Full text of Mukesh Ambani's big Reliance Jio announcement
Here is the full text of Mukesh Ambani's speech:
On September 1, I shared with you my belief that Jio is a game-changing network for India and for Indians.
In three short months, you have proved me right. Jio has become the fastest growing technology company, not only in India, but in the history of the world. In the first three months since its birth, Jio has grown faster than Facebook, WhatsApp or Skype. In 83 days, Jio has crossed 50 million customers on its 4G LTE ALL-IP wireless broadband network!
To each one of you, I want to say… Dhanyavaad. Thank You. This is your achievement. Thank you… for your enthusiasm. Thank you… for reinforcing our belief in India’s digital appetite. Thank you… for launching our nation on the path to the top 10 digital countries in the world. We are overwhelmed, and truly humbled, by your response. We look forward to millions more of our citizens joining this Jio movement.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Jio is a data strong network built for the Internet from the ground up. I am delighted to share that Jio customers are making the most of the Jio Welcome Offer we launched in September. On average, a Jio customer is using 25 times more data than the average Indian broadband user.
This is truly unleashing the transformative potential of data. A Jio customer today is consuming data on par with, and in many cases more than, sophisticated users anywhere in the world.
My fellow Indians,
The main reason we launched the Jio Welcome Offer, was to use this period to get your valuable feedback and to iron out the deficiencies that we jointly discover. And we have indeed received a lot of feedback. You spoke to us. And we listened.
We listened to your best ideas and we have been working sincerely and wholeheartedly to implement them. Thanks to your constructive feedback, Jio is better today than when we started. I am truly grateful to each and every one of you who have patiently stood by us all through this process of continuous improvement.
I want to take a few moments to mention four concrete examples.
First, is eKYC. Jio has signed-up over 6 lakh customers every single day for the past 3 months. Under the traditional paper-based process, this meant long queues and unexpectedly high fulfilment times. Thanks to the Government of India and TRAI, we were able to fast-track Aadhaar based eKYC roll-out nationally.
This allowed SIM activation in under 5 minutes. This is the best experience for activating customers anywhere in the world. Today, Jio has successfully rolled out eKYC across 2 lakh outlets in India. To put this in perspective, this is nearly equal to the total number of ATMs in India.
We are in the process of doubling this network, to 4 LAKH digitally enabled outlets, by March of 2017. Every Jio store and retailer in every neighborhood can not only activate Jio customers via eKYC, but is also equipped to provide unmatched customer service and new Aadhar-based services because of this digital infrastructure.
This is an investment that Jio has made to create a powerful physical plus digital capability for supporting a variety of offerings into the future. It gives me great satisfaction that we have fulfilled our promise to make the onboarding experience for Jio users as simple and delightful as possible.
My second example is: Voice Interconnetion with existing telecom operators. While customers have shown unprecedented love for Jio services, we have not received the required support from existing operators. In the last 3 months, nearly 900 crore voice calls from Jio customers to the networks of our three largest competitors were blocked.
The benefits of Jio’s superior voice technology have been denied to Indian customers due to such anti-competitive behavior of incumbent operators. Through all this, Jio has been a tireless champion for Indian customers, and their right to free HD voice services.
Given the gravity of the situation, the authorities have intervened and instructed all the operators to provide sufficient interconnection capacity. We thank the government and the regulator for enforcing the license conditions.
While we have started getting Points of Interconnect, we continue to monitor this capacity so that the Jio voice calling experience remains superior. Over the past months, the call block rates has come down from over 90 per cent to nearly 20 per cent as of yesterday. We are working with all our fellow operators to ensure that in the coming weeks, this will come below the specified grade of service, which is 0.2 per cent.
I want to reiterate that Jio is committed to ensuring that all domestic voice calls by Jio customers will be flawless and free.
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| 'I want to reiterate that Jio is committed to ensuring that all domestic voice calls by Jio customers will be flawless and free.' |
Friends,
My third example relates to enterprise and high-end customers. Most of these users do not want to give up their existing phone numbers. I am happy to inform that Jio now fully supports Mobile Number Portability, and all customers can retain their existing number when they migrate to Jio.
And, we have gone a step further. We have recently introduced home delivery of Jio SIMs, so that these customers, who are often too busy to visit a store, can get a Jio SIM home-delivered. And once delivered, the Jio SIM can be activated in 5 minutes through eKYC.
This feature is being progressively launched across India through the MyJio application and will be available in the top 100 cities by 31st December 2016.
My fourth and final example relates to network speed. Jio’s network is built for capacity and speed. But, with 50 million customers taking full advantage of the free Jio Welcome Offer, we have faced a few issues with data speeds on our network.
About 8 per cent OF Jio towers have experienced congestion due to abnormally high data usage. As a result, customers served by these towers have experienced lower data speeds. While 92 per cent of our base station, and customers, have been experiencing consistently high data speeds, We are not satisfied!
We are working to de-congest these 8 per cent towers, so that impacted customers go back to experiencing true-4G speeds.
On the whole, Jio is not only delivering 4 times more data than all other Indian telecom operators combined, but also much faster throughputs than any other mobile network in India. And we are striving to improve it even further and to live up to the expectations of every single Jio customer.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am grateful for all your feedback over the past 3 months. We take your inputs very seriously. Jio is, and will remain, a customer obsessed organisation. During our last interaction, I promised that we will not sit back until we have provided the best customer and service to all Jio customers. Because of inadequate availability of points of interconnect from other operators, I believe that we are yet to deliver on this promise.
