(HBL)
Reliance Jio, which has now grown to a $100 billion entity in terms of valuation, is the “biggest risk” the Ambanis have ever taken, said Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries.
“We have 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 l 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. But I told my Board that 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 India,” said Ambani in an interview with McKinsey & Company’s Gautam Kumra.
He said that at Reliance Industries, which will celebrate golden jubilee in 2027, there is no hesitation in believing that the company can build businesses of the future. “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 fulfill it at scale and over a long arc of time. That remains a fundamental piece of Reliance. We also have no hesitation in believing we can build businesses of the future. With our experience, we can extrapolate the future 20 years from today. That’s why we didn’t hesitate to build polyester first or to build 4G before its time. The same is now true about our newest business venture in new energy. We are building one of the world’s largest manufacturing ecosystems for green and clean energy. It covers solar, batteries, hydrogen, bio-energy and much more,” Ambani added.
The chairman said that Reliance continues to reinvent its business every 3-5 years and the company is now headed towards becoming “a deep-tech and advanced manufacturing company.”
Ambani said, “When you think about innovation, it is not only in the product. Investment is also in disrupting the market, in developing a new business model, and in finding totally new solutions to the needs of society.”
