Why India’s Jio Platforms Leave In On An Investment Spree
Jio Platforms is on a tear. The telecoms and digital arm of the Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) has raised US$15.2 billion in 11 deals over two months amid a worldwide pandemic. “RIL seems to have mastered [dealmaking] better than anyone else,” Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO of digital advisory firm Greyhound Research, said in a note this month.
“It’s hard to find a parallel to this anywhere else in the world.”
The fundraising flurry began with a blockbuster announcement on April 22 that RIL was selling a 10 per cent stake in Jio Platforms to Facebook for US$5.7b (FJ$ 12.39b).
Jio Platforms made subsequent deals with U.S. private equity firms KKR, Vista, General Atlantic, TPG, L Catterton, and Silver Lake, whose deal has two parts.
It also secured investment from United Arab Emirates funds Mubadala and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
In the most recent deal, Jio Platforms announced that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund will invest US$1.5 billion for a 2.3 per cent stake in the company.
After the Saudi deal, RIL claimed on Friday that it is now “net debt free,” a feat it achieved nine months earlier than expected.
All told, RIL has sold 25 per cent of Jio Platforms and could soon part with another stake, as it reportedly considers a deal with either Google or Microsoft.
Both are reportedly vying to buy a 6 per cent share in the company.
(Google and RIL did not return Fortune’s requests for comment, and Microsoft said it didn’t “have anything to share” about a potential deal.)
In addition to paying off debt, the capital will likely be used to prepare for an overseas IPO for Jio Platforms, says Ambareesh Baliga, an independent stock markets analyst in Mumbai. Analysts predict the company could debut at a valuation of US$100b (FJ$217b)
Currently, Jio Platforms is not listed on any stock exchange; its parent is listed in Mumbai and New York.
The pandemic seems to have accelerated the ambitions of chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man, who wants to transition his RIL conglomerate away from oil toward digital industries.
But whether Jio Platforms can ride its recent investment wave to become India’s first bona fide tech giant will depend on whether the telecom operator can morph into a digital empire powerful enough to beat out stiff competition in India and from abroad.
From textiles to telecoms
Ambani’s father, Dhirubhai Ambani, founded Jio Platforms’ parent company, RIL, as a textile manufacturer in 1973.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, the senior Ambani expanded the business into producing chemical precursors for the textiles and, eventually, into petroleum.
At the time of the patriarch’s death in 2002, RIL was India’s largest conglomerate, with the majority of its revenue coming from its oil division.
His passing sparked a fierce battle over the company between his two sons, Mukesh and his brother, Anil.
The siblings eventually agreed to split control of the empire in a 2005 deal brokered by their mother.
Mukesh took control of RIL’s oil assets, and Anil got the company’s telecom divisions.
The truce proved temporary
In 2010, Mukesh reentered the telecom space by purchasing a small mobile telecom network operator called IBSL.
Mukesh would later use IBSL as a vehicle to buy the rights to wide swaths of India’s bands in government-run spectrum auctions, eventually running his own brother out of the telecom business in 2018.
Data is the new oil
After purchasing spectrum rights early last decade, RIL’s forays into telecoms and digital industries ramped up in earnest in September 2016, when its subsidiary, Reliance Jio Infocomm, launched 4G services in India.
The company claims it attracted 100 million subscribers in its first six months and has since amassed 388 million subscribers as of April 2020, according to RIL financial statements.
A company restructuring in November 2019 saw RIL bring all its digital initiatives—including Reliance Jio Infocomm—under the new Jio Platforms umbrella.
“In this new world, data is the new oil. And data is the new wealth,” chairman Ambani said last year.
Capitalising on a crisis
As the coronavirus pandemic struck India, it created conditions conducive to RIL’s digital push.
India was under complete lockdown for roughly a month starting in late March, and is now engaged in a partial reopening as COVID-19 cases continue to spike across the country.
“COVID-19 lockdown has forced even the non– tech savvy Indians to move online,” said Baliga. India’s government reported that Internet usage surged by more than 13 per centduring the lockdown.
“In normal circumstances this could have taken a few years to shift, but it happened in a few weeks,” he said.
