Reliance Jio plans to roll out smartphones below Rs 5,000 in 2 years

Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL) is looking to roll out low-cost smartphones in sub-Rs 5,000 category in India.

RIL's telecom arm- Reliance Jio is in talks with local suppliers to jack up their production capacity to produce around 200 million units within the next two years.

The handsets priced around Rs 4,000 will come with Jio branding, Bloomberg reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, adding that the phones will run on Google's custom OS (operating system) announced by RIL at its 43rd AGM (annual general meeting) held in July this year.

Also Read: Reliance Jio to produce 10 crore low-cost Android phones by December

The oil-to-telecom conglomerate, at the AGM, had announced its partnership with Google to build an Android-based operating system for its affordable 5G smartphones soon.

Announcing the association with Google, RIL CEO Mukesh Ambani had said that Jio Platforms and Google would jointly develop an entry-level affordable smartphone that would be designed from "ground-up" and offer optimised Android OS and Play Store.

"Reliance will bring an entry-level 4G or even 5G smartphone for a fraction of its current cost. To power such a value-engineered smartphone, we also need an equally value-engineered smartphone operating system which will be designed from ground-up," Ambani had said at the AGM.

He had also claimed that the (Reliance) Jio has over 350 million feature phone users in India. Ambani had added that the Jio-Google partnership is determined to make India "2G-mukt."

Also Read: Google, Jio to develop new Android-based operating system for entry-level smartphones