In the Forbes list, Mukesh Ambani, owner of the conglomerate Reliance Industries, is rated 21st, with a wealth of $ 81 billion. Jiomart to Embed into WhatsApp.
The Reliance Industries conglomerate of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani plans to merge its online grocery delivery services with WhatsApp, Jiomart embedded into WhatsApp, within six months. This was confirmed by the local financial newspaper Mint on Monday, quoting two unnamed officials familiar with the matter.
Ambani joined the Indian e-commerce sector last year with the innovative JioMart project. The start-up quickly experienced exponential growth and now averages about 500,000 orders a day, according to The Times of India, thanks to the help of its parent company Reliance Industries, the local oil giant owned by Ambani, and partly due to the coronavirus pandemic.
JioMart’s growth has reshaped the balance of India’s lucrative online grocery market and has also dominated the old niche champions, Amazon and Walmart, the American giants.
In the list of billionaires, India’s wealthiest man overtakes Elon Musk.
This is not shocking, because, physically, since 2006, Reliance Retail, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, has been selling groceries in India and has nearly 11,000 stores in more than 6,700 cities, a strong basis for starting an online sector.
With a 9.99% stake in Jio Platforms, India’s leading digital services platform, JioMart is now able to shift to the next stage and connect with WhatsApp, the country’s most successful messaging app, to boost local merchants’ interaction with their consumers, thanks to its alliance with Facebook, which last year invested $5.7 billion.
This move would allow WhatsApp’s 400 million local users to order Reliance items without having to leave the app, according to Mint sources.
At 63, Ambani is ranked the richest man in India and ranks 21st among the billionaires in the world. According to data from Forbes, he had earned a fortune of $81 billion by that year.
He is also the president and managing director of the oil and gas giant Reliance Industries, founded in 1966 as a small textile manufacturing business by his late father, Dhirubhai Ambani, which grew into India’s largest oil firm and received revenue. For $88,000 million (in 2019).
Reliance has sought to separate itself from its original oil and resources sector in recent years. Thus, in 2020, through investors such as Google and Facebook, it raised around $ 26 billion for its internet and distribution divisions, being competitive with Amazon and the Walmart-owned Indian giant Flipkart.
Jio Networks, as a subsidiary of the oil company, comprises the full scope of Ambani’s digital businesses, including Jio, India’s largest mobile network provider, which has around 388 million subscribers, and other digital companies, which in turn have a broad variety of applications where users can watch videos, shop online, send text messages, read news and more.