Mukesh Ambani Unveils Succession Plans And A Range Of Blueprints
Mukesh Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Industries and older son of founder Dhirubhai Ambani kicked off succession plans during the companies 46th AGM with the announcement that three of his children would join the board as non executive directors
Our Top Reports For Today
- <00:55> Mukesh Ambani unveils succession plans and a range of blueprints, including for a technology service company
- <03:51> Reliance announces expanded plans for Solar PV manufacture and wind energy.
- <15:36> Cumulative rainfall levels are now down 8%, as are reservoir levels in many parts of India.
- <16:53> Office leasing activity is down 12% from the peak of 2020, even as co-working picks up.
NOTE: This transcript contains only the host's monologue and does not include any interviews or discussions that might be within the podcast. Please refer to the episode audio if you wish to quote the people interviewed. Email [email protected] for any queries.
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Reliance Unveils Succession, Last Mile Wireless 5G Connectivity Plan To Fibre And New Renewable Plans.
Mukesh Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Industries and older son of founder Dhirubhai Ambani kicked off succession plans during the companies 46th AGM with the announcement that three of his children would join the board as non executive directors even as spouse Nita Ambani would step down as non executive director in order to focus on the group’s foundation work.
Given that the children, Anant, Akash and Isha Ambani all hold executive roles within the group, unlike mother Nita Ambani, it is interesting that they are not being inducted onto the board in executive roles at the moment.
Isha heads the retail business, Akash is chairman of the board of Reliance Infocomms and Anant the youngest is on the board of almost all major subsidiaries including retail and telecom.
Most present executive board members include old timers like Nikhil R Meswani and Hital R Meswani who are extended family apart from PMS Prasad who has been on the board for almost 14 years and with the company for over 40 years and is a veteran originally from the petrochemical business.
During his address Ambani revealed the transition from a telecom player to a technology player, something analysts like Deven Choksey are betting on and I will come shortly.
On the telecom side, he announced Jio AirFiber to be available next month through which the company hopes to connect 200 million homes with last mile connectivity through 5G. Presently, Jio Fiber, which means actual fibre optic connectivity into homes has 10 million subscribers, who consume, he said, over 280 GB of data per month, 10 times higher than India’s per capita mobile data consumption.
More than 80% of India’s data consumption happens indoors, the company said, adding elsewhere that it had become the biggest destination for entertainment in the country, via Jio Cinema.
The leap or the transition to technology here is through Jio Platforms, providing managed services for Reliance Group but is now ready to offer cloud and other services to businesses outside Reliance, in India and abroad. Something like Amazon Web Services, I would reckon, or the Indian scale up version of it. There were other announcements in the space as well, broadly consumer, home, business and platforms.
Meanwhile, more was expected on the Jio Financial front and the stock fell sharply after that, being whatever the market wanted to see, did not present itself.
Someone who did present himself was Larry Fink, Chairman & CEO of Blackrock, which manages some $10 trillion of assets globally and spoke about the India opportunity and doing business with Reliance. BlackRock has been present here for over 15 years and is already one of the largest non-Indian investors in India today, and India lies at the heart of our global platform, Mr Fink said.
Jio is of course doing an asset management company tie-up with Blackrock, small in the scheme of things, at least right now.
By the way, if you didn’t know, Reliance’s consolidated revenues last year were Rs 974,000 crore and its net profit was Rs 73,670 crore and accounted for 9.3% of India’s merchandise exports last year.
Ambani also announced the setting up of what he called a fully-integrated, automated, giga-scale electrolyser manufacturing facility for a large-scale Green Hydrogen production at Jamnagar.
He further revealed a solution for stubble burning via deployment of bio energy projects or specifically compressed biogas for which pilots and a commercial scale plant have been running. The group is targeting 25 plants across India in the near future which will eat up 5.5 million tonnes of agro-residue and organic waste.
He announced specific renewable energy plans as well. This is what he said.
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So Reliance in all announced either a blueprint or expanded plans for Retail, Oil and Gas, Green Energy, apart from telecom and technology.
