Mukesh Ambani , the richest man in Asia, is launching his own e-commerce platform in the second most populous country in the world, India.- The launch of ‘local’ e-commerce platform could bring in fierce competition against foreign players like Amazon since it wouldn’t be subject to the same scrutiny.
Reliance Retail ’s offline avatar already serves 3.5 million customers every week.- Ambani states that this is a move against ‘data colonisation’ — a way to migrate control and ownership of Indian data back to India.
Ambani is planning to launch his own e-commerce platform in India, starting with the western state of Gujarat.
Currently, the Indian e-commerce space is pretty evenly split between Flipkart and
When Ambani launched his own network, Reliance Jio Infocomm, it only took the company two years to garner 20% of the market share. In comparison, Amazon has been in India for over five years now and managed to $4 51% of the market share during the most recent festive season. But, at the end of the day, they are indeed different industries.
Ambani’s retail plans
The Indian government is already pulling out the red carpet from under the feet of foreign players with its new e-commerce policy. The policy $4 from offering deep discounts or selling their $4 — like MarQ or the Amazon Echo.
Ambani, who controls a $43 billion fortune, won’t be subjected to the same terms and conditions as a ‘local’ player in India.
His plans reportedly include building an ‘immersive shopping experience’ using next-gen technology with augmented reality (AR) to compete against Amazon and Walmart-owned, Flipkart.
Reliance Retail, in its offline avatar, has already shown exponential growth over the past five years. From 2017 to 2018, its annual revenue increase two-fold from ₹337.65 billion ($4.73 billion) to ₹691.08 billion ($9.68 billion).