Jio rolls out new feature phone offers

Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd has launched new offers for feature phone users that the company claimed will help the Mukesh Ambani-led telecom operator closer to its aim of 2G-free India, the company said on Friday.

The telco will offer a JioPhone device, unlimited voice calls and 2GB data a month for two years at a price of ₹1,999. The offer will be available across all Jio and Reliance Retail stores starting 1 March, the company said.

For similar benefits, Jio claimed, customers pay more than twice the amount on other networks. It claimed to have upgraded over 100 million users to JioPhone and said the country still has 300 million mobile subscribers “trapped in the 2G era”.

Reliance Jio, which started operations in September 2016, provides only 4G wireless service. Existing JioPhone users can also avail of the offers at ₹749 with a validity of one year. They will get unlimited voice calls and 2GB of data per month, Jio said.

The JioPhone offers could be the telco’s strategy to capture market share by signing up 2G/3G customers on other networks. Though Jio is India’s largest telco by market share, its net subscriber addition has been on a decline. It added only 478,917 users in December versus rival Bharti Airtel Ltd’s addition of 4.1 million.

Vodafone Idea Ltd (Vi) has been losing millions of 2G customers every month. It lost 5.7 million subscribers in December alone, the highest since March. With this, the telecom operator has lost 34.9 million customers during April-December.

According to the company data, Vi had 269.8 million subscribers as of 31 December, down from 271.8 million in the previous quarter. It had 109.7 million 4G users in Q3 versus 106.1 million in the September quarter.