Between March and November last year, even as the coronavirus upended lives and devastated economies around the world, India's richest man was handed more than $27 billion to make a bet on the future of the internet.
Its super-cheap data has helped bring hundreds of millions of Indians online for the first time. When Ambani launched Jio, India had fewer than 350 million internet users. Now, it has 750 million."A lot of this change, especially in terms of bringing people online, has happened on the back of the positive disruption that Jio triggered," Ajit Mohan, Facebook's vice president and managing director in India, told CNN Business.
"It will be powered by an indigenous developed network, hardware, and technology components," Ambani told a virtual audience at the India Mobile Congress in November, in a possible nod to calls for China's Huawei to be excluded from building the country's 5G network. "One would be hard pressed to come up with a meaningful list of technological innovations and IP that Jio created that could be the basis for its expansion abroad," Chaturvedi added.The country's online population of 750 million — second only to China, which has shut out US companies for decades — is the biggest draw for global tech. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix and Uber, to name a few, have already spent several years and billions of dollars to crack open the market.
Ambani has been the biggest beneficiary of many of those regulations, and the billionaire has been a vocal champion of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his campaign for a"self-reliant" India. His father, Dhirubhai, started a small yarn trading firm in Mumbai in 1957 that he subsequently spun into a thriving textile business. Over decades, it grew into the sprawling conglomerate Reliance Industries spanning energy, petrochemicals and telecommunications. Dhirubhai's death in 2002 kicked off an acrimonious succession battle that split the business in two.
One of the major casualties of the price war was Anil Ambani. His Reliance Communications company announced in late 2017 that it would sell most of its assets and exit the mobile business. Two days later, Jio acquired Reliance Communications. And two years later, the elder Ambani underscored the divergence in the brothers' fortunes by helping pay off an $80 million debt to Ericsson, keeping Anil out of jail.
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