Reliance aims to digitise 5 million Kirana Shops by 2023| Will launch Jio-enabled Mobile POS | $700 billion unorganised retail market has immense potential
Reliance already has a strong online retail base with over 300 million Jio customers and 10,000 offline stores in 6,500 cities.
“Just as Reliance became known in the past 40 years as a company that won the trust of millions of retailers, it will be known in the coming decade as an enterprise with lakhs of partners and an enabler of a large ecosystem of entrepreneurs.” – Mukesh Ambani at RIL’s 40th Annual Meeting.
- Reliance has set sights on conquering India’s nascent Mobile POS market which currently has players like SnapBizz, Nukkad Shops and GoFrugal.
- MPOS in India has kicked off after GST implementation demanded modernization of small-time retail shops.
- Reliance already has a deep footprint retail with over 10,000 outlets pan-India.
- Reliance aims to create the world’s largest online-to-offline (O2O) e-commerce platform in the country.
- The Jio MPOS will be priced dirt cheap compared to products already on the market, similar to the Jio 4G strategy.
Reliance launched the Jio Mobile Point of Sale (POS) solution recently signalling the birth of what’s touted to be India’s biggest offline to online (O2O) platform. This comes on the back of RIL acquiring two logistics and software start-ups in the start of 2019.
Reliance Industries’ entry into online retail will propel the Indian kirana stores (grocery shops towards digitization). The current 15,000 digitised retail stores will reach 5 million by 2023, as per a Merrill Lynch study in the wake of the launch.
Mukesh Ambani’s Jio vision of domination
Mukesh Ambani in 2016 had announced a Rs. 5,000 Crore VC kitty for Reliance’s Jio arm to support entrepreneurs to build ‘businesses of the future.’
The big bet in retail is Ambani’s plan to snatch away market share from his
e-commerce rivals Amazon and Walmart in the $36 billion Indian market.
