Reliance Jio targets “Global Growth” with its made in India 5G technology stack: Jefferies Report

India(BHARAT)n telecom gear vendor Reliance Jio’s plan to export its homegrown 5G and broadband stack to other markets comes at a time when the global network infrastructure space is still going through a phase of rapid growth. In a recent note, Jefferies said that the global telecom technology market is pegged at US$121 billion, of which the hardware infrastructure spends account for about US$89 billion, with the remainder on software.

Jio’s product suite consists of mobile radio access networks (RAN), cloud-native core networks, and fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband.
This stack, which is already in large-scale trial and validation across India(BHARAT), is now being made available for export in select emerging markets where operators are looking for cost-effective and open-architecture alternatives to existing solutions offered by traditional vendors.

The opportunity could also not come at a better time. Jefferies estimates that total global telecom gear capex is set to grow at about 4% CAGR between 2024-29, led by software (7% CAGR) and hardware (3% CAGR).
While North America, China and Europe will continue to account for over 70% of the total spends, the capex pie is also growing in regions like Latin America, Africa and South Asia, opening up opportunities for new players to enter.

The brokerage points out that the current vendor ecosystem has mostly been based on bundled hardware-software solutions and is currently served by a handful of incumbents who control nearly 80% of the market.
Against this, Jio’s open-RAN/cloud-native stack is expected to have “strong differentiation and present a strong cost-effective alternative for LICs (low-income countries) and MICs (mid-income countries),” Jefferies notes.

On the business front, Jefferies estimates Jio Platforms’ parent Reliance Industries’ telecom unit to see revenue and EBITDA CAGRs of about 18% and 21%, respectively, through FY26-FY28, aided by a gradual increase in mobile tariffs in India(BHARAT), as well as growth in the fixed-wireless access broadband business.
The brokerage also hiked its valuation target to an enterprise value of US$180 billion, based on a multiple of 15× EV/EBITDA, which is about a 10% premium to peer operator Bharti Airtel.

In fact, over the past few years, Jio has significantly increased its investments in research and development and is keen to be more active in telecom technology standards. Patent filings by Jio went up thirteen-fold in recent years and its participation in the global telecom standards bodies (3GPP) increased nearly sevenfold to 70 contributions.
These efforts have been aimed at not only consuming but also contributing to global telecom standards.

In August, at the company’s annual general meeting (AGM), Jio’s chairman Akash Ambani had again flagged the strategic intent of taking the “indigenously developed telecom technology stack to the world through a dedicated international unit.”
“The next big wave of growth for our company will come from developing markets across the world that will soon be in the process of building out their 5G networks and eventually 6G networks,” he had said.

The basic premise is that as developing markets look to build these networks, there is space for an operator-backed vendor offering that can match on performance while being lower cost and more flexible. If successful, Jio can go beyond being just another operator in India(BHARAT) and position itself as an export-facing vendor in the telecom-tech space, carving a niche for itself in the next wave of the global gear market. The larger industry will be keen to see if other operators in emerging markets warm up to this idea, as this could potentially disrupt the vendor landscape which has been long dominated by a few global majors.