Airtel doesn't want to bring subsidized phones to counter JioPhone Next
Jio Phone Next is scheduled to go up for sales on September 10th, it was co-developed by Reliance Jio and Google. Reliance Jio expects to sell 50 million units of the Jio Phone Next in the coming six months.
The price hasn’t been revealed yet, but the smartphone could cost as low as Rs 5,000 for the Basic model, while the Advanced variant is said to come for Rs 7,000.
Airtel’s CEO, Gopal Vittal, said that the telco has clarity on how to deal with Jio Phone Next and Airtel won’t be taking the subsidy route to tackle Jio Phone Next.
Gopal Vittal said, Airtel the entry-level smartphone has a very small market share in the country as consumers are looking for better quality devices that aren’t feasible under a budget of Rs 4,000-Rs 6,000.
Upon the matter of subsidizing smartphones, Vittal said, “When the handset comes up for renewal at the end of two years or 30 months, the customer makes the choice all over again to actually use the network of their own choice.
As a consequence, to stay in the same place you need to keep subsidizing again and again. Worldover it is not clear if handsets are value disruptive in that perspective.”
So far, our company has been fortunate for 25 years not to spend billions of dollars of subsidy that the world does across the markets. India has escaped that. So far we have not been required to do it,” Sunil Mittal, chairman of Bharti Airtel said.
As per the report, Airtel was in discussion with several OEMs in India to develop low-cost 4G smartphones. The telco planned to sell these smartphones either under its own brand or bundle them with the connections.
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