Mukesh Ambani gave a peek into his next big ambitious move on Monday, revealing details about the plan to take on e-commerce giants like Amazon and Alibaba through a fusion of digitisation and retail.
Speaking to an audience that included the likes of Aditya Birla Group's Kumar Mangalam Birla, Tata Sons' N. Chandrashekharan and ITC's Sanjiv Puri at the 'Make in Odisha Conclave' in Bhubaneswar, the Reliance Industries chairman and managing director called his plan to take small merchants and traders online 'New Commerce' and said, “We are committed to connecting everyone and everything everywhere”.
"Reliance is working on creating the world's largest online-to-offline 'new commerce' platform," Ambani said in his speech, adding that it will transform the lives and businesses of three crore merchants in the country. "We will enable them to do anything and everything that large enterprises and large e-commerce players are able to do," he said, adding, "Reliance and Jio will considerably improve the ease of living of everyone".
Turning Jio's network into a business platform was always believed to be at the crux of the company"s future push, which otherwise made a better part of its profits from petrochemicals till this year. The first indication of this came at the Reliance annual general body meeting a few months ago, where Ambani had publicly laid out his blueprint to take on the fast-growing world of e-commerce and combine Reliance's major expansion into retail over the past few years with its telecom unit's unmatched network and infrastructure spread across the country.
Monday's speech at the Odisha conclave gives further insight into the next big focus for India's biggest company—move from being an oil and natural gas-centric behemoth into consumer services, especially into retail, by arming small businesses and merchants with the powers of the internet to market to a potentially global consumer base. The JioGigaFiber, a high-speed fixed-line broadband service the company is rolling out at a frenetic pace in smaller towns and villages, will be central to this plan.
"Our aim and resolve is to ensure that India rises from the present 135th rank to be amongst the top three nations in fixed broadband within the next three years," he said. The idea, simplistically put, is to make every neighbourhood shop and trader into a potential business with access to a global market through the Jio network, and thereby take on the Amazons and Alibabas of the world. This retail symbiosis will also help negate whatever disadvantages Jio had being a late entrant in the telecom sector.
Additionally, Ambani said Reliance Group companies will invest Rs 3,000 crore in various businesses in the state of Odisha. This is in addition to the Rs 6,000 crore already invested in the state.
