After all its affordable feature phones at just Rs 1500 which got quite popular as a handy phone for everyone in India. Now Jio is planning to unveil large screen smartphone yet in the budget segment for those people who want to upgrade from their feature phones to own such a 4G device, as reported by ET.
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At an Interview with ET the Sunil Dutt, head sales, channel development at Reliance Jio stated” We are trying to work with partners who can bring in affordable large-screen smartphones for a large mass of customers who are yet to make a shift to a 4G smartphone, so that they can experience the right kind of connectivity as well as the right kind of content on devices which are affordable”.
“We will keep coming out with something new in every few months,” said Dutt, when asked about the future device launches.
“There are billions of people who are on devices which do not support good data experience or rich content experience, for them we introduced JioPhone to start experiencing more content services of Jio like television, cinema, music, even YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp,” said Dutt.
There is also a report that Reliance Jio is planning to tie up with US contract manufacturer Flex to produce 100 million mobile phone handsets locally.
According to ET”The company is in advanced discussions for a large order and that has caused a stir in the market, even prompting Flex to negotiate some tax benefits with the government in the SEZ where its factory is located in Chennai.
There is also a report from Research firm Counterpoint that The Jio has captured the utmost 47 per cent of the feature phone market in Q2, 2018 driven by the success of its Jiophone. Further, it also predicts that Reliance Jio is likely to maintain the growth momentum as it refreshed its Jiophone coupled with aggressive upgrade offer of Rs. 501 and bringing popular apps including WhatsApp to Jiophone 2.
This is also confirmed by the firm about the feature phone shipments grew for the fourth consecutive quarter. This is a complete contrast to the smartphone market which is literally an experiencing negative growth rate. Feature phones contributed to 23 per cent of the total handset shipments in Q3 2018 and remains a sizable market.
Although, it is pointed out that after the slowdown of shipments from Jio in India. The growth of feature phones came from Middle East & Africa (MEA), which has emerged as the largest feature phone market globally.