Mumbai, India-based Reliance Retail and Reliance Jio Infocomm will jointly launch a new e-commerce platform, said the Reliance Group chairman and managing director, Mukesh Ambani, who will combine his Jio telecom service, mobile devices, and a vast physical retail network for this business.
Reliance Group has vast retail space in the country with over 10,000 Reliance Retail stores across more than 6,500 Indian cities and towns and about 50 warehouses. The company’s wholesale stores will help stock the small and daily run retail stores. The small store and daily shop owners have about 90 percent of India’s retail landscape.
The two companies aim to integrate the offline stores of three million small retail players, pan India, via Reliance Jio’s online platform. Jio currently has 280 million subscribers. The e-commerce business will bring merchants on board through Jio’s apps and devices, V. Subramaniam, a top executive at Reliance Retail, explained, and JioGigaFibre will bring the entire marketplace together by extending broadband fiber connectivity to homes, merchants, and SMEs in 1,100 cities to start with. The business will use augmented reality, holographs and virtual reality to create an “immersive shopping experience.”
