International broking and financial services firm Credit Suisse said Reliance Jio’s unlimited 4G preview offer is now available without any invites.
Under the pre-launch offer, the company gives unlimited calls, data, app subscription and SMS for a period of 90 days for anyone buying a LYF branded handset.
“… our checks showed that in at least a few stores in a couple of cities we checked, a walk-in customer buying a Lyf Handset will get a SIM connection,” a report authored by Credit Suisse Research and Analytics said.
The Credit Suisse team has been among the few in the analyst community with a strong opinion about the impact that the launch of Reliance Jio will have on the telecom landscape of India.
While most telecom analysts think Jio’s launch will not cause any drastic change in the market, Credit Suisse has been warning that it would hurt margins of incumbent operators such as Bharti Airtel and Idea Cellular substantially.
It reiterated its stance today. “Our negative view on telcos stays, with twin risks of upcoming spectrum auctions and RJio launch.”
LYF PREVIEW OFFER TO BE A HIT
The Credit Suisse team, led by Sunil Tirumalai and Viral Shah, put a value of around Rs 9,000 on the unlimited offer.
Given that the offer can be availed by anyone who buys LYF phones starting from Rs 4000 onwards, the analysts said the offer could give a strong lift off to Reliance Jio’s subscriber acquisition journey.
“Airtel’s highest 4G plan for 15GB costs Rs3000 per month. Thus, RJio’s offer is worth at least Rs 9000 – while the Lyf handsets start from Rs4000. We suspect this should be sufficient to get a few million users on board.”
Reliance Retail is estimated to have around 5 mln LYF branded handsets out in the market today.
At the same time, said the analysts, “the requirement of buying a phone (a new brand at that) to get the connection means that this is not meant to be the big bang mass offer yet.”
Credit Suisse also said it found Jio’s network to continue to remain robust.
“We continue to see the network holding up well on coverage and speeds (20mbps+ vs 12-15mbps for other 4G networks) across multiple cities and towns we have visited recently.
“On the flip side, some of our team members faced some glitches in the subscriber enrolment process.”
Though Jio has not launched yet, its pre-launch 4G offer could hit data revenue of big incumbents, the firm said.
“We suspect the full fledged impact of RJio launch will hit only with the commercial launch whenever it happens (is the 3 months intro offer an indication?). However, for the few million users who are likely to take connections now, we would expect a sharp drop in their data recharges on their regular SIMs.”
Jio has also unveiled its website over the last couple of days.
