Reliance Industries Ltd Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani said the company's newly-launched telecom venture Reliance Jio stands for affordability and data is the new oil in the industry.
"Jio was conceived at a time when the world was fast digitising. What the Jio platform offers is partner with the next generation to solve problems for India to make sure our industries are more productive," Ambani said.
"To my mind, data is the new natural resource. In that sense, India is blessed with 1.3 billion people, for it to have real value it has to be processed into intelligence. Data is the new oil and its benefit is immense to society. India with its young population will have a competitive advantage," he added.
He was speaking at an interactive session at the Nasscom India Leadership Forum 2017 in Mumbai.
He added Jio subscriber base is growing at a pace which it itself had not expected at the time of launch.
"When we started Jio, we set a target for ourselves that we will acquire 100 million customers in shortest time. Even we didn't imagine that we would do it in months," Ambani said.
The company has been providing free 4G service since its soft launch on December 27, 2015 for RIL employees only and later opened it for all customers on September 5, 2016 thus completing over 160 days of its commercial operations.
"We just set ourselves a goal. Aadhaar enabled us to acquire a million customer a day which is unheard of in the industry as a whole," Ambani said.
The company provides connection on basis of instant verification of Aadhaar number of customers.
Jio crossed 50 million subscribers in just 83 days, adding at an average rate of six lakh subscribers per day and surpassing the subscriber addition rates of global giants like Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype.
More recently, announcing its third quarter results, Reliance Industries had said its telecom subsidiary Jio has garnered 72.4 million subscribers as of December 31, 2016.
However, the rapid ramp-up of subscriber base comes amid company's ongoing stand-off with incumbent operators over network connectivity issues where Jio's rivals have claimed to have provided it more than sufficient connection points for its subscribers growth which the Ambani led firm has strongly denied.
On February 8 this year, Airtel said it had provided adequate interconnect capacity to Jio to serve over 190 million customers and that the newcomer has been unable to activate all the points of interconnect (PoIs) and utilise the said capacity.
Reliance Jio, however, had termed Airtel's claim as "malicious and misleading".