The lockdown Internet boom, paired with a global downturn in oil prices, saw Jio Platforms in late April become nearly as valuable as all of RIL’s other properties combined. Recent investment deals have valued Jio Platforms at US$65b (FJ$141), whereas RIL’s total market capitalization on the Nasdaq is US$133b (FJ$ 289b).
Facebook’s investment helped boost the company’s overall value. Shares in RIL jumped more than 8 per cent on the New York Stock Exchange following the April deal.
The Facebook deal appealed to investors since it allows Jio to leverage the Facebook-owned
WhatsApp’s wide reach in the Indian market.
That synergy is now under investigation, with India’s antitrust watchdog probing the deal for potential anticompetitive conduct, according to Bloomberg.
As of now, there is no timeline for the watchdog’s decision.
A digital empire?
Jio Platforms’ telecom services have the largest subscriber base among providers in India, but its other digital initiatives remain in early stages of development.
JioMart, an e-grocery delivery platform, launched limited services in January.
The company aimed to use Reliance Retail, an RIL subsidiary with 12,000 stores in over 6,600 towns and cities across India, and a network of local corner stores across the country as the backbone of its e-commerce ambitions.
Days after Facebook’s investment, Jio Platforms announced that customers could place grocery orders via the Facebook-owned WhatsApp messaging service, a useful tool for homebound consumers.
But Jio Platforms had to temporarily suspend the WhatsApp service this month after orders went unfilled owing to a shortage of delivery drivers.
E-commerce is the company’s most promising frontier because 90 per cent of India’s massive and diverse retail sector remains offline, says Amitendu Palit, a senior research fellow at the NUS Institute of South Asian Studies in Singapore.
But before Jio can become India’s “everything store,” it will have to outmaneuver foreign competitors and local companies backed by deep-pocketed outside investors. Established egrocery players, Alibaba-backed BigBasket and the northern India–based Grofers, reported a surge in sales amid India’s lockdown. Meanwhile, Amazon and Walmart-backed FlipKart are smaller players in the grocery space but continue to dominate India’s e-commerce sector generally.
The ‘depth to do it’
Still, Jio may be better poised than others to digitize India’s retail space.
“There’s a great amount of effort that needs to be put into digital literacy, and digital businesses, across a vast segment of unorganised sector operators,” says Palit.
“Reliance is probably the only company in India that actually has that kind of breadth and depth to do it.”
In its quest for tech dominance, Jio Platforms is also counting on the success of a suite of Jio mobile apps, including music streaming service JioSaavn, digital currency JioMoney, and videoconferencing platform JioMeet, which garnered 100,000 downloads in the run-up to its official release.
These software capabilities, combined with Jio’s vast telecom subscriber base and a network of physical retail outlets, may uniquely position Jio to dominate India’s digital sphere—or so Jio’s new investors would like to believe.
“Few companies have the potential to transform a country’s digital ecosystem in the way that Jio Platforms is doing in India, and potentially worldwide,” Henry Kravis, cofounder of KKR, said in a statement announcing the firm’s investment.
“Jio is a disruptive industry leader that is empowering small businesses and consumers across India by providing them with critical, high-quality digital services,” Jim Coulter, cochief executive officer of TPG, said in a statement announcing his firm’s deal.
Yet competition is likely to stiffen as American tech giants eye the telecom sector as a launchpad to strengthen their foothold in India’s growing digital market.
Amazon, for instance, is reportedly in talks to buy a 10 per cent stake in Bharti Airtel, India’s third-largest telecom operator.
Google, in addition to its reported interest in Jio, is considering taking a 5 per cent stake in Vodafone Idea, India’s No. 2 telecom company behind Reliance.
However, as a vast conglomerate with many retail outlets, RIL gives Jio Platforms a “strong local ground presence” in communities across India, says Palit.
Using this network as a base, the company says Jio Platforms aims to include millions of small merchants, micro-businesses, and farmers in its digital network.
Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said in April that he’s partnering with Jio Platforms for access to the “60 million small businesses [in India] and the millions of people [who] rely on them for jobs.”
Jio has a long way to go before becoming a global tech giant, Palit says, but Jio’s local focus gives it an advantage in tapping into India’s vast offline market.
“Where else in the world now today can you expect to see this kind of digital growth?” he says.