Here’s how it panned out, one by one. 

Jio’s inexorable crawl to pole position in telecom 

The story of India’s telecom sector goes something like this. Once upon a time, the sector was dynamic and vibrant with over a dozen players. Then, Jio entered the scene, and things were never the same again. Cut to five years later and there were three major telecom players (no, BSNL doesn’t count), and one of them, Vi, seemed like that exhausted, sleep-deprived person at the party who just wants to leave but is being persuaded to stay for just a little bit longer.  

So that left Airtel and Jio. 

After a long, bruising war that lasted for nearly half a decade, Jio finally surpassed Airtel to become India’s largest telecom player with the most number of active users. But then came 2020 and 2021, and Jio felt stuck. That’s because even though Airtel was trailing Jio, it had the better users. So it had a much higher average revenue per user (ARPU) than Jio, which was fighting to keep the users it had acquired. 

As we wrote last year, Airtel was perfectly happy being #2. 

And Jio found itself stuck in what we called a K-shaped conundrum. It was struggling to add new users. 

Here’s what’s happening in 2022. 

Right now, Airtel still has the better ARPU, but some analysts feel that Jio is in a position to make strides on this key metric later this year. There’s some history here. In the previous quarter, Jio’s ARPU went up by an astonishing 10.5%, which was the highest growth rate in the industry.

If you are a telco competing with Jio, I imagine it feels like one of those Terminator movies. Jio is coming for you. Slowly. Inexorably. Unrelentingly. And there’s nothing you can do about it. 

And with 5G auctions around the corner, it looks like 2022 is the year that Jio grows even stronger. 

In retail, Reliance has got its cake and eaten it too

Remember how Reliance beat Amazon and took over Future Group? 

If you don’t, then there’s no way I can explain all those twists and turns in a few sentences. Instead, just read what I wrote a couple of months ago. It’s really a phenomenal story. 

Basically, Future Group’s creditors are trying to liquidate the company. Amazon is an equity investor and does not want that to happen. So Amazon’s lawyers spend days and weeks in all kinds of courts and drafting increasingly threatening letters to Future Group’s directors, calling them all kinds of names. Words like fraud and collusion are liberally used. 

And what is Reliance doing? 

Well, after taking over Future Group’s stores overnight, it’s now in the process of setting them up.

Somehow, Reliance seems to have walked away with Future Group’s stores but with none of its financial liabilities. And poor Amazon has shifted from fighting with Reliance to now battling Future Group’s lenders, which includes the Bank of India.  

I mean, if this isn’t a good outcome for Reliance, then I don’t know what is. 

Reliance is making oil work

You’d think that a global oil crisis and war would be bad for Reliance, which has vast interests in oil and gas. 

Well, think again. 

It turns out, Reliance has found an opportunity here too. 

Before the war, Europe bought a large chunk of oil from Russia. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and Europe decided to scale back on oil imports to teach Russia a lesson. Russia then looked around for countries who wanted to buy from it. Enter India, which is currently importing cheap oil (relatively) from Russia at an unprecedented scale. In fact, just recently, Russia become India’s #1 source of oil, displacing Saudi Arabia. 

So what does India do with all this oil? 

Well, it refines it into petrol, and notably, diesel, and sells it to Europe at a much higher price. It’s both sad and hilarious. I’m used to European countries following this playbook with countries in Asia. Here, it’s the other way around. 

And guess who gains from all this?

And then, there’s cricket

I could write a lot about this, but honestly, I don’t think I can do any more justice to it than my wonderful colleague, Jaideep, who wrote a stellar piece in his newsletter Moneyball on what Reliance’s wins in the IPL media rights auction mean. 

You can read the whole thing here. 

If there’s one takeaway from Reliance’s victories, it is how it has managed to do all this by taking on giants and still winning. Unlike, say, the Adani Group, which seems to have carved out victory in new sectors helped by the Government of India’s pro-liberalisation strategy. Reliance is something else. 

Of course, you can have your theories on how this happened, and whether it’s a coincidence or whether there’s something deeper going on. But the fact is, Reliance seems to be doing it.

And that, in itself, is astonishing, and worthy of some admiration.