RIL’s 42th shareholder meeting today; Ambani may give update on Jio

TIL Desk/Business/Mumbai-Reliance Industries chief Mukesh Ambani is likely to give an update today on Jio’s 4G launch and signal culmination of the $42-billion capex cycle it had earmarked for its other businesses three years ago. Ambani may devote a large part of his speech at RIL’s 42th shareholder meeting in Mumbai today to the update and a road map for the company’s telecom venture in terms of network rollout and the customer base during the test launch.

But he may stop short of announcing a date for commercial launch, industry watchers and sources said. According to the sources, Ambani is likely to provide a status update on the Rs 2 lakh-crore spending on building telecom network as well as growing subscriber numbers, which at the last count stood at 1.5 million test users.

The AGM today comes at a time when the new entrant is locked in a dispute with the existing cellular operators on the points of interconnect. Reliance Jio has accused incumbent players of not releasing sufficient interconnection ports during its test run of services while the existing operators (under the aegis of COAI) have dubbed its testing of network as an effort to bypass regulations.