Jio effect: Mobile data prices fell 48% in 2016, says report

India’s wireless consumer data prices have fallen 48 percent since last year as incumbent telecom carriers had to respond to new entrant Reliance Jio’s pricing, said a report by Kleiner Perkins Internet Trends 2017 report, authored by its partner Mary Meeker.

Data prices have fallen to USD 1.9 per GB from USD 3.1 per GB, mobile operators used to charge consumers in India, a year ago. It was even higher at USD 3.7 per GB of data, operators used to charge in 2015.

The report was released this week by Meeker at a conference in California. The report said that India has about 355 million internet users, the world’s second largest user base after China.

Meeker pointed that Indians spend 28 hours on an average per week browsing the web on their mobile phones out of which around 12.5 hours is spent accessing entertainment content.

The rest 9.5 hours is spent on search, social media and messaging apps.

The report also states that while the cost of smartphones has gone down, it is still unaffordable for many. Fierce competition among local players Micromax, Lava and Karbonn along with Chinese smartphone makers such as Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi will continue to bring the prices down, the report indicated.

However, Chinese and Global smartphone makers still enjoy the larger share of the pie at approximately an 85 percent market share.
India has also overtaken the US in terms of total Google Play Store downloads in 2016.

Messaging apps Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger topped the list in terms of most downloaded Android apps in 2016. They were followed by ShareIT, TrueCaller and Facebook in top five rankings. Streaming apps Hotstar and JioTV occupied the eighth and ninth spot respectively.