If there is one undeniable fact about the Reliance Industries' success story, it has to be the company's ability to dream and deliver at scale. Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) is India’s most profitable company, the top contributor to India’s gross domestic product (GDP), exports and taxes as a single company. It owns India’s leading telecom company Reliance Jio, the top brick and mortar retailer (Reliance Retail), India’s largest producer of petrochemicals and polyester business, and is the number one company in market capitalisation.

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The company's journey that began in 1977 with a Rs 50 crore investment and about 60,000 shareholders has effectively given shape to the equity cult in India and as of today the company has a whopping 26 lakh shareholders. While RIL has diversified, and more recently pivoted to a future linked to the digital economy, it has never shied away from thinking big.

Over two decades ago, the first major transformation for Reliance took shape at Jamnagar in Gujarat. In 2000, the world’s largest grassroots refinery went onstream in a record 36 months - a journey from textiles to hydrocarbon. Reliance went on to become the first private Indian company to be listed among the fortune 500 companies in 2004.

As the company successfully completed one transformation from another, seeds were sown for the next big shift. The rise to the top in the retail business started 14 years ago and now, the Reliance Retail network covers over 7,000 cities and towns with nearly 12,000 stores making it one of the fastest growing retailers globally and it has been ranked among the top-100.

Reliance has become an integral part of millions of Indian households, but the next big move was nothing short of a revolution that ended up touching nearly half a billion people. Jio enhanced India’s telecom sector with its vision of connecting everyone, everything and everywhere.

In less than four years, Jio is the leading telecom operator in the country with 33 percent market share. It has the most subscribers and is recording the fastest subscriber growth compared to any other company in the world.

On April 22, Reliance announced that social media giant Facebook was picking up nearly 10 percent stake in the company by investing over Rs 40,000 crore and since then there has been multiple big international investors that have pumped in funds into the company.

As the country was under lockdown, amid the coronavirus pandemic, the investments have been nothing short of a vote of confidence on India's growth story. What followed was a long list of marquee investors like Intel, Silver Lake, Vista who jumped onto the Jio bandwagon in 82 days. The company has raised Rs 1.78 lakh crore by selling just over 25 percent stake and undertaking a Rs 53,000 crore rights issue - the largest by any company in India. The uninterrupted 12-week investment spree is the largest continuous fundraise by any company in the world.

First Published:Jul 15, 2020 8:15 PM IST