44th AGM of Reliance Industries Limited: Deep Insight Into RIL’s Dominating Future

Reliance Industries Limited (RIL). A name with motto, ‘Growth is Life’. RIL had its 44^th Annual General Meeting (AGM) yesterday and kept entire nation astonished and bewildered with its reports, stats and future plannings. With rock solid frameworks and key important policies, RIL truly thrives to ‘grow in life’. Here are some of the key takeaways from the AGM, which could potentially change the scenario in almost all the sectors of the business.

Reliance Foundation and COVID-care

While pandemic hit the nation hard, RIL foundation prioritized the work which could help the nation and people in difficult times. 5 Missions were launched:

• Mission Oxygen – Jamnagar refinery was repurposed to produce high-purity industry grade oxygen and within 2 weeks; production was 1100 Metric tonnes per day. With 85,000 man-hours of work in less than 10 days, Reliance is producing over 11% of India’s oxygen. Procurement of 100 new medical tankers were done from both, within the India and from countries like Germany, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Netherlands, Indonesia, Belgium and Thailand. RIL delivered what mattered the most, when it mattered the most!

• Mission COVID Infra – Started with 250 beds facility in Mumbai, now has over 2000 beds for COVID care across the nation. Also launched COVID testing lab with capacity of over 15,000 tests per day.
• Mission Anna Seva – Provided more than 7.5 crore free meals to marginalized communities, daily-wage workers, and frontline workers across the country.
• Mission Employee Care – No jobs, No salaries and No bonuses were cut. All medical expenses were fully paid. To the employees who were succumbed to death, Reliance continues to pay Employee’s salary to family for next 5 years. Alongwith, finance their children for education in India till graduation and continue full medical coverage for lifetime.
• Mission Vaccine Suraksha – Set up 116 vaccine centers across 109 cities and via JioHealthHub platform, slots can be booked and certificates can be downloaded at ease.

Business and Financial Performance

Consolidated revenue of nearly Rs. 540,000 crores, mostly contributed from consumer businesses. Interestingly, the consumer business Reliance Retail is a decade old and Jio is just 5 years old. Net profit this year was Rs. 53,739 crores with gain of nearly 34% from past year.

Reliance added 75,000 new jobs in the market amidst the pandemic when people were losing their jobs. This was largely due to Retail and Jio business. Retail is the undisputed leader in organized retailing in country and with scale of more than 6x from its next competitor.

Also, the deal between Saudi Aramco which was halted a bit, may formalised in expeditious manner by the end of this year. In exploration and production (E&P) business, till 2023, Reliance aims to establish itself as one of the largest producers of gas in India by meeting 20% of India’s demand.

Later, H.E. Yasir Al-Rumayyan who is chairman of Saudi Aramco, joined the board of RIL as an independent director.

New Energy Business: Vision, Mission and Implementation Plan

With vision to create next big value creation engine for Reliance and India, and commitment to become net carbon zero till 2035; RIL presented its roadmap for implementing this vision.

While JIO as launched with aim of bringing digital divide in India, RIL launched its new energy business with the aim to bring the green energy divide in India and globally. RIL established Reliance New Energy Council with some of the finest minds across the globe. Reliance is creating a coalition of partnerships with leading global universities, best technology companies and most promising start-ups in America, Europe, Australia and Asia.

RIL announced 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 cradle of our new energy business”, Mukesh Ambani. Over next 3 years, RIL will invest Rs. 60,000 crores to create and offer a fully integrated, end-to-end renewables energy ecosystem. This will be done by establishing 4 new giga factories,

1. Integrated solar photovoltaic module for production of solar energy
2. Advanced energy storage battery factory for storage of intermittent energy
3. Electrolyser factory to produce green hydrogen
4. Fuel Cell factory to convert hydrogen into motive and stationary power

For other purposes, additional Rs. 15,000 crores will be invested in value chain, partnerships and future technologies. Thus, our overall initial investment from RIL’s resources in the New Energy business will be Rs. 75,000 (over $10 billion) crore in 3 years.

Further, two additional divisions will be built to strengthen this ecosystem. First, a dedicated Renewable Energy Project Management and Construction Division. Second, a dedicated Renewable Energy Project Finance Division.

Apart from these, India’s first world-scale CARBON fibre plant, new materials and green chemicals, and what not; all will be coming under the roof of Reliance and its varied sectors to contribute for company’s multi-decade growth plan.

Reliance JIO

Reliance JIO became first operator outside China to cross 400 million mobile subscribers. And is today the world’s second largest mobile data carrier, handling monthly traffic of over 630 crore GIGABYTES. With investment of Rs. 57,123 crore in acquiring additional spectrum and a growth of nearly 45% in past year alone, JIO has been continued as a digital lifeline to Indians amid social distancing and pandemic.

On the path of making India “2G-Mukt” and “4G-Yukt”, Google and JIO are co-developing a next generation, feature rich and extremely affordable smartphone, JIOPHONE Next; expected in September this year. And after Sundar Pichai’s speech, it was confirmed that, JIO will use Google’s cloud services to power JIO’s 5G solutions.

Apart from Google, RIL confirms partnership with Facebook for integrating WhatsApp and JioMart on trial basis. And partnership with Microsoft for initial 10 MW capacity of JIO-Azure Cloud Data centres.

Reliance Retail

With 1500 new stores, it now has total of 12,711 stores and maintains & strengthens Reliance Retail’s leadership position. Electronics, Apparels, Grocery, lifestyle products, etc, etc… Retail not only supplied necessary goods, not only protected jobs; but also created 65,000 new jobs across the country.

Apart from this, RIL’s media business Network18 also surged with profits and value creation was also done immensely. Reliance has the capacity to administer investments of over USD 200 billion directly and through its partners.

“Post COVID, India will emerge stronger. It will be a Better India, a Resurgent India, a more Equal India, and a far more Self-Confident India”, Mukesh Ambani. Reliance thus, not only aims and does a vertical growth; but also more impotently a horizontal growth across various sectors and climbs new summits of success in onward journey.