Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) will host its 42nd annual general meeting on August 12 and several key announcements, including the launch of Jio Phone 3 are expected at the event.

Apart from the launch of Jio Phone 3, commercial rollout and pricing of Jio’s broadband service GigaFiber, and the triple play plan for GigaFiber that bundles broadband, landline as well as television services, are also expected to be announced at the RIL AGM.

Jio Phone 2 was launched at the last AGM and carried a price tag of Rs 2,999. Its next iteration, Jio Phone 3, is expected to be priced at Rs 4,500. While Jio Phone 2 came with a qwerty keypad, its new edition is likely to be an all-touch smartphone with a powerful processor and significantly greater storage.

One of the most anticipated announcements is the commercial rollout of Jio GigaFiber. RIL’s broadband offering is currently in a preview phase and is available for a security deposit of Rs 4,500 with free installation for the 100 Mbps plan. The security deposit drops to Rs 2,500 for the 50 Mbps plan.

The pricing for the broadband plans is expected to be inline with peers but RIL will sweeten the deal by making it a triple play —a combination of broadband-landline-TV OTT service. A base price of ranging between Rs 500-600 for GigaFiber is expected.

As of last RIL AGM, Jio had 250 million users whose per month data usage totaled 240 crore GB while voice usage on the network stood at 530 crore minutes per day. The Jio users’ video consumption amounted to 340 crore hours per month.

However, Jio’s capacity utilization was below 20 percent.

At the last AGM, the big announcement was the launch of its new e-commerce initiatives. RIL integrated Reliance Retail's physical marketplace with Jio’s digital infrastructure.

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First Published:Aug 9, 2019 1:23 PM IST