It’s Official: Partnership With DEN & Hathway Finalised, Jio to Capture 5 Crore Homes 

Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani controlled Reliance Industries has entered into a strategic partnership with two of India’s leading cable service operators, Den Networks Limited and Hathway Cable and Datacom Limited. RIL will make the primary investment of Rs 2,045 crore through a preferential issue under SEBI regulations and secondary purchase of Rs 245 crore from the existing promoters for a 66% stake in Den, reports Financial Express.

The company has described the deal as ‘win-win’ outcome for customers, local cable operators, content producers and the companies. The partnership will allow fuelling the expansion of JioGigaFiber to 50 million homes across 1,100 cities.

Since the public rollout of Jio in September 2016, the company has been attracting customers of rival services like Airtel, with numerous freebies and attractive offers. It is already the third-largest telecom by revenue share. In order to grab a share of the expanding broadband market, Reliance also launched the JioFiber service in July 2018.

Both Hathway and DEN have 7.2 million digital cable subscribers each, with operations across 350 and 200 cities, respectively. Hathway also enjoys over 52 per cent share of the total cable broadband market in India.

Some industry experts have cautioned that the deal might attract the attention of the Competition Commission of India (CCI) as it could give Reliance unfair advantage over other players in the field.