireless offering, and which is why we've been able to do that more successfully than the other operators, giving a more consistent performance level to subscribers. Now, you can stretch that. You can use that, the same network architecture to create slices for specialized services. These would typically start with enterprise offerings, where enterprises need certain dedicated slices for assurance and of throughput, et cetera. These can go beyond that. Gaming, for instance. Where people need higher throughputs, and which they are willing to pay a premium for. That's something that our network is ready for.
Of course, we have to see if the market, the regulations, et cetera, are also ready for those.
We are not looking at anything on a B2C side kind of a business in the mobility?
No, even on the mobility, you create specialized slices for different use cases. As I said, gaming will be a B2C offer, direct to consumer offering.
Okay. In the voice or data we are not looking to do?
No, not today.
Not today.
You could potentially do that. The network supports it, but whether consumers need something like that, would the consumers pay a premium for that, and whether that would be regulatorily compliant, I think those are the things that we'll need to work through.
Thank you.
Thank you. Hi. I have a couple of questions on retail. Quick commerce first. There seems to be a fair bit of competition in the market. Horizontal e-commerce players seem to be adding a fair bit of dark stores. Of course, you have the three quick commerce players. In that scenario, how do you see the industry consolidating in the next few years, and what are your ambitions about the quick commerce industry? Do you have like a dark store target, a market share target, a user target? Would you be like a consolidator in the industry if the opportunity comes? That would be my first question.
See, the way we look at our stores is, they are omni stores, right? Ultimately, I am looking at wallet share of the consumer, right? People have different needs, where they go for weekly, monthly shopping missions to a store and they do top up from online deliveries, right? I'm using the same big box store to deliver to the customer or walk in to the customer, right? Ultimately, that's what I care about. Dark stores are only meant to fill the gaps where, because my network is designed for walk-in. Now, if there's enough concentration at some location, where to meet the service levels, I need to put a dark store, we put a dark store, right? That's how we look at it. I think that we have a sufficient network right now.
We have store expansion plans. Those continue, and I think that will couple with, you know, how the industry goes, where the demand is. We don't have a specific. Because we don't look at dark store or walk-in store. Frankly, every store in my network can deliver to the customer. It's like what is the right node to service to the customer from.
Right. On the consolidation bit?
I don't think I would be able to worry. Let's see how the industry evolves. There are quite a few players, so we'll see. We are pretty clear. For us, it's more around, you know, looking at the wallet share of the customers and meeting their needs, right? How the industry evolves, we'll all see.
Right. Just to follow on the electronics and fashion that you talked about.
Mm-hmm.
With two-hour launch. How exactly does the network and the supply chain work in that scenario? Like, can the customer, for example, when they order, you would have like different riders placed at different points. Like, how is the backend supply chain working?
No. You don't place riders anywhere. These are all gig workers, right? I have enough density in the network, right? Now, a rider who's there, I can assign him. If the order comes for grocery, I can assign from a grocery store. We also have limited assortment of other categories in our dark stores also. You know, when I have my other, let's say an electronic store, I can expose the entire Grab & Go assortment, right? The same rider will go and pick up from, let's say, the digital store and deliver to the customer. You don't have dedicated riders for a store. It's a network, that polygon that you play in.
Sure. Thank you.
Hi, sir. My question is on retail. So you've delivered 11% growth in retail this quarter. However, if I want to evaluate the retailing business performance on a like-for-like basis, if I deduct 75% of your RCPL sales from the base to make it comparable, it's like a 15%-16% growth in the retailing business. Now, this has come with only a 1% increase in the square footage on a YoY basis. Just wanted to understand that this significant increase despite the square footage being low, is it mainly the ramp-up of the quick commerce or e-commerce business, or it's a good mix between a very strong SSSG at the physical stores plus the QC and e-com ramp-up?
The reason I'm asking this question is, if I want to make a mental model for your growth in future, how do I split it in three parts, your SSSG for the physical stores, your increase in square footage, and the ramp-up of QC, EC? If you can even just very roughly tell me the percentage contribution of each of these three in addition to answering the earlier question. Yeah, that would be great.
Sure. One, I think I'd spoken in my, in my presentation, the impact of RCPL takes the revenue growth from 11% to 14%. There's roughly a three percentage point impact because in Q4 last year that revenue was there. It has gone out, right? See, for the purpose of reporting, we are doing SSSG because that means offline, which continue to be healthy single digits. It's also a mix issue. Depends on where the growth is coming from because the productivity of different formats, so formats vary, so difficult to, you know, extrapolate from square footage to this thing. But overall, I would say there's healthy growth in the stores. Also, QC and B2B are ramping up as well. Now that's obviously reflected in the margins also.
