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.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
RSS