Airtel ties up with Karbonn to take on Jio’s feature phone
NEW DELHI: India’s largest telco Bharti Airtel Ltd has tied up with Karbonn 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 YouTube, WhatsApp, and Facebook.
Airtel said the price of the smarphone, Karbonn A40, 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 Pudipeddi, director, consumer business and chief marketing officer, Bharti Airtel.
“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 BSE’s benchmark Sensex 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 4G-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, Jio 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 4G smartphone and make 36 continuous monthly recharges of ₹169. The customer will get a cash refund of ₹500 after 18 months and another ₹1,000 after 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 be done 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.