Reliance Communications (BSE: RCOM), India’s largest and only telecom operator offering nationwide CDMA and GSM mobile services, and GetJar, the world’s second largest app store announced today a strategic alliance between the two companies. According to this alliance, GetJar will offer Reliance Communications its extensive catalog of over 65,000 free mobile applications. Reliance Communication’s over 100 million subscribers will gain immediate access to GetJar’s massive library of applications via a GetJar apps store through RCOM’s VAS platform R-World. GetJar will also enable RCOM to offer its Apps Store to a large bandwidth of mobile handsets across multiple brands and not remain restricted to a few high-end smartphones. Reliance Communications will offer the GetJar Apps Store across GSM and CDMA networks.
As the world’s largest independent app store, GetJar is the most cost effective, easy and scalable distribution channel RCOM will be able to leverage in order to generate traffic to its network. With over 300% growth year-on-year, GetJar averages nearly two million downloads per day globally. In India where mobile phones have become an important part of everyone’s livelihood the country is adding more mobile phone subscribers each month than any other.
“We wanted to partner with the largest, most experienced, “open” application catalog provider to address virtually any device being used by our customers,” said Mr. Anil Pande, Head – VAS, Reliance Communications, “Our partnership with GetJar means that all Reliance Communications customers will instantly have access to thousands of applications ranging from games, shopping and lifestyle applications to sports, entertainment and productivity applications.”
“Our agreement with Reliance Communications allows it to immediately connect its customers with over 65,000 free applications with very little effort,” said Ilja Laurs, founder and CEO of GetJar. “It made a great deal of sense to partner with India’s largest integrated communication service provider as GetJar is also the fourth most visited mobile site in India. We are very excited to offer our catalog of free applications through Reliance Communications’ R-World platform.”
Reliance Communications customers will have access to thousands of applications ranging from games, social networking, sports, entertainment and productivity applications. Popular apps such as Facebook® Mobile, Yahoo!, Fandango and eBuddy can be easily downloaded to over 2300 handsets across all major platforms. RCOM will offer the service at 50 paise per MB of usage. The application download and use by itself will be free of cost.
The GetJar alliance is part of RCOM’s strategy to offer a comprehensive Apps Store service that will include its white-field Apps store RWorld2.0 and GetJar’s third party service offering over 65,000 mobile applications in all.
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RCOM application store strategy is directly linked to increase in data traffic, increase in data plan adoption and sale of other services through the use of free applications. The enabler of enhanced data usage is possible when a key element is given away for free. The free applications in RCOM’s Apps Store strategy will help achieve mass mobile data plan adoption and mobile internet use. This will be the immediate upside to its strategic alliance with GetJar.
Following the alliance with GetJar, Reliance Communications joins a list of leading global companies using GetJar’s flexible, open app store approach including Sprint, Sony Ericsson, 3UK, The Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Mobile France.
About Reliance Communications
Reliance Communications Limited founded by the late Shri Dhirubhai H Ambani (1932-2002) is the flagship company of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. The Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group currently has a net worth in excess of Rs. 64,000 crore (US$ 13.6 billion), cash flows of Rs. 13,000 crore (US$ 2.8 billion), net profit of Rs. 8,400 crore (US$ 1.8 billion).
Reliance Communications is India's foremost and truly integrated telecommunications service provider. The Company, with a customer base of 105 million including over 2.5 million individual overseas retail customers and nearly 3 million DTH customers, ranks among the Top 5 Telecom companies in the world by number of customers in a single country. Reliance Communications corporate clientele includes 2,100 Indian and multinational corporations, and over 800 global, regional and domestic carriers.
Reliance Communications has established a pan-India, next generation, integrated (wireless and wireline), convergent (voice, data and video) digital network that is capable of supporting best-of-class services spanning the entire communications value chain, covering over 24,000 towns and 600,000 villages. Reliance Communications owns and operates the world's largest next generation IP enabled connectivity infrastructure, comprising over 190,000 route kilometers of fibre optic cable systems in India, USA, Europe, Middle East and the Asia Pacific region.
About GetJar
GetJar is the world’s second largest Apps store, second only to Apple iTunes, with over 900 million downloads to date. The company provides more than 65,000 mobile applications across all major handsets and platforms to consumers in more than 200 countries. In June 2009, GetJar was named winner of the 2009 Meffy Award for Best Direct to Consumer Service. GetJar is backed by marquee investor Accel Partners and is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in the UK and Lithuania. For more information: www.getjar.com and follow us on Twitter @getjar.