Changing Course

Mukesh Ambani's conviction about the Indian market is paying off as opposed to those who invested abroad heavily.

- Nevin John

NTIL A DECADE BACK, when Indian conglomerates were shopping around the globe to ride on the economic boom, Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and MD of Reliance Industries (RIL), had been reclusive. He was criticized for an inward-looking business approach and not scaling up RIL as a global player in petroleum. In the domestic market, after building the second refinery in Jamnagar and investing in hydrocarbon exploration and retailing in 2010, he took a second plunge into telecom. Then it was silence again until 2014. But that was soon to change.

Reliance Jio tied up with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), original design manufacturers (ODMs) and chipset vendors for end-to-end device design and engineering in late-2014 and started rolling out physical infrastructure across India. Within two years, in September 2016, it launched the commercial operation of Reliance Jio. In three years, Jio acquired over 350 million customers and emerged as the second-largest player in the telecom industry, after Vodafone Idea. Jio is also second in terms of average revenue per user (ARPU) – ₹122 in the first quarter of this financial year.