Reliance Industries (RIL), India’s largest conglomerate, is set to pivot into a deeptech and advanced manufacturing enterprise, chairman and managing director (CMD) Mukesh Ambani said.
"In artificial intelligence, our purpose is clear: to address complex societal challenges and create wealth for the nation and its people.
"We don’t intend to play the high-stakes graphics processing unit game. Instead, we will focus on downstream applications.
"The next phase for Reliance is to become a deeptech and advanced manufacturing company,” Ambani said in an interview with McKinsey & Company.
The oil-to-telecommunications (telecom) behemoth spans sectors including digital services (Jio), energy, petrochemicals, new energy and materials, retail, and media and entertainment. Ambani emphasised Reliance’s strategy of owning core technologies and driving innovation internally, with McKinsey & Company’s Gautam Kumra.
“We started with telecom. In 2021, we launched 5G.
"We built everything ourselves, end to end — the core, the hardware, the software, every single piece.
"We used Ericsson and Nokia to help us on 20 per cent, just to make sure that the 80 per cent we put in was good.
"I also wanted to make sure that our people weren’t too full of themselves.
"I said to them, ‘You have to be better than these guys.’ And we are now.
"That gives us unique capabilities today that we are launching in the market.
"As it’s our own technology, we will now be able to offer unique services.”
The biggest risk RIL has taken so far is Jio while re-entering the telecom sector, Ambani said.
“We’ve always taken big risks because, for us, scale is important.
"The biggest risk we have taken so far was Jio.
"At the time, it was our own money that we were investing, and I was the majority shareholder.
"Our worst-case scenario was that it might not work out financially because some analysts thought India wasn’t ready for the most advanced digital technology,” he added.
Ambani recalled telling his board, “In the worst case, we will not earn much return.
"That’s okay because it’s our own money.
"But then, as Reliance, this will be the best philanthropy that we will have ever done in India because we will have digitised India and thereby completely transformed it.”
Reportedly, Jio Platforms is considering an initial public offering with an estimated enterprise value of $136–154 billion.
Jio’s subscriber base as of the 2024–25 third quarter stood at 482.1 million.
Speaking about the conglomerate’s newest business venture — new energy — Ambani said the company is building one of the world’s largest manufacturing ecosystems for green and clean energy, which covers solar, batteries, hydrogen, bioenergy, and more.
“This is our contribution to saving planet earth from the looming climate crisis,” he added.
Ambani, at an annual general meeting of RIL in 2021, announced an investment of over Rs 75,000 crore ($10 billion) to build the most comprehensive ecosystem for new energy and new materials in India.
RIL aims to achieve net-zero carbon status by 2035.
“At the beginning of building any new business, we ask ourselves: ‘What is the most critical need for India’s development, and how can we fulfil it at scale and over a long arc of time?’
"That remains a fundamental piece of Reliance,” Ambani added.
Ambani said that RIL firmly believes it can build businesses of the future, and with its experience, it can extrapolate the next 20 years from today.
However, the CMD added that the businesses of the future will have to be adept at harnessing the technologies of the future.
“The fact that the technology landscape is changing at an exponential speed is self-evident.
"I think that the big challenge will be in the confidence of our next generation to succeed in this new landscape,” Ambani said.
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