The chairman of Reliance Industries is probably a fan of Tony Stark. Apologies to all the DC Comics fans out there. If the Marvel comic character imagined a suit of armour around the world, Mukesh Ambani is probably imagining a layer of Reliance at every single transaction point in a customer’s day. Fuel, check. Telecom, check. Grocery, check. Fashion retail, check. Furniture, check. Toys, check. And now medicine. Or rather, pharma.
In 2020, Reliance began building out its pharma muscle by acquiring India’s earliest e-pharmacy, Netmeds. But it had laid the groundwork for its pharmaceutical ambitions way earlier, in 2016, with the launch of a health-focussed app called JioHealthHub. Its grand plan, say company executives, is to roll its many different health offerings into the app, which the company envisions as a one-stop solution for booking tests, doctor appointments, hospital visits, ordering medicines, etc.
And so, after the Netmeds acquisition, more followed. A two-decade-old pharma software company. A majority stake in a specialty diagnostics company. Reliance has also set up a pharma company and an affordable diagnostics chain in-house.
The final piece of its pharma puzzle is offline expansion—it wants to set up 3,000 pharmacies across the country. Already, it has quietly set up 114 pharmacies operating under the Netmeds brand, carving out space from its existing small-format retail store chain Reliance Smart Point.
Reliance’s endgame is to target the 440 million subscribers of its telecom arm Jio, as well as its 150 million retail customers, cross-selling across online and offline channels in grocery, pharmacy, fashion, and telephone recharges. Suit of armour, check.
But pharma is not telecom. You can’t give away medicines for free like Reliance did with data. And offline pharma, especially, will be a tough nut to crack, with organised competitors such as Apollo and MedPlus already controlling 15% of India’s pharma retail market. (The unorganised sector controls the rest). Equally difficult will be integrating all its adjacent yet disparate businesses together.