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Freetoprofits HowJioMukeshAmbani's$30bnstartupwillmakereturns FactorDaily
Freetoprofits HowJioMukeshAmbani's$30bnstartupwillmakereturns FactorDaily
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A
phones.
lmost a year before he unveiled the Jio Phone this July, Mukesh Ambani had decided that
the way to the wallet of 500 million Indians yet untouched by data was through free 4G
As he told this to a stunned room of top executives, the questions that came up centred around
pro tability of a project that had already soaked up about Rs 150,000 crore in capital.
Ambani was rm. “It’s not about subscribers nor is it about pro tability. All that is a by-product (of
what we will do). First, we need to connect the country’s length and breadth,” he told his
con dants, recalls a company insider who was in the room.
For the executive, it was like deja vu. Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance
Industries, which owns Reliance Jio, had done this before — not once, but twice.
The rst time was 14 years ago when Reliance Infocomm, Ambani’s rst shot at telecom
services, launched Monsoon Hungama. The phenomenon shook the telecom industry and
brought mobile call rates down to 40 paise a minute.
“What is the cheapest cost of communication,” Ambani had asked a group of company people
some months before the July 1, 2003, announcement of Monsoon Hungama, this insider told
FactorDaily.
The Monsoon Hungama connection had two things – a phone, Rs 100 of free talk time – for Rs
501 and a monthly subscription of Rs 200 for the next two years.
Almost overnight, mobile phones changed from a luxury to aunt to a commodity service that
became common. “Even in 2003, MDA had plans to connect farmers, hospitals, schools, colleges
and government and civic bodies on a mobile platform,” the insider says. People inside Reliance
refer to Ambani as MDA, short for Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani.
The second time was when in late 2015 when Ambani had started discussing the price at which
he would launch Reliance Jio. “Free,” was the answer until Jio got a critical mass of subscribers.
When Reliance Jio launched its fourth generation or 4G, high-speed broadband service last year
in September it gave it for free to millions of Indians — free calls, free data and free content.
Fourteen years have gone by but Ambani’s telecom playbook hasn’t changed
(https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/2017/07/21/reliance-deja-vu-the-return-of-the-
monsoon-hungama-offer).
“For him, it is like an un nished dream… Woh toh ho nahi paya na purane wale Reliance mein.
Woh infrastructure develop hone se pehle toh company divide ho gaya. (That couldn’t happen in
the old Reliance. The company got divided before the infrastructure was developed.),” says
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another insider. He is referring to a split of the Relianceempire in 2005 between Ambani and
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younger brother Anil.
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content/uploads/2017/09/Jio_timeline.jpg)
Still, where’s Ambani going to recover Rs 200,000 crore or over $30 billion (that’s the latest
investment gure for the Jio project) from? “They are losing money and they will continue to lose
money,” says a senior executive with an incumbent telecom operator. “Reliance Industries shows
Rs 200,000 crore as additional expenditure… Till the time the management is not satis ed with
the service (and that) Reliance can capitalise on the service, the number on the balance sheet will
not show the true picture of Jio.”
Sure, 500 million smart feature JioPhones at a security deposit of Rs 1,500 each will yield about
Rs 75,000 crore (no one expects a sizeable number of people asking for a refund after three years
of using the phone). But, the till will ring only when customers use Jio to access data services,
apps and content like never before in India. That will decide how the fortunes of Reliance
Industries, valued at over $83 billion, fare in the years to come.
Jio did not reply to a request for interviews or respond to questions sent. This story has been
pieced together with multiple interviews of company insiders, executives working for Jio’s rivals,
its vendors and elsewhere in the ecosystem, analysts, lobbyists, and government o cials. A
substantial number of them wanted to stay anonymous.
Ambani’s pricing is not based on Jio’s number of subscribers it has today (125 million by total
SIMs sold and about 90 million by active users), explains an industry expert who has closely
watched Ambani for many years. “Most companies do pricing based on the current scale of
operations… Ambani’s pricing is based on what scale will Jio achieve ve years down the line,” he
says.
Ambani is betting on a large number of data users. Costs will be driven down with economies of
scale. “Based on the assumption that he will have an unprecedented scale, he has already
lowered his price… He is asking users to pay the amount he would charge with two to three times
of Reliance Jio’s current scale,” the expert says.
