The 45th annual general meeting (AGM) of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), India’s largest company in terms of market-capitalisation, has commenced. RIL Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani will deliver the keynote address.
Ambani announced Jio 5G services on Monday. Within Diwali 2022, Jio 5G will be launched in the metro cities in India. “Using 5G, we can accelerate the roll-out of top quality, highly affordable fixed broadband services,” Mukesh Ambani said, adding that “Jio 5G will be the world’s most advanced 5G,” he said, while adding, “Subsequently, we plan to increase the Jio 5G footprint month after month. By December 2023, which is less than 18 months from today, we will deliver Jio 5G to every town, every taluka, and every tehsil of our country.”
During his speech, Ambani said that Jio 5G will connect over 100 million homes with “unparalleled digital experiences and Smart Home solutions”, Ambani said. “We will catapult tens of millions of small merchants and small businesses to great heights, empowering them with cutting-edge, plug-and-play solutions delivered from the Cloud.”
He pointed out, “Our company became India’s first corporate to cross $100 billion in annual revenues. Reliance’s consolidated revenues grew 47 per cent to Rs 7.93 lakh crore, or $104.6 billion.”
With Jio 5G, Reliance will connect everyone, everyplace and everything with the highest quality and most affordable data, Ambani said.
“We have indigenously developed an end-to-end 5G stack which is fully cloud native, software deined, digitally managed, with support for even advanced features like Quantum Security. This is fully developed in-house by our 2,000-plus young Jio engineers, working tirelessly for the past three years. We have already deployed this Made-In-India 5G stack in our network, with sufficient capacity to serve hundreds of millions of users right from day one. Furthermore, Jio 5G is uniquely positioned to offer captive or private 5G solutions for Indian enterprises at owner’s economics,” Ambani added.
“We are privileged to have world’s leading tech companies as partners in our ‘Made in India’ 5G collaboration,” Ambani said as he mentioned Meta, Google, Microsoft, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, and Cisco. He also announced a partnership with Qualcomm. “Today, I announce exciting partnership with Qualcomm,” he added.
Reliance has commited a total investment of Rs 2 lakh crore for ‘standalone, true’ 5G network roll-out.
Other than Jio 5G, RIL CMD stated that amidst global crisis, India stands out as beacon of growth and stability. “There is severe economic stress in many parts of world; uncertainty due to heightened geopolitical tensions, global risks.”
Akash Ambani, chairman of Jio, said, “True 5G delivers breakthrough increases in broadband speed and drastically lowers latency. We don’t get 1 Gbps even on many of the fixed broadband networks in our country.”
“Reliance Retail on achieving a record of Rs 2 lakh crore turnover and an Ebitda of Rs 12,000 crore. Today, Reliance Retail is among the Top-10 Retailers in Asia,” Ambani said.
Isha Ambani, director of Reliance Retail, said the company had last year served “Over 200 million registered customers”, which is equivalent to the collective population of the UK, France, and Italy, at Reliance Retail’s physical stores and digital platforms.
“We welcomed 520 million walk-ins to our stores, growth of 18 per cent YoY, and 4.5 billion visits to our digital platforms, up 2.3x YoY,” she said.
She also announced WhatsApp-JioMart tie-up. “JioMart and WhatsApp partnership will help growth. JioMart-WhatsApp users can use WhatsApp pay, cash on delivery and other payment methods,” she said during the AGM.
On the oil and gas business section, Mukesh Ambani said, “With 19 million standard cubic meters per day of production in ultra-deepwater fields, KG-D6 is contributing 20 per cent of India’s domestic gas production. With the commissioning of the MJ Field by end-2022, KG-D6 will increase its contribution to nearly 30 per cent of India’s gas production. This will help meet India’s growing demand indigenously, leading to import savings of nearly $9 billion/annum.”