Jio will launch its smartphone — Jiophone Next — in partnership with Google on September 10. Market analysts predict further pricing aggression from Jio in a bid to shore up its subscriber base with the telecom major’s launch of the new phone.

According to Trai data, Jio held a 36.98 per cent share in an 118-crore wireless subscriber market in India at the end of June 30, 2021.

While Airtel had a market share of 29.82 per cent, Vodafone Idea held a market share of 23.15 per cent. The private operators dominate the telecom industry in India with an overall subscriber share of 90 per cent.

“JioPhone Next is expected to be launched on September 10, and it could turn out to be another round of pricing aggression from Jio to accelerate its subscriber market share gains,” said Naval Seth, research analyst at Emkay.

Reliance Jio chairman Mukesh Ambani had announced the JioPhone Next launch on Ganesh Chaturthi at the company’s annual general meeting in June.

With an Android operating system, the phone is expected to include features such as Google Assistant, language translation, camera with augmented reality features among others while being an affordable 4G smartphone.

Sundar Pichai CEO, Google had said that the phone will support an optimized version of Android and will support the latest updates.

Jio currently has feature phones as JioPhones and the market is expecting announcement from the company soon on pre-orders of the JioPhone Next.