by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Buzz
New Delhi : After a successful run with Jio which decimated the rival telecom players and has empowered 28 crore users in India till date, Reliance Industries Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani now wants to become India’s first Internet tycoon, according to The Economist.
“With his service Jio, he has upended Indian telecoms and changed his country. Now he wants to go further and become Indian Jeff Bezos or Jack Ma, using Jio as a launch pad,” said The Economist in its latest January 26 edition.
India’s mobile phone customer base reached 1.17 billion in November last year, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). The broadband user base crossed 500 million users and nearly 97 per cent of them are on wireless connections.
Jio alone has created a mega base of 28 crore subscribers with ultra-cheap data plans.
“His ambition to become a tech tycoon goes beyond making money in telecoms. RIL has already invested in content creation, and has bought rights to distribute cricket matches and Disney films on its ‘Jio TV’ platform,” added the report.
Addressing the “Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit 2019” on January 18, Mukesh Ambani announced that Reliance would double its investment and employment numbers over the next decade.
Urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi to lead a fight against “data colonisation,” he said Reliance Jio and Reliance Retail would soon launch a new commerce platform for small retailers — a mega mission which will first be launched in Gujarat and then across the country.
Reliance Jio Infocomm last week reported a 65 per cent increase in its standalone net profit for the October-December 2018 period.
Its standalone net profit stood at Rs 831 crore in the third quarter of the financial year 2018-19, against Rs 504 crore reported in October-December 2017-18.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Taponeel Mukherjee,
News that Reliance Jio has raised 53.5 billion Japanese yen (approximately Rs 3,251 crore) in Samurai loans is proof that as the telecom sector in India evolves, not only is Reliance Jio pushing for changes on how businesses are run, but it is also innovating on the capital structure front. There are important takeaways for the infrastructure sector from this Samurai loan.
Tapping into Japanese investors provides infrastructure businesses in India with an opportunity to access a large pool of capital that is looking for returns in a low interest rate environment. While an Indo-Japan collaboration through Japanese technology transfers is extremely beneficial, capital transfers through Samurai loan-type transactions is an area that deserves equal attention.
Reliance Jio’s Samurai loan allows it to borrow in a relatively low interest rate currency such as the yen and eventually swap the yen back into rupees to fund investments at home. Even factoring in for hedging costs, such transactions allow companies to borrow cheaper than a similar loan in India. Most importantly, it opens up a large pool of capital in Japanese institutions and retail investors.
To get an idea of why Japanese investors, who have traditionally invested largely in Japanese government bonds and equities, might want to start looking at offshore markets such as India, one needs to understand the policy changes and macro-economic conditions in that country, especially over the last few years. “Abenomics”, extensive monetary easing by the Bank of Japan and extremely low interest rates have all contributed to the changing macro-dynamics.
The size of assets with Japanese investors is significant, with institutions such as Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) having a total of 162.6 trillion yen of assets under management in December 2017. This makes GPIF the single-largest pension fund manager in the world. In addition, there is a structural shift underway in organisations such as the GPIF through a series of reforms initiated in 2014 — a shift that has seen the investment focus move towards international equities, bonds and alternative assets.
It is important for India to attract a part of this reallocated capital not just from GPIF but other large Japanese financial institutions. The Reliance Jio deal has shown that there is healthy appetite amongst Japanese investors for Indian businesses that have robust models.
To further understand why Japanese investors would have an interest in Indian debt-like investments one needs to look at data at an individual level. According to the annual survey by the Central Council for Financial Services Information, a body administered by the Bank of Japan, 54.1 percent of Japanese household financial assets are held in savings and bank deposits, with only 8.9 percent held in stocks.
When one considers Japan’s ageing population, one realises that the demand for fixed coupon paying assets such as bank deposits will only increase in the country. So, even if the average household does allocate more towards equities than they currently do, the demand for fixed income assets will still remain high as the population ages further. A three-year term deposit earns anything between 1 and 10 basis points in Japan.
This combination of an ageing population and high demand for fixed income assets in a low interest rate country shows us why there is demand for high quality interest paying investments in Japan. The fact that the total size of the financial assets held by Japanese households stood at $16 trillion at the end of June 2017, as per Bank of Japan data, gives us an idea of both the conundrum facing Japanese policymakers and the opportunity for Indian infrastructure businesses. To put $16 trillion in perspective: It is approximately seven times India’s GDP.
While Japanese capital is available, it is also discerning. Hence companies need to create robust business models, stable cash flow profiles and corporate governance standards that will satisfy Japanese investors. Over the next two decades, as India looks to create world class infrastructure, structures such as Samurai loans will be needed. As the infrastructure sector gradually recovers, capital structure innovation through channelling Japanese capital into attractive investment opportunities in the years to come will be a must.
(Taponeel Mukherjee heads Development Tracks, an infrastructure advisory firm. Views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at taponeel.mukherjee@development-tracks.com or @Taponeel on Twitter)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business Summit, Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Events, Marketing Basics, Markets, Technology
Mumbai : Reliance Jio is committed to contribute and use Open Source technologies to better its consumer experience, the company’s Director and Board Member Akash Ambani said here on Friday.
