Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Industries reported a record consolidated net profit in the April-June quarter, riding on the back of increased petrochemical margins and improved performance of its telecom sector.
Its first quarter consolidated net profit was up 18 per cent year-on-year to Rs 9,459 crore, against Rs 8,021 crore a year ago. It is to be noted that the company had exceptional Rs 1,087 crore profit from its divestment of stake in Gulf Africa Petroleum Corp in the year ago quarter.
Reliance's consolidated revenue for the quarter surged 57 per cent—from Rs 90,537 crore a year ago to Rs 141,699 crore.
A big driver behind RIL's strong performance is the petrochemical business, where revenue in April-June gained 58 per cent to Rs 40,287 crore. Petchem EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes) increased 95 per cent to Rs 7,857 crore, while margins also jumped to 19.5 per cent from 15.8 per cent.
"The big standout is petrochemicals at Rs 9,211 crore of EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation), which is 82 per cent higher year-on-year. To put some context, before we started on our expansion in petrochemicals in FY13, our whole year EBITDA for petrochemicals was at this level," said V. Srikanth, joint CFO at RIL.
Elsewhere, RIL's telecom arm Jio posted its third profitable quarter. Net profit at Jio was at Rs 612 crore, a quarter-on-quarter growth of 20 per cent.
Jio's standalone revenue in the first quarter rose 14 per cent over the January-March quarter to Rs 8,109 crore.
As of June 30, Jio had 215.3 million subscribers with average revenue per user (ARPU) at Rs 134.50 per month.
It is also seeing a good traction in the new post-paid plans that it has launched recently, which have a higher ARPU, said Anshuman Thakur, Jio's head of strategy.
Its organised retail, where RIL is opening on average 10 stores per day, is also seeing tremendous growth, with revenue more than doubling to Rs 25,890 crore. Retail EBIT jumped 266 per cent to Rs 1,069 crore and EBIT margins were at 4.1 per cent.
"The benefits of strong focus on cost control, scalability and operating leverage is reflecting in the 3x EBITDA growth on a year-on-year basis," it said.
Reliance Retail now has 8,533 outlets, including 4,530 Jio touch points, across over 5,200 towns and cities in India.
In contrast, oil and gas segment revenue was up 8 per cent to Rs 1,432 crore in the first quarter, while it reported a EBIT loss of Rs 447 crore, impacted by 12 per cent decline in domestic production as well as 27 per cent fall in production in US shale operations.
Gross Refining margins (GRM) also fell to $10.50 per barrel from $11.90 per barrel in the year ago quarter.
"Lower crude throughput due to planned turnaround of one crude distillation unit and softer refining margins led to decline in segment EBIT," it said.
Ahead of the results, RIL shares closed at Rs 1,129.60, up 1.7 per cent.