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How Mukesh Ambani Shook Up India's Mobile Phone Industry

Reliance Jio has reported 2 quarters of profit, driven by subscription growth that has continued even after the firm began charging for data services.

Tech, Media & Telecom | (c) 2018 Bloomberg | Bhuma Shrivastava, Bloomberg | Updated: October 17, 2018 15:18 IST

by Taboola

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Mukesh Ambani leads Reliance Jio which has gone from zero to more than 200 million subscribers since 2016

HIGHLIGHTS

1. Reliance Jio has reported two quarters of profit.
2. The company is due to report earnings on Wednesday.
3. Prior to Jio's entry, India had more than 10 wireless providers.

Within two years, India's richest person turned the local mobile-phone market into the world's biggest consumer of wireless data. But along the way, billionaire Mukesh Ambani laid waste to profits in the overcrowded industry by driving down prices to as low as zero.

Ambani leads Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd., which has gone from zero to more than 200 million subscribers, all of them on a nationwide 4G network, since 2016. While the user growth has come at the expense of smaller rivals who've merged or quit the market, the thrust into the country's No. 3 spot for wireless carriers has also ravaged profit at Bharti Airtel Ltd., and Idea Cellular Ltd. The latter has merged with Vodafone Group Plc's India unit to overtake Bharti as the market’s biggest operator.

 

Meanwhile, Reliance Jio, a unit of Ambani’s energy-to-retail conglomerate Reliance Industries Ltd., has reported two quarters of profit, driven by subscription growth that has continued even after the company began charging for data services. The company is due to report earnings Wednesday.

Consumers have been the clear winners, as the cost of sending and receiving data wirelessly has plummeted.

The plunge in prices has led to surge in data traffic to 1.5 billion gigabytes a month last year, according to Amitabh Kant, chief executive officer of NITI Aayog, India’s government policy think tank.

"Mobile data consumption is higher than USA & China put together," Kant posted on his Twitter account in December 2017.

While users benefit from declining prices, losses are expected to continue at the country’s big three surviving carriers. Bharti will probably report an 8.1 billion rupee ($110 million) net loss for the three months ended Sept. 30, according to the average of analyst estimates.

The Cellular Operators Association of India expects more losses ahead for the industry.

"I see at least another three quarters of losses," said Rajan Mathews, director general of the industry group. "I don't think the present tariffs are sustainable."

20 COMMENTS

Prior to Jio's entry into the market, India had more than 10 wireless providers, with the smallest five accounting for about 21 percent and Bharti, the largest, taking up 25 percent.

Since Jio stormed in with introductory free data and voice services, the market has consolidated into three big providers, including Vodafone Idea Ltd., which completed its merger at the end of August.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

\from 018 https://www.orfonline.org/raisina-dialogue/raisina-dialogue-2018/

Over the past few years, India has made digital financial inclusion one of its most important policy priorities by seeking to bank the unbanked in order to transfer welfare benefits directly to the people. A panel at the Raisina Dialogue 2018 explored India’s growth in the digital payments space and addressed how lessons from India can be instructive for other emerging economies. The growth of Aadhaar, a unique public data infrastructure, has enabled people to bypass several steps when obtaining essential banking services. As panellists noted, Aadhaar has enabled the country to leapfrog technologically by ensuring transparency and promoting inclusivity through the Jan Dhan programme. Aadhaar has led to the creation of IndiaStack, a suite of layers built on a digital identity that facilitates authentication, storage, and payments online. The IndiaStack has also created an ecosystem where data can be utilised as a public good, allowing private actors to innovate on top of the platform to provide better, more targeted services. It cost the state some US$2.4 billion to build the Aadhaar infrastructure; and there are now over one billion Indian citizens on the platform. This means that providing citizens with their unique identity had cost India an average of two dollars per person. Aadhaar’s success story lies in how states managed to bring people into the ecosystem in a manner that was not only efficient but also quick and inexpensive. Cash is a huge competitor for the digital payments ecosystem, with only 15 percent of transactions worldwide being carried out online. In India, leading up to the last two years, over 95 percent of all transactions were in made by debit card. Aadhaar has been critical in transforming the payments ecosystem since then. The speed with which one can put merchants and consumers on-board using Aadhaar ekyc has proven to be a successful model. As a panellist put it, India has the potential to become a “normative superpower” on financial inclusion and digital payments. The growing payments ecosystem, however, has to be secured at the same time, to protect the people – consumers and merchants—as well as the processes and data. European economies

are currently leading the conversation on security risks and solutions for the payments sector; India must pay heed to such developments. Fin-tech startups and smaller enterprises will play a huge role in realising the goal to digitise all transactions. Using data analytics, MSMEs and SMEs that have traditionally and historically had a better record of repayments can compete with the bigger players and potentially disrupt the market. Data can also be analysed to promote financial inclusion for all, leading to an increased flow of resources from the banking system to those below the poverty line. The next biggest disruption that India will undertake is to wipe out credit cards, debit cards and ATM machines. People will instead transact at zero cost using only their smartphones and their own biometrics. This, in turn, will lead to an upsurge in the data collected on financial transactions which can enable younger companies to expand their markets. People are keen to eliminate the middlemen and use their own devices to carry out financial transactions. Innovations such as the Bharat QR and the United Payments Interface (UPI) can be an instrumental layer on which the private sector can develop their solutions. India has pioneered a novel public-private partnership for the digital age, with both the state and the startups competing to serve the people.

