Industry will be $100 bn in 10 years: Ambani

Says Reliance Jio could take India, currently ranked 150th globally in mobile internet access, into top-10 league

Even as Reliance Jio, the telecom arm of Reliance Industries, readies a soft launch for its 4G services, company chairman Mukesh Ambani elaborated how it could change the mobile broadband environment in the country in the coming months. The statement comes as speculation mounts over the date of Reliance Jio’s actual launch, which is expected later this year.

Speaking at the inaugural session of Frames, the annual three-day media and entertainment seminar organised by the Federation of Indian Chamber, Commerce and Industry (Ficci) in the city, Ambani, 58, said that Jio could intervene in four ways to help improve mobile internet access in the country. “India ranks 150th in the list of countries as far as mobile internet access goes. This is low if you take into account the number of countries, which is 230,” Ambani said. “Jio could help change all this and push India’s rank into the top ten by improving coverage from the current 15-20 per cent (of the India population) to 70 per cent on day one,” Ambani said.

Ambani, who was last here 12 years ago in 2004 during the Reliance Infocomm launch, said that the speed of Jio would be 40-80 per cent higher than the average speed of mobile broadband available now and that data capacity would improve 100 times with the new service. “All of this will be available at an affordable price because we believe you cannot improve accessibility without reducing price,” Ambani said.

Jio had launched services for Reliance group employees three months ago and the impending soft launch for other consumers will make SIM cards available for Rs 200. This will come with free data and voice for three months, a Credit Suisse report said recently.

Ambani also highlighted five mega-trends that would transform the digital world in the future to drive home his point of a digital eco-system governing human lives. “Anything and everything will go digital,” he said, and “what we will see is a shift from orality to visuality.”

He said that the digital world would lead to growth that would be exponential rather than linear and that the domestic media and entertainment (M&E) sector would touch $100 billion in the next decade. “In 12 years, the Indian M&E industry has grown nine times (from $2 billion in 2004). From a world that was ruled by silos, what we are now seeing is a convergence of telecom, media and technology,” he said.

Penetration of digital to the last mile would lead to a surfeit of information, which would ironically lead to a scarcity of genuine content, a challenge most purveyors of digital technology would have to contend with, he pointed out. “Lastly, digital is not about technology, but about humanity. No transformation is complete if it does not impact human life meaningfully,” Ambani said.