I was reading an interesting
article about the data usage across different service providers including
Reliance Jio. According
the published report in Business standard , Most of the incumbents Mobile
service provider based user at an average consume less than 1 GB data ( approximately
0.8 GB) per month whereas recently launched Reliance Jio trial userbase of
7 million showed exceptionally good result on data download Reliance Jio trial
user base is consuming around 19.2 GB per month. Isn't it mind blowing and why
the incumbent Mobile Service providers failed to find such a data hungry
userbase. Indian Mobile Service Provider at an average generates Data ARPU of
around $1.65 and if they will get the trial userbase of Reliance Jio then their
data APRU will be one of the highest across all geographies.
In point of view, Reliance Jio
userbase usage pattern is just an illusion and nothing else. It clearly
indicate that Indian Mobile user always prefer to hop for the free services. It
would be interesting to see what will be per user data consumption when it
comes to Reliance Jio once they launch full commercial services.
I would like to remind RelianceJio that India implemented Mobile Number Portability ( MNP) and more than 23%
of the VLR active userbase already hopped from one Mobile Service Provider to
another one. When Mobile Number Portability ( MNP) came to force then Indian
Incumbent faced very high churn rate as mobile user misused the clause of MNP.
In order to acquire new user, the new Mobile Service provider's offered number
of freebies and mobile user opted for it and once they consumed the free talk
time to data, they moved to another network and hence they effectively
possessed free mobile connections.
I am confident that Reliance Jio
is going to get around 15 to 20 million userbase within first full
commercialized financial year but will have very high churn rate. As per the
rumor in the market that Reliance Jio will position its service with veryaggressive subscription price point but at the same time they should be ready
to deal with the MNP issue which they cannot avoid.
The Incumbent like Airtel, Idea
and Vodafone will play around in the same strategic and tactical way to let
Reliance capture market share and let go their low ARPU generating user which
in turn will hurt Reliance Jio more as Reliance Jio will be offering service in
subsidized manner.
At the same time Reliance Jio
should be ready for bad debt when it comes to recovery of monthly bill, the way
many new entrant of 2011-2013 faced.
Reliance may analyze the trial
data as optimistic result but in my point of view, its a warning bell for them
and they should do the position of the product strategically so that they don't
hurt themselves more than their competitors
