India's mobile data market, smartphone/4G phone penetration beginning to grow exponentially. This is evident from 1) leading mobile operators in India, namely, Airtel and Idea, have seen their data subscribers grow 26% and 25% respectively in the past two years and 2) mobile data consumption per sub per month has grown from an average 175MB (mega-bytes) in 2013 to 750MB currently; 3) average monthly consumptions per Reliance Jio user within first month of test launch to Reliance employees has been in excess of 18GB
Further the sharp increase in smartphone shipments to India over 2013 to 2015, and more recently the robust growth in 4G phone imports to India increasing share of 4G phones as a percentage of smartphones to near 50%, underscores our thesis of mobile data revenue in exponential growth mode; and an improving 4G ecosystem would provide RIL's Jio with a good market environment to scale up its subscriber base quickly.
