Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) is now a “truly zero net debt” company following the capital raising at Jio Platforms and the rights issue, and it will now look forward to only adding strategic partners to each of its businesses, chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani said at the virtual AGM on Wednesday.
Addressing shareholders at the AGM, he said that the capital raising at Jio Platforms is significantly in excess of its net debt of Rs 161,035 crore at the end of 2019-20. Including the Rs 53,000-crore rights issue and over Rs 7,000 crore from the BP deal, Reliance has garnered in excess of Rs 2 lakh crore.
Ambani pointed out that as RIL is now a zero net-debt company, it now has an extremely strong balance sheet which will support all its growth plans for the three hyper-growth engines — Jio, retail and the oil-to-chemicals business.
On organised retail, Ambani pointed out that over the last five years, its revenues in this segment has grown 8 times while profits have risen 11 times. Reliance Retail, he added, has received strong interest from strategic and financial investors and the plan is to induct global partners and investors in the “next few quarters”.
On its e-commerce venture-JioMart, he said that apart from grocery, we will expand the service to cover electronics, fashion, pharmaceutical and healthcare in the days ahead. At the same time, Reliance is also accelerating the rollout of JioMart.
While the company has piloted the beta version of the JioMart grocery customer online platform in 200 cities, within a few weeks of launch, it has reached over 250,000 orders per day. JioMart is now focussing on scaling up its geographical reach and delivery capabilities.
Apart from expanding its services in the country, the new commerce platform of RIL will also work with the messaging service of Facebook-Whatsapp to create growth opportunities for small merchants and kirana shops in the country and to ensure that consumers are able to transact seamlessly with nearby kiranas using JioMart and WhatsApp.
