Jio was the biggest risk Reliance has taken so far: Mukesh Ambani

Reliance Industries Ltd chairman Mukesh Ambani, in an interview to McKinsey & Company, said that the biggest risk taken by the company so far was Jio.

“We’ve always taken big risks because, for us, scale is important. The biggest risk we have taken so far was Jio. At the time, it was our own money that we were investing, and l was the majority shareholder,” Ambani said in an interview to McKinsey & Company.

“Our worst-case scenario was that it might not work out financially because some analysts thought India wasn’t ready for the most advanced digital technology. But l told my board in the worst case, we will not earn much return. That’s okay because it’s our own money. But then, as Reliance, this will be the best philanthropy that we will have ever done in India because we will have digitised India, and thereby completely transformed India,” said Ambani.

India’s richest man said that Reliance is going to be a deep-tech and advanced manufacturing company. “We started with telecom. In 2021, we launched 5G. We built everything ourselves, end to end—the core, the hardware, the software, every single piece. We used Ericsson and Nokia to help us on 20%, just to make sure that the 80% that we put in was good,” he told McKinsey & Company.

At the beginning of building any new business, Ambani said we ask ourselves: "What is the most critical need for India’s development, and how can we fulfil it at scale and over a long arc of time?"

"We also have no hesitation in believing we can build businesses of the future. With our experience, we can extrapolate the future 20 years from today. That’s why we didn’t hesitate to build polyester first or to build 4G before its time. The same is now true about our newest business venture in new energy. We are building one of the world’s largest manufacturing ecosystems for green and clean energy. It covers solar, batteries, hydrogen, bio-energy and much more,” Ambani said in the interview.

The RIL chairman highlighted that the world changes every five or ten years. “It goes against everything that we learned in business school, such as not integrating across the value chain. We have challenged all of those things. What has also happened is that, as we chase the opportunities of technology into the future, some of these opportunities become bigger than our existing opportunities. And we cannot leave them alone,” he told McKinsey & Company.

Ambani also recounted his late father, Dhirubhai Ambani, telling him that, “Reliance is a process. It’s an institution that should last. You have to make sure that Reliance lasts beyond you and me.”