Can Reliance succeed globally?

Reliance Industries, one of the few Indian companies with annual revenues of over $100 billion, is increasingly delving into technology. At its recent AGM, Mukesh Ambani declared, “Disruptive technologies and innovation have always been the greatest creators of wealth for nations and corporations alike.” He added that by adding a suite of tools and platforms—JioBrain—he said, “I foresee that by enhancing JioBrain at Reliance, we will create a powerful AI services platform that we can offer to other enterprises as well.”
Some time ago, Zoho founder Sreedhar Vembu stated that increasing R&D spending is the responsibility of companies, not governments.
Highlighting the growing adoption of new technologies, Ambani further said, “We plan to set up gigawatt AI-ready data centres.” This is heading towards India’s AI infrastructure. Last year, Reliance filed over 2,555 patents in multiple fields.
Reliance is riding high as the Competition Commission of India has approved the $8.5 billion merger of Jio Cinema and Hotstar Disney+ India. While Netflix has never made much money in India, Prime Video will have a hard time competing with Reliance. Jeff Bezos is struggling as the market leader in India, and Amazon is second only to Flipkart in the e-commerce space. That doesn’t take away from AWS’s status as the cloud market leader.
One area where India is a clear leader is flash trading with companies like Swiggy, Instamart and Big Basket Now. In its latest funding round, Zepto raised a cool $340 million, taking its valuation to over $5 billion. Amazon India is looking to enter this space in 2025.
Another ambitious billionaire is Bhavish Aggarwal, who wants Ola to be the largest EV company in the world. This is easier said than done, as the EV space is more about innovation than brute force manufacturing strategies. A lot of R&D, patents and AI have to come into play. Interestingly, Exponent Energy, in partnership with bus maker Veera Vahana, aims to charge a 13.5-metre bus in just 15 minutes.
National Quantum Mission to award grants to 15 startups Quantum is important, not just AI. OYO, which has become the third-largest hotel chain by number of rooms, aims to triple its net profit in fiscal 2025.
UIDAI (Aadhaar) Founder and Chairman and Non-Executive Chairman Nandan Nilekani announced that the value of all startups that have been built on the back of Indian public infrastructure has crossed $100 billion.
The Indian startup ecosystem is the third largest in the world and probably the fastest growing. We currently have 1.4 lakh established startups. This is key to India becoming a $10 trillion economy in a short span of time.