Gujarat is where Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries, will test his e-commerce model, a juggernaut that is likely to push rivals Amazon and Flipkart just as Reliance Jio bruised and battered top telecom companies.
Speaking at the Vibrant Gujarat Summit today, Ambani revealed that Gujarat would be the first state where the new e-commerce platform would be launched. He said Jio and Reliance Retail’s new e-commerce project would empower 12 lakh shopkeepers in Gujarat.
Ambani’s retail plans, online and offline, for 2019 will be defining India Inc strategy next year. Tighter e-commerce rules that will apply on foreign giants from February 2019 will make this strategy more potent
Now that Jio has connected the masses — getting 250 million of them and counting firmly in its ecosystem — Ambani will start commerce on his platform to make money and recoup the massive investment, the largest the country has ever seen, to sell fashion and food, electronics and financial services, and even advertising.
Mukesh Ambani has an ambitious plan to utilise it’s over 5,100-plus smaller Jio Point stores in more than 5,000 cities and towns as the last mile connection point for its e-commerce venture to reach consumers without internet access or who have never shopped online, an ET report revealed last month.
Significantly, Ambani said Jio’s network was fully 5G ready and his company would not only help the state create smart cities but also smart villages. Unveiling an ambitious vision at the company’s 41st annual general meeting last year, Ambani had announced several new ventures, including JioGigaFiber, that would ultimately capture almost every sphere of a consumer’s life—from food, clothes and entertainment to health and security.
Ambani had spoken of intertwining his retail and telecom businesses, each supporting the other. “We see our biggest growth in creating a hybrid, online-to-offline new commerce platform of 35 crore customer footfalls at Reliance Retail, 21.5 crore Jio customers five crore Jio giga-home customers, and three crore small merchants and shopkeepers,” Ambani said. This means most of things and services you buy will have a Reliance imprint.
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