Jio’s growth is funded by the money Reliance Industries makes from other businesses, especially
its cash cow energy business. Downstream chemical margins and oil prices, which have
outperformed Asian gas prices, have made it comfortable for Reliance to pump in money into Jio.
The executive with the incumbent telecom operator says, “Eventually the oil business will go
down. Look at the signs – automobiles is moving towards electric vehicles… What will Reliance’s
new business be? That is why Mukesh Ambani is creating an alternate business in telecom.”
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Globally, experts believe “data is the new oil (https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/07/data-new-
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(/)is bankrolling his data play.
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oil-digital-economy/)”. Ambani’s presence in oil “We see the potential
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for 2017-18 earnings to rise by 3% more than offsetting the impact from the free telecom offer,”
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writes Parag Gupta of Morgan Stanley in his research report on the company ‘Monetization –
Steady but Slow’.
“These users have never used Google, YouTube, Net ix or even Whatsapp,” says Kunal Bajaj,
angel investor and independent telecom consultant. For everything Jio has an app, be it health,
news, magazines, television, movies, music, connected car, chat, ecommerce or mobile
payments.
“It’s like China, where there is a huge dominance of local brands in the internet business. Once
these rst-time users take the Reliance Jio connection of the bundled phone, they might end up
consuming services on Jio’s apps,” Bajaj added. Rather than heading out to others.
With its free offering, Jio managed to gather a pool of customers from both the small and
incumbent players, which is now a critical user base. “It is like a walled garden,” says the
executive with the competing telecom operator. “They are hoping that all the users will stay inside
the Reliance ecosystem.”
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If Ambani pulls this off, Reliance Jio will be the rst telecom operator to be a successful content
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company. It won’t have any local or international equivalent.
The content business is ruled by
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companies such Google, Facebook, Net ix, Hostar, among others, which Reliance Jio will have to
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compete with.
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brief from Ambani was simple: “Think
Jyotindra Thacker heads the app business unit at Jio. His
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about the last man standing. Think about the community. Think what the villager needs to Podcasts (https://factordaily.com/podcasts/)
consume.”
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Entertainment was the obvious choice. India thrives on Bollywood. Then came news, followed by
chat.
About 85% to 90% of tra c on Jio is for entertainment. “Jio TV is a replica of Tata Sky and more.
There are 400 channels on its platform… all real time, and on mobile,” says a third Jio insider.
Serials and news on channels such Zee and Sab TV are most watched.
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Back in 2014, Ambani realised that the apps Indians would consumer would not all be
international apps. Internally, he emphasised on building apps that were important for Indians. “In
2013, he started giving directions of where it was heading,” says the third insider.
The apps were the fourth pillar of the Jio strategy, the other three being: a rich data ready
network; an ecosystem of devices; and cheap and fewer data plans aimed at video consumption.
The bet on videos is deliberate: about 75% of data on the Jio network is consumed watching
videos.
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In January, Jio started its health app that will compete
with companies like Practo and Lybrate. It
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is also in discussions with NCERT, the government bodythat publishes school textbooks, and a
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couple of education startups like ExtraMarks to offer online courses to kids from Class 1 to Class
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12.
The gameplan is to eventually to charge for content, no matter how di cult that may be. “All this
is for free now… Once people are used to consuming the content, in the months to come there will
be some kind of subscription money,” says the third insider.
Rivals insist Jio’s content bet will come to naught. “Content is not a big advantage… It doesn’t
mean that you own the ecosystem. There will always be others with better content out there,”
says another executive of an incumbent telecom operator.
Says an analyst who doesn’t want to be named: “About 20% of data consumption happens on
apps that are Jio’s. Rest of the data is being used on third-party applications like YouTube and
Hotstar.” This could not be independently con rmed with Jio executives or others around the
company.
Data consumption of 20% on in-house apps is considered a very good number. It is 2-3% for other
telecom operators. Once other applications gain traction, data on Jio’s own apps will rise, expect
insiders.
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next- scal-Sunil-Mittal.html), said that though(/)
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away most of the expenses.
