Akash Ambani, Managing Director, Jio Platforms Ltd.,at the Jio IPO Media Meet held on October 15, 2026.
Akash Ambani, Managing Director, Jio Platforms Ltd.: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’m here as representative of the entire company and it is my deep honour to do that.
And thank you Isha and Mr Kotak for your opening remarks. Before I really start diving into the details of our presentation, what I wanted to stand here and tell you about is the mission of Jio. What we have built over the last 10 years and what drives our future growth. The mission of Jio is simple. The mission of Jio is to connect every Indian home, every Indian citizen, and every Indian enterprise with the highest quality and most affordable digital services. What we have been inspired by is our Prime Minister's Digital India, Make in India, and a Viksit Bharat 2047. To do that, we see a goal of enabling India as a premier digital society, and us as Jio Platforms Limited as an able partner to enable that.
We started the story with our connectivity, and today, Mr Kotak spoke about what transformation our country has gone through. We see now to launch products and services that enhance the life of every Jio user on top of that connectivity platform, and that's the most important unit of our business. The most important unit of our business is our customers. That's what I walk into office on a daily basis and think about - how I can enhance the life of every Jio customer and deliver them services that can improve their daily life, and that's the mission of Jio of what we stand for and what is the basis of our growth for the last 10 years.
With that, let me walk you through a couple of numbers - where we stand today. Today we stand at 53 crore Indians that have trusted us as their digital connectivity partner. All of this in just the last 10 years. Just on September 6 of this year, we celebrated 10 years of us as a company. Where that has resulted in is an EBITDA of over Rs 76,000 crores in 10 years. That has put us in growing faster than even the global tech companies. The last three years has seen an EBITDA growth of almost 18% 17.8% to be exact, 53.3% EBITDA margins in the quarter one of this financial year.
What we have stood for is building and delivering value for our Indian customers, whilst making sure that our business stays very healthy. The basis of our EBITDA and our EBITDA growth has been us powering 60% of India's digital traffic. Today, Jio carries over 60% of India's data traffic. And why do I really speak about that number? I speak about that number because we have an innate understanding better than any other Indian company about our customers, right? And one recent example of what we've been able to launch is our 5G service.
We started our 5G rollout just three years ago, and today we're the world's largest 5G base outside of China. And we did the fastest 4G to 5G migration anywhere in the world. I spoke to you about our quality promise. What really is our quality promise? How do we really measure it? In a simple statistic, how much our consumers are consuming GBs per month per customer, and today we stand at 43.7 GB per customer per month, and that shows that we built a technology platform for India from India, but leads global standards in just the last 10 years.
What I want to now talk to you about is where this journey started. We've always believed that India has been a data scarce nation because it was supply constrained. Jio was the 14th operator to enter the market in 2016.
At that point of time, the pricing per GB was almost at Rs 228 per GB on usage. The download speed was two and a half Mbps. The total universe of data customers in India was less than 70 million, and the usage of these 70 million was almost 200 MB per month. We saw that as our biggest opportunity, to change India from a data scarce nation to a data abundant nation, and that's what we've enabled 10 years from now. As the industry together today, we've grown from 14 players to just four, and today we deliver 68 Mbps of total download speed across India, Rs 7.5 per GB, and about 26.7 GBs per customer per month, as the industry put together.
The statistics on Jio's networks differentiate us. This is what we deliver in terms of highest quality of services for our customers. Today, across 53 crore Indians, we give an average download speed of almost 200 Mbps. That's twice as fast as the other operators. Our pricing per GB stands at the lowest anywhere else in the world, at almost Rs 4.9 rupees per GB, and this is on usage. And our data consumption stood at 43.7 GB per user per month, and that is what has pivoted India from being the 155th nation of broadband in penetration and consumption in the world to number one in just 10 years.
What we have built, and as I said we were inspired by Digital India, Make in India, and contributing to a Viksit Bharat 2047. What we have now built is an end-to-end technology stack that cuts across four areas: a fully autonomous network, as you saw in the video, for our 5G mobile broadband subscribers, including our 4G; a fully integrated home platform; and devices, operating systems, and digital applications that enhance the life of every Jio user. We're the only Indian company that has ranked in the top 20 global companies in terms of patents filed, according to the WIPO. Over 7,220 patents have been filed by a talented base of over 12,000 Jio engineers, and that's what we have enabled. This end-to-end stack is not only created by us; we've created it, we've deployed it, and we operate it for 55 crore Indians, and that is the pillar of our strength.
