Indian digital services company Jio Platforms, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, may target West Asia, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asian regions as markets for its self-developed 5G technology kit after it tests and scales it up in India, Indian newspaper The Economic Times reported.
The company is also aiming to form partnerships to manufacture the kit in India, according to the report. Jio Platforms will soon start talks with local system integrators and manufacturers to potentially start producing Jio’s own 5G kit, a senior company executive reportedly said.
“Electronic manufacturing needs to be done through specialized firms, whether it is Jio or any other provider. This will be done in India,” the executive said.
According to Neil Shah, partner at Counterpoint Research, Jio will ideally need to work with partners to integrate the system completely in-house.
“Similar to Rakuten, Jio will look to sell the technologies in the form of either an end-to-end platform it will build or in a modular way to the other operators globally,” Shah reportedly said.
New Japanese market entrant Rakuten Mobile, a subsidiary of e-commerce giant Rakuten, developed its own communication platform aimed at offering solutions and services for the deployment of virtualized networks at speed and low cost by telecom companies, enterprises and governments around the world.
Rakuten Communications Platform contains all the elements of the Rakuten Mobile network, including telco applications and software from multiple vendors, OSS and BSS systems handling customer billing and activation systems, in addition to edge computing and virtual network management functions.
Last month, India’s Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani confirmed that Jio Platforms engineers had designed and developed a “complete 5G system” from scratch.
The executive said that Jio Platforms’ 5G kit will be ready for trials as soon as spectrum is available, with field deployments possible in 2021.
Once the 5G equipment is proven in India, Ambani said Jio Platforms will be well-positioned to export the system to other global operators as a complete managed service.
Reliance Industries and Jio Platforms recently announced that Google committed to invest INR337 billion ($4.5 billion) in Jio Platforms. Google’s investment will translate into a 7.73% equity stake in Jio Platforms.
With Google’s investment, strategic and financial investors committed a total INR1.52 trillion in the last few months, taking a 32.97 interest in Jio Platforms. Some of the firms that recently invested in the Indian company include Qualcomm, Facebook, Silver Lake, Vista Equity Partners, KKR, General Atlantic and Intel Capital.
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