by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Economy, Investing, Markets, News, SMEs
Bhubaneswar : Reliance Industries Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani said on Monday the group, which has already invested Rs 6,000 crore in Odisha over the last few years, will invest an additional Rs 3,000 crore in the state.
“Today, Reliance has emerged as one of the largest investors in the state in the last few years. Reliance has already invested over Rs 6,000 crore in the state. And today, I am committing to invest an additional Rs 3,000 crore in our new businesses in Odisha,” he said at the Make in Odisha Conclave here.
The additional investments would be made in the next three years.
“Most of our investments are in creating the Jio network. For Reliance, Jio is not just another business. It is a mission to transform India — to transform Odisha. We have created sustained new employment opportunities, both direct and indirect, to over 30,000 people in the state,” he said.
Since Reliance Jio commenced operations little over two years ago, India has moved from the 155th rank in mobile broadband penetration to being the number one nation in mobile data consumption in the world, he said.
“We are committed to connecting everyone and everything, everywhere always with the highest quality and the most affordable price. I have a big reason for focusing on digital business.
The world is at the cusp of a digital revolution,” Ambani said.
He also said the group is taking another step to propel Odisha further into the digital future.
“With JioGigaFiber, we have now begun an ambitious push in fixed broadband through fiber-to-the-home and premise.
“Our aim and resolve is to ensure that India rises from the present 135th rank to be amongst the top three nations in fixed broadband within the next three years,” Ambani said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Entrepreneurship, Social Entrepreneur, Success Stories
Mumbai : Three Indians, including Reliance Industries (RIL) Chairman Mukesh Ambani and human rights lawyer Indira Jaising, feature in Fortune magazine as the 50 Greatest Leaders of 2018, released on Thursday.
Architect Balkrishna Doshi is the third Indian in the list of the American magazine “of the thinkers, speakers, and doers who are stepping up to meet today’s challenges” and includes Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron.
Ranking Ambani, who turned 61 on Thursday, at 24th place, Fortune said that he had “in less than two years, brought mobile data to the masses and completely upended the country’s telecom market”.
“Since Ambani, chief of the $47 billion conglomerate Reliance Industries, launched Jio — the first mobile network in the world to be entirely IP-based — in September 2016, the company has signed up a staggering 168 million subscribers.
“The secret? Offering dirt-cheap data and free calls (and plowing billions of dollars into the infrastructure that transmits them). The effect, dubbed ‘Jio-fication’, has driven India’s higher-price carriers to drop costs (if not run them out of business), and it fueled a 1,100 per cent rise in India’s monthly data consumption,” it said.
Lawyers Collective Founder Indira Jaising has been ranked 20.
“When the poorest in India need a voice, they find one in Jaising, a lawyer who has dedicated her life to battling injustice,” Fortune said.
“She has fought on behalf of victims of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, helped Syrian Christian women in India win property rights equal to their male counterparts’, and helped draft India’s first domestic violence law.
“Her work has recently led her to Myanmar, where she was appointed by the UN to lead an investigation into the persecution of Rohingya Muslims,” it added.
Ranking Doshi at 43, Fortune said he is the winner of architecture’s highest honour this year – the Pritzker Prize – and has spent the bulk of his 70-year career championing accessible housing, earning the nickname of “the architect for the poor”.
“His designs include the Aranya low-cost housing project in Indore, a labyrinth of homes and courtyards that provide around 80,000 residents with a balance of open spaces and communal living, and the mixed-income Life Insurance Corporation Housing in Ahmedabad, where several generations of a family can occupy levels of the same building.
“Underlying all his work is the ideal that all economic classes deserve good housing,” it said.
The first rank in this year’s list goes to “The Students” of Marjory Stoneman Douglas and other schools in the US that suffered from gun violence.
This year’s list includes Bill and Melinda Gates, tennis star Serena Williams, General Motors CEO Mary Barra, Tencent CEO Huateng ‘Pony’ Ma, Chinese environmentalist Ma Jun, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian and Hollywood actor-producer Reese Witherspoon.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Business Summit, Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Emerging Businesses, Events, Large Enterprise
By Sourabh Kulesh,
Mumbai : Reliance Group’s Unlimit — an Internet of Things (IoT) venture for enterprises — and tech giant IBM on Monday announced a collaboration to co-create IoT solutions for industry verticals, including automotive, insurance, utilities and industrial automation.
The two companies are developing IoT solutions for implementation across Reliance Group companies, addressing key segments such as user-based insurance (Reliance general insurance), asset and vehicle tracking (Reliance commercial finance), tower monitoring (Reliance communications) and transformer maintenance (BSES & Reliance energy).
“With 2.7 billion connected devices and growing, Indian economy, enterprises and consumers are embracing IoT at a rampant pace,” Harriet Green, General Manager, Watson IoT, Customer Engagement and Education, IBM, told reporters here at the first-ever IBM ‘Genius of Things (GoT)’ summit.
“Our collaboration is an example of IBM leading the global IoT movement with a growing ecosystem of clients and partners. This underscores how IBM and ‘Unlimit’ are taking the power of IoT to Indian enterprises and capturing the phenomenon of digital disruption for joint client innovation,” she added.
As part of the collaboration, IBM will provide its Watson IoT Platform to collect and connect data, including sensor data, from devices and provide use-case specific dashboards.
