Mukesh Ambani At Reliance AGM: Top 5 Highlights

At the 44th annual general meeting of Reliance Industries Ltd., Mukesh Ambani announced the company’s mega investment in a new business – green energy, said the deal with Saudi Aramco would close this year, promised the launch of the Jio-Google phone in September and 5G soon, and updated on the digital and retail businesses.

At the start of the AGM, most of the Ambani family took to stage one by one. Mukesh, chairman and managing director, began by introducing the board and company officials, children Akash and Esha followed, paying tributes to Covid frontline staff and wife Nita, also a RIL director, spoke about the various initiatives of the foundation. It was well into 30 minutes of the meeting when Ambani began to share his views on the business.

Here are five key takeaways:

Discussions with Saudi Aramco, one of the world’s largest energy and chemicals companies, have made “substantial progress”, said Ambani. The deal has been pending for over a year now.

“I expect our partnership to be formalised in an expeditious manner this year.”

He also announced that Yasir Al-Rumayyan, chairman of Saudi Aramco and the governor of the Public Investment Fund, will join the RIL board as an independent director.

Click here for more on the Aramco deal and its implications for RIL’s O2C business.

Ambani announced that RIL will venture into a new energy business with the “aim of bridging the green energy divide in India and globally”.

The company aims to build four giga factories to manufacture and integrate critical components at an investment of Rs 60,000 crore over the next three years.

This will be done at the Dhirubhai Ambani Green Energy Giga Complex on 5,000 acres in Jamnagar.

“Jamnagar was the cradle of our old energy business. Jamnagar will also be the cradle of our new energy business,” said Ambani.

The company said it will also invest Rs 15,000 crore in value chain, partnerships and future technologies, including upstream and downstream industries.

The overall investment in the new energy business will be Rs 75,000 crore in three years, according to Ambani.

Read more on RIL’s new energy plans here.

At last year’s AGM , Ambani announced a fully loaded but low-cost smartphone being developed in collaboration with Google. At this year’s AGM he said the phone would launch in September.

Here’s how he described it:

• fully-featured smartphone.

• supports entire suite of applications from Google, Jio, Android Play Store.

• powered by an Android OS, jointly developed by Jio and Google.

• includes features like voice assistant, automatic read-aloud, language translation, smart camera with augmented reality filters, etc…

Reliance Jio will be the first to launch 5G, claimed Ambani, but he didn’t detail when.

The company recently received regulatory approvals and trial spectrum for 5G field trials.

“We have tested the Jio 5G solutions in India and we successfully demonstrated speeds well in excess of 1 GBPS,” he said, adding that the company is now working with partners to develop a full range of 5G-capable devices.

Reliance Retail’s partnership with kirana stores added 3 lakh shops across 150 cities last year. JioMart registered over 6.5 lakh peak orders in a single day, said Ambani.

The goal is to add 1 crore partners over the next three years, he said.

The retail business will focus on:

• product development capabilities.

• strengthen sourcing ecosystem.

• linking all major sourcing and consumption locations.

• automated, modular, reliable and scalable warehousing and logistics ecosystem.

• expanding store footprint multi-fold this year.

• acquiring businesses.