Apart from the varied announcements made at the Annual General Meeting regarding the future investments and itsachievements, RIL(Reliance Industries Limited) has a vision of venturing in the telecom sector including its provision of high-end data services, on its own. It proposes to build its own towers for the same wiping out all the rumorsregarding its collaboration with GTL or RCOM.
A senior official member also announced their plans of manufacturing their own mobile handsets,if circumstances favor.However, lack of computing and storage facilities are turning out to be obstacles, making the handsets expensive at present.
RIL had previously claimed its plans of withdrawing from the Asset-Light model and had set the balls rolling for the set-up of 1,00,000 towers for its 4G services.At present, RIL is the only company that holds pan-India airwavesto offer 4G services that it won in an auction for Rs 12,848 crore. It acquired 95% stake in Infotel Broadband from Himachal FuturisticCommunications for Rs. 4800 crore for this purpose.
According to a senior official member from RIL, it will be economical for them to build their own towers considering the high valuations of tower companies. They plan to build their own towers where each tower will cost around 10 lakh, which is much lesser than the valuations of other Tower Companies who have quoted Rs.40 lakh.
Based on reports, their agenda is to make tablet computers in the price range of Rs.3000 to Rs.8000 compatible with 4G services that will bepriced reasonably that will be affordable by the common man.
With respect to manufacturing mobile phones, it plans to embrace cloud computing in order to minimize the cost of manufacturing. It intends to offer mobile enabled services to its retail customers on its mobile network using its joint venture with financial services company DE Shaw. In the last two years fromthe time this joint venture commenced, the two have been catering to regulatory approvals. RIL has always been keen on partnerships and has entered into content aggregation system with varied renowned companies. It emphasized the significance of partnerships and associations in the meeting and considered it the impetus to its growth, in the forthcoming years.
RIL aims to consolidate all its digital services including finance, entertainment, education, healthcare, brokerage in order to pave way for a one-stop customer interface. For the same, they wish to use the mobile platform. The mobile handset offered is to be designed in a way that it willenable basic transactions at shops, eateries, restaurants,etc. This will provide momentum fortheir growth and add value to their company.