SoftBank may invest $2-3 bn in Reliance Jio: Reports

Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) is in talks with Japan’s SoftBank Vision Fund to secure an investment of $2-3 billion in its telecom business Reliance Jio Infocomm, said media reports. The discussions are currently said to be at the due diligence stage.

According to a report by ET Now, the investment will give the $100-billion SoftBank Vision Fund exposure to Jio’s telecom business, the third largest in the country, apart from its technology platform and e-commerce products built around it.

RIL did not respond to email queries from TechCircle seeking at the time of publishing this report.

RIL shares closed at a high of 1.43% at Rs 1,364.65 on Tuesday.

In a separate report, RIL’s retail arm Reliance Retail Ltd was said to be testing its online food and grocery delivery app among its employees ahead of a rollout by the end of this year.

The service will follow an online-to-offline model where users can order on the app which will be fulfilled by local merchants, business daily Mint reported, citing two persons in the know.

In January this year, Ambani had announced that Reliance Retail and Reliance Jio will jointly launch an e-commerce platform and Gujarat would be the first state where it would be implemented. This is in keeping with his strategy of diversifying the company’s revenue stream to consumer goods from its oil and gas focus at present.

RIL has also invested across multiple digital businesses to strengthen its digital offering. In 2019, RIL had already invested $100 million for a 87% stake in conversational platform Haptik, delivery services provider Grab, software firm C-Square, vernacular language services provider Reverie, welfare schemes platform EasyGov and software services firm SankhyaSutra Labs.