Question

pick a topic of interest to you ( e. g., consumer in one geographical area, or one specific industry). you are going to compare what you found in one reference work, one website, and one journal article. Give URLS and complete bibliographical information. where possible, provide the names of the authors and their backgrounds. describe what each of the sources provided in terms of quantity of relevant information, depth of analysis, objectivity, recency, etc. did any of these sources seem more oriented to promoting a product, industry or country rather than objectively describing and evaluating that topic?.
your assignment should be two pages in length, double -spaced, 12-point font, Times New Roman.

Answer 1

Topic Chosen : customer base of reliance Jio in India

Source 1 : Economic Times - By ET Bureau dated Feb 21, 2019, 08.10 AM IST

Content

“Reliance Jio Infocomm outgunned incumbents by adding 8.56 million mobile phone users in December, taking its subscriber base past 280 million, while Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtellost customers triggered by early effects of minimum recharge plans aimed to weed out non-revenue generating users.

Market leader Vodafone Idea and second-largest, Bharti Airtel lost 2.33 million and 1.5 million customers, respectively, says Trai’s latest subscriber data. Mukesh Ambanicontrolled Jio widened customer market share to 23.82% (23.17%) on-month, while VIL and Airtel’s narrowed to 35.61% (35.94%) and 28.93% (29.17%) respectively, Trai data showed.”

Verdict : The website had a lot of ads like economic times app, Amazon etc. The information focused on mostly facts and I feel the article did not provide sufficient information. The data statistics are reliable as the information is said to be taken from TRAI data.

Source 2 - NDTV gadgets by Gadgets 360 staff dated 18 January 2019

Content

“HIGHLIGHTS

• Jio reported 65 percent increase in its net profit for Q3 2018-19
• Its standalone net profit stood at Rs. 831 crores
• Jio's revenue during the period under review stood at Rs. 10,383 crores

Telecom major Reliance Jio Infocomm on Thursday reported a 65 percent increase in its standalone net profit for the October-December 2018 period.

Its standalone net profit stood at Rs. 831 crores in the third quarter of the financial year 2018-19, against Rs. 504 crores reported in October-December 2017-18, the company said in a statement.

Reliance Jio's operating revenue during the period under review stood at Rs. 10,383 crores, 50.9 percent higher than the Rs. 6,879 crores earned during the corresponding period of the last financial year.

Its subscriber base as of December 31, 2018 was 280.01 million. Earning per subscriber marginally moderated to Rs. 130 per month from Rs. 131.7 previously.

"Jio has sustained its pace of underlying subscriber additions with net addition during the quarter of 27.9 million (as against previous four-quarter average of 28.4 million)," said the statement.

Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani said RIL maintained robust growth momentum across retail and Jio platforms and "the share of consumer businesses is steadily increasing its contribution to the overall profitability of the company".

Further, average data consumption per user per month was 10.8GB and average voice consumption was recorded at 794 minutes per user per month. Video consumption drove most of the usage, increasing to 460 crore hours per month, it said.

The company said last month it would hive off its tower and fibre assets, a move that could help sell or list the assets in future.

"We're in the process of de-merging our tower and fibre business and the end objective will be to have different set of investors who would want to run these companies," said V Srikanth, joint chief financial officer.

"This means that these assets go off our balance sheets so the liabilities also go down," he added.”

Verdict - the website too had a lot of ads. As compared to ET the information was more inclusive than a brief explanation. Both the sites do not mention the exact names of who gathered and write these articles. The NDTV mentions “Written with agency inputs” which I think means they have added a few facts as gathered by their team. These facts thus, may not be reliable. NDTV also has an option to read the article in Hindi as well facilitating their customer needs better than ET.