Indian tycoon takes on Amazon, Walmart

Bloomberg

Reliance Industries Ltd. plans to take on the likes of Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc. in India’s retail industry by creating a platform that combines online and conventional shopping.
Billionaire Chairman Mukesh Ambani outlined the plan at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Mumbai
saying Reliance saw its “biggest growth opportunity in creating a hybrid, online-to-offline new commerce platform.” The effort will involve the group’s Reliance Retail Ltd. and Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. businesses, he said. The latter will also introduce a fibre-based broadband service Aug. 15.
Global retail powerhouses like Amazon and Walmart have been investing in India’s retail industry, where e-commerce sales may more than double to $72 billion by 2022 from $32.7 billion in 2018, research firm eMarketer estimates.
The retail-to-refining conglomerate is looking to tap the online market after spending as much as 2.5 trillion rupees ($36.3 billion) in setting up mobile and fiber broadband infrastructure, Ambani said.
Reliance has “crystallised its much anticipated convergence plans,” Jefferies India Pvt. analysts led by Somshankar Sinha said in a report after the annual shareholder meeting.
“The centerpiece this year was a peek into its convergence strategy across homes, enterprise & e-commerce premised on its fiber network.”
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, said in May it will acquire a 77 percent stake in Flipkart Online Services Pvt. for $16 billion, grabbing an asset that had also attracted Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest
person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The platform will use augmented reality, holographs and virtual reality to create an “immersive shopping experience,” Ambani said, without giving a timeline or financial targets.
The service will be available to small merchants as well,
enabling them to “do everything that large enterprises and large e-commerce players are able to do.”