Reliance AGM 2022: What To Expect From Mukesh Ambani’s Speech

Reliance Industries Ltd.'s Chairman Mukesh Ambani is expected to offer a road map on listing or strategic sale at key businesses, including clean energy, at the oil-to-retail conglomerate's Aug. 29 annual general meeting.

Over the last decade, Ambani has been making strategic announcements at the AGMs, which are eagerly awaited by investors. This time, the expectation is that his speech at the 45th AGM would revolve around timelines for listing Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd., retail and oil-to-chemicals units.

Besides, the potential strategic stake sale in new energy businesses, the likely 5G rollout and its monetisation plans would be the key topics, according to a report by JM Financial.

RIL is aggressively investing and partnering with other businesses across the green energy value chain and has reiterated a commitment of $10 billion in capital expenditure over three years. “It aims to scale up the business over the next couple of years and expects this new growth engine to outshine all existing growth engines in just five-to-seven years,” JM Financial said.

HSBC Broking said so far they have seen limited communication of strategy on the new energy business. "We expect some details and potential timelines for various projects under execution.”

HSBC also expects to hear the aspirations of RIL's 5G telecom business and its distribution plans. "On the retail side, we expect to hear how they are integrating with the kirana shops,” it said.

In the digital business, RIL has reiterated its plans to convert 25 crore 2G feature phone users to 4G and to connect five crore homes via fiber-to-home and five crore micro, small and medium enterprises via its enterprise solutions.

In the last fiscal, RIL invested Rs 82,700 crore in the digital business, including telecom, taking its cumulative investments to over $60 billion, of which around $8 billion has been spent on the pure digital business, the JM Financial report added.

Reliance Jio is aggressively targeting the 5G launch and has successfully tested it across sites and completed planning across 1,000 Indian cities. Jio's 100% home-grown 5G stack and tie-up with Google will power the 5G experience.

In FY22, the retail unit invested Rs 30,000 crore, three times the amount in FY21; and digital businesses invested Rs 83,000 crore, or 2.5 times the previous year's number, on spectrum and capacity.

Reliance Retail Ltd. is targeting 75% of the new stores in tier II and below cities, the HSBC report said.

According to JM Financial, the retail business continues to see omni-channel presence emerging as the new normal.