“Open Source is very important for Jio – being both a contributor and utilising it for our business needs. Every day people when people use a LYF device, Jio Phone or Jio Application – their lives are enriched through the technologies enabled with Open source,” Ambani said during his inaugural speech at the India Digital Open Summit.
The summit is taking place at Reliance Corporate Park and Reliance Jio is a key partner.
“Our chairman (Mukesh Ambani) believes that India is on the path to be a technology innovation leader and a technology superpower, and Open Source community will be a driving force of this,” he said.
Saying that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming a mainstream in all of our lives with recent activities, Ambani added: “In India, AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality) is still in the initial stages of adoption, but market will register a compounded annual growth rate of more than 50 percent in the next five years.”
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Business Summit, Events, Large Enterprise
Mukesh Ambani
Kolkata : Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani on Tuesday said the Jio network will cover 100 per cent of West Bengal’s population by December 2018 and also committed over Rs 5,000 crore of investments in the state for non-Jio businesses in the next three years.
Addressing the Bengal Global Business Summit here, Ambani said the company will set up an electronics manufacturing facility in the state.
“Our current Jio network covers 1,000 towns and nearly 39,000 villages in the state. Jio will reach 100 per cent of West Bengal’s population by December 2018. Every last village will be covered by 4G technology. We are embarking on an ambitious project of connecting Bengal with optical fibre,” he said.
According to him, Jio will connect every education institution and hospital in the state by December 2019.
The group will launch the digital service centre in five districts of the state, with the immediate effect of facilitating digital entrepreneurs.
He promised to set up an electronics manufacturing facility in the state.
Ambani said the group has prioritised the availability of 4G Jio phone in the state with effective zero cost.
“We are committing to invest Rs 5,000 crore in non-Jio businesses in Bengal in the next three years,” he said.
Applauding the West Bengal government’s economic activities and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Ambani said: “Didi, under your leadership, Bengal is becoming the best Bengal.”
Ambani said he attended the second edition of the business summit in 2015. “Reliance had committed an investment of Rs 4,500 crore in Bengal…We have invested and committed not just Rs 4,500 crore but we have completed an investment of over Rs 15,000 crore in the last two years.”
He said the company was able to make the investments as the state created a “friendly” climate and enabling policy and infrastructure.
He said the company would focus on digital space.
Jio will set up a Chair in the name of Physicist Satyendra Nath Bose in a prestigious institution in West Bengal, he said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Corporate, Corporate Reports, Large Enterprise, Markets, Technology
New Delhi : Riding on the Jio wave, 2018 will see India gradually move away from being a developing 4G country, overcoming the hiccups necessary to become a full-grown 4G power, a new report said on Friday.
London-based OpenSignal, which specialises in crowdsourced wireless coverage mapping all over the world, said that Jio’s market entry kicked off an intense price war in the telecom scene in India, resulting in offerings of cheaper LTE services from all operators, driving more consumers to 4G than ever before
“The trend will continue next year. Whether Jio remains the huge dominant driver in 4G growth remains to be seen. After a year of free and steeply discounted data pricing, Jio may make 2018 the year it raises prices. That could level the playing field for India’s operators,” said Andrea Toth from OpenSignal.
“Jio’s widespread 4G access, along with its at-first free and later heavily discounted data and voice plans, quickly won the hearts — and wallets — of more than 100 million mobile users across the country,” Toth added.
India’s current mobile data subscriber penetration stands at 40 per cent which is expected to double to 80 per cent by 2022, according to Crisil’s predictions.
“LTE services have taken the leading role in the unprecedented increase of data users in the past year, in large part thanks to Jio,” the report said.
During the quarter ending June 2017, total data usage stood at over 4.2 million terabytes, out of which 4G data accounted for 3.9 million TBs, according to TRAI data.
“LTE availability in India is remarkable. The users were able to connect to an LTE signal over 84 per cent of the time — a rise of over 10 percentage points from a year earlier. This places India ahead of more established countries in the 4G landscape such as Sweden, Taiwan, Switzerland or the UK,” Toth noted.
Barely six months in the market this year, Jio secured its lead in the 4G availability race, “with users able to access its LTE signals 91.6 per cent of the time,” according to an earlier OpenSignal national report published in April this year.
No other mobile operator managed to score higher than 60 per cent in these tests.
“Six months later, we saw significant improvements in availability across all major operators but those improvements weren’t enough to close the gap with Jio, which was able to provide an LTE signal at a jaw-dropping 95.6 per cent of the time in the same test period,” Toth informed.
While LTE availability saw a meteoric rise, the same cannot be said of 4G speeds.
“In our latest State of LTE report, India occupied the lowest spot among the 77 countries we examined, with average download speeds of 6.1 Mbps, over 10 Mbps lower than the global average,” the report said.
As 4G adoption rose, and more and more consumers subscribed to 4G services, the networks experienced congestion, resulting in a decrease in average download speeds across the board.
With operators rolling out low-cost data plans to grow their consumer bases, and manufacturers launching affordable 4G smartphones enabling a greater slice of the population to get connected, OpenSignal expects 4G availability to maintain its rising trajectory across the country.
—IANS
