iWorld
Reliance Jio capex at Rs 18k cr in Q1-18, Retail’s solid performance in FY-17
BENGALURU: The Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani headed Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) reported its financial performance for the quarter / year ended 31 March 2017 (Q4-17/FY-17, current quarter/current year). RIL’s digital venture Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (Jio) has been touted as the largest startup in the world with investments announced to the tune of Rs 1,50,000 crore. The company plans capex at Rs 18,000 crore for Q1-18. The company says that capex investments will drop sharply from Q2-18 onward. This is indeed a huge sum, when one considers the fact that its nearest peer and the largest telecom operator in terms of subscriber base until Jio overtook it, Bharti Airtel Limited (Airtel), had capex of Rs 20,591.9 crore during the entire financial year 2016. It may be noted that Airtel has operations in other geographies besides India, and the capex number mentioned above includes those countries also. RIL claims that Jio contributes to more than 80 percent of data consumption in India.
Further, RIL plans capex of Rs 2,500 crore for fiscal 2018 for its organized retail segment – Reliance Retail Limited (Retail segment) that had a phenomenal performance during FY-17. Reliance Retail reported revenue of Rs 33,765 crore for fiscal 2017, 60.2 percent more than the Rs 21,075 crore reported in the previous year. Quarter-on-quarter (q-o-q), the segment’s revenue in Q4-17 at Rs 10,332 crore was 18.9 percent more than the Rs 8,688 crore in Q3-17 and year-on-year (y-o-y) it was 83 percent more than the Rs 5,646 crore in Q4-16.
The Retail segment’s EBIT in FY-17 at Rs 784 crore (2.3 percent EBIT margin) was 55.6 percent more than the Rs 504 crore (2.4 percent EBIT margin) in the previous year. Q4-17 EBIT at Rs 243 crore (2.4 percent EBIT margin) was 5.2 percent more that Rs 231 crore (2.7 percent EBIT margin) and 89.8 percent more y-o-y than Rs 128 crore (2.3 percent EBIT margin).
The Retail segment’s Business PBIT in FY-17 at Rs 1,203 crore was 40.4 percent more than the Rs 857 crore in FY-16. Business PBIT in Q4-17 at Rs 366 crore was 9.9 percent more q-o-q than Rs 333 crore and 65.6 percent more y-o-y than Rs 221 crore.
RIL’s Revenue (turnover) increased by 12.3 percent in FY-17 to Rs 3,30,180 crore from Rs 2,93,298 crore in FY-16. The company’s revenue increased 10.3 percent q-o-q to Rs 92,889 crore in Q4-17 as compared to Rs 84,189 crore and increased 45.2 percent y-o-y from Rs 63,954 crore.
Overall RIL reported record annual consolidated net profit of Rs 29,901 crore in FY-17, up 18.8 percent as compared to the Rs 25,171 crore in FY-16. Consolidated net profit for Q4-17 at Rs 8,046 crore was 6.8 percent higher q-o-q as compared to Rs 7,533 crore and was 12.3 percent higher y-o-y than the Rs 7,167 crore.
Note: The unit of currency in this report is the Indian rupee – Rs (also conventionally represented by INR). The Indian numbering system or the Vedic numbering system has been used to denote money values. The basic conversion to the international norm would be:
(a) 100,00,000 = 100 lakh = 10,000,000 = 10 million = 1 crore.
(b) 10,000 lakh = 100 crore = 1 arab = 1 billion.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
