Reliance Industries Limited (RIL)’s fourth generation telecom arm, Reliance JioInfocommwill launch personalized Wi-Fi devices of the size of a visiting card for its sister company, Reliance Retail.
RIL is planning to capture a huge customer base of Reliance Jio from its retail arm evenbefore it is officially launched in the market. The upcoming telecom arm will be launched by the month of June in the next year which will focus mostly on providing mobile-based enterprise solutions for small-scale businesses besides traditional mobile services and voice over Internet.
Reliance Retail becomes the exact launch pad as it is expanding its cash and carry stores, with brand name Reliance Market that caters to local kirana owners, traders, caterers and hoteliers. In the previous quarter, Reliance Retail has experienced good returns on investment from its cash and carry stores segment. Its first store has been operational since 2011 in Ahmedabad that has a customer base of 1, 25,000 customers currently. Owing to the success of this store, Reliance Market has come up in Bangalore, Mumbai, Anand, Faridabad, Chennai and Guntur. In the annual general meeting, Mukesh Ambani spoke about the expansion of more such stores. There are plans to open 15 more stores by the end of this current financial year which will increase the customer base for the cash and carry business of the company to a million by the end of June next year.
Here in these stores, Reliance Jio will provide their personalized Wi-Fi devices to create hot-spots that will connect with various devices on high-speed data. It aligns with the idea of the telecommunication company to cater to small scale business owners with technology that can help in managing the store and inventory beyond limit.Another big advantage for Reliance Jio will be that Reliance Market will bring a captive customer base of about a million customers under one roof.
Apart from synchronizing with its own sister companies, the upcoming telecom brand is signing deals with other companies to build up its nationwide infrastructure. RIL will invest about $3 billion in the current financial year to launch its 4G network.
The telecommunication arm has also partnered with companies like Omnitech, Verizon and Google. Omnitech InfoSolution is an information technology outsourcing and management services company that provides business-to-business solutions, while Verizon is a mobile service provider that offers products like Wi-Fi, wireless, internet television and Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology based mobile devices. Google will provide voice over internet services for JioInfocommm.