Reliance Jio recently announced a new JioPhone 2021 bundle offer for users. There are three plans which the users can choose from. The first plan comes for Rs 1,999 for two years, and it provides the user with 2GB of data per month and unlimited voice calling. The second plan for Rs 1,499 comes for 1-year, and the existing users can get the bundled offer for a special price of Rs 749/year. While these may seem like attractive prices, it won’t really impact the growth of other telcos much, believes Goldman Sachs.
Users Might Continue Using 2G and Feature Phones Instead of Shifting to Jio’s 4G
The JioPhone 2021 offer from Reliance Jio is expected to have a limited impact on the growth of other telcos such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea (Vi). Analysts believe that Vi is more prone to losing subscribers itself than because of Jio’s new bundled offer. Another reason the analysts cited was that feature phone users can still stay with the 2G network of Airtel and Vi. People who don’t want to shift to Jio’s ‘4G only network’ won’t have any interest in the offer launched by Jio. Additionally, even if there are any problems created by the offer for the growth of Airtel, the telco would offset it by gaining new users at the cost of Vi’s subscribers. It is worth noting that the original JioPhone offer is slated to end this year, and the new JioPhone 2021 offer is aimed to retain customers. Jio is expected to retain most of the JioPhone users, if not all. Further, the new JioPhone 2021 offer indicates that the telco’s worries about the supply chain for the feature phone are over or subsided for the time being. However, in a note, Edelweiss Securities said that Jio’s feature phone offerings would dilute its average revenue per user (ARPU). On the other hand, J M Financial has said that Jio’s ARPU is slated to grow steadily because of the increased demand for data and smartphones.
