Reliance Adds More Brands to the Jio Preview offer: HTC, Intex, and Vivo Join the Party

Reliance Digital has announced that its Reliance Jio Preview offer will be available on smartphones from 19 brands. The company had earlier announced 16 brands and has now added 3 more to the tally. These 3 new additions are HTC, Intex, and Vivo. All smartphones will have 4G support.

Reliance Jio has been the talk of the town this year. The Indian smartphone industry has been at the edge of its seat ever since Reliance announced Jio and Lyf 4G smartphones.

It wasn’t too long ago that Lyf became the fifth largest smartphone brand by shipments in India. Reliance capitalized on this and slashed the prices of Lyf 4G smartphones. The company is also offering 3 months free 4G connectivity. Reliance is doing the smart thing by opening up its Jio Preview offer to brands other than its own. This is a two-pronged strategy that will help push Reliance ahead of its well established contemporaries in the Indian smartphone market.

Other than HTC, Intex, and Vivo, Reliance has also made this offer available to Samsung, Asus, Micromax, Yu, Gionee, Karbonn, LG, Videocon, Lava, Xolo, Panasonic, Sony, Sansui, Alcatel, TCL, and of course Reliance’s very own Lyf.

A ‘gadget bubble’ waiting to burst?

Over the last year and a half, the iSpyPrice Blog has repeatedly emphasized the importance of a growing 4G market. These are those that argue that before 4G takes full effect the market needs to first adopt 3G at a large scale. The problem with that argument is that every market is different and the Indian smartphone is volatile and stable at the same time.

It is volatile in the sense that in the name of Digital India the smartphone market has been treated to the likes of Freedom 251, a brand that has so far succeeded in only one thing – making promises. If even 20% of the Indian smartphone market became prone to making such lofty promises, the smartphone space in India could find itself in the midst of, what I call, a ‘gadget bubble’.

The demand for such ridiculously low priced products will always be welcomed by the consumer but it is still a demand that cannot be met. At least there is no precedent for it, therefore, any claims that such schemes could succeed are just that – ‘claims’. We will wait for the evidence to come in.

India is a land of gigantic opportunities for smartphone brands

Having said that if there is a smartphone market in the world you would want to enter with a reasonable blueprint for success, it is the Indian smartphone market. This is one market that can only grow. I suppose that can be said of most developing markets but in India’s case it is different. Not only is the brick and mortar offline distribution channel a highly successful way to reach customers in India, but India is also the only country where the online sales model has, what would qualify as, gigantic possibilities.

More from iSpyPrice: Check out this amazing Lyf mobile price list

Picture this – as per current estimates India has 462,124,989 Internet users out of a population of 1,326,801,576. That’s an Internet penetration percentage of 34.8% for the entire population. That may not sound like a perfect scenario but then again this 34.8% makes India the second most connected country in the world. Only China has a larger penetration percentage for a population of this size. But that’s not even the impressive bit.

The number of people who have come online in India in the last 12 months is a staggering year-over-year percentage change. India saw a 30.5% increment in the number of people who now have access to Internet. No developing, or developed, nation comes even remotely close to this stat.

Here are a few numbers just for perspective’s sake:

1. China has seen a 2.2% increment in 12 months
2. United States has seen a 1.1% increment and
3. Brazil has seen a 5.1% increment

So if you are a smartphone brand you know India presents incredible opportunities through online channels and this is what stabilizes the volatility that some bad apples may introduce to the market. Essentially, more people coming online would result in creation of more opportunities and a growing target audience for smartphone brands.

Reliance Jio could push India further ahead of the rest of the world in terms of connectivity

Brace yourselves for the Reliance Jio Preview is exactly the impetus required for the growing Indian market to take an even bigger leap of faith. This is the point I was alluding to earlier in this post. India’s 3G adoption rate may, or may not, be a point of debate but the fact is if a brand like Reliance starts pushing 4G aggressively, it may not be long before 4G reaches the same adoption rate as 3G currently has.

More from iSpyPrice: One in four smartphones launched in India are from emerging brands

It doesn’t have to be either this or that. For a market like India, connectivity at any speed is welcome, but if 4G is pushed aggressively we may end up having a population within 5 years with faster Internet connections than entire populations of several countries. We will have to wait and see whether this actually transpires but at the moment Reliance is pushing all the right buttons.