Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man and chairman of Mumbai-based Reliance Industries will soon launch Reliance Retail, an e-commerce platform in India. The marketplace will allow small merchants or ‘kiranas’ and other offline vendors to sell their goods online.
Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, the mobile network operator owned by Reliance Industries introduced nearly free mobile broadband a couple years ago enabling over 300 million of its subscribers to get online. Additionally, Reliance already owns and operates 10,415 retail stores across 6,600 cities in India. These factors will help boost the company’s e-commerce business.
Nisha Biswal, president of the U.S.-India Business Council at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in an interview with CNBC, “Within the last nine months, we have seen a significant shift towards more protectionist policies, data localization, and preferential treatment towards domestic companies. This is a worrisome trend that we hope will reverse course in the next term [of Modi’s leadership].”