So what does a Reliance watcher and market veteran like Deven Choksey feel ? I caught up with him and asked him what he took away from the AGM speech ?
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Meanwhile, Bill Gates swung by at the Reliance AGM, virtually of course and announced that they and Reliance would be working on a series of collaborations, somewhat unusually since Gates usually works with Governments and nonprofits.
The collaborations would include a partnership with Bill Gates’ climate organisation, Breakthrough Energy, on addressing climate change, helping unlock economic power for women, and improving health outcomes for the poor.
“To make meaningful progress fighting climate change, we need businesses, philanthropists, and governments to spend more on affordable green solutions that will enable India to achieve its economic and climate aspirations at the same time,” he said.
Gates also announced that Gates and Reliance will over the next three years support one million women to fulfil their potential through self-help groups.
Finally, the duo hope to support innovation and implementation at scale to develop drugs and point-of-care diagnostics. We’ll also continue to work with communities to support the government’s efforts to eliminate infectious diseases.
Elsewhere in the stock markets, shares of RIL slipped 1.4 per cent, those of Jio Financial Services fell 0.97 per cent. The S&P BSE Sensex ended at 64,997, up 110 points while the Nifty50 closed at 19,306, up 40 points.
Shell Gets New Head
Elsewhere in energy, Shell India announced the appointment of Mansi Madan Tripathy as the new country chair of the company, effective 1 October. She will succeed Nitin Prasad who has been the country chair since 2016.
''As Country Chair of Shell India, Mansi will oversee Shell Group of companies in India, in addition to her role as Vice President, Shell Lubricants for Asia Pacific. Mansi will relocate from Singapore to New Delhi, her home city, to take up the role,'' the company said.
A graduate from the National Institute of Technology Kurukshetra, Tripaty has an MBA in Marketing from SP Jain Institute of Management and Research. She was earlier managing director of Shell Lubricants India and country marketing officer and joined Shell from Procter & Gamble in 2012.
Rains Are Slowing Down
India has been witnessing deficient rainfall in the month of August and it stands at 32% below LPA or long period average compared to a 13% (above LPA) surplus rainfall received back in July.
Against this, for the cumulative period, rainfall is down by 8% below LPA (6% below LPA in the previous week) compared with a surplus of 7% (above LPA) for last year. Overall Kharif sowing has inched up marginally with much higher acreage in rice. However, pulses sown areas continue to lag for the same period.
While there are regional variations, reservoir levels, another important metric as a % of total capacity stands at 64% as on 24 Aug 2023 compared with 81% for the last season. Total live storage available in 146 reservoirs stands at 79% of storage of last year and 94% of average storage for the last 10 years.
The impact of scanty rainfall in some regions is likely to be reflected through higher prices in the coming months, says BOB Research which put together these numbers.
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And finally, there has been a significant 12% decline in regular office leasing activity in the current fiscal year (FY23) compared to the peak year (FY20) when leasing stood at 43 mn sq. ft. across the top 7 cities.
In FY23, leasing across the top cities stood at approx. 36.11 mn sq. ft, real estate consulting firm Anarock has revealed.
On the other hand, coworking has grown.
Flexi office spaces’ share of office activity shot up to 23% in FY 22-23 - a 11% surge against the 12% share in FY20. This is the highest recorded growth across all office sectors, says Anarock.
Pune leads with a transaction share of 40% followed by Bangalore comes next with the net absorption of coworking office spaces increasing to 30%.
So how is your office shaping up and which model are you following, if any ?
Write in to us at [email protected] !
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And before I go, happy to connect with Dr Nandita Iyer, author of our popular CEO’s Diet column. In this week’s column, she talks about how designing your environment affects your eating habits and ways to incorporate design for healthier eating.
I begin by asking her to tell us more about why our eating environment is important to us.
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That’s it from me for today. Have a great Tuesday and see you soon.
Thank you as always for your wonderful and warm feedback directly to me as well as on LinkedIn where I try to post one of our reports everyday.
Bye for now.
