By Indranil Sarkar and VarunVyas Hebbalalu
BENGALURU (Reuters) -India’s Reliance Industries is on track to more than double in size before the end of the decade, its billionaire-chairman Mukesh Ambani told shareholders on Thursday.
Reliance, which is India’s most valuable company with a market capitalisation of $245.44 billion, said it expects to double sales and operating profit in its telecom and retail businesses over the next three to four years as it unveiled measures to step up its adoption of artificial intelligence.
As well as developing a suite of AI tools and platforms called ‘Jio Brain’ and setting up data centres in the western state of Gujarat, which it plans to power them with green energy, Reliance will also partner with global tech firms.
“Our goal is to create the world’s lowest AI inferencing cost, right here in India. This will make AI applications in India more affordable than anywhere else,” Ambani said during the company’s annual general meeting.
Inferencing is how live data is run through a trained AI model to make a prediction or solve a task.
Reliance shares rose by as much as 2.5% after it also said it plans to consider issuing bonus shares to its existing shareholders at a 1:1 ratio, its first such move since 2017.
While the AI and cloud-related efforts will help Reliance’s telecom arm Jio retain customers, they are “expected evolutions” which have already been implemented by competitors, said Balaji Subramanian, a research analyst at IIFL Securities.
“Those are all incrementally positive, but the AGM today, at least from a Jio perspective, was not groundbreaking,” he added.
Retail and telecoms are two of Reliance’s largest businesses, with the former making up nearly a third of its first-quarter revenue, while digital services provided by Jio contributed 15%.
Jio, launched in 2007, has become the market leader in Indian telecoms, surpassing Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea to boast the largest subscriber base.
Reliance Retail, which owns e-commerce platforms with JioMart and stores under labels from Reliance Digital to Smart Bazaarhas, has become India’s largest retailer by revenue, offering Indians just about everything.
Reliance also said it expects its new energy business to become as profitable as its oils-to-chemicals unit over the next 5-7 years.
Meanwhile, Ambani welcomed Disney’s $8.5 billion-merger with Reliance’s media assets to form India’s largest entertainment group, which was approved on Wednesday by the country’s antitrust authority.
“Just like Jio and Retail, our expanded Media business will be an invaluable growth centre in the Reliance ecosystem,” he said.
($1 = 83.8800 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Indranil Sarkar and Varun Hebbalalu in Bengaluru; editing by Jason Neely, David Goodman, Dhanya Skariachan and Alexander Smith)
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