Jio turns up the heat post-auction, plans $25bn roll-out and Google handset

Reliance Jio is ready to burn cash to fulfil its ambitions of dominating India’s burgeoning 5G market after already taking a slight lead over Bharti Airtel with 421m subscribers, a 36% share. Jio is intent on pushing this up to half largely by harnessing its greater spending power and then marketing its resulting Standalone offering in major cities as ‘True 5G’. The company’s financial muscle – as part of the Reliance empire and with multiple big-name investors such as Google and Meta – was evident in the 5G auction itself as it spent more than twice as much as Airtel – INR88,078 crore ($11.1bn) against INR43,084 crore ($5.4bn). In terms of raw spectrum Jio only acquired 25% more than Airtel…