India’s telecom price war is back, and this time the battle is being fought with freebies.
After announcing last year the first tariff increase in three years, telecoms are offering incentives such as subscriptions to services from Netflix to Amazon Prime to win customers in a content hungry market.
With theaters in India, among the biggest film markets globally by number of tickets sold, closed due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, the demand for entertainment content has shifted online.
Several big-budget local films have been released on streaming platforms this year.
On Tuesday, Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, the nation’s biggest telecom by subscribers, launched a new 399 rupees (US$5.40) plan for users who opt for monthly billing instead of pay-as-you-go packs. Besides 75 gigabytes of data, customers would get access to Netflix on a mobile device and one-year subscription to two over-the-top (OTT) applications and access to Jio’s movie and songs library.
“Reliance Jio’s new postpaid plans offer more content and come at 20 percent discount” to Bharti Airtel Ltd, analysts at Jefferies India Pvt said in a report to clients.
Bharti’s comparable entry-level plan is priced at 499 rupees and offers the same amount of data, but does not include access to Disney+ Hotstar and Netflix, while Vodafone Idea Ltd’s plan offers 40GB data and does not include any of the three online platforms, analysts said.
Over the past four years, the number of users opting for monthly billing of mobile services has come down sharply and such users now form about 5 percent of the total 1.14 billion subscribers and generate 15 percent of the sector’s revenue, analysts said.
Although Jio introduced its postpaid plans in 2018, the company’s offerings did not see much traction, showcasing “stickiness” of this base of customers, Morgan Stanley analysts said.
“This time extremely aggressive content offerings could be the key attraction for consumers,” Emkay Global Financial Services Ltd analysts Naval Seth and Sonali Shah said in a note.
They expect Bharti and Vodafone Idea to follow Jio with similar tie-ups with OTT platforms to retain the monthly bill paying customers whose average monthly spending is higher than the prepaid users.
Bharti Airtel has lost nearly 9 percent, while Vodafone Idea has fallen 12.7 percent in two sessions since Jio announced the enhanced postpaid plans.
When Lika Megreladze was a child, life in her native western Georgian region of Guria revolved around tea. Her mother worked for decades as a scientist at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Tea and Subtropical Crops in the village of Anaseuli, Georgia, perfecting cultivation methods for a Georgian tea industry that supplied the bulk of the vast communist state’s brews. “When I was a child, this was only my mum’s workplace. Only later I realized that it was something big,” she said. Now, the institute lies abandoned. Yellowed papers are strewn around its decaying corridors, and a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin
ELECTRONICS BOOST: A predicted surge in exports would likely be driven by ICT products, exports of which have soared 84.7 percent from a year earlier, DBS said DBS Bank Ltd (星展銀行) yesterday raised its GDP growth forecast for Taiwan this year to 4 percent from 3 percent, citing robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI)-related exports and accelerated shipment activity, which are expected to offset potential headwinds from US tariffs. “Our GDP growth forecast for 2025 is revised up to 4 percent from 3 percent to reflect front-loaded exports and strong AI demand,” Singapore-based DBS senior economist Ma Tieying (馬鐵英) said in an online briefing. Taiwan’s second-quarter performance beat expectations, with GDP growth likely surpassing 5 percent, driven by a 34.1 percent year-on-year increase in exports, Ma said, citing government
UNIFYING OPPOSITION: Numerous companies have registered complaints over the potential levies, bringing together rival automakers in voicing their reservations US President Donald Trump is readying plans for industry-specific tariffs to kick in alongside his country-by-country duties in two weeks, ramping up his push to reshape the US’ standing in the global trading system by penalizing purchases from abroad. Administration officials could release details of Trump’s planned 50 percent duty on copper in the days before they are set to take effect on Friday next week, a person familiar with the matter said. That is the same date Trump’s “reciprocal” levies on products from more than 100 nations are slated to begin. Trump on Tuesday said that he is likely to impose tariffs
HELPING HAND: Approving the sale of H20s could give China the edge it needs to capture market share and become the global standard, a US representative said The US President Donald Trump administration’s decision allowing Nvidia Corp to resume shipments of its H20 artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China risks bolstering Beijing’s military capabilities and expanding its capacity to compete with the US, the head of the US House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party said. “The H20, which is a cost-effective and powerful AI inference chip, far surpasses China’s indigenous capability and would therefore provide a substantial increase to China’s AI development,” committee chairman John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, said on Friday in a letter to US Secretary of