If you have looked at my margins, they have come down a bit because my hyperlocal, you know, deliveries are growing pretty rapidly. Internally, we look at the big box growth, right? From the same box, how much I'm able to deliver, whether the customer walks in or I have to deliver, right? When we look at from our network design perspective, where is the demand, and to service that demand, what do I need? Now, it's a customer preference. For different need, customer want to walk in, or they want to just get things delivered, depending on what the requirement is, the need for convenience, and we do both ways, right? For us, it's the wallet share of the customer, right? It's just from a reporting perspective, we are saying SSG.
Now, practically, if you think about it, if I'm delivering, even delivering from the store, that's the entire sale coming to me, from that box. Internally, that's how we look at it.
You have a fairly large square footage now. On this big base, how do you look at square foot additions like this 1% growth which we saw this year? Was it a year of consolidation, or you think that basically now whatever physical infrastructure you wanted to build is largely built, and from here on, it'll every year be sort of a very slow growth on this?
See, we'll continue to build. There's a lot of penetration to be done, especially in the tier two and beyond cities. We'll continue to build the store footprint. I guess, you know, last year we have opened quite a few. We have closed a few. You know, that's a regular exercise. But on net net, you'll continue to see store square footage of stores increasing, and you'll also continue to see the productivity increasing.
Mid-single digit would be a good estimate for square footage growth?
Again, I won't be able to.
Okay.
You know, you should expect square footage to grow as well as number of stores to grow.
Sure. Thank you so much.
Hi. I have questions on Reliance Jio. The first question is, if I look at the JPL numbers of Jio, you know, the EBITDA was somewhere between INR 800-900 crore a quarter. That has increased to almost INR 1,300 crore in this quarter.
What is driving that increase? That's my first question. Some color on, you know, the timelines for Jio's IPO because we basically, you know, publicly it is stated that first half of 2026 is when we should expect Jio IPO. Is that timeline still hold because we still not seen the DRHP? Last question that any update on the AI data center which you are planning? Thank you.
Sure.
That's it.
I'll take first, and on second and third Anshuman would be there. On first, clearly the services which we have is a comprehensive set of services for home and enterprises. The large part of margin expansion is coming from the operating leverage here because the cost for delivering these services have not gone up. A large part of our contracts are structured like that, and that is leading to the margin expansion in digital services.
I mean, you know, just the increase in revenue, actually the increase in EBITDA is more than the increase in revenue, so.
I think if you look at the consol JPL minus RGIL.
Yes
It's not. I'll. We need to check. I don't think it's more than that.
Okay.
For sure.
I'll check and come back.
Yeah.
Maybe you can take that.
I'll take that up, yeah.
On your second and third question, on IPO, we have a statement in today's press release as well. It's fairly imminent. We are working towards it, and we'll keep you posted. A lot of the work has been done. We'll keep you posted in the coming days. On the third question around the AI data centers, firstly I'd like to clarify that the AI data centers are not being done in Jio Platforms Limited. They are gonna be part of the intelligence business, so RAL or the intelligence entity that has already been created. We have started. There is work going on on our own data centers that we need for our captive purposes as well as for our partners in Jamnagar. That work is going on.
We are also working towards our gigawatt scale data centers, and that's something that in the next few quarters we'll see more progress on and then we'll update you.
Sure. Thank you.
Okay, Anshuman. Yeah, Anshuman, questions. First, what drove JPL growth to be higher than Jio's growth? That's the first question.
Sorry, could you repeat that, Deepti?
Yeah. What drove JPL growth to be higher than Jio's growth? That's the first question. On Jio, are you expecting further acceleration and subscriber additions, so that in absence of tariff hike, double-digit growth continues?
On the first one, sort of feel free to add. Look, the digital services are growing off a smaller base, so in terms of percentage growth you'll expect to see higher growth there. We're launching more services. We've spoken about our data center offering, Meghraj, where the scale of that, you know, customer uptake has picked up quite a bit. Our AI cloud offering, plus some of the new products we have launched, plus our enterprise offering. That is expected to grow faster. Just because it's growing off a smaller base, the percentage growth will be faster. Not to say that Jio or the connectivity piece will not grow, that will also continue to grow, but you'll expect digital services to grow faster.
On the second one, look, there is certain organic growth which we'll expect both in realizations, because people will continue to use more services. People will tend to upgrade in the plans that they use and subscribe to some of the additional services that we are offering. You should expect some increase in the ARPU even without any tariff increases. We spoke about this 4%-5% kind of number that we have been observing over the last few quarters. That kind of growth happens even without any tariff increases. Then of course, the subscriber growth rate will be there. We do expect to continue to gain market share in the market. We have a differentiated better offering with much better 5G than what the other operators have been able to establish.
We do expect to gain market share in the market.
I have one question on the media business.
Mm-hmm.
