Reliance Jio managed to ship more than 15 million JioPhones during the last quarter of 2017, according to a new report. Out of the shipped products, more than 80% units are sold to customers. With these numbers, Jio's parent company Reliance Retail also became the leader in the feature phone market, dethroning South Korean brand Samsung. In the feature phone category, Reliance Retail now has 27% market share.
As per a report from Economic Times, Reliance Retail has become the No. 1 player in the feature phone market, which is followed by Samsung with 17% share. Micromax is third in place, thanks to the strong sales of Micromax Bharat 1 feature phone. itel Mobile and Nokia secured the fourth and fifth position as per the report. The publication managed to source data from Counterpoint Research and the research agency is yet to announce the report officially.
The excellent sales of JioPhone also expanded the feature phone market size by 47% in the country, and overall 50 million feature phones were shipped in the quarter as per the report. "JioPhone brought in huge volumes in the quarter, due to which it was able to surpass Samsung, which typically leads this segment," said Tarun Pathak, associate director at Counterpoint to the publication
"The device saw traction as feature phone users moved to the JioPhone and could use the similar form factor device to consume data as against the voice only earlier," he further added.
And other people aware of the matter revealed to the publication that Reliance Retail managed to ship more than 15 million JioPhones in the quarter. Earlier, we believed that Jio hasn't had a great time after launching the JioPhone, but this news surprised us.
In fact, this might be true because when Jio reported that it had over 160 million subscribers at the RIL40 event last month, everyone was taken by surprise. And this is why the new report seems to be a possible one. Earlier, Jio itself confirmed that it received over six million bookings for JioPhone in the first phase.
Furthermore, to lure more subscribers to purchase the JioPhone, the telco even revised the Rs 153 tariff plan, which now gives 1GB data per day. And that's more than enough for a feature phone.
