BENGALURU (Reuters) -Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, the telecom arm of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd, reported its slowest profit and revenue growth in five quarters on Friday, due to higher expenses and lack of recent tariff hikes.
Jio, India’s biggest telecom carrier by subscribers, said net profit rose 13% to 47.16 billion rupees ($574.8 million) in the three months ended March 31, from 41.73 billion rupees a year ago.
Its revenue from operations grew 11.9% to 233.94 billion rupees. Expenses for the quarter rose nearly 12%.
Jio’s revenue growth has been around 23% to 29% in the last four quarters, while profit has increased by 18% to 21%.
Analysts had cautioned the those growth rates would slow since there were no tariff hikes to cushion the load of Jio spending $11 billion on buying 5G spectrum auction in August.
Reliance Industries is scheduled to report results later in the day. ($1 = 82.0420 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Rama Venkat and Anuran Sadhu in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D’Souza)
