I can’t understand why tech’s biggest players are obsessed with it. I mean, I know what they may be thinking and why they’re salivating. But I believe they’re just behaving as if they don’t want to be left behind and seen as losers, whereas the truth (IMO, and take this with a big pinch of salt) is that this looks like the seemingly limitless amount of money pumped in by Uber or SoftBank in the hopes of “capturing the market and making boatloads of money”, only to realize later that the underlying proposition and the model were defective, which they will never admit.
Reliance has a lot of political backing (and Jio is what it is today because of concessions), but again strictly IMO, I think all these tech companies “investing” in Jio will be left holding the bag in a few years.
I am no expert in any sense but the comparison to 'limitless amount of money pumped in by Uber or SoftBank in the hopes of “capturing the market and making boatloads of money”' here is incorrect.
JIO already has a good amount of paying, repeating customers and they have the infrastructure setup and working already for 1B+ people (not subscribers).
So yeah, the tech companies might lose it but not like Uber / Wework did (IMO). Also, another important point to note is that Reliance, regardlesss of the political party, will have the backing.
Uber also had a huge number of paying customers! The problem is that they could not be paying enough to make ends meet.
If Jio is profitable, or would be profitable if it did not invest all the profits (like Amazon used to do), it's another story. But if the unit economy isn't working, then yes, it'b be an Uber, a unicorn which is too heavy for its own hooves.
They're also heavily indebted and that profit is propped up by some rather questionable accounting shenanigans, so take that number with a pinch of garam masala. Still, the unit economics in mobile telecoms are very different from an Uber: setting up a network from scratch is extremely expensive, but the net cost of adding an additional subscriber is nearly zero and the revenue from each additional user goes pretty much directly to the bottom line. (Again compare Uber, where they probably lose money on many rides due to driver subsidies, predatory pricing, algorithms not accounting for traffic etc.)
"Uber also had a huge number of paying customers" but we knew that they(UBER) were burning cash despite that.
That is not the story with JIO, also JIO is also owned by RIL which has other businesses and would NOT need approvals / investments / bureaucracy to move cash from there to JIO, if need be.
Reliance has a lot of political backing (and Jio is what it is today because of concessions), but again strictly IMO, I think all these tech companies “investing” in Jio will be left holding the bag in a few years.