Ambani leads the battle with Bezos (for now)

Both became centi-billionaires (personal worth @ $100 billion). Both are looking to global domination in the future. One rules America and the other rules India. And they’ve been fighting a proxy battle over control of the Future Group

- Sunil Rajguru

While ecommerce doesn’t claim that big a chunk of the retail pie in India, it is still the biggest bet for the future. Mergers and consolidations are already taking place. The first was global retail giant Walmart taking over Indian giant Flipkart for a perfect online-offline synergy merger. Then we had the Tatas taking over BigBasket and they have big plans and are in the process of developing a super app.

Amazon is a global biggie and apart from ecommerce is looking to have its own fleet of robots and autonomous vehicles to have a solid disaster-free supply chain network. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a world leader of cloud services. Prime Video is part of the Streaming Big 3 along with Netflix and Disney+. If that’s not enough Amazon sits on the biggest pile of buying consumer data to exploit in the future. Jeff Bezos has a vision.

Reliance is the giant of India. yesterday Big Retail and Big Oil ruled. Today it is the turn of Big Tech. Reliance is trying for the ultimate trifecta by ramping up all three. If yesterday it was textiles, petrochemicals and oil, today starting with Jio, Reliance is seeing a string of acquisitions and tie-ups in the tech space. Mukesh Ambani also has a vision.

But sometimes visions clash. And it’s almost like a game of chess.