Reliance, India’s biggest conglomerate, touched never seen before heights over the past year, and today’s AGM announcements make that fact clearer than ever before. While businesses around the globe saw uncertainty rising, leading to difficulty in business, Reliance achieved a net debt-free balance sheet much ahead of its target date of March 2021, something that Mukesh Ambani had promised 2 years ago.
Reliance Industries Limited saw consolidated revenue rising to ₹540,000 crore ($73Bn), with consolidated EBITDA of ₹98,000 crore. Out of this, 50% of the revenue was contributed by consumer business. The company secured a massive profit of ₹53,739 crores, a 34.8 percent increase over the last year.
Reliance paid ₹21,044 crore of customs and excise, ₹85,306 crore of GST and VAT and ₹3,213 crore of income tax, Ambani said, while talking about the company’s contribution towards India’s economy.
That’s not all, as RIL broke the record for the the most amount of capital raised by any company over the span of one year, accumulating a massive $44.4Bn over the past 12 months.
“For the FY2021, Reliance successfully carried out the largest ever capital raised by any company globally in a year, notwithstanding the COVID challenges,” he said.
Reliance Retail, India’s biggest retail giant, continues to lead across categories like grocery, electronics and apparel, despite the legal troubles with Future Group acquisition and feud with Amazon. The company added 1,500 new stores, bringing the total number up to 12,711. The business also created over 65,000 new jobs and now employs over 2 lakh people.
And of course, one can’t talk about Reliance without mentioning Jio. The telecom subscriber added over 37 million subscribers during the year, now serving over 425 million consumers. The company is now the second largest mobile data carrier in the world.
Apart from all this, Mr. Ambani also announced some new endeavors during his speech, which bring to light the company’s latest efforts. Taking the goal of becoming net carbon zero by 2035, the company will set up the Reliance New Energy Council. He also pledged that Reliance will invest ₹60,000 crores for setting up 4 gigafactories focused on green initiatives. The company will also launch a new new energy business and has announced the new Dhirubhai Amban Green Energy Giga Complex. With the gigafactories and all the other investments, the company will spend a massive 75,000 crores initially on the energy business.
Moreover, the richest man in India announced the operationalization of an initial 10 MW capacity of JIO-AZURE Cloud Data centers in Jamnagar and Nagpur, in collaboration with Microsoft.
The company also announced plans of internationalization, having partnered with ARAMCO. As a part of this partnership, YP Trivedi will retire from Reliance board, and will be replaced by Yasir Al-Rumayyan Chairman of Saudi Aramco and Governor PIF.
And of course, there was the much awaited fruit of the Jio-Google partnership, with the companies announcing the new JioPhone Next, which will become available in September this year. Moreover, the companies will also work together to develop 5G technologies for India, as part of Mukesh Ambani’s efforts to make India not just 2G mukt, but 5G yukt.
