Silver Lake Partners, a US-based private equity firm has decided to invest another round of capital in Reliance – this time in its retail arm. After investing $1.35 billion in Reliance’s telecom arm Jio earlier this year, the American firm is now purchasing a 1.75 percent stake in Reliance Retail with a fresh investment of $1 billion.
With 12,000 stores nationwide, Reliance Retail serves 640 million customers in India. In a bid to further expand its retail business, Reliance recently acquired all of the wholesale, retail, logistics and warehouse businesses of another top Indian conglomerate, the Future Group, for $3.8 billion.
Ambani, a 63-year old Indian business tycoon commented on the new deal, saying that such partnerships will help create an inclusive platform that will help millions of small Indian merchants.
“We believe technology will be key to bringing the much-needed transformation in this (retail) sector so that various constituents of the retail ecosystem can collaborate to build inclusive growth platforms,” Ambani said on Wednesday.
Reliance Retail has been planning to digitize Indian SMBs via its network, Jio, which secured major investment from both Facebook and Google earlier this year.
While Facebook invested $5.8 billion in the purchase of a 9.9 percent stake in Reliance Jio, in July Google invested $4.5 billon in Jio platforms and picked up a 7.7 percent stake in India’s largest telco with 387.5 million users.
The company, which earlier this year became India’s first and only company to have a market capitalization of $160 billion (INR 12 trillion), recently secured second place on the FutureBrand Index 2020 after American tech player Apple. London-based FutureBrand is a management consulting company and its annual index is a global perception study that ranks the world’s top 100 companies by market cap on a perception basis rather than based on financial strength.