Reliance Retail partners with Whatsapp for online shopping

At the company's 45th annual general meeting (AGM) on Monday, Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani unveiled his succession plan, introducing his daughter Isha Ambani as the new leader of Reliance Retail. 

The retail business arm of Reliance Industries continues to expand the offline and online segments as it is counted among the top ten retailers in Asia with a turnover of Rs 2 lakh crore.

As part of its future growth plans, Reliance Retail has entered into a partnership with Meta to enable online shopping of groceries on the Whatsapp platform through JioMart.

Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO, Meta, said in a Facebook post, “This is our first-ever end-to-end shopping experience on WhatsApp—people can now buy groceries from JioMart right in a chat. Business messaging is an area with real momentum and chat-based experiences like this will be the go-to way people and businesses communicate in the years to come."

Besides, Reliance Retail will also expand into the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) segment.

“I am excited to announce that this year, we will launch our fast-moving consumer goods business. The objective of this business is to develop and deliver high quality, affordable products which solve every Indian's daily needs,” newly-appointed head of the retail arm Isha Ambani said during the AGM.

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On the growth of its retail business, Isha Ambani said, “We served over 200 million registered customers, equivalent to the collective population of the UK, France and Italy, at Reliance Retail's physical stores and digital platforms.”

The growth in walk-ins at the physical stores of Reliance Retail has been 18% year-on-year (YoY) and got 4.5 billion visits on its digital platforms, which was up 2.3x YoY.

According to Isha Ambani, Reliance Retail opened 2,500 stores during FY22 to take its total store count to over 15,000 spread over a space of 42 million square feet. All this has led to an employee base of over 3.6 lakh.

On the digital commerce front, Reliance Retails is delivering nearly six lakh orders every day, which is an annual increase of 2.5 times. JioMart is now delivering in over 260 towns.

Isha Ambani said, “Our digital commerce platforms of reliancedigital.in and JioMart provide a comprehensive omnichannel network, enabling us to deliver 93% online orders from stores within 6 hours.”

(This story was updated to add more info.)