Reliance Jio Unlikely to Achieve its Audacious Goals in the Broadband Sector: CMR

Reliance Industries held its Annual General Meeting on July 5, where it announced various products like the JioPhone 2, Jio GigaFiber and Jio GigaTV. The Mukesh Ambani led telco also made some big promises for the coming months. Also, it is undeniable that Reliance Jio has set very audacious goals for itself which seem almost impossible to achieve. A CMR report has come up highlighting that Reliance Jio might be lagging behind its big goal. Although the telco has set up some milestone for reaching a massive subscriber base, there has been no deadline provided by the telco for the same.

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During the AGM, Mukesh Ambani announced that Reliance Jio had amassed 215 million subscribers as of this month. In total, 125 million more subscribers have been added since the last AGM held in July 2017. Out of these 125 million, 25 million have been added through JioPhone, 5 million from JioFi and the remaining 60 million are smartphone users having a different brand of handset.

However, despite seeming like big numbers, these stats do not present a rosy picture for the reasonably new telecom operator. The India Monthly Mobile Handset report said that there were 116 million mobile shipments in the country, out of this only 60 million are accounted for by Reliance Jio which points out that things might not be as good for Jio as they look from the outside. As per CMR’s report, the cumulative shipments of JioPhone have been a little over 50 million. However, Ambani clarified that there are only 25 million JioPhones in use which tells us that the JioPhone fever amongst the buyers has died out after the initial extravagant use of the device. The higher price of the JioPhone 2, which will now come for Rs 2,999 and with minimal improvements over its predecessor has been expected to worsen the picture. The JioFi sales are as usual and do not add any substantial value.