Jio-Facebook to make India a premier digital society: Ambani

Agreeing with him, Zuckerberg said that a lot of Indian entrepreneurs need digital tools that they can rely on to find and communicate with customers and grow their businesses

Reliance Industries’ chairman Mukesh Ambani and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday outlined their plan for wiring small businesses in the country through their partnership, which will make India a premier digital society.

As is known, in April, Facebook acquired a 9.99% stake in Jio Platforms for $5.7 billion. The two firms plan to collaborate on the e-commerce front to digitise the country’s over 60 million micro, small and medium businesses, and 30 million neighbourhood kirana stores.

At a fireside chat with Zuckerberg on Tuesday, Ambani said that he firmly believed that in the next two decades, India will grow to be among the top three economies in the world. “But more importantly, it will become a premier digital society. It will be a modern society with young people driving it, with young businesses driving it. And our per capita income will go from $1,800-2,000 per capita to $5,000 per capita.

Our mid-income or the middle class in India which is about 50% of its total number of households, will grow to 3-4% per year. And I think that Facebook, Jio, and a lot of other companies and entrepreneurs in the world, have a golden opportunity to be in India, to be part of this economic and social transformation, that we are witnessing and that will accelerate in the coming decades,” Ambani said.

Agreeing with him, Zuckerberg said that a lot of Indian entrepreneurs need digital tools that they can rely on to find and communicate with customers and grow their businesses. “And now this is just something that I think that our partnership can really help with,” he said.

“It always blows me away that India has more than 60 million small businesses, and millions of people around the country rely on them for jobs and that’s a big part of what I hope that our partnership can serve here. We support more than 50 million WhatsApp business app users globally every month already. And more than 15 million of these are in India,” Zukerberg added.

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