JioPhone manufacturing-facility moved from China to Chennai, amid production issues
What's the story
Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Jio Infocomm shifted the production facility of its affordable 4G feature phone, JioPhone, from China to India, after facing supply-related issues.
Production by a new vendor has already started in Chennai. Sources said the first 6mn phones were manufactured at the Chinese unit where it suffered from capacity bottlenecks.
Jio is likely to miss its 200mn handsets sales target by Dec'18.
Quote
200 million sales target seems unlikely
A source stated: "The manufacturing capacity in China is 300,000-400,000 devices per day maximum. The fulfillment team responsible to get the devices manufactured has not been able to deliver. The target to achieve sales of 200 million phones by December 2018 seems unlikely."
Details
Chinese facility couldn't deliver JioPhones on time
Reliance Jio announced JioPhone in Jul'17; the pre-bookings started on 24 August. It received an overwhelming response that led to deliveries being delayed.
It already delivered the first batch of 6mn JioPhones. The company has reportedly resumed sales for 10mn customers who pre-booked the phone in August.
JioPhone's Chinese production-team has been unable to deliver phones on time, which likely affected the sales targets.
Information
Jio targeting 10 million customers
A source said that for the second phase of JioPhone sales, the company is targeting 10mn devices and the manufacturing has already begun at a Chennai unit. Reliance Jio started informing prospective buyers via text messages to pay Rs. 1,500 and collect their phones.
Jio Userbase
Jio banking on JioPhone sales to boost user-base
Mukesh Ambani-owned telco, Reliance Jio, reportedly has a user base of 145.96 million subscribers as of October-end, according to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.
Jio has an internal target of getting 400 million subscribers on board by 2018-end; it would take advantage of the SIM-locked JioPhone to achieve this target.
It believes that JioPhone sales would boost its user-base.
Information
JioPhone production in India
At the time of JioPhone's launch, Mukesh Ambani said that Reliance Jio was "targeting to have 5 million JioPhones available every week." However, it ran into production issues. He also said JioPhone production would start in India in the last quarter of 2017.
JioPhone
Features and specs of 4G JioPhone
The 4G VoLTE JioPhone has a 2.40-inch display, dual-core Spreadtrum SPRD 9820A/QC8905 processor, 512MB RAM, 4GB internal-storage (expandable up to 128GB), 0.3MP front camera, and 2MP rear camera.
It facilitates secure mobile payments through NFC, like Samsung Pay. It supports 22 Indian languages.
It also supports voice commands. Recently, Google announced a special Google Assistant version for JioPhone that recognizes Hindi and English voice-input.
Price, Plans
JioPhone marketed as a "free" phone
Jio took the handset market by storm when it launched JioPhone at Rs. 1,500. Customers need to pay Rs. 500 while pre-booking and the remaining Rs. 1,000, at the time of delivery.
However, JioPhone is effectively free as the Rs. 1500 is refundable after three years if it is returned.
Customers get unlimited voice-calling, SMS, 4G data by subscribing to Jio's Rs. 153/month plan.