The annual general meeting (AGM) of Reliance Industries (RIL) to be held next Thursday could give clarity on pricing, features and tariffs of Jio-Google phones.
At the company’s AGM last year, Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director, RIL, had announced that Google would partner with Jio to design an operating system to bring out an affordable entry-level smartphone, which Ambani said was a step in making India “2G-mukt”.
Google LLC had also invested Rs 33,737 crore or $4.5 billion to pick up a 7.73% stake in Reliance’s digital arm Jio Platforms. The US tech giant had said it will be investing Rs 75,000 crore or $10 billion into India via equity infusion and partnerships over the next 5-7 years. The investment in Jio had covered almost half of its commitment through Google for the India Digitization Fund of $10 billion.
However, according to analysts, phones are unlikely to be available immediately. “In our view, the phones are unlikely to be available for the next two months at least,” analysts at BofA Securities said in a report.
Further, clarity on JioMart and other online commerce businesses along with the JioMart-WhatsApp integration is also expected to be announced at the AGM. There could also be more clarity on “incremental information on the road map to net carbon zero and ESG with focus on clean/renewable energy and thoughts on Made in India 5G, digital and content strategy”, analysts said.
It is also expected that RIL may introduce a new affordable laptop to tap into the massive demand for work from home machines. “We don’t consider this to be material news from a stock perspective even if the pricing is aggressive,” BofA analysts said.
In its latest annual report, RIL highlighted that Jio is accelerating the rollout of digital platforms and has indigenously developed the next-generation 5G stack. Qualcomm and Jio successfully tested 5G solutions in India, achieving the 1 GBPS milestone on the Jio 5G solution, it said. RIL also said that Jio has built sufficient network capacity for the next 300 million mobile broadband subscribers, over 50 million fibre homes and 50 million micro, small and medium businesses.
In FY21, Jio Platforms completed fundraising of Rs 1,52,056 crore across 13 global marquee investors, which include Google and Facebook, among others.
