A reading guide to Reliance Jio, the most important tech company in the world | TechCrunch

Over the past few months, COVID-19 has brought much of the fundraising community to a standstill. However, amidst it all India’s hypergrowth telco Reliance Jio Platforms has put its fundraising efforts into full gear.

Over the past three months, Jio has raised over $15.5 billion from a cohort of investors that include prominent financial institutions like KKR and Silver Lake Partners, massive sovereign wealth funds like Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and some of the biggest names in tech including Facebook.

India’s richest man built a telecom operator everyone wants a piece of

The recent deals have cemented Mukesh Ambani’s ambition to make his oil-to-retails giant Reliance Industries (India’s most valuable firm) a top homegrown internet giant.

On Friday, he said he plans to publicly list Reliance Jio Platforms and Reliance Retail, the largest retail chain in the country — also controlled by him — in the next five years.

As Reliance Jio Platforms, which has become India’s top telecom operator with over 388 million subscribers in less than four years, continues its funding spree, at Extra Crunch we are doubling down on our focus on covering everything Jio from here on out.

How Reliance Jio Platforms became India’s biggest telecom network

As we’ve attempted to get up to speed on the company, we’ve compiled a supplemental list of resources and readings that we believe are particularly helpful for learning the story of Jio, which remains a mysterious firm to many.

1. Mukesh Ambani Won the World’s Most Expensive Sibling Rivalry | Bloomberg Businessweek | 6/3/2020
   This story documents the early days of Reliance Industries, and the rags-to-riches story of its creator, Dhirubhai Ambani. It also gives us a peek at the often-complicated relationship between Ambani’s sons, Mukesh and Anil, both of whom fought for parts of his empire when he died.
2. The Rainmaker Behind Mukesh Ambani’s $13 Billion Deal Spree & Ambani Prepares Facebook-Backed Unit for Overseas IPO | Bloomberg | 6/11/2020 & 5/26/2020
   Profile of Manoj Modi, a powerful and enigmatic force behind Reliance Industries’ $15.2 billion deal spree with Facebook and other giants. Modi is rarely mentioned by the company at its shareholder events, and he rarely interacts with the press. But over the years, he has become one of the key executives at Reliance Industries and a confidant of Mukesh Ambani.
3. How Reliance Jio transformed India’s telecom industry, in five charts & Why investors are betting big on Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio. Here are 4 factors | Reuters | 6/4/2020 & 6/11/2020
   Reuters has looked at the gigantic empire of Reliance Industries and attempted to work out the synergies among its various subsidiaries. Reliance Industries runs Reliance Retail, India’s largest retail chain. Reliance Jio Platforms is today the nation’s biggest telecom operator. Their subsidiary, JioMart, is a new challenger to Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart.
4. Two Years Ago, India Lacked Fast, Cheap Internet—One Billionaire Changed All That & Inside Facebook and Private Equity’s $8.8 Billion Bet on India’s Richest Man | WSJ | 9/5/2018 & 5/20/2020
   The first piece captures just how Reliance Jio Platforms was able to win the Indian telecommunications market — and more importantly, enriched the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians and changed how they viewed smartphones and mobile data.
5. India’s richest man built a telecom operator everyone wants a piece of | TechCrunch | 6/1/2020
   Did you know Jio Platforms is not the first time Mukesh Ambani attempted to enter the telecommunications market? Even though he had to give up on his first telecom empire, he used those learnings in building Jio Platforms and as luck would have it, buying back his first telecom business.
6. Mukesh Ambani’s strategy with Reliance Jio is avoiding Anil Ambani’s mistakes with RCom | Business Insider India | 9/28/2019
   Another look at the rivalry of the two brothers, and how the younger sibling messed up his telecom ambitions.
7. Reliance Jio’s latest annual report | Reliance Jio Investor Relations Website
8. Reliance Jio’s latest quarterly report | Reliance Jio Investor Relations Website
9. Reliance Jio’s latest financial presentation | Reliance Jio Investor Relations Website
10.  The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age | By James Crabtree, Penguin Random House | 7/2/2019
    Crabtree’s book offers more insight into Reliance Industries, and its opening chapters are dedicated to portraying Mukesh Ambani. The book also documents the law of the land in India, which reformed in the late 1990s to pull itself out of four decades of conservative socialism. But the world’s second-largest internet market is still grappling with a range of pressing challenges, Crabtree explained in an interview with Extra Crunch last year.

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