With over 52 million customers taking Jio’s free voice and data since its launch on September 4, Reliance Industries Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani, on Thursday, announced ‘Jio Happy New Year Offer’ of free data, voice, video and applications till March 31 for new users joining from December 4 as well as the existing ones. Besides, Ambani also announced a rollout of ‘Jio Money Merchant Solutions’, a mobile payment application for enabling digital payment for small merchants at their various points of transactions and a service to home delivery of Reliance Jio SIM cards was also announced.
The move comes at time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is making his effort for digital push across India after his bold move of demonetisation on November 8. “Jio has become the fastest growing technology company, not only in India, but in the history of the world! In the first three months since its birth, Jio has grown faster than Facebook, WhatsApp or Skype,” Ambani said.
Jio has crossed 50 million customers in first 83 days (user base now is over 52 million).
“Starting 4th of December, 2016, every new Jio user will get Jio’s data, voice, video and the full bouquet of Jio applications and content, absolutely free till March 31, 2017,” he said, adding that the benefit will also be extended to the existing users.
Following the big ticket offer for its customers, stocks of its rival telecom companies tumbled as much as 6 per cent. Idea Cellular, Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications stock witnessed heavy selling pressure. At the end of Thursday’s trading on BSE, Idea Cellular was down 5.93 per cent at Rs 72.95, while Bharti Airtel settled at Rs 319.10, down 1.66 per cent. Reliance Communications also closed at Rs 35.75, down 5.05 per cent.
As far as Jio’s plan is concerned, it will come with a Fair Usage Policy (FUP) which will cap data for Reliance Jio customers at around 1 GB per day. Ambani, who had more than a decade ago left the telecom business to younger brother Anil when the Reliance empire their father had created was split, formally re-entered the sector in September, offering free voice call for life and free data till December 31. After that, Reliance Jio Infocomm ltd was to offer data for Rs 50 per GB and a monthly plan for as low as Rs 149.
Justifying the change in FUP, he said 20 per cent of users consuming disproportionately high amount of data, leading to congestion in network. “During this period, Jio customers will also be able to test-drive Jio’s digital recharge and billing experience, especially using the JioMoney wallet,” he said.
Ambani, whose company had a bitter war of words with dominant incumbent telecom operators like Bharti Airtel over providing points of interconnection, said lack of support from existing operators had resulted in nearly 900 crore voice calls to other networks being blocked. “The benefits of Jio’s superior voice technology have been denied to Indian customers due to such anti-competitive behaviour of incumbent operators,” he said, adding that because of intervention of authorities, the call block rate has come down to nearly 20 per cent as of on Wednesday from over 90 per cent.