The telecom arm of Reliance Industries, Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited has appointed Shamik Das as its new Chief Corporate Development Officer. The company is gearing up to roll out its 4G services, this year.
Responsibility of Shamik Das
Shamik Das will be reporting to Pankaj Pawar. Pawar is an experienced member in Mukesh Ambani’s leadership team. He looks after Reliance Industries’ telecom and retail ventures.
Sources informed Das will be teaming up with Pawar and play a significant role in planning. They will begin with determining regions where the 4G services may be launched in the first phase.
“His immediate responsibilities would be assessing customer readiness and appetite for data in the geographies where Jio will roll out 4G voice and data services in coming months,” sources added.
The appointment of Das is done to reinforce Reliance’s efforts to match synergies between its two consumer-facing businesses, retail and telecom. In the first half of 2015, Reliance Retail had dedicated a separate division that focused on selling 4G supportive devices.
Das is a chartered accountant. He has served as CEO of the Southern region in Bharti Airtel. After this, he was appointed as the CEO of S Tel Pvt. Ltd. He then joined the fourth largest mobile carrier of the country, Reliance Communications as Joint President and Chief Operating Officer of the wireless business. After serving for three years, he had quit last year.
To provide efficient 4G services, Reliance Jio is in a hiring spree for its senior level officials. In April, 2015, Reliance Jio also appointed Anand Narang as the Head of its marketing division of devices who earlier worked at Huawei India. Last week too, Idea Cellular’s ex-Marketing Head, Pradeep Shrivastava joined Reliance Jio as Chief Marketing Officer.
Acquisitions of Reliance Jio
After the spectrum auction conducted in March, this year, Reliance Jio became the biggest holder of liberalized spectrum. The auction was termed as the costliest airwaves sale. Reliance Jio can give efficient and seamless 4G services on the LTE technology platform across a mix of spectrum bands of 800 MHz, 1800 Mhz and 2300 MHz with the help of an intergrated ecosystem. Reliance Jio is also establishing a futuristic broadband infrastructure that will deal with the rising demands of data and voice services. The company will make use of long term evolution or LTE which is a technology standard for providing broadband services of high speed. This is called fourth generation or 4G.
Reliance Jio is the only organization in the country to hold a pan- India Broadband Wireless Access spectrum that it won in 2010. This enables the company to give 4G services in any part of India. It also acquired ISP (Internet Service Provider) license through acquisition of Infotel Broadband Services. The company aims to provide all kinds of broadband services. Besides, Reliance Jio has a Unified License (UL) that it got in October, 2013. With this license, the company can make use of any technology to give different telecom services.
Summary
To prepare for its upcoming 4G launch, Reliance Jio has hired Shamik Das as its Chief Corporate Development Officer.