Even before Mukesh Ambani made a slew of announcements on Monday, the group orchestrated some momentum at Jio, the telco-to-tech arm of India's largest conglomerate, Reliance Industries Limited. Its 10-year partnership with software major Microsoft in 2019 is kicking in motion—two data centres backed by Microsoft Azure are almost ready for commercial launch. And in the last six months, Jio Platforms has gone on a hiring spree, poaching top-level executives from Wipro, Microsoft, Ericsson, and even Disney + Hotstar. It's a juggernaut that has slowly begun to move forward, one that the RIL chairman himself confirmed in the company's 45th annual general meeting yesterday. "We are strengthening our expertise by attracting the best global talent across all key digital technologies." For Jio Platforms' investors - Meta, Google, and private equity and sovereign funds - it's about time. After all, they have funnelled over US$20 billion into the company. The company has its fingers in telecom (Reliance Jio), e-commerce and grocery (JioMart, in partnership with its retail arm Reliance Retail), over 20-plus applications that include video and music streaming, video conferencing, and gaming services, an ads business (JioAds), a thriving payments business (JioPay). And all of this is bolstered by its - 420 million retail telecom customers. And that's not even mentioning its highly lucrative television broadcasting business. But despite having such an interconnected network, its retail telecom business Jio Info-comm is still the child that brings home the family bacon. The company's annual non-telco revenue in the year ended March 2022 was less than Rs 1,500 crore (US$188 million). That's not great news for a company aiming to go public. Especially when investors expect returns in Ebitda multiples of 12X-13X, higher than the 7X-8X at which a typical telco would be valued. Jio Platforms must get its non-telco businesses to fire on all cylinders, describe our Multimedia Team in their deeply insightful articles based story today on Jio Platforms' IPO ambitions http://www.multimediastudio.net
