The increasing importance of RIL’s consumer-facing businesses

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26 Aug, 2025 12:21

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Reliance Industries Ltd’s pivot to clean energy with a Rs 75,000-crore investment stole the show in its annual general meeting yesterday. However, its consumer-facing businesses – digital services - and retail are becoming more important as they gain scale and contribute to the bottom line.

As RIL chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani pointed out, “Almost 50 percent of the EBITDA was contributed by consumer businesses.” EBITDA stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation.

“One of these consumer businesses, Retail, is only about a decade old. The other business, Jio, is only five years old,” said Ambani.

The chart below traces the growth of the consumer businesses’ contribution to RIL’s revenues and EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes). From 1.45 percent for the fiscal year ended March 2015, the contribution of these segments to RIL’s profits has increased to 49 percent.

Doubling down

Ambani has set an ambitious target of tripling the retail business over the next three to five years by strengthening its sourcing ecosystem, building supply chain infrastructure and investing in research and product design.

Also read: Reliance Retail: Robust growth prospects to drive valuations

RIL also plans to on-board 10 million merchants on JioMart over the next three years and is working on a full-scale new commerce solution after trialling WhatsApp-JioMart integration.

“We believe the new commerce business will be instrumental for retail segment to grow at that pace,” said analysts at Kotak Institutional Equities in a note to clients.  “Our recent primary surveys on JioMart provided encouraging feedback from the merchant partners; however, it needs to be scaled up meaningfully in the coming years for the company to achieve its ambitious targets.”

Besides, Ambani also announced the launch of an affordable 4G smartphone – JioPhone Next - in partnership with Google which will roll out by September.

Disclaimer: Moneycontrol is a part of the Network18 group. Network18 is controlled by Independent Media Trust, of which Reliance Industries is the sole beneficiary.