Today at the 40th Annual General meeting, Mukesh Ambani, Chairman Reliance Industries limited, launched its long-rumoredfeature phone JioPhone. The developing news is that Jio is in talks with India handset players Intex and Micromax to manufacture its feature phones going forward.
Ishita Bansal, Product head –Mobile, Intex said to The Mobile Indian, “We are in talks with Jio for manufacturing 4G ready features phones but as of now nothing has been formalised.” When we reached out to Micromax for their side of the story, they said, “We do have discussions with Jio regularly for one thing or the other.” They didn’t comment on the feature phone specifically.
Sources familiar with the development at Jio said to The Mobile Indian, “Reliance is in advance stage of talks with Intex and Micromax for 4G feature phones but overall it is still in the discussion stage.”
Our source further said, “ Jio is planning to tie up Indian handset brands for 4G feature phones and may be by October – November time frame we might hear some announcement. Right now Jio’s focus is on hard negotiations for feature phones so that they can extract the best out of the handset players without much change in the price.”
Reliance Jio has set an ambitious target of migrating 50 million Indian 2G feature phone users to 4G enable feature phone. The company plans to make 50,00,000 JioPhone available in the market per week from September and to do so it would definitely need the support of handset players like Intex and Micromax. The task it has taken on its hand it mammoth.
Reports have suggested that for the 15 August launch Jio is ready with around 20 million units but going forward partnershipshave to in place to get the maximum reach. It is rumoured that the first batch of JioPhones has been procured from Chinese OEMs Zhejiang Techain Electronics and Megaphone.