“We are in the age of super-intelligence. What manufacturing was for China, super-intelligence will be for India.”
He said India’s USD 2.5 trillion economy would most certainly hit the USD 5 trillion mark well before 2024 and then double by 2030.
Mukesh Ambani's message to telecom competitors: Some losses worth taking, big boys can afford them
The Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries delivered a speech about India’s rise in the world order and the role it could play to lead the fourth industrial revolution.
01 Dec, 2017 15:59
Former US President Barack Obama had just left after his session at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2017. Moving from shadows in the audience to under the spotlight, Mukesh Ambani played it ever so smoothly. He called upon the “big boys” of the telecom sector to look beyond profits and losses, and instead think about the difference they were making to the consumer, and thereby to the country.
The Reliance Industries Chairman and Managing Director had just delivered a speech that talked about India’s rise in the world order and the role it could play to lead the fourth industrial revolution. Post his speech, Ambani answered a few questions posed by Hindustan Times Editor-in-Chief Sukumar Ranganathan.
“To me what is most important is 'Do we really move the country forward' and 'Does the consumer gain?' and I think that the question as a journalist that you should be thinking about is that 'even if there are profits and losses, who gains and who loses, and as long as the consumer gains, and the country moves forward, it's worth taking those losses, right? Some of us are big boys, we can afford that,” Ambani said in reply to a question that referred to a recent statement by Bharti Airtel Chairman Sunil Mittal.
That message would surely travel fast; Sunil Mittal's brothers, Rakesh and Rajan, were a part of the audience.
Mittal had recently said in an interview that Reliance Jio Infocomm’s entry into the sector had led to its rivals writing off USD 50 billion in investments. Ambani may have a point. With the entry of Jio in September last year, data tariffs have fallen to a fraction of their levels a year ago while India’s ranking in terms of data consumption has jumped to number one from 150. Some of Reliance Jio’s rivals have been around in the industry for over 20 years.
Delivering his speech that lasted 25 minutes, Ambani said RIL was willing to go beyond the Rs 60,000 crore it had put in its last investment cycle for the next round of growth. He listed agriculture, education and healthcare as three areas on the group’s roadmap where it saw tremendous opportunities.
“Five years ago, when most Indian businesses were investing outside India, we decided to invest about USD 60 billion in India. We have nearly completed this investment cycle and we are now ready to commit even more in our next investment cycle. We are doing this out of our undiminished conviction that India is the next biggest investment opportunity in the world,” Ambani said.
He said the time had come for a combination of technologies to play a role in agriculture, education and healthcare and solve societal problems without bothering to turn to governments and regulators for profits and losses.
“This (agriculture) is a difficult problem to tackle but we are ready to take on difficult problems. It’s very much on our roadmap, building of the resources, thinking through. We don’t just jump into anything, we think through it carefully. Agriculture, education and healthcare, all three are on our roadmap which, to my mind, are the most difficult,” he said.
He called upon foreign investors to “invest in India, earn in India, grow in India, partner and prosper together with India”. Ambani said by the middle of this century, India’s rise would be higher than China’s and more attractive and give the world a “superior development model”.
He said, “We are in the age of super-intelligence. What manufacturing was for China, super-intelligence will be for India.”
He said India’s USD 2.5 trillion economy would most certainly hit the USD 5 trillion mark well before 2024 and then double by 2030.
He said the next three decades will be most defining for India and the country was positioned to lead the next revolution. He said by 2050, the country would have 300 million more people to feed. “There is a pressing need and golden opportunity to create a digital green revolution. Data is not only the new oil, data is also the new soil,” he said.
He said the fourth industrial revolution would be led by connectivity, computing, data and artificial intelligence. He said the new age would have three defining characteristics – the first being the exponential changes that technology would bring as against linear changes that happened earlier.
The second defining characteristic, he said, would see scarcity giving way to abundance – abundance of abundance of energy, health, agricultural output, manufacturing capacity, abundant knowledge and renewable materials.
The THIRD defining characteristic would be a migration from a goods and services economy to one powered by intelligent services.
“There is no doubt that in the coming years, machine intelligence will augment and multiply biological intelligence manifold,” Ambani said.
(Disclosure : Reliance Industries Ltd. is the sole beneficiary of Independent Media Trust which controls Network18 Media & Investments Ltd.)
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