India's oil-to-telecom conglomerate, Reliance Industries, will hold its forty-second annual general meeting on Monday. A new Jio Phone, commercial rollout of Reliance Jio's broadband service GigaFiber and integration of Reliance Retail in the Jio ecosystem are among the key announcement expected by chairman Mukesh Ambani at the RIL AGM 2019

. Reliance Jio may also unveil the triple play plan for GigaFiber that bundles broadband, landline as well as television services. RIL reported a 6.8 percent jump in its consolidated net profit at Rs 10,104 crore for the first quarter ended June 2019.

Here are the key things to watch out for in the 42nd RIL AGM:

JioGigaFiber

The commercial rollout and pricing of Reliance Jio's broadband service, GigaFibre, is one of the most anticipated announcements at the RIL AGM. RIL’s broadband offering is currently in a preview phase and is available for a security deposit of Rs 4,500 with free installation for the 100 Mbps plan. The security deposit drops to Rs 2,500 for the 50 Mbps plan.

The pricing for the broadband plans is expected to be in line with peers but RIL will sweeten the deal by making it a triple play —a combination of broadband-landline-TV OTT service. A base price of ranging between Rs 500-600 for GigaFiber is expected.

Jio Phone 3

Reliance Jio had launched Jio Phone 2 at the last AGM and carried a price tag of Rs 2,999. Its next iteration, Jio Phone 3, is expected to be priced at Rs 4,500.

While Jio Phone 2 came with a qwerty keypad, its new edition is likely to be an all-touch smartphone with a powerful processor and significantly greater storage.

According to Trai data, Reliance Jio added 81.8 lakh customers, taking its total subscribers to 32.29 crore in the month of May. Reliance Jio’s subscriber growth is aided by offtake of Jio phones and cheaper monthly plans.

Reliance Retail: Omnichannel e-commerce strategy

At the last AGM, the big announcement was the launch of its new e-commerce initiatives. RIL integrated Reliance Retail's physical marketplace with Jio’s digital infrastructure.

RIL is currently undergoing groundwork on the O2O (online to offline marketplace), with the likely launch of a food and grocery app by end of this year.

Reliance Retail operates neighbourhood stores, supermarkets, hypermarkets, and wholesale, specialty and online stores. It received over 500 million footfalls during FY 2018-19, a growth of 44 percent Y-o-Y.

Earlier this month, The Economic Times reported that Amazon.com Inc is in exploratory talks with Reliance Retail to buy an up to 26 percent stake. RIL was previously in talks with China's Alibaba to sell a stake in Reliance Retail, but a deal could not be sealed due to differences in valuation, Reuters had reported.

Tower & Fiber business

RIL may announce its future strategy for deleveraging its telecom assets. The company in July sold its tower assets via an investment trust to Canada's Brookfield Asset Management for Rs 25,215 crore. Brookfield, along with co-investors, will invest in the units proposed to be issued by Tower Infrastructure Trust sponsored by RIL's wholly-owned unit Reliance Industrial Investments and Holdings Ltd (RIIHL).

Earlier this year, Reliance had demerged the fibre and tower businesses into Jio Digital Fibre Pvt Ltd and Reliance Jio Infratel Pvt Ltd, respectively. As much as Rs 1.07 lakh crore of debt too moved to these companies. Reliance is also holding parallel negotiations for a similar monetisation exercise for its 7,00,000 route km fibre network.

Disclosure: RIL, the promoter of Reliance Jio, also controls Network18, the parent company of CNBCTV18.com.

First Published:Aug 12, 2019 9:48 AM IST