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.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last