Mukesh Ambani and Mark Zuckerberg bet big on India
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook Inc., hopes the social media giant and Reliance Industries Ltd. can together transform India’s digital payments landscape, replicating the latter’s success in disrupting the telecommunications sector.
Zuckerberg at an online event mentioned Dhirubhai Ambani, the late Reliance founder, who said he had envisioned phone calls in India as cheap as postcards, priced at less than a penny then. His son Mukesh Ambani’s ability to make that wish come true has inspired him, Zuckerberg said.
“That is what we have tried to do with the courier … and hopefully we can do it together with the payments,” Zuckerberg told Ambani during the event.
The telecommunications unit run by Ambani, the richest man in Asia, disrupted the sector in 2016 when it came in with free calls and very cheap data rates, forcing rivals to resign, merge or go bankrupt while converting. into the country’s top wireless carrier over time. Ambani and Zuckerberg are now betting big on India as its more than 1 billion consumers hook on their smartphones and increasingly rely on them for everything from entertainment and grocery shopping to online money transfers.
Accumulating victories
The American social media firm invested $ 5.7 billion for a 9.99% stake in Ambani’s digital venture in April, sparking a flurry of sales of other holdings. Finally, it also got approval for deployment in November this year to operate its WhatsApp payments service in India after struggling for years to get a permit.
Ambani expects India’s economy to scale the leaderboards and per capita income to more than double to $ 5,000, as the country transforms into a digital powerhouse.
“I strongly believe that in the next two decades, India will grow to be among the top three economies in the world,” Ambani said at the same event. “But more importantly, it will become a world-class digital society.”
For Facebook, there is no more capable partner than Ambani’s retail refining conglomerate to help dominate this nascent but growing market.
“A big part of the reason I was excited to partner with you is that there are not many people around the world who have gone from industry to industry and revolutionized and improved them, and continue to do so,” Zuckerberg told Ambani.
(With the exception of the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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