Love seeing the desis come out on Hacker News. It's good to see that my internal stereotype of desi techies remains accurate. Anyway, "ram ram".
What is Jio, and why are tech’s biggest players suddenly obsessed with it?
51–60 of 108 posts
Re: What is Jio, and why are tech’s biggest players suddenly obsessed with it?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's an open secret that the Ambani's are the most corrupt family in India. Not very sure about that lol!
The publicly known net worth is just notional number not just in India but any country. Im pretty sure the princes and kings or Saudi, or Putin could be more worth than Bezos or Gates. That way corruption is very hard to measure in India. There was one story like an year back in the state of Telangana where a sub-inspector was caught, the raid revealed he was worth around 300 crore rupees. That is what he was unable…
For those like me who don’t know what’s a crore, it’s 10m; a crore rupees ~US$134k.
Also looked up bribing traffic police as it sounds somewhat incredible. Found this: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-natio... According to that article, 82% of respondents (among truck drivers and fleet owners) alleged to have paid bribes in their last trip, at an estimated average of Rs 1257 (US$17) per trip (I assume people who’re annoyed about bribes are more likely to respond, so the reality should be somewhat better than 82% which is kind of crazy...).
Re: What is Jio, and why are tech’s biggest players suddenly obsessed with it?
#53When JIO was launched, till it became the behemoth it is today, there were a series of some 20 regulatory changes in Telecom in India, all benefiting Jio at the right time, hurting their competition.
When everyone is investing in Jio, I think its that absurdity everyone is investing in.
Re: What is Jio, and why are tech’s biggest players suddenly obsessed with it?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's an open secret that the Ambani's are the most corrupt family in India. Not very sure about that lol!
The publicly known net worth is just notional number not just in India but any country. Im pretty sure the princes and kings or Saudi, or Putin could be more worth than Bezos or Gates. That way corruption is very hard to measure in India. There was one story like an year back in the state of Telangana where a sub-inspector was caught, the raid revealed he was worth around 300 crore rupees. That is what he was unable…
I mean paying bribes does not make you corrupt. The person accepting the bribe is corrupt. So the most corrupt family in India is most probably the Gandhi family. The Ambanis may be the family to have paid most of the bribes.
Re: What is Jio, and why are tech’s biggest players suddenly obsessed with it?
#55Except for data is not new oil. It is the new myth, way more powerful myth than that of money.
Re: What is Jio, and why are tech’s biggest players suddenly obsessed with it?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
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.
Jio is profitable. On paper, their net profit in Q2 was ~$500MM USD.
https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/reliance...
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.)
Re: What is Jio, and why are tech’s biggest players suddenly obsessed with it?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
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.
"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.
WAY different than Uber / Wework, etc.
Re: What is Jio, and why are tech’s biggest players suddenly obsessed with it?
#58Because the largest market for growth these entities have outside of China, is India. The middle classes want the goodies, and these players want the income. Jio has the market.
And more importantly choke-hold over the government bureaucracy. They can essentially bulldoze government over any rules and regulations, and bribe around freely. This is how Reliance got big.
Here comes the copy pasted argument without any fact or figures to support it that appears in every thread regarding Jio/Reliance/Ambani/India or a combination thereof.
Frankly, it is getting a bit stale and feels a lot like the standard Redditesqe drive-by factless commenting behavior to gain cheap karma and dopamine hits of raging against the system. HN is supposed to be better.
> They can essentially bulldoze government over any rules and regulations, and bribe around freely.
Um no. Can you show any, any incidences of them breaking the law or bribing anything other than "I know deep down in my heart of hearts that they do"?
And regarding bulldozing regulations or skirting them, isn't that how every corporation works. Hell, that is essentially how every SV company, big or startup works. And so does any other company in any other country. Nothing unique or special going on here that should be pointed out in every thread.
> This is how Reliance got big.
This is not how Reliance got big. They got big by work and bringing products to the market. The founder made his first IPO by quite literally hawking his shares alongside his products to retail customers. And Jio is not something that is mandatorily being shoved down people's throats. People willingly use it and pay for it.
Re: What is Jio, and why are tech’s biggest players suddenly obsessed with it?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
That may have been in the past. However ever since Modi Government came to power, industrials access to government has reduced drastically. Initial days of Modi, there used to be some fish trap to warn the officials.
No way you can say that with straight face. The regulatory capture of TRAI by JIO is very well known.
Any proofs, incidents, facts, figures to support your accusations?
> The regulatory capture of TRAI by JIO is very well known
It is very well known in the same vein as "Bush did 9/11", "George Soros is the boss of Illumnati", "Zuckerberg is a lizard human", "Freemasons rule the world", "Area 51 has aliens", etc. Essentially baseless urban myths.
Re: What is Jio, and why are tech’s biggest players suddenly obsessed with it?
#60Is Jio still using and building on KaiOS, their fork of FirefoxOS, the javascript-based mobile OS? I'd love to read the story behind that and where it's going next. Are their contributions open source?
They are going to shift to Android for their 5g budget phones with Google doing some specific android work for them.