Mumbai, July 16 2020: At the company's 43rd annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday --its firt by virtual video and YouTube-- Chairman Mukesh Ambani announced  the latest to join the Jio platform as a strategic investor: Google who will pump in US$ 4.5 billion or  Rs 33,737 crore for 7.7% stake.
The partnership will see them join to build a new  Android-based smartphone operating system to fuel  an affordable  5G  smart phones -- aimed at the 350 million Indians, who currently use a 2G feature phone. Ambani announced that Jio will be developing a complete 5G solution from scratch; trials for this will be launched as soon as 5G spectrum is available.
In other announcements made by Jio's trio of young exedcutives: Akash and Isha Ambani and KiranThomas:
Jio and WhatsApp will be working closely to create growth opportunities for millions of Indian small merchants and enable customers seamlessly transact with kirana (grocry)  shops. Facebook which also invested in Jio in April shares a strong vision for digitally empowering consumers as well as SMEs and entrepreneurs across India.
|Jio Platforms is conceived with vision of developing original, captive intellectual property, using which we can demonstrate transformative power of technology across multiple ecosystems – first in India, and then rest of world.
|Isha Ambani  introduced  JioMart to customers: Trusted supplies, fresh produce, delivered at the doorstep; great value and attractive prices; easy-to-use platform that offers intuitive experience with voice-integration in multiple languages. A unique solution that JioMart offers is to convert the kirana’s existing stores in less than 48 hours into refreshed self-service stores, thereby transforming their customer experience completely. JioMart is currently undergoing a pilot in Mumbai region.
 Reliance Industries earlier this week launched   JioMeet,  India's first cloud-based video conferencing app with unlimited free calling, which is being seen  taking on Zoom. The app has seen 5 million downloads within days of its launch.
Akash Ambani described upgrades to Jio's  Set-top box and JioFiber home data offering. Jio’s latest innovation is  JioGlass, a mixed reality headset  that works with JioMeet said Kiran Thomas
Jio's aim is to  connect half a billion mobile customers, a billion smart sensors and 50 million home and business establishments in the next three years. To this end  the company has launched five accelerators of growth of digital connectivity: Mobile broadband, JioFiber, Jio’s enterprise broadband, broadband for SMEs, and Jio’s Narrowband Internet-of-Things (NBIoT). Jio currently has a base of around 388 million subscribers. See Image of the day for visual highlights of the Jio tech announcements.