Inside Jio's Content Factory

Mukesh Ambani’s vast media and entertainment empire is key to powering Jio’s extensive data network. Jyoti Deshpande, head of RIL’s media business, is the one giving shape to an ambitious strategy, step by step.

- Aveek Datta and Sourav Majumdar

Backward integration. These two words have formed the core of reliance industries ltd’s (ril) business strategy over the past four decades.

SINCE 1977, RIL, with a present turnover of ₹6.22 lakh crore, has progressively entered new businesses—from textiles to petrochemicals; from petrochemicals to crude refining; and from crude refining to oil and gas production.

Sure, there have been seemingly unrelated diversifications in between—into retail and telecom. While that has been more out of RIL chairman Mukesh Ambani’s vision of seeing his company’s future in consumer-facing businesses, the capital for growing these businesses has, no doubt, come from this successful yarn-to-oil backward integration.

Around four decades later, RIL—India’s largest company by revenue which is led by India’s richest billionaire—is attempting a backward integration of a different kind.

This time, RIL, valued at ₹7.58 lakh crore, is hoping to traverse the value chain in the technology, media, and telecom sector. With the successful roll-out of Reliance Jio Infocomm’s (Jio) broadband wireless network, which has already become India’s largest telecom player by notching up 340 million subscribers, and the aggressive commercialisation plans for JioFiber—the telco’s home broadband and digital services business— RIL has laid the groundwork and the ‘pipe’ for its ambitious triple play strategy.