RIL’s Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani is going to make some important announcements today at 1.30PM. You can follow the announcements live on Reliance’s Flame of Truth and Jio Digital Life YouTube channels. You can also do the same on Facebook via official pages of Reliance Industries Limited and Reliance Jio. For Twitter, you need to follow @FlameOfTruth and Reliance Jio Twitter handles.
Ever since its commercial launch, Reliance Jio has been growing at a fast pace, mainly because of with its lucrative offers including free voice calls for lifetime, free data and subscription to content apps. The freebies have helped Reliance Jio shoot to the top league of telecom operators in the country. On the other hand, the likes of Airtel and Vodafone have been making all out efforts to compete with Jio with a range of low-cost data plans.
Jio, in the meanwhile, has continued to race towards its goal of 100 million subscribers. In January, the company reported 72.4 million subscribers onboard. Ambani is most likely to formally announce the company crossing 100 million subscribers today. The feat would come just after six months of commercial launch in September last year. It may be recalled that the company had raced to 50 million subscribers in just 83 days.
While there’s no official confirmation, it’s being speculated that Reliance Jio might extend its free offers. The company’s Happy New Year is set to expire on March 31, 2017. Already, the company has run Welcome Offer and a Preview Offer before the commercial launch. Extension of free offers is going to be a tricky decision for Reliance Jio as it’s widely believed that majority of consumers are using Jio for the free data and unlikely to retain the SIM if the services are made paid.
Another major announcement that Mukesh Ambani could make is the launch of a VoLTE-enabled feature phone. If a few leaks and rumors are to believed, such VoLTE feature phone with Reliance Jio subscription already exists. A few days ago a Twitter user shared a photo of what’s believed to be Jio’s feature phone, which comes with dedicated buttons for Jio apps like MyJio, JioTV, JioCinema and JioMusic.
According to rumors, the company is most likely to price the phone around Rs 1,500. While Jio has primarily benefited from adoption by smartphone users, the company appears to want to further propel its momentum in the market by tapping the feature phone segment, which still dominates India’s mobile phone market. According to the latest IDC data, feature phones remain the dominant category in the total mobile phone market with annual shipments of 136.1 million units. The category declined by only 9.4 percent in CY’ 2016 as compared to 16.2 percent in CY’ 2015, the report points out.
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