But, with the imminent availability of sufficient points of interconnect from other operators, over the coming weeks, I am confident that Jio customers will be able to experience a flawless voice experience. With this humble reflection, I want to announce today… That starting 4th of December, 2016, Every new Jio user will get… Jio’s Data, Voice, Video and the full bouquet of Jio applications and content, absolutely FREE, till 31st March 2017.
We are calling this the “Jio Happy New Year Offer”. During this offer period, Jio and Jio customers, will be able to continue our journey of co-creating and building the best network experience together. All our 52 million plus Jio Welcome Offer users will continue to enjoy the unlimited benefits of Jio Welcome Offer till 31st December, 2016.
And on New Year’s day, all Jio Welcome Offer users will be automatically signed-up for the Jio Happy New Year Offer as well. That’s right – No need to purchase a new SIM. All existing Jio customers will get the extended benefits of Jio Happy New Year offer, till 31st March 2017, on their current SIM card itself.
Friends,
The Jio Happy New Year Offer incorporates a lot of our learnings from the Jio Welcome Offer. For instance, we have noticed that 80 per cent of Jio users consume less than 1 GB of data daily. 1 GB per day is still a substantial amount of data. In fact, it is 30 times the average usage on other networks!
But, the other 20 per cent of users consume disproportionately higher amounts of data, and we have observed that this disproportionate usage contributes significantly to the congestion that I mentioned earlier. In short, 20 per cent of the users create a poor experience for the other 80 per cent. So, in the Jio Happy New Year Offer, we have fine-tuned our Fair Usage Policy to ensure that all users get a fair share of Jio’s network capacity.
During this period Jio customers will also be able to test-drive Jio’s digital recharge and billing experience, especially using the JioMoney wallet. So, under the Jio Happy New Year Offer, Jio customers will get 30 times the average usage on other networks absolutely free till 31st March 2017. AND the overall service experience for all customers will be much better. All the details of the Jio Happy New Year Offer are available on MyJio, as well as on Jio.com.
Friends,
Today, I want to congratulate and applaud our Honorable Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modiji, for his bold and historic decision to demonetise old currency. By doing this, our Prime Minister has given the strongest possible push to the growth of a digitally-enabled, optimal-cash economy in India. This decision is an important step in his ongoing efforts to change the mindset of the people of India.
Digitally-enabling transactions will help to create a fair, just, transparent and strong India and Indian economy.
It will bring unprecedented accountability at every level. I believe that the common people will be the biggest beneficiaries of this change. Every Indian will have a digital ATM in their hands, which they can operatewhenever and wherever they want.
No more will they have to travel and stand in queue for train tickets, bus tickets, movie tickets, to pay bills for utilities, or to deposit and withdraw money from banks. Time saved is money earned. Therefore, I am absolutely confident that a digital-enabled economy will help India become stronger – and every Indian becomes even stronger.
Once again, I would like to join my fellow Indians in congratulating our Hon. Prime Minister for this historic decision that implements his vision of digital India and lays a strong foundation for the Indian economy. With one single step, he has brought all the unproductive money into productive use. This will enhance credit flow in the economy and legitimate credit is the fuel that powers the engine of economic growth.
So far, credit in our country has mostly been high value and low volume Digital enablement has laid the groundwork for broad availability of low value, high volume credit. This will provide credit to our farmers, small shopkeepers, traders and daily wage earners. Again, the biggest benefit of this goes to the ordinary Indian.
Friends,
All of us at Jio are enthusiastically committed to making this transition smooth for every Indian across the country.
Today, with the JioMoney application, every Indian has access to a Digital money wallet that is linked to their bank account.
One of the key drivers for adoption of Digital Money and the Cashless way of living is people’s ability to convert physical Cash into Digital Cash and vice-versa. In order to make this possible, JioMoney is rapidly expanding its reach to millions of touch points where Aadhar based micro-ATMs will be deployed.
Friends,
To enable digital transactions, merchants, especially small merchants, are an important component of our economy. To fuel their transactions, Jio is working to empower Indian merchants by building a digital retail ecosystem, which we are calling JioMoney Merchant Solutions.
This will enable digital transactions of all types, whether they be at Mandis, Small shops, Restaurants, Railway ticket counters, for Bus and mass transit and even for person-to-person money transfers. Starting 5th of December, every merchant can download the JioMoney Merchant Application.
Customers use their JioMoney Wallets to pay merchants from their bank accounts, and merchants can use the Jio Money Merchant App to accept these payments directly into their bank accounts. Using the JioMoney Merchant App, merchants can also make supplier payments, transfer money between his bank account and use digital petty cash. JioMoney is focused on signing-up over 10 million small merchant retailers in the coming weeks across 17,000 towns and 4 lakh villages.
With this, the JioMoney ecosystem will be a committed and enthusiastic partner for the smooth implementation of our Hon. Prime Ministers game-changing vision of creating a digitally-enabled and strong Indian economy.Friends,
In 3 short months, Jio and India have together crossed a number of important milestones and are well on our path to achieving global digital leadership. 2017 will be the 70th year of India’s freedom. On this occasion, I humbly submit the Jio Happy New Year Offer to the nation and wish that each and every one of you make the most of it.
As always, we keenly look forward to your constructive feedback, and to co-create the best network experience in the world. Thank you… for trying Jio, for using Jio, for improving Jio and finally, for loving Jio. We hope that with Jio, your life is digital. And life is beautiful. I wish you a very good evening and a happy, prosperous – and digital – 2017.