Experts hail RIL’s mega announcements at 44th AGM

A big step towards internationalisation, a roadmap for green energy business and the promise of a smartphone by September, Reliance Industries' 44th Annual General Meeting set the foundation for the oil to telecom conglomerate's future strategy.

Reliance industries has signalled a big push to clean energy, as it announced an investment of Rs 75,000 crore in the space over the next three years.

The conglomerate also took its first steps towards internationalisation. Yasir Al-Rumayyan, Chairman of Saudi Aramco and Governor of PIF will serve as an independent director on the RIL board.

Ambani also announced that the wait for the JioPhone would be ending soon. He highlighted that JioPhone Next, developed in collaboration with Google will be available in the markets from the 10th of September.

The Reliance chairman also signalled that their retail business will be among the top 10 retailers in the world, assured shareholders of 3-fold growth within 5 years and promises to create 10 lakh new jobs in 3 years.

To discuss this CNBC-TV18’s Nisha Poddar spoke to Manish Chokhani, Former Investment Banker, Ajay Mathur, Director General of International Solar Alliance and Dinesh Kanabar, CEO of Dhruva Advisors.

Chokhani said, “For Reliance the tagline which they always had that growth is the way of life has really been through. If you see the evolution from the time there IPO in 1977 from a textile company to then going into fiber intermediates, then going into the petrochemical space, going into the refining space, then going upstream to E&P, then building retail and Jio they have constantly been to use the late Dhirubhai’s words changing orbit.”

Kanabar said, “Organisations which did not keep on evolving perish. Here is an energy company which went from energy to retail, to telecom and is now getting back into energy but not the same old energy which was there, but in the new form. It just shows that an organisation keeping in shape with the times, you are trying to be carbon neutral everything else and trying to see that you are really well respected and established keeping in tune with the time.”

He added, “That is a key point where you are talking about not just being a service provider using somebody else technology but developing that technology itself and I don’t know that there is even a single global precedent where somebody has gone up and said that I am a telecom network, I am now going to build a 5G capability myself and then roll it out globally.”