Having missed most of the first three industrial revolutions, India has its chance to lead the fourth industrial revolution through a convergence of its IT prowess, ultra-high-speed internet connectivity and affordable smart devices, billionaire Mukesh Ambani said on Thursday. The richest Indian, who heads the nation's most valuable company Reliance Industries, said his group's telecom and digital unit Jio was conceived to provide the key ingredients needed to lead the fourth industrial revolution.
Mukesh Ambani-owned RIL's JioMart is set to launch a slew of new products including financial services, electronics to airline tickets to take on the competition from upcoming rivals like the Tata Super app and other established players including PayTM, Amazon and Flipkart. This comes at a time when RIL's e-commerce revenues are set to grow by 35 per cent to $15 billion within four years and its core retail revenue is expected to grow at the same pace to $44 billion, as per a forecast by Goldman Sachs. "The Tata vs JioMart war will be the next big corporate battle to watch. "While Tata has an upper hand like in-house products and brands, RIL has the backing of global biggies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft," said head of a rating firm asking not to be quoted.
While Jio MF will undoubtedly grow in size, it will have to cross multiple hurdles even to emerge as the market leader, observes Debashis Basu.
The global billionaires list witnessed as many as 94 new entrants from India, stated a report by Hurun India on Tuesday. Following a net addition of 84, the country's billionaire tally touched 271 with their combined wealth at $1 trillion, noted the report. Mukesh Ambani, chairman & managing director of Reliance Industries, is the only Indian to make it into the top 10 of the Hurun Global Rich List 2024, a ranking of billionaires in US dollar terms.
Reliance's big-bang entry across the solar ecosystem will cut dependence on Chinese imports drastically. And Ambani's repeated emphasis that RIL's new energy foray will be 'a truly global business' points that his group is playing not just for a share of the Indian pie but to be the OEM in the larger 5,000 GW global market by 2030, points out Shailesh Dobhal.
Reliance ADAG Chairman Anil Ambani on Friday expressed hope that the Indian industry and the government will work as partners to seize the opportunity to create largescale infrastructure across all sectors in the country.
Are the big five using their dominance to shut out rivals? That is the key question, says Prosenjit Datta.
Why should Reliance Digital position itself as an alternative to Chadhaji's store? It simply doesn't make good business sense, says Sudhir Bisht.
R-ADAG has taken on board Ashutosh, the business head of Sahara One and Entertainment's Hindi movie channel Filmy, as the COO for its upcoming movie channels.
It's oil firms that are big in India and not information technology companies as presumed, with Reliance Industries voted the undisputed leader by American magazine Forbes.
Both sports and digital will drag down the healthy operating margins that entertainment television continues to make.
RIL is setting up infrastructure for a full-fledged horizontal e-commerce offering - internally called the New Commerce - to simultaneously launch pan-India by October-November.
Reliance Industries Ltd's $7.2 billion asset sale to BP PLC has given it the firepower to expand more aggressively overseas, potentially pitching it into competition with Asian rivals for big oil and gas deals.
Delhi Development Authority's land deal to Reliance Industries throws up larger issues of governance.
According to documents accessed by Business Standard, RIL increased its direct stake in Jio to 98.9 per cent as on March this year by pumping more capital into the company.
IT major HCL Technologies' Shiv Nadar has retained his position as the 'most generous Indian' in 2023 as well, with a 76 per cent jump in his donations at Rs 2,042 crore. Wipro's Azim Premji's donations zoomed by 267 per cent to Rs 1,774 crore during the same year, according to the Edelgive Hurun India Philanthropy List 2023 released on Thursday. Richest Indian Mukesh Ambani donated Rs 376 crore in the year, which is an 8 per cent decline.
Isha's stab at the bottom of the laptop pyramid shows she is a true Ambani.
RIL is on its way to becoming a global hydrocarbon major with a larger petroleum refinery and sizable upstream business.
Global funds, according to Christopher Wood, global head of equity strategy at Jefferies, are now beginning to pay more attention to India with the market now offering 30 companies with a market capitalisation over $25 billion.
At the heart of one of the biggest transformations in India's corporate history lies a plan to offer super-fast broadband services.
Big TV, the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Amabni Group's soon-to-be-launched direct-to-home venture, has bagged the official DTH partnership for the Indian Premier League, the Board of Control for Cricket in India's Twenty20 cricket tournament, for a bid of $31.16 million (about Rs 137 crore) for the next four years.
Among major Sensex movers, ITC rose the most by 1.70 per cent, Wipro by 1.43 per cent, Tech Mahindra by 1.36 per cent and Nestle India by 1.27 per cent. Other gainers included HCL Tech, Asian Paints and Reliance. On the other hand, ICICI Bank, NTPC, UltraTech Cement and Tata Steel traded with a loss of up to 0.82 per cent.
Operating margins have been the primary driver of corporate earnings in India in recent quarters, despite revenue growth suffering from weak consumer demand. Companies across sectors have reported a sharp improvement in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (Ebitda) margins over the past two years, benefiting from lower commodity and energy prices. Higher margins more than compensated for slower revenue growth, resulting in double-digit growth in net profit for five consecutive quarters.
RIL is also set to file its tariff plans, which will mark the company's intent to commercialise Jio's operations, with the regulator this week
Reliance Industries (RIL) has reset its battery pack production timeline, shifting it from 2023 earlier to 2024, details shared in the oil-to-telecom conglomerate's latest annual report suggest. In the FY23 annual report released on Sunday, the company has listed the start of battery pack production in 2024. A year ago, at the company's annual general meeting (AGM), Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of RIL, had said, "We aim to start production of battery packs by 2023 and scale up to a fully integrated 5 GWh annual cell-to-pack manufacturing facility by 2024."
Jio is targeting to differentiate its services via superior data and an associated ecosystem of content.
Lenders and shareholders of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) will meet on May 2 to demerge the firm's financial services business. This is expected to create a big player in segments including the NBFC (non-banking financial company) space with net worth of Rs 25,851 crore as of March 2022. According to the plan, RIL shareholders will get a share in the demerged entity for each one held in the company.
With the strain and anxiety of the longest Lok Sabha polls now behind the leaders, governance, with consensus, is the next step.
In power, Mamata Banerjee has tried to bury the ghost of the past, but it might still be work-in-progress. Big-ticket and eye-grabbing (in terms of investment size) projects are still few and far between, reports Ishita Ayan Dutt.
Efficient use of data and a great sense of timing are two things that stand out in the Sebi whole-time member's order in the matter of Reliance Petroleum
Unlike Reliance Jio's focus on 4G, it plans to segment the data market based on device prices and spectrum.
April-June 2023 (Q1FY24) was a mixed quarter for India's top family-owned business groups. Three of the big five in terms of revenue reported a year-on-year (Y-o-Y) decline in combined net sales and two saw a Y-o-Y fall in net profits. Combined net sales of all listed companies in the five groups were up just 2.2 per cent Y-o-Y at Rs 6.6 trillion in the quarter, down sharply from the 10.3 per cent in the March 2023 quarter (Q4FY23) and 42.8 per cent in Q1FY23.
Both groups warn of initiating strict actions, issue public notices.
The Indian film industry joined hands with Hollywood on Wednesday to counter piracy.
When Vineet Mittal first got into solar power, sometime around 2009, and was planting solar panels in Gujarat, renewable energy looked like a sector ripe for startups. Renewables were clearly the future of energy, and the big boys - Mukesh Ambani's Reliance, Adani Group, and the Tatas - were focusing much more on coal and petroleum. Little did Mittal know that things were going to change drastically.
Their startup investments number 13 so far, compared to 17 deals in 2020.
