India's largest private sector company by market cap, Reliance Industries, run by business magnet Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani, is in the process of transforming Reliance Industries from being an oil giant to a digitally rich business. In 1985, when the founder and then Chairman, Dhirubhai Ambani, changed the name of (then) Reliance Textiles Industries to Reliance Industries, that marked a sign of change that a business ambition beyond textile business and will go on to build oil-refining and petrochemical businesses.

Today, Mukesh Ambani, current Chairman of Reliance Industries, heralded a 'New Reliance' at the 46th AGM of the company and conveyed to the shareholders that in the age where data is money and following India’s G20 theme — ‘One Earth, One Family, One Future, Reliance has changed its course from oil and gas towards a technological and greener future.

In its 46th annual general meeting, Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director of RIL, introduced the world to "New Reliance." He explains, "In all humility, I would like to say that the new Reliance has been a forerunner of the emerging new India. With soaring ambition, we have set seemingly impossible goals and achieved them. This is evident from the fact that Reliance has cumulatively invested more than $150 billion in the last ten years—higher than any other corporate entity in India. The best way to describe this new Reliance is that we have become a new-age technology company with distinctive capabilities. Today, we are a net producer of technology, a large-scale deployer of technology, and a democratiser of technology…"

Key highlights of the Reliance AGM

• Nita Ambani has stepped down from the Board of Directors of Reliance. She will continue to be the Chairperson of Reliance Foundation, and in that role, will attend all Board meetings as a permanent invitee to the Board. Whereas Isha, Akash, and Anant have been welcomed to the Board.
• Consolidated revenues stood at Rs. 9,74,864 crore, EBITDA was at Rs. 1,53,920 crore, and the net profit was at Rs. 73,670 crore. Exports for the year jumped 33.4% to Rs. 3.4 lakh crore. The company added 2.6 lakh jobs across all businesses during the year, with a total number of on-roll employees of nearly 3.9 lakh. The number of indirect livelihood opportunities we have created is many times larger.
• Jio digital services business posted an all-time high revenue of Rs. 1,19,791 crore and an EBITDA of Rs. 50,286 crore. Jio's overall customer base has now crossed the milestone of 450 million subscribers, reflecting year-on-year revenue growth of over 20%.
• Jio True 5G is pioneering a 5G broadband offering. In just nine months from the rollout, Jio 5G is already present in over 96% of the census towns in our country. Nearly 85% of the total 5G cells operational in India are in Jio's network. From December this year, Jio will be able to promptly fulfill each and every demand for Jio 5G broadband connections across the country. 5G rollout is powered by Jio's own 100% in-house developed 5G stack. Therefore, in the coming years, I can see Jio leveraging our Made-in-India tech stack to drive value creation and revenue growth at home and abroad.
• The company has recently launched Jio Bharat to accelerate its mission to create a 2G-mukt Bharat, priced at Rs. 999. Jio Bharat supports UPI payments.
• Jio Fiber has reached 10 million subscribers. Jio's optical fiber infrastructure spans over 1.5 million km across India. Jio Air Fiber, which will be launched on the auspicious occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi on September 19, will help connect millions of potential customers without having home broadband. Jio Air Fiber uses a pan-India 5G network and advanced wireless technologies to bypass the need for last-mile fibre. With JioAirFiber, we can supercharge the reaching and connecting expansion with up to 150,000 connections per day, 10-fold more than the fibre connection, expanding our addressable market over the next three years to over 200 million high-paying homes and premises.
• In the words of the Chairman, Jio Platforms is now ideally placed to offer these innovative platforms, services, and managed services to businesses outside the RIL Group, both in India and abroad. This represents another powerful growth driver for both Jio connectivity and Jio platforms.'
• In the home segment, Akash Ambani introduced Jio Smart Home services.
• Reliance Retail, the only Indian retailer in the global Top 100, posted an annual revenue of Rs. 2,60,364 crore in FY23, registering a year-on-year growth of 30%. The company delivered an EBITDA of Rs. 17,928 crore and a net profit of Rs. 9,181 crore. Reliance Retail crossed the milestone of 100 crore transactions and received more than 78 crore footfalls during the year. The number of registered customers grew to nearly 25 crore. Reliance Retail has invested over USD 10 billion in the past two years and opened over 3,300 new stores last year, totaling 18,040 stores. Two-thirds of these stores are in Tier II, Tier III cities and smaller towns.
• Coming on to the Oil and gas business. With the green vision in foresight and by joining hands with valuable partner BP, Reliance has revived gas production in the KG-D6 Block from near zero a few years ago to about 20 million standard cubic meters per day (MMSCMD) in FY23. Reliance is well on track to enhance production to 30 MMSCMD, which will be 30% of India's gas production and 15% of its current gas demand, and could save up to $7 billion per year in imports for the country.
• The company remains focused on the fast-track execution of our Dhirubhai Ambani Green Energy Giga Manufacturing Complex at Jamnagar. The solar Giga factory will manufacture PV modules, cells, wafers, ingots, polysilicon, and glass at a single location in Jamnagar. The company will target bringing the factory on-stream in a phased manner by the end of 2025.
• The company will also pursue wind power generation. Towards this, they have made significant progress in developing a manufacturing ecosystem critical to achieving cost-efficient wind power generation at Gigascale.
• Their concurrent priority is to set up our battery gigafactory by 2026. It will manufacture battery chemicals, cells, and packs, leading up to containerised energy storage solutions, and will include a battery recycling facility to deliver a truly integrated ecosystem.
• After setting up two demo units for compressed biogas (CBG) at Jamnagar, they commissioned the first commercial-scale CBG plant at Barabanki in Uttar Pradesh, then scaled up to 25 CBG plants across India. The target is establishing 100 CBG plants in the next five years, consuming 5.5 million tonnes of agro-residue and organic waste, mitigating nearly 2 million tonnes of carbon emissions, and producing 2.5 million tonnes of organic manure annually. This would result in a reduction of about 0.7 MMTPA of imported LNG.
• The company is progressing well to deploy our committed capital of Rs. 75,000 crore to build our new energy manufacturing ecosystem. This will enable us to accelerate giga-scale production for round-the-clock power, large-scale green hydrogen production for green chemical manufacturing, and green mobility.