Reliance Industries, which has agreed to pick up a 95% stake in Infotel Broadband, the only company to win a nationwide licence in the recently-concluded broadband wireless auction (BWA), will follow an asset light and partnership heavy approach in telecom, chairman Mukesh Ambani told shareholders at the company?s annual general meeting in Mumbai on Friday.
This means that the company will forge partnerships with a host of service operators, technology providers and device manufacturers, thus underlining a collaborative approach against the disruptive one followed some eight years back when it entered the mobile telephony on the CDMA platform. ?We will collaborate with strategic partners, such as service providers, infrastructure providers, device manufacturers and other participants in the ecosystem,? Ambani said.
To seed this ecosystem, RIL plans to set up a wireless innovation centre in Mumbai. This platform will be at the core of an infocomm ecosystem where content creators, application developers and global technology players can come together to deliver unparalleled customer value experience.
Analysts see the proposed centre to be on the lines of the sprawling knowledge city, Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City (DAKC), which Mukesh built to house the network centre and other operations of the then Reliance Infocomm. The DAKC now fucntions as the operating centre of Reliance Communications (RComm), which is run by younger brother Anil Ambani.
If anybody was expecting that Mukesh would announce any strategic partnership with RComm either by picking up stakes in it or its tower arm, Reliance Infratel, then they were clearly disappointed with no such announcement coming.
As if wanting to start from the point he left in his telecom venture, Mukesh said, ?Much has changed in these eight years since Reliance first ventured into the infocomm space with 2G CDMA-based mobile services. From less than 5 million mobile users in 2001, India, at present, has grown to nearly 600 million mobile users, and continues to add close to 20 million customers every month?.
Lamenting how India could not keep pace with communication technologies in the broadband space, Mukesh said, ?Unfortunately, during these years, India has not kept pace with the world in terms of more advanced communication technologies. Today, India has less than 1% market penetration while developed nations have over 60% penetration. Meanwhile, China has a rapidly growing market of over 130 million broadband users?. Mukesh said the information revolution, powered by Internet, has created a global expressway of content, information, knowledge and services.