Mukesh Ambani's Reliance e-comm venture to empower 30 Mn small retailers in India

Reliance Jio and Reliance Retail will soon launch a new commerce platform which will benefit consumers, retailers, and producers equally. At the same time, it will empower around 30 million small shopkeepers, said Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and MD of RIL.

Reliance operates in nearly 3 Million Square Feet of Warehouses in West Bengal. It will further increase in the next two years, he added while speaking at the fifth edition of The Bengal Global Business Summit 2019.

For Reliance Jio, the company plans to prioritise digital rejuvenation of rural markets.

Jio has close to 1 lakh active Business Partners across Bengal.  "Now, in yet another unique initiative, we have set up Jio Points as a direct distribution channel in deep rural markets, to cater to the growing rural market and each and every village in West Bengal," said Ambani.

The richest man of the country plans to have Jio presence in every tehsil of the state.

As per RIL chairman, about 350 Jio points are already operational and aims to have around 1000 by end of 2019.

Till date, in the state, Reliance has already invested about one-tenth of its total investment in India. The company plans to pour in Rs 10k crore in the digital space of the state. Reliance has been the biggest investor in the digital space of the state with 28k crore, added Mukesh Ambani.

Last month, Ambani while speaking at Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit 2019 had said that it would launch a new e-commerce platform connecting 12 lakh small retailers in the state.

E-commerce is his biggest plan after Reliance Jio launch in 2016.

He has a multi-pronged plan to connect together his diverse businesses to win Internet businesses.

Ambani plans to connect its retail neighborhood stores or Jio point store with consumers. Recently, for this Mukesh Ambani-led Jio had piloted point-of-sale (PoS) services targeting merchant community. With these aspects assembled together, the company aims to create a hybrid offline-online commerce model.

He has not though talked about the dateline of the launch.

But home-grown Reliance, once it launches its new commerce platform, will have a regulatory edge over existing e-commerce giants such as Amazon and Walmart-led Flipkart.

Earlier, through Jio, Reliance disrupted the telecom industry by adding 28 crore user base with an ultra cheap data plan in the last two years. In January, Jio reported a 65 per cent increase in its standalone net profit to Rs 831 crore for the October-December 2018 period.