Reliance Jio and it's first ever online-only Annual General Meeting
Reliance
Jio had its first ever online-only Annual General Meeting on July 15, 2020.
The meeting started with a bang – massive investment by Google. It appears there is
a never-ending queue of investors for buying shares of Reliance Jio. Over the
past few months, Reliance Jio has been able to raise a huge amount from various
investors, Facebook and Google buying 9.99% and 7.7% stake in the company
respectively.
 |
Investments in Reliance |
Now,
Google has been in talks since it announced to invest $10 billion in India as
India Digitization Fund and it has decided to invest a part of it in Reliance
Jio. Mukesh Ambani confirmed Google will invest an amount of 33,737 crores i.e.
7.7% stake in Jio Platforms and everyone lauded him for delivering another
masterstroke.
Well,
that's not it!!
Mukesh
Ambani announced that Jio has designed and developed a complete 5G solution
from scratch that will enable Reliance to launch a world-class 5G service in
India.
Now
let’s diverge a little bit to know about this “Made in India” 5G solution!
As
Ambani talked on PM’s AatmaNirbhar Bharat, he emphasized that Reliance will
work with other companies to promote “Made in India”.
He
said that company has been focused to develop homegrown 5G products &
solutions in India. This Made in India technology can be deployed and launched
in 1 year once the spectrum is available.
Now
what is the benefit of 5G over the incumbent 4G and why is it going to take 1 year??
As
everyone knows, 5G is supposed to be providing increased speed and latency.
Latency is how fast your network can communicate which is ~50 milliseconds for
4G. This will reduce by 5 times on upgrading to 5G to ~10 milliseconds.
5G
spectrum on its own has 3 bands i.e. low, medium, and high which provides
higher speed as we move up the band. It
cannot be so easy, so what’s the catch? As
you move up within the 5G band, the speed may improve but network coverage
reduces, i.e. in high band speed is maximum but it has extremely limited
network coverage. To solve this issue, infrastructure is to be developed i.e.,
numerous towers need to be installed for better coverage.Where
does India stand?? Lab
trials have been completed by telecom service providers and their equipment
vendors. These service providers have tied up with equipment makers like Nokia,
Ericsson, etc. for the deployment of 5G networks. But
field trials have not been done, which were supposed to be completed by 2019,
but due to the deteriorating condition of the telecom sector, the Department of
Telecommunications has not yet allotted the spectrum. So,
Jio now claims that it will provide an end to end 5G solution, but how? Among
the long list of investors, Jio has 4 strategic investors i.e., Facebook,
Intel, Qualcomm, and Google. With these investors, Jio will be able to provide
a successful end to end solutions. Jio
is the only company in the world to have both Facebook and Google as its
strategic investors. It is partnering with Google to build an operating system
at a low cost in India so that it's affordable to millions of Indians who are
still currently using a 2G feature phone.If
Jio completes field trials as well, it can provide 5G solutions worldwide as
well and also compete with Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE, etc. The
next big thing for the meeting was about another strategic investment from
Facebook. Mukesh Ambani emphasized that Jio Mart launched in January 2020,
which aims to link producers, traders, small merchants, consumer brands, and
consumers will be working together with WhatsApp to create more growth
opportunities. Facebook and Jio’s partnership aims to help Jio Mart by using
WhatsApp’s business app to help small business reach their customers easily. Also,
WhatsApp Pay and Jio Money can integrate to provide a hassle-free experience to
customers for their payments. Few
other major announcements included that Reliance has become a net debt-free
company 1 year ahead of its schedule. Along
with this, Mukesh Ambani announced that Reliance has been ranked among the
world’s 60 largest companies by market capitalization. The
company will try to achieve the net Carbon Zero target by 2035 by adopting a
cleaner, sustainable, and planet-friendly model. Reliance has also approached
NCLT with its proposal to spin off the Oil-to-Chemical business into a separate
subsidiary. Reliance
also announced Jio Glass as well as Jio TV+ launch. Jio Tv+ will be a content
aggregator that would feature aggregated content from various platforms such as
Amazon Prime, Disney + Hotstar, Voot, Netflix, Zee5, JioCinema, etc. As
evident from the meeting, Mukesh Ambani talked of big plans for telecom,
retail, and oil gas verticals. The company has been doing so well, since the
launch of Jio. Now strategic investments from companies like Google and
Facebook is cherry on the top. Reliance has single-handedly altered the
digital landscape of the country and it’s a wait and watch, how it’s going to
shape it for the years to come.
5G
spectrum on its own has 3 bands i.e. low, medium, and high which provides
higher speed as we move up the band.
Comments
Post a Comment