MODERATOR Tidhar Wald, HEAD OF GOVERNMENT RELATIONS & PUBLIC POLICY, BETTER THAN CASH ALLIANCE PANELLISTS Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI AAYOG Vijay Shekhar Sharma, FOUNDER AND HEAD, PAYTM Porush Singh, INDIA AND DIVISION PRESIDENT, SOUTH ASIA, MASTERCARD Arvind Gupta, HEAD, DIGITAL INDIA FOUNDATION Agnieszka Wierzbicka, EXPERT, MINISTRY OF DIGITAL AFFAIRS, POLAND

nhk had interesting segment on bollywood movie- breaking with taboo it was a dramatised biography of a guy who is getting womens napkins to india. Apparently 80% of girls still use dirty rags. Converting to an affordable modern solution could also create up to a million jobs for women according to the changemaker

Koreas Rail Road BRI #BR1

#BR1 #theeconomist @obamauni

Koreas agree to start railway, road work by Dec.​ The two Koreas have agreed to break ground for the modernization of cross-border railways and roads in late November or early December, said a statement released by South Korea’s Unification Ministry on Monday.  read more >>

The Push, Pull, and Purse of Chinese Public Diplomacy: A Conversation with Samantha Custer

August 1, 2018

This episode explores the latest public diplomacy efforts that Beijing has carried out in the East Asia and Pacific region to boost favorable views toward China. Through the lens of AidData’s ground-breaking report, Ties That Bind: Quantifying China’s public diplomacy and its “good neighbor” effect, our guest Samantha Custer analyzes the methods, objectives, and successes of China’s regional public diplomacy and political influence activities. Custer also delves into the implications of China’s state-sponsored strategies for the greater region and the field of public diplomacy.
 
Samantha Custer is the Director of Policy Analysis at AidData, a research lab at the College of William and Mary that produced the Ties That Bind report, in partnership with the CSIS China Power Project and Asia Society Policy Institute. She previously co-authored World Bank papers on open data and citizen feedback with the Open Development Technology Alliance and assisted former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright teach a foreign policy course. Additionally, Ms. Custer has advised multilingual education policy with SIL International and coordinated the advocacy efforts of the Asia Multilingual Education Working Group for UNESCO.

We have arranged for Jack Ma's lead researcher Tsinghua Professor Ying Lowrey (author of 2 books on alibaba 2007-2012 and just published 2012-17) to spend 5 days at BRAC in Bangladesh to review all of the areas Jack Ma most wants to find sustainability goals partners and massively scale through student livelihood participation. As you may know Jack is tapped by Guterres and others at UN to lead hi-level youth futures reporting such as the seminal report on AI and Digital Cooperation being prepared in time for sharing at Beijing's Belt Road 2 April 2019. This is being co-edited with Melinda Gates and 20 world class technologists for sustainability.

Earlier this year Jack' Ant Finance  took 20% share in brac's http://www.bkash.com which has been peer reviewed by Bill Gates as the fintech model most likely to reach a billion unbanked; but as i think you know by the time Jack helps celebrate the 2020 olympics his driving motivation is to help youth play leading roles in livelihood education everywhere- brac's partners are number 1 in that too as far as education can empower women and end communities where life is fearsome, unhealthy or worse

Would it be possible to circulate this to people who might be interested? By coincidence back in 2007 as dad first sponsored a wave of journalist students to interview all of Dr Yunus directors  i gave the first proof copy of Yunus social business book to the then head of JICA USA. BRAC's double model for transforming aid where experts dont live with the people who need to learn skills is the greatest economic miracle i expect to witness in my life. Whats the purpose of sustainability investment and education experts if we exclude those facing the most life critical challenges every day? And in population terms half of our species live in China or the nations facing Eurasia's southern coastal Belt.

My fathers work at The Economist for which he was awarded The Emperor's Order of Rising Sun with Gold Bars tried to help peoples of all nations develop win-win trade and reverse the way that Mercantile Colonisation had impoverished the East. Japan started up the Rise of all peoples East

 Reversing Colonial Market Systems and Maps was in fact the founder of The Economist James Wilson's initiative from 1843, which became the Commonwealth Constitution with Queen Victoria and James' son-i-law Walter Bagehot, and may later explain why Prince Charles at the 1964 Olympics was one of the first to celebrate with Sony's Akio Morita and other Japanese Business Leaders in 1964 an era when the moon race started to raise worldwide hopes that blending human and artificial intelligence could free all of humanity's most natural goals

We hope BRAC and Bangladesh is a start although the deepest womens empowerment srat to helping build student club exchanges between south asia, asean china and Japan as well any where in the west that frees its students to collaborate in all the community replications now needed if sustainability is to be where we are all linking in by 2030

at Norman Macrae : Books & Surveys at The Economist i have tried to produce a mp linking all my fathers surveys. All downloads are free but not all reproductions of twentieth century economist surveys are equally readable. If people see a country that may for example be critical to a Belt Road collabiration i can retype the article if people need it

Norman Macrae : Books & Surveys at The Economist breaking help us update happiest news across 13 Belt Roads to Sustainabilitywith 996 china entrepreneurs and at ...

Mostofa Zaman is at the centre of arranging Professor Lowrey's 5 days . we have 3 main formats for global connectors

live meetings in dhaka

skype ins

receipt of relevant ideas to brainstorm with a promise to circulate debriefings

Mostofa can also confirm several local Japanese connections he has made over the 10 years we have been covering Bangladesh and its extraordinary models for empowering worlds poorest women to build communities and to celebrate leapfrog partnerships such as mobile and solar

With 3 working weeks to design all this Mostofa would happily receive questions or connection ideas direct.

WE will be trying to publish the week's proceedings in English, Chinese and Bangladeshi but if anyone wanted to volunteer Japanese translation we would of course love that

Yours sincerely 'Chris Macrae Washington DC Norman Macrae Foundation text 1 240 316 8157