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Seventeen months after Mittal’s statement Reliance Jio launched an all-4G network. On
December 1, 2017, Ambani said: “On an average, a Jio customer is using 25 times more data than
the average Indian broadband user.” By February, it was obvious that Reliance had a gusher on its
hands — this time, one of data. “Today, India is the number one country in the world for mobile
data usage. Jio users consume nearly as much mobile data as the entire United States of
America… And nearly 50% more mobile data than all of China,” Ambani said at an event.
Soon enough Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular made voice calls free and came out with bundled
data packs. “Incumbents already had that reach. They have matched the price,” said the rst
incumbent executive quoted earlier. “But they (Jio) destroyed the smaller players.”
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Between August 2016, the month before Jio stepped into the market, and June 2017, Aircel, Tata
Teleservices, Reliance Communication, and Telenor lost nearly six percentage points in market
share — about three- fths of 10.39% share that Jio had, per data
(http://www.trai.gov.in/sites/default/ les/Press%20Release%20No.113_Eng.pdf) from the
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).
The bloody price war showed on Airtel’s books, too. Its net pro ts dropped from Rs 1,460.7 crore
in the quarter to September 2016 to Rs 367.3 crore in June 2017 ending quarter.
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The pain may continue. “(The) telecom sector revenuescould be impacted by positive 5% to
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negative 8% with a downward bias across various scenarios
of conversions to the plans Podcasts (https://factordaily.com/podcasts/)
introduced by Jio as well as incumbents,” writes Saurabh Handa, analyst with Citi Research in a
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report titled Jio: Proving the Naysayers Wrong.
Ambani couldn’t have disrupted the industry without two things — a network that would be ultra-
low cost to operate and affordable mobile phones.
Kiran Thomas was the rst employee of Reliance Jio. He had worked with Ambani in Reliance
Communication and had later joined Reliance Retail on Mukesh’s split with brother Anil.
Ambani gave Thomas the job of setting up the IT systems and the network infrastructure with a
four-point brief:
2. The towers shouldn’t look ugly and go with the city’s landscape. So, in
XLRI the towers looked like palm trees, in Chandigarh they were made
like tulip structures, and in other places like water tanks.
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3. It should be multi-utility. So, some of them
have street lamps and
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surveillance cameras mounted.
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4. Try and create process that would reduce time and wastage.
Already more than 100,000 towers have been set up. “In the next phase there will be a total of 1.5
lakh towers, which will cover 90% of the population,” said the third insider. At present Jio covers
80% of India’s population.
The radio towers were low cost, too. The energy consumption is less than a kilowatt, comparable
to three kilowatt on legacy towers. Executives FactorDaily spoke with said that the electronics are
designed in such a manner that the towers can take extreme temperatures without air
conditioning.
Then the network was also built on IP-based platform, which further helps in reducing the cost.
The IP-based network the cost of servicing data and calls is as low as, say, eight paise for a one-
minute voice call. For the incumbents the cost is 30 paise but this includes the contentious
interconnection usage charge (IUC, which is what one operator pays another to land a call).
Jio claims the IUC of 14 paise for a call minute is based on legacy equipment costs and way too
high. Incumbents hotly contest that.
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FactorDaily reviewed a presentation made by Reliance Jio to the government, in which Jio said
that companies (like Airtel, Vodafone and Idea) do not want to reduce the IUC because it is a
revenue earner. It said that in the last seven to eight years incumbents have not invested in legacy
networks, which was for voice calls only, cost of which has already been recovered. The recent
investments have been in building a data network for 3G and 4G. On these networks the IUC
should be much lower, Jio argues.
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If TRAI indeed cuts the IUC, as the industry expects, theimpact on incumbent bottomlines could
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be painful. Operating pro ts of Airtel and Idea may shrink 7% to 9%, estimates Podcasts (https://factordaily.com/podcasts/)
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whammy-if-Trai-cuts-interconnection.html) Mint.
Such an outcome would favour Jio, which according to a senior executive, has just 5% of its
network utilisation on voice. For incumbents, the comparable number is about 50% to 60%.
Incumbents beg to differ. “We have to run three networks — 2G, 3G and 4G… They are bound to
have that because of 600 million 2G users. One cannot have a complete IP-based network,” says
the rst executive with an incumbent operator.
Analysts believe Jio is set to save money on calls. “We expect IUC will likely be revised down
modestly in the upcoming review. Our sensitivity suggests Jio gets over Rs 25 to 30 savings per
customer for a reduction in IUC from 14 paise to 8 paise, which it could pass to customers in the
form of lower prices,” writes Navin Killa of UBS in a report.