JioHotstar has five times the MOUs of Netflix. I mean, has it had a break even? That's the first question. Your linear TV has a disproportionate share in the industry. Is the TV advertising for you still growing or it's degrowing?
Yeah. On the first one, I think our overall subscription business is one part of the overall business. We have a very large and profitable entertainment business that's driven a lot by TV, to the point that you were making. Our overall profitability is a combination of all those businesses. As I mentioned to you earlier, entertainment is a very profitable business that we have. On TV, we are seeing a large improvement in monetization as per some of the numbers that I showed you before. I think that is the momentum that we are going to see, and the final performance will be a balance of those two.
Thank you.
Sorry, one question on oil and gas. You know, what is known is, of course, what I meant was the downstream part. I'm sorry, Sanjay.
Of this one.
What is known about certain products like LPG having supply challenges? You talked about PVC having supply challenges, but you know, beyond those obvious ones, which are the other chemical and petrochemical products where you believe availability can be a challenge if this continues? Like, for example, if because we are producing more LPG, are the propane linked products that supply is getting challenged? Or what are the other areas where we are seeing the challenges?
Yes. Partly you are right, because wherever LPG is used as a fuel, those end consumption sectors
They are struggling. In fact, the government is now working in a very cohesive manner. They have formed what is called a joint working group, and this working group is a combination of Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Department of Chemicals and Petrochemicals, and a couple of other ministries also, like Department of Food and Public Distribution were also part of it. What this group is trying to do is to ensure that the key critical end sector requirements are not starved of the feedstocks. Therefore, exceptions are being made from the LPG control order to ensure that these critical sectors are not starved of feed. That's the. Other than that, yes, there is, as I said, naphtha is critically short. EDC also has been impacted, the supplies.
The biggest impact has been on methanol, and that will probably have an impact on the fertilizer sector, end sector. Natural gas has got very badly impacted because of Ras Laffan getting hit, and that will also have, it's impacted. The government is, of course, trying its best to ensure that the critical sectors remain unimpacted to the best extent possible. I mean, critical sectors like CNG, PNG, but the other non-critical things, which the government thinks non-critical, they were cut off. They are continuously reviewing those allocations also to ensure that the common man is not impacted at the end of it.
Sure. Thanks. One small one on FMCG. Revenue has been written as INR 22,000 crore, but if you look at the two key brands where the revenue is given, that's only less than INR 7,500 crore.
Yeah.
What are the other big, you know, products or brands which are contributing?
When I talked about the Campa brand, that was only one particular brand under the beverage category. Our beverage category, the revenue is more than about INR 6,000 crore. Similarly, when I talked about Independence brand, it was one part of the category for our daily essentials. The other larger contributor for this whole category is daily essentials for our business right now, which is almost contributing about 40% to the revenue. These are the two major contributors for our revenues right now.
Okay. Thanks. Just one last on retail. When do you think, you know, this because of maybe quick commerce or whatever, the dilution in EBITDA margin, by when do you think we'll get that stability? Because your EBITDA growth again has been just about, I think, 3% YOY. Perhaps because there's more revenue and that's lower margin. When do we reach that stage that we start getting closer to double-digit EBITDA growth, if that's possible?
See, it's just a function of each business contributing. It's just a function of the mix, how quickly the offline business grows versus the quick commerce business grows, versus the B2B business grows, right? It's a function of the mix. If we slow down the growth of you know, online business, margins start improving.
Okay. Thanks.
It's a mix. As far as the online business continues to grow faster.
Okay, thanks.
Can we take one last question from Vijay? Yeah, good evening. Anshuman, I had a question for you. You're obviously seeing a lot of momentum in Jio from a subscriber perspective. Let's say 525 million, that further expands. You're gonna get the IPO out as well. So if you take a, let's say a 1-2-year kind of view, what does success look like for Jio in terms of financial metrics like ROIC, free cash flows? Any goalposts which you can speak to?
Not really, because look, we're not gonna get into forward-looking and, you know, where we wanna be in a couple of years. For now, I think I'll tell you what the priority areas are, but I'm not gonna put numbers to where we want to be in one or two years. Priority area on mobility, gain some more market share because we have the network advantage, we have product advantage, we have fairly differentiated offerings. We would wanna capitalize on that. Home is a priority for sure. That's something that we've been innovating a lot and we've seen good pickup in acquisition. We have had to do some, you know, changes in between moving to in-house, et cetera, new equipment being put on the ground. Otherwise, that's fairly growing steadily, and that's a priority.
Enterprises to an extent is a priority. We wanna gain more market share there. We have a much more room to grow and gain market share there. Of course, digital services. We have launched a few in the last couple of quarters, and we want them to scale up, ramp up. Those would be the priority areas. I'll not get into numbers where we would like to be. Yeah, they're gonna be exciting times. Next couple of years are gonna be very exciting for Jio.