What do I really mean by that? I spoke about, you know, how we can best convert India to digital society. Today we see a 1.4 trillion-dollar digital economy by FY31, and how we are going to try to address to take a huge market share of this. The end-to-end technology stack gives us a capability like no other, and what we have really been able to provide is the depth in our patents. And again, to repeat, over 7,220 patents, where the only Indian company in the top 20 globally to have contributed to this, and this gives us an innate example. Why did we take to build our own proprietary stack? We build our own proprietary stack to serve our customers better, to give them services that they have never witnessed before, and that is something that we can stitch in terms of the entire consumer experience better than anyone else.
The second thing is our digital gateway; we touched upon it. What we have is an innate understanding of our Jio customers. What can we can enable for them and for partners to reach them. Because we have an understanding of these customers from three areas that no one else has: a true demographic, their propensity to spend, and the ability to consume additional services. We can now drive partners and our own services to 55 crore Indians. Let me take you through two or three examples. The first example I want to start off with is over 336 digital subscriptions across OTT and music we do for our Jio customers. What that really means is for our partners, we're able to drive an insight to activate better than anyone else because we have the understanding of our customers.
Another example is our recent example of Gemini. Google in India is also a big company, over a billion users on their surfaces, and of course Gemini being their flagship product. So why did they really need to partner with us? This is not a simple distribution deal. What we were able to do, like we did with the data market, was co-create a new market, and today that has resulted in Gemini adding 30 million new subscribers for its base. For me, what that really means is that if we can serve our Jio users with the best affordable services and the highest quality of services to make sure that there is a competitive advantage when they are on our Jio network, that's the value I want to drive for our customers.
Let me give you two examples of third-party services. Let me talk about our own services. Recently, at the Reliance AGM, we announced a voice AI travel service. What that really means is today, because of our end-to-end 5G capability and our core that we have deployed, we can deploy this to 53 crore Indians, and that really democratises intelligence in our country, just how we did with data. We can drive this at no additional cost for the user, and accessible to all our users at the same time.
What that really means for the users is today we carry 20 billion minutes of voice on our network on a daily basis. That's the largest in the country. We will enable simple use cases of productivity. If me and you are on a call, and we need to speak to each other, and have an action to-do list, a summarisation and transcription across 12 Indian languages, distributed to 53 crore Indians, we are the only player in town that can do that.
And like this, we can have more and more services that we can launch to our Jio customers, that we can drive daily value on. The infrastructure part of our business makes our business very hard to replicate. I spoke to you about a 5G base of now over 250 million. What we were able to do is roll out 5G in just 19 months. And this is a laborious activity in terms of putting up our towers. In the 19 months, that we covered 99% of India's living population, we were putting up a tower every minute of a 12-hour working space, a working day. And that's the efficiency that we want to drive our businesses with.
For me, what that makes sure is that we have an infrastructure footprint that makes our business very hard to replicate. Coupled with that, we have the largest spectrum bank in the industry, and these three pillars will be the basis of our future growth engines. Let me talk to you about three, rather four, examples of our growth.
The first one being Mobility. Today, we see a universe of adding close to 340 new customers on our mobility base. The simple breakdown of that is: 100 million new citizens of India will get a SIM card for the first time because of the age criteria over the next five years. 240 million subscribers that sit on 2G networks will migrate to 4G and 5G networks faster than ever. It becomes now very cost uneconomical and laborious to operate a 2G network. We've seen the entire device ecosystem shift, and that is the one point that we are going to track. What gives us our right if we deliver the highest quality of services at the most affordable, and services that none of our other competitors can launch, to our customers, this gives us our right to win these customers. Just as an example, in the last financial year, we added three times more net active additions than our nearest competitor.
The home story is very different. Today, we started laying fiber to connect homes since 2010. What that has really enabled for us is a home pass of close to 40 million homes. But as we know, India's demographic is approximately 300 million homes and a 100 million pay TV households as we speak today. We see that as our biggest growth entry. Today, the fiber networks have to operate on right of way, society permission, building permission, and then we do the customer connect.
As well as that, we have to operate and manage our fiber to 19,000 PIN codes of India. The solution to go from 40 million homes to 100 million homes was very obvious to us within the organisation. The last mile had to go wireless. The world did this with a technology called 5G FWA. We think that that technology doesn't scale because of the volume of users that we want to handle on our 5G network. So, we built our own technology on top of that.