Jio’s free data, content and devices are expected to delay its pro tability — the latest being the
JioPhone. Ambani has said that Jio’s contract manufacturers, including Foxconn and Flextronics,
will make ve million of these phones every week.
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Most of these phones will be lapped up by the millions shifting from feature phones straight to
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4G, being swept into it by the data tsunami triggered byJio and incumbent operators reacting to
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it. Ask phone maker veteran and Micromax co-founder Rahul Sharma about the jump from 2G to
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4G. He said demand for 3G phones has fallen off the cliff. “People in places like Jammu were
asking for 4G devices. We had to recalibrate our strategy,” he said.
The JioPhone has been a year in the making. “Almost a year ago, executives at Reliance Jio
started working on this phone,” says the rst insider. “We are talking to a large number of vendors
for chips including Qualcomm, MediaTek, and others.”
There are also special plans for the JioPhone user: Rs 23, Rs 53 and Rs 153, valid for two days,
one week and 28 days, respectively, and with it comes half GB of data every day, and zero call
charges.
Analysts feel that Ambani’s pricing might be steep for a feature phone user. “We believe
consumers that buy a Rs 1,500 phone and pay Rs 164 per month (Rs153 for 28 days) are two
mutually exclusive sets. In our view, ARPU for most feature phone users in India is less than Rs
100,” writes Manish Adukia, analyst with Goldman Sachs in a report on the JioPhone. (ARPU is
short for average revenue per user a month.)
Adukia buttresses his argument with information from Vodafone India that shows 70% of feature
phone users have an ARPU of less Rs 50.
But there may be a small uptick in ARPU for the industry that may indicate more spending by
customers on their phone bills since Jio launched. TRAI data shows that prepaid ARPU in India
climbed to Rs 112 in July 2017, nearly 9% more than the Rs 103 it was before Jio launched.
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The JioPhone, which may need price revisions in future for a better product-market t, has its
own back story. A Rs 1,500 phone with 4G capabilities was unheard off till two years ago. Pankaj
Pawar, part of Ambani’s core Jio team, held discussions with mobile phone makers as early as
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2013-14 to bring out devices at lower price points.
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“We were working with various OEMs,” the third insider says. “They were reluctant. They said that
there weren’t enough phones, not enough connections… We started testing every 4G device on
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our network and set up a small lab.”
None of the handset makers were ready to blink. Team Ambani knew that Jio was a non-starter at
the market prices for 4G phones.
So, in 2015, Reliance brought LYF to the market, a cheap 4G phone starting at Rs 3,000. Within a
couple of quarters, it was among the top ve handset brands in the country alongside Samsung
and Micromax.
That experience evidently helped. The JioPhone has come more than a year after LYF was
launched.
The quarters ahead will show if Jio will deliver returns to justify its $31.3 billion investment.
Morgan Stanley estimates Jio will spend $2 billion a quarter for the rest of 2017-18 before capital
expenditure slows down next nancial year. It also estimates that if Jio follows on its current
trajectory, it will have 226 million users by 2021 at an ARPU of Rs 223 (up from Rs 175 now).
At that stage, Morgan Stanley says Jio will start making returns to Reliance Industries’ 2.5 million
shareholders, including Ambani — $382 million in net pro t with free cash ow of $1.57 billion.
However, Jio will have to buy more spectrum in the coming months, especially in the 700 MHz
band. Morgan Stanley’s worst case scenario assumes Jio’s spending goes up and ARPU not
keeping pace (Rs 181 over 204 million customers). If that happens, predicts the analyst rm, Jio’s
losses will continue ($1.7 billion in 2021).
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The Jio story has just begun. The difference in Ambani’s second coming into the telecom and
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digital world is that there isn’t a hard stop like(/)
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when he had to step away from Reliance
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Infocomm.
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The story was updated at 4:50pm on October 23, 2017 to correct typos.
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a comment...
Aryan Tripathi
Good and detailed analysis. One thing to take care is proof reading, there are crazy amount of mistakes in the whole article.
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Gopan Joshi
Nice write up!
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Vineet Kumar
Nice article however there is one minor error at one place where is menioned 1, Dec'17 please correct the date
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