The free data offer rolled out by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Infocomm seems to have done wonders for social media giant Facebook which witnessed a net income growth of 128 per cent in the fourth quarter.
The US-based company said that Jio’s free data offer contributed significantly to its strong fourth quarter numbers.
In the fourth quarter of 2016, Facebook's net income rose 128 percent to $3.6 billion and revenue climbed 51 percent to $8.8 billion.
Facebook also said it earned $12.4 billion in income from operations last year, nearly double the total from 2015 ($6.2 billion), and that its number of daily active users rose to an average of 1.23 billion, up 18 per cent from the previous year.
Facebook CFO David Wehner said the company’s growth in Asia was boosted by the free data being offered in India.
“In the fourth quarter, wanted to call out that we have seen an increase in third-party promotional free data plans in places like India,” Wehner was quoted by Economic Times as saying.
“So that (free offer) clearly is having an impact in APAC (Asia-Pacific) and India was our strongest growth market (by user base). So, that would be something that I would say was a little bit more unique this past quarter,” he added.
At fourth quarter end, Facebook had 165 million monthly active users in India, largest in the world after the US. The California-headquartered company saw an 18 per cent year-on-year consumer base growth to 1.23 billion daily active users that include 396 million from Asia.
A recent study by Smartapp has pegged Facebook as the biggest beneficiary of the free data offer from Reliance Jio. The finding revealed that Facebook logins had surged to 467 per cent after the new entrant Jio started free promotional services.
