Reliance Industries shares gained as much as 1.6 percent on Friday, recouping from previous session's losses a day after billionaire chairman Mukesh Ambani unveiled a mega fixed-line broadband initiative and announced plans for an e-commerce platform that may rival the likes of Amazon.
The oil-to-telecom conglomerate is India’s second most valued company by market value and its annual general meeting is one of the most awaited business events in the country.
Here's a wrap of some of the major analyst opinions going out to Dalal Street pros on Friday.
Pricing will need to be aggressive for Jio GigaFiber: Jefferies
JioFiber: The key announcement was the launch of a fixed-line broadband service. While Jio announced the same under the Jio GigaFiber brand there was no launch date or pricing details.
"Roll-out will likely be gradual as last mile connection takes time. We believe that given its aim of 50 million households (1 8 million market currently) on Jio GigaFiber, pricing will need to be aggressive," Jefferies analysts wrote in a note.
JioPhone: Reliance reduced its pricing for JioPhone to Rs 501 (in-lieu of exchange of feature phone) from the current upfront Rs 1500 refundable deposit.
"Reliance announced a new offer for JioPhone (Rs 501 on exchange) indicating that price competition will continue and intensify in the voice only segment."Cautious on the sector: Jefferies expects the competitive intensity to remain high as operators vie for market share. It expects ARPU to remain under pressure and cost pressures to also increase.
Jio GigaFiber was the big announcement at the meeting: Morgan Stanley
JioFiber: "With this service, Jio aims to provide ultra HD entertainment, multi-party video conferencing solutions, voice-activated virtual assistance, virtual reality gaming/shopping and smart home solutions to home owners. The target is to reach 50 million homes."
"Reliance plans to create a new hybrid online to offline commerce platform wherein it will synergize the 215 million Jio subscribers, 350 million footfalls in its Reliance retail stores, 30 million potential merchants that have last-mile connectivity, and 50 million broadband homes it is targeting."
JioGigaFiber has the potential to disrupt pricing: IDFC Securities
JioFiber: JioGigaFiber has the potential to disrupt pricing in the fixed broadband space and this will have a negative bearing on margins of existing broadband players and will hurt valuation as well because currently bulk of the value is driven by their broadband business.
"As JioGigaFiber will also provide television services, it might hurt TV distributors (cable, DTH) as well. We expect commercial launch of JioGigaFiber to begin from the end of this calendar year and it will happen on a housing complex by complex basis rather than at one-go (given last-mile infra challenges."
JioPhone: We expect Jio’s pricing to be extremely competitive and initial 3 to 6 months could be completely “free”, just as was the case during its wireless service launch.
"We believe that an entry price point of Rs 500 (for basic broadband service) could lead to massive penetration and this price could be increased as more value-added services (such as TV, video calling, etc.) are provided on top of this. The price point of Rs500 would be far lower than the average ARPU of larger MSOs and also lower than their entry packs."
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