You can’t direct the wind but you can adjust the sails, goes the wisdom. Airtel did just that when it solicited interest from phone makers for a co-branded low-cost smartphone. It came just three days after Reliance Jio and Google said, on 10 September, that the launch of the JioPhone Next smartphone is delayed by a few months. They attributed it to incomplete testing and the global semiconductor shortage.
The reports in our Article today, there’s a more to this delay. The inventory shortages would barely produce half the targeted 50 million devices in the coming six months. A whole host of things are not ready, including the Indian language interfaces.
This gives its rivals breathing time but it also puts Jio’s own business targets on a timer. In the year ended March 2020, Jio added an average of 20 million subscribers each quarter, in the following year, this dropped to 7 million. A 65% decline. The JioPhone Next launch was meant to arrest this slide.
With its earlier phone users nearing the end of their 3-year lock-in period, Jio would detest them switching to a non-Jio 4G handset. In fact, retaining its 2G subscribers and up selling them its own 4G services is what has prompted Airtel to announce its co-branded smartphone move. It’s another matter that smartphone makers, who were made to sign an NDA by Airtel and still don’t know much about the plan, saw the telco leak a lot to the business papers. Anyhow, if Airtel gets serious about it, then it’d be following its own African playbook, and not Jio’s.
On the ground, though, Jio has a formidable plan and infra has already appealed to the government to subsidise the 2G-to-4G migration. Telecom executives expect the upcoming elections in Uttar Pradesh to also give a massive push to JioPhone Next's adoption.
It may not be 2016 all over again, but the 2021 smartphone-bundled telecom fight is set for a new round in the consumer market
