Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, Jio, is an Indian telecommunications company and subsidiary of Jio Platforms, headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. It operates a national LTE network with coverage across all 22 telecom circles. It does not offer 2G or 3G service, and instead uses only voice over LTE to provide voice service on its 4G network.
Jio soft-launched on 27 December 2015 with a beta for partners and employees, and became publicly available on 5 September 2016 became an instant hit. As of 31 December 2019, it is the largest mobile network operator in India and the third-largest mobile network operator in the world with over 387.5 million subscribers.
The company led by billionaire Mukesh Ambani added 5.6 million mobile subscribers in November, taking its total user base to 369.93 million, and replacing Vodafone Idea Ltd as India’s largest mobile services provider by subscribers, showed data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai).
Jio has been pretty much everywhere, I am pretty sure you’ve noticed that Jio is entering different market sectors with a lot of different services. But the problem is it is cloning a lot of popular apps. So the real question is that “Is Reliance JIO a SUPERPOWER or a COPYCAT?”, well this is a question we will discuss today.
Let’s get started, there are two types of company in the market, one which comes across a problem in the market and does the research finds it’s a solution and create a product or a service to solve the problem. The second type of company is the type of companies that look for opportunities, the moment they see an opening where they can capture a market share they just jump right on it! Jio is in the latter category of companies.
Let me explain this, ever since the long run began we saw Zoom the cloud meeting app getting crazy popular all over the world because of its 100 person meeting groups. Now Jio saw this as an opportunity and saw that Zoom is getting very popular and before it captures the Indian market they should act right away. Hence, Jio created Jio to meet in just 2 months. Yes, Jio just took 2 months to create an app that already has 1 million downloads. Here is the comparison of the app’s interface.
With an uncanny resemblance to the Zoom app, many netizens even joked that JioMeet should just be named ‘Jio Zoom’. Zoom India head Sameer Raje says, that he was shocked to see the similarities between Zoom and JioMeet but knew it was coming – due to a boom for video calling tools. “It’s fine, it is not the first time Zoom has faced competition. Our strength has been our products and technology, and our focus is on customers. What our competitors do is their strategy,” he said.
Same goes with the most popular messaging app Whatsapp, JioChat is a complete copy of it, we can’t help but wonder why it looks the same as WhatsApp. There’s hardly any difference when it comes to the design of these two apps. WhatsApp has been around for many years now and its design remained mostly the same since its release.
At the recently held AGM Jio announced a new platform JioTv+ which would be one sign-in one-stop solution for all the OTT platforms like Netflix, Prime Video, Hotstar, Voot, Zee5 and many more. This idea sounds amazing but the UI? Well, it’s a lot similar to the AppleTv+.
So, it’s pretty clear that Jio does not care about the uniqueness of their product or building a product that is out of the box because it will take a lot of time to create a new product and this might lead to missing a big opportunity. Jio is all about business.
Well, coming back to our question that “Is Reliance JIO a SUPERPOWER or a COPYCAT?”. It’s kind of both and it’s not a bad thing. They just care about becoming a superpower. If the new products including the 5G and 5G smartphones or the JioGlass become a hit then it won’t take much time for them to become a superpower.
