Within two years, India\u2019s richest person turned the local mobile-phone market into the world\u2019s biggest consumer of wireless data. But along the way, billionaire Mukesh Ambani laid waste to profits in the overcrowded industry by driving down prices to as low as zero.<\/p>\n
Ambani leads Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. has gone from zero to more than 200 million subscribers, all of them on a nationwide 4G network, since 2016. While the user growth has come at the expense of smaller rivals who\u2019ve merged or quit the market, the thrust into the country\u2019s No. 3 spot for wireless carriers has also ravaged profit at Bharti Airtel Ltd., and Idea Cellular Ltd. The latter has merged with Vodafone Group Plc\u2019s India unit to overtake Bharti as the market\u2019s biggest operator.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Reliance Jio, a unit of Ambani\u2019s energy-to-retail conglomerate Reliance Industries Ltd., has reported two quarters of profit, driven by subscription growth that has continued even after the company began charging for data services. The company is due to report earnings Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Consumers have been the clear winners, as the cost of sending and receiving data wirelessly has plummeted.<\/p>\n
The plunge in prices has led to surge in data traffic to 1.5 billion gigabytes a month last year, according to Amitabh Kant, chief executive officer of NITI Aayog, India\u2019s government policy think tank.<\/p>\n
\u201cMobile data consumption is higher than USA & China put together,\u201d Kant posted on his Twitter account in December 2017.<\/p>\n
While users benefit from declining prices, losses are expected to continue at the country\u2019s big three surviving carriers. Bharti will probably report an 8.1 billion rupee net loss for the three months ended Sept. 30, according to the average of analyst estimates.<\/p>\n
\u201cI see at least another three quarters of losses,\u201d said Rajan Mathews, director general of the industry group. \u201cI don\u2019t think the present tariffs are sustainable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Prior to Jio\u2019s entry into the market, India had more than 10 wireless providers, with the smallest five accounting for about 21 percent and Bharti, the largest, taking up 25 percent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Within two years, India\u2019s richest person turned the local mobile-phone market into the world\u2019s biggest consumer of wireless data. But along the way, billionaire Mukesh Ambani laid waste to profits in the overcrowded industry by driving down prices to as low as zero. Ambani leads Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. has gone from zero to more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44733,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44732"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44734,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44732\/revisions\/44734"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}