In 2010, Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries (RIL) promised India a wireless broadband revolution. India is expected to see the launch of 4G by 2012, but as expected, all such big projects get delayed. We expected to see the internet inflection point by 2014 (what is inflection point).
India is confident of seeing an explosion in its internet user base in India because the big man himself made this announcement yesterday at the AGM of Reliance Industries. Mukesh Ambani spent half of his hour-long speech on Reliance Jio’s plans.
A few months ago, I heard about Reliance Jio’s broadband vision. Reliance wants to launch its broadband services in India’s 100 largest metros/cities and is targeting to get 100 million subscribers in the first 100 days. 100-100-100 is their mantra.
Mukesh Ambani wants India ranked amongst the top 10 countries on net penetration (from the current pathetic #142).
All newspapers and technical portals have carried about this exciting development. Few highlights,
Jio Drive, Jio Play (HD TV), Jio Beats (streaming music), Jio Money (digital payments) will be offered to each subscriber. These could be a competition to Times Internet owned Gaana.com, Tiger funded Saavn, Alibaba funded Paytm.
Their sister company Reliance Retail, which had a revenue of Rs 17,640 crore (Rs 417 crore profit) will venture into e-commerce.
Sources say local language content will be offered on Jio mobile apps. R-Jio can expect a lot of first-time internet users from non-metros who are non-English speaking. What will this user base want to consume on the internet – could be content, ecommerce, govt services etc but they would want it in their language, not in English.
We can expect to see an explosion in the consumption of local language within a year. Oneindia.com is in the right space, rather in the right digital space!
In early 2015 we were at 300 million. India took 10 years to reach the first 200 million mark,
Sales of smartphones in India doubled from 156 million units in 2013 to 364 million in 2014 — that growth is set to continue and take India past 500 million internet users by 2018, the bulk of whom will be on mobile devices.
In mid-2015, India had 150 million mobile internet users. With the launch of R-Jio wireless broadband services, this number should double by April 2016. Looks like 500 million internet users in India by 2018 is a pessimistic projection; we should expect 500 million mobile internet users by 2018 (if R-Jio’s plans succeed).
Projections get to be wrong. In 2011, it was projected the mobile ad market in China for 2014 would hit $1.1 billion, but in reality, it hit the $7 billion mark! India should prepare itself to see the same growth in the mobile space. The mobile ad spend in India is set to grow from $170 million in 2015 to $942.5 million in 2018. If R-Jio’s vision is any indication of the mobile internet user base, then it is safe to assume by 2018, the mobile ad spend will be a few billion dollars and not just $942.5 million.
Every internet player in India – ecommerce, video, auto, classifieds, education, finance, entertainment, lifestyle, news, and tech – will benefit from this upcoming telecom revolution if they are in the local language space.
With such aggressive plans from R-Jio, India can expect to see a disruption in digital services in the mobile space. Let the digital war begin.
Mukesh Ambani wants to destroy the digital divide in India. Finally, we expect to see the internet inflection point soon in India.
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