Jio Aur Jeene Do

RIL has raised over $15 billion dollars from 11 investors in the past two months through selling stakes in Jio Platforms

Jio is the “everything store” of India.

Such taglines are pretty much in all business channels and newspapers. But what’s the deal?

Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (popularly known as Jio), is a mobile network operator in the country with around 38CR customers in a population of 137CR. In 2016, Mukesh invested $33 billion to construct a nationwide 4G broadband service network and offered cheap data rates and free domestic calling to boost subscribers. Along the way, Mukesh assumed the title of India’s richest man; his company became India’s top-ranked Fortune 500 company in 2019, along with revenue over $82 billion in 2019. It is owned by Reliance Industries, headquartered in Mumbai.

Jio provides 4G LTE services and is the only VoLTE (Voice over LTE) service provider in India. In May 2016, Jio launched a bundle of multimedia apps on Google Play as part of its upcoming 4G services. Location-based AR game Pokémon Go was launched in India in December, 2016 in collaboration with Jio in which hundreds of Jio stores and other Reliance marts and shopping malls like Reliance Trends and Reliance Digital became Sponsored PokéStops and Gyms. Jio Platforms has since risen into areas like digital currencies and education; it intends to open Jio University in 2021 to educate India’s next generation in areas like artificial intelligence. Along with that, it produces cell phone which commanded 21% of India’s total handset market in 2018, a year after the introduction.

The major uplift behind Jio’s new partnership with Facebook, however, seems to be the company’s planned launch of a nationwide JioMart e-commerce platform.

Total Rs 78,562 crore invested in recent weeks that value Jio Platforms for an equity value of Rs 4.91 trillion and an enterprise value of Rs 5.16 trillion

Right now, Amazon and the Walmart-owned e-commerce firm Flipkart command over 60% of India’s e-commerce market, according to market intelligence firm S&P Global. Yet these companies have been hit by recent regulations that favor domestic players like JioMart over foreign competitors. In December, Jio Platforms conducted a soft-launch of JioMart in three neighborhoods near Mumbai, supplying more than 50,000 grocery products.

JioMart had plans to rapidly expand in the early months of 2020, which have likely been put on hold because of the country’s lockdown amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The lockdown Internet boom, along with a global downturn in oil prices, saw Jio Platforms in late April become nearly as valuable as all of RIL’s other properties combined. Recent investment deals have valued Jio Platforms at $65 billion, whereas RIL’s total market capitalization on the Nasdaq is $133 billion.

“In this new world, data is the new oil. And data is the new wealth,” chairman Ambani said last year.

Reliance Industries (RIL) has turned net debt-free ahead of its March 2021 deadline and will rope in investors in its consumer and retail businesses in next few quarters, chairman Mukesh Ambani announced. As on March 2020, Reliance had a net debt of Rs 1.61 trillion and the company managed to turn itself net debt-free after raising Rs 1.68 trillion via a 24.7 per cent stake sale in Jio Platforms and its rights issue.

Held by Reliance Jio, India is home to the world’s second largest internet user base, accounting for 12 per cent of all internet users globally, the 2019 Mary Meeker report on Internet Trends said. Jio is one of the most innovative internet companies based outside the US, it added. Jio’s free voice call and lucrative data plans have helped grow data usage by two-fold in one year owing to moderate internet restrictions in India.

With 307 million mobile phone service subscribers, Reliance Jio is expanding offline access to e-commerce, the report said.

Few days post Facebook’s investment, Jio Platforms declared that customers could place grocery orders via the Facebook-owned WhatsApp messaging service, a handy tool for homebound consumers. But Jio Platforms had to temporarily suspend the WhatsApp service this month after orders went unfilled owing to a shortage of delivery drivers. Reliance announced its foray into the e-commerce segment with a hybrid online-offline model in 2018 and has since then acquired logistics and rural consumer-focused start-ups.

With surging stock prices of RIL, it won’t be wrong to say Reliance is the new face of the new India.