[Transcript] #8: Reliance Jio - How India's largest company enabled a mobile revolution & how Africa can also have a "Jio Moment"
Transcript for podcast originally recorded on July 26, 2020
Hello highly-educated Afrobility readers,
As I mentioned previously, we will start to release transcripts of all Afrobility episodes to paid Substack members and below is the next one from our Reliance Jio episode.
2023-07-25 Thoughts: Reliance Jio was our first non-African episode and I thoroughly loved recording it. The episode covered a captivating story, tracing Reliance Industries Limited's journey from trading and textiles to an IPO, and eventually becoming a conglomerate involved in petrochemicals and beyond. We also explored the significant role Jio played in fostering tech growth in India. In the final part of the episode, we delved into the largest African companies, both in the tech and non-tech sectors, to identify potential candidates capable of creating a Jio-like moment across the continent. It was an enjoyable episode, and it's impressive to witness how Jio continues to expand its influence and impact in India
Enjoy & DFTBA!
Olumide Ogunsanwo
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Transcript starts here
[00:00:00] Olumide Ogunsanwo: Welcome to Afrobility, a conversation about African business and technology. Today, we're going to talk about the potential for Reliance Jio moment in Africa. We'll start with some context of the Reliance parents group, its telco subsidiary Reliance Jio, their impact on the Indian market, and we'll discuss ways in which Africa could also have a Reliance Jio moment.
This episode was recorded on July 26th, 2020. Okay. So boom, we're talking about Reliance Jio today. Excited?
[00:00:30] Bankole Makanju: Yeah, I'm super excited. I think this is important to Africa as it is an opportunity to have something like Reliance Jio in Africa. Reliance with Jio built a new type of mobile network in India that's cheaper than competition and attracted investments of tens of billions of dollars from everywhere in the world.
It's having a crazy unprecedented impact on India's economy. And this is important because. Reliance as a company is creating a playbook, one that goes from importation to import substitution, to manufacturing, to multiple other businesses. I think that's something that I want to explore in this podcast episode.
[00:01:05] Olumide