Samsung has big plans in India, with the Korean giant having launched its Gear VR (2015), Gear S2, and Gear S2 Classic, in the country last year, with the luxury Gear S2 Classic Rose Gold and Platinum smartwatches following. Samsung’s Galaxy J series has been one of the best-selling Samsung series in India despite its being powered by Android, though, instead of Tizen.
That hasn’t stopped Samsung though from making plans to bring a Tizen Academy to the country consisting of app developers that would mentor locals and encourage app development for Samsung’s new homegrown OS that looks to play a big role in its Internet of Things (IoT) agenda. The Korean giant has said that it will double smartphone production in India by 2019, showing that its plans with India are anything but short-term.
Android saturation in India has peaked, but Tizen could prove to be fierce competition in the mobile space, except there’s one problem: while Tizen-powered smartphones such as the Z1, Z2, and Z3 are cheap, mobile data plans are not.
To encourage the growth of the digital movement in India and ultimately, its own mobile OS adoption by local users, Samsung has partnered with Jio to bring LTE to India on a large scale, with Samsung implementing the world’s largest greenfield LTE network and aiding Jio in the network creation and growth (ensuring the LTE network complied with global 3GPP LTE standards) from beginning to end, including VoLTE, while Reliance Jio offered free voice and the world’s lowest-priced mobile data to Indian users. The result is that Reliance Jio Infocomm has become the world’s fastest-growing telecommunications provider, growing to 100 million users in just 170 days (less than half a year, for those doing the math). For this, Samsung and Reliance Jio have been awarded the Best Mobile Innovation for Emerging Markets Award at Global Mobile Awards (GMA) 2017 for their partnership and success to expand the mobile market in emerging regions. The partnership has been in place since 2012.
Samsung and Jio, despite enjoying this honor, are not done yet. The pair recently announced their new Infill & Growth (or I&G, for short) project that is designed to expand Jio’s network reliability and coverage. Samsung looks to enhance Jio’s mobile data speeds, coverage in rural areas (until reaching at least 90% penetration), alongside of in-building penetration and outdoor performance for urban areas – thereby encouraging emerging market adoption. Samsung’s VoLTE, Quality Monitoring and Analysis (VoMA), and Cognitive Traffic Monitoring and Optimizer are tools that have made this all possible.
Samsung and Jio are both excited about their continued partnership and what it means for India as an emerging market. “As Jio’s end-to-end LTE solutions partner, it is a great pleasure for Samsung to contribute to Jio’s tremendous success. The massive deployment of over a million cells across India is especially remarkable. We will strive to create new paradigms for LTE-Advanced Pro and 5G by closely cooperating with Jio as a unified workforce,” said Samsung Electronics Networks Business President and Head Youngky Kim.
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