After retail, Reliance Jio looks for an enterprise encore

With a 1,000-strong team in place, India's largest telco is gearing up to conquer the country’s $3 billion enterprise telecom space

Jio wants to disrupt the telecom enterprise market—with a focus on micro, small and medium enterprises

With optical fibre in 1,600 towns, a dedicated team of over 1,000 executives, and a partnership with Microsoft, it wants to commoditise cloud applications

The large enterprise segment will be harder to crack. Jio has already tried and failed to woo companies like Apple and Flipkart

Even as incumbents like Bharti Airtel and Tata Communications defend their turf, Jio could have a shortcut to gain large enterprise clients

When Reliance Jio made its entry in 2016, it created waves, not ripples. Huge tidal ones, caused by its dirt-cheap tariffs. They washed many away, while incumbents like Vodafone India and Idea merged just to stay afloat. When the waters receded, Jio stood tallest, with more subscribers than any of its competitors.

Indeed, in its most recent results—for the quarter ended March 2020—its net profit, year-on-year, almost tripled to Rs 2,331 crore (~$308 million). In the same period, Bharti Airtel, its closest competitor, saw its net loss over 5X—to Rs 5,237 crore (~$693 million) from Rs 1,035 crore (~$136 million) in the preceding three months.

AUTHOR

Pratap Vikram Singh

Pratap is based out of Delhi and covers policy and myriad intersections with the other sectors, most notably technology. He has worked with Governance Now for seven years, reporting on technology, telecom policy, and the social sector.

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