Airtel ties up with Karbonn to take on Jio’s feature phone
NEW DELHI: India’s largest telco B hart iA ir tel Ltd has tied up with K ar bonn Mobile India Pvt. Ltd to introduce an affordable 4G smartphone, taking on Reliance Jio’s 4G-enabled feature phone.
The smartphone will be bundled with a monthly recharge pack and come with cash-back benefits. The Android-based 4G smartphone will offer a full touch screen experience, dual SIM slots and access to apps like You Tube, WhatsApp, and Facebook.
Airtel said the price of the sm ar phone, K ar bonn A 40, which is being sold in the market for ₹3,499, would be slashed by 60% to ₹1,399 and will include a monthly pack of ₹169 from the telco.
Airtel will form such tie-ups with other device makers too, said Raj Pu dip ed di, director, consumer business and chief marketing officer, B hart iA ir tel.
“We plan to partner with multiple manufacturers to bring affordable smartphone options to the market and build an ‘open ecosystem’ of low-cost devices”.
Shares of Airtel rose 5% on a day the BS E’ s benchmark Sen sex fell 0.28% to 31,833.99 points.
The move comes almost three months after Jio, a unit of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd, introduced its 4 G-capable feature phone, which comes with unlimited data and optional TV streaming that is essentially free for subscribers who will merely pay a ₹1,500 security deposit refundable after three years. Jio has sold six million of its featurephones so far.
Since its launch last September, J io has built a user base of 130 million, squeezing revenues and profits of incumbent telcos. In just six months since the launch, data consumption in India rose six-fold to 1.2 billion gigabytes per month, making India the largest mobile data consumer in the world, Ambani has claimed.
For the Karbonn phone, a buyer needs to make a down payment of ₹2,899 for the 4 G smartphone and make 36 continuous monthly recharges of ₹169. The customer will get a cash refund of ₹500 after 18 months and another ₹1,000after 36 months, taking the total cash benefit to ₹1,500, Airtel said in a statement.
In case the customer does not wish to opt for the ₹169 bundled plan, she/he has the flexibility to opt for recharges of any denomination and validity.
To claim the cash refund benefit, recharges worth ₹3,000 must bed one within the first 18 months (for the first refund of ₹500) and another ₹3,000 over the next 18 months (for the second refund of ₹1,000), the company said.