Prabhu RamBillion-dollar investments, marquee shareholders, and a business built without any Chinese footprint, India’s 10-month old Jio Platforms appears to have all the right ingredients to become the next big global tech giant.
At a time when the world is dealing with a raging pandemic and the global economy is in turmoil, Jio Platforms, a digital conglomerate spun off from India’s Reliance Industries (RIL), has managed to raise over $20 billion (Rs1.52 lakh crore) from investors such as Google and Facebook.
Owned by Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, Jio Platforms dabbles across most new-tech segments such as cloud, media, digital commerce, financial services, gaming, education, healthcare, agriculture, e-governance, and smart cities.
At present, Jio has a user base of around 400 million, which can now be cross-sold products and services such as e-commerce, streaming content, payment wallets, education, and healthcare.
Enter Jio Platforms.
In November 2019, Ambani announced the launch of Jio Platforms, a subsidiary of RIL that the company describes as “a next-generation technology platform focused on providing high-quality and affordable digital services.” Jio Platforms has made significant investments across broadband connectivity, smart devices, cloud and edge computing, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, internet of things, augmented and mixed reality, and blockchain, as per RIL.
And in June, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo appreciated Reliance Jio for its “clean technology” referring to the fact that the company, unlike most of its global peers, is not dependent on Chinese telecom equipment providers.
“The world today is looking for alternatives (to China), and that is where brands with full end-to-end 5G stack are in favour. Jio, with its string of acquisitions, has developed good in-house system integration expertise and is further eyeing new partnerships to bolster its 5G capabilities,” said Prabhu Ram, CMR’s Industry Intelligence Group head.
Source: Quartz