“As India is becoming the hot bed for digital disruption, we are confident that our powerful technology platform, with Watson IoT at its core, will provide enterprises with a flexible, scalable and secure solution,” Juergen Hase, CEO, ‘Unlimit’, told reporters here.
Unlimit will design IoT use cases for various industries in the Indian market and build them on the IBM Watson IoT Platform, which provides device registration, IoT rules, advanced analytics, visualisation, reports and cognitive capabilities for each use case.
As a result, rather than approaching businesses on one-by-one basis, Unlimit will provide customers with access to these capabilities so that they can leverage IoT-driven insights and information for business decisions, create new product offerings and revenue streams.
The Unlimit IoT platform aired at the enterprise users was launched in April this year. Unlimit aims to provide a common platform for vertical industries such as automation, healthcare, agriculture, financial services and asset tracking.
Green said that IBM’s amazing Cloud capabilities enable all communication and infrastructure that is needed to work for the transformation of businesses.
“We have a set of applications that allow us track, record and work together effectively through exceptional software. ‘Watson’, designed especially for IoT, also works as a differentiator for the company,” Green added.
Watson analyses the massive structured and unstructured data to help digital transformation of companies.
IBM also announced key clients and partnerships with Kone, KPIT, Avanijal Agri Automation, Acculi Labs, Tech Mahindra and Arrow Electronics to drive IoT growth in India.
“With an unparalleled, growing global ecosystem of over 6,000 clients, 1,400 partners and 750 IoT patents, IBM is uniquely positioned to lead the IoT revolution across industries and help companies in India plug into critical new revenue streams,” said Karan Bajwa, Managing Director, IBM India/South Asia.
Through a multi-year agreement with IBM, Kone will tap into the IBM IoT Cloud Platform to connect, remotely monitor and optimise the management of millions of elevators, escalators, doors and turnstiles in buildings.
KPIT, a global technology company that specialises in product engineering and IT solutions across several industries, will use IBM’s IoT Continuous Engineering to deliver high-quality designs and connected products efficiently.
Avanijal Agri Automation will use the company’s ‘Irrigation Automation System’ solution to collect and log irrigation data from various sensors on the field for agronomical analysis which helps further enhance the yield on a continuous basis.
Acculi Labs will leverage IBM’s IoT platform to build and scale “Lyfas” — a scalable rural healthcare solution to smooth the flow of data from the edge device to cloud for further analysis and prognostics.
With IBM IoT solutions, Arrow Electronics will offer more than 160 industry-leading cloud services such as artificial intelligence (AI), Blockchain, advanced data analytics and cyber security to customers.
Tech Mahindra is harnessing IBM technology for designing experiences through orchestration of systems, sensors, devices, platforms, external data, back-end systems, analytics engine and much more.
(Sourabh Kulesh can be contacted at sourabh.kulesh@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Large Enterprise
New Delhi : (IANS) Industrialist Anil Ambani-led Reliance Communications (RCOM) on Wednesday said the talks of its merger with the promoters of Aircel to combine the wireless business of the two companies have been extended by 60 days.
“Reliance Communications today announced that, based on the good progress made so far, it has extended the exclusivity period with Maxis Communications and Sindya Securities and Investments, the shareholders of Aircel, by 60 days to May 22, 2016, to consider the potential combination of the Indian wireless business of RCOM and Aircel and mutually derive the expected substantial benefits of in-country consolidation, including opex and capex synergies and revenue enhancement,” a company statement said.
It said the discussions were non-binding in nature.
“Any transaction is subject to completion of due diligence, definitive documentation and regulatory, shareholders’ and other third party approvals. Hence, there is no certainty that any transaction will result,” the statement added.
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Buzz
New Delhi : (IANS) The government on Friday clarified that the decision to allow marketing and pricing freedom for gas produced in difficult areas will not apply to Reliance Industries’ (RIL) discoveries in the KG-D6 block unless the company withdrew its legal suit over gas pricing.
“Gas discoveries getting the benefit should be unencumbered of any legal case. Either arbitrations or legal cases should have ended or withdrawn for getting the benefit of the decision,” Petroleum Minister Dharmndra Pradhan told reporters here.
A cabinet panel on Thursday freed gas pricing from the new blocks and existing discoveries which are yet to commence production. However, to protect user industries, it put a price ceiling derived by a formula linked to the weighted average cost of imported fuels.
A clause in the decision has the caveat that if there are pending arbitration or litigation cases pertaining to such assets, the new policy shall only become applicable upon the conclusion or withdrawal of legal proceedings.
Besides the arbitration on gas price, RIL has approached arbitration over the government disllowing costs of $2.3 billion on grounds of shortfall in production.
The difficult areas for which the new pricing norms have now been formulated are defined as those from deep-water, ultra deep-water and high-pressure, high-temperature areas. Such areas were not considered when prices were fixed for normal gas discoveries in October 2014.
The bulk of such fields are with Reliance Industries and state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp.
“The marketing and pricing freedom will be applicable to existing discoveries where arbitration or litigation exists directly on gas price, only after conclusion or withdrawal of such processes,” Additional Secretary, Petroleum, U.P Singh told reporters here on Friday while making a presentation on the cabinet decision.
