Reliance Jio Cloud-linked laptops likely to cost less than Rs 10,000

Jio is working on JioBook that will have an embedded 4G chip; it is expected to be priced below Rs 20,000

Reliance Jio is working on a plan for the massification of laptop usage for education, which may turn out to be a big use case for 5G. A senior executive of the company said it is working on a basic laptop that should cost below Rs 10,000. The personal computer (PC) will consist of a display, a keypad, a Jio operating system, and hardware to connect to the cloud, where all the information and applications will be stored.

Users shall have the flexibility to pay for storage on the cloud, based on their needs and requirements.

The company hopes to collaborate with global PC makers and that will help it increase the laptop market by several times in the country. The basic strategy is to bring many of the backend functionalities in a PC to the cloud and reduce the cost of the machine.  

According to the Jio executive, the country has over 1.5 million schools and an average of 10 classrooms in each school.

According to Jio’s calculation, there is an addressable market for 100 million laptops, which can be bought by students or schools, or offered by states with a subsidy. The bulk of laptops currently cost between Rs 30,000 and Rs 50,000 and they are unaffordable, Jio executives said.

The sheer potential of the market only in the edtech space can be seen in the context that less than 15 million PCs were sold in the country last year by all the players, led by HP and Dell. 

The company is looking at doing the same in gaming, too, so that users do not have to buy expensive consoles like the Xbox. The games will be on the cloud from where they can be accessed by players with little delay on their laptops.

Reliance Jio is also working on JioBook, a laptop for which the company partnered with Qualcomm and Microsoft. It will have an embedded 4G chip and is expected to be launched below Rs 20,000.

As a strategy, Reliance Jio has only intervened whenever it sees a product gap that is impeding growth of the market or when vendors are reluctant to take the plunge. For instance, it got into assembling of Jio 4G feature phones as they found a cheaper offering for consumers to upgrade from 2G to 4G. In the initial stages of its launch of 4G, it got into the assembly of 4G VOLTE phones as vendors did not see much of a future for its adoption. Later, they all joined the party and Jio decided to withdraw from the business.