Our technology operates on the 5G unlicensed band, the Wi-Fi band, and today, 40% of our new additions are acquired using that technology. On a 30 million base, six and a half million customers are already operating on this technology. That has given us a unique ability to address 19,000 PIN codes of India and grow our peace in those areas. The astonishing number is 40% of my net additions are coming from outside tier one and tier two cities.
We don't want to only launch broadband. The Wi-Fi band technology gives us the ability to give one gig download and one gig upload with the third generation of our technology. What we showcased earlier this year was taking the next generation that can deliver 5 gig download and 1 gig upload, and that is giving the promise of our highest quality. What we want to deliver to the home is not a broadband service, but an integrated consumption story for broadband, TV, and digital applications.
Today, we are able to give our television OS over five hours of consumption on a daily basis to our current customer base. It is the preferred destination of consumption for any Jio home, including people who have a smart TV. For me, this is our biggest growth engine for the coming years – to transform our 30 million base to a 100 million base, to really service 19,000 PIN codes of India, and today, as a testament to that, we add about 67.5% of India's net fixed broadband additions. And again, one of the technologies we are using is on our own proprietary technology, which sits on the unlicensed panel. We call it UBR.
The third one that I want to speak about is Enterprise. On the enterprise side, we believe there is a huge growth opportunity in front of us. India today has 3,50,000 lease lines. Today, we want to make sure that we are not only finding for broadband market share, but the entire digital services market share, which is probably addressed in a $56-billion-dollar market opportunity.
A recent example is this. Today, 65% of the bank branches of the country are connected on Jio. What we have enabled for them is not just ubiquitous high-grade security broadband, but also video surveillance that gives us an innate ability for them to serve their customers better, and security use cases. And this is one such example. I can go sector by sector, whether it be hospitality, BFSI, and other sectors, to tell you about our enterprise.
Our international roadmap is very different and a unique playbook that we are trying to pioneer in the world, what we think is that the end-to-end technology stack that we have created, deployed, and operate gives us an ability to partner with telecom partners across the world and really do this in a capex-like manner. What we think is providing this as an end-to-end technology stack, not as a vendor or a software service, but really being a managed service partner to enable future growth ventures for our partner is a preferred model of our deployment. And because we have showcased that we've really served this in India in one of the most complex markets, we believe there is a huge market opportunity all across the world, including the developed and developing nations.
We will choose our partners very carefully on the basis of the market opportunity, so that it would make a significant difference to our balance sheet and the ability for us to partner deeply for the growth of their business. And this is the intended monetisation ability that we have for our end-to-end technology stack. As we go further and further into this in the coming years.
For me, we want to make sure that the customer is the one that benefits the most, and this will be product and service led, with our end-to-end technology stack as an enabler.
I want to now talk about the financial numbers of our business. As we deliver value for our customer, it is also important to grow financially. Last three years, we have grown at a revenue growth rate of circa 15%. Our revenue has grown from Rs. 1,09,000 crore to over Rs. 1,46,000 crores in the last three years, and that's a CAGR of 15.8%. Our EBITDA, from 50% to the June quarter of this year, has gone to 53%, and our EBITDA growth is at 54,000 crores to 76,000 crores. That shows our business is in a very healthy and at a high growth rate.
So, really, to summarise, what we see in front of us: significant market opportunity on four segments: the mobility segment, the home segment, the enterprise segment, and the end-to-end monetisation of our core technologies. The proprietary end-to-end technology stack has given us the ability to play across the value chain and a potential for India to become an exporter of technology rather than an importer of technology.
Extensive future-ready infrastructure: Today, I we have over 3,60,000 towers laid over India, and over 1 million rude kilometres of fibre. I've always said that Jio's first mission is to democratise technology to benefit Indians. 6G is on our horizon. What this really means is that we will do 6G as a software upgrade rather than a new infrastructure build out.
A large and engaged customer base, and this is the most important part of our business. As long as we continue to deliver value to each of our customers, understand their needs better, serve those needs, we will be able to drive the digital services and the digital society of our vision much better. Today, we have the ability to be the preferred gateway for third party and our first party providers to our subscribers, and at a very proven scale of business, a healthy growth rate and profitability, our business has established itself.
Today, we have an EBITDA margin of 53.3 percent, a revenue to free cash flow ratio of 30%. 30% of our revenue flows right into our free cash flow. And an EBITDA less capex of 28.6% of revenue in FY-26. So that's really the five drivers of supporting Jio platforms, and to Isha's point of how we think we can compound our business interest. Thank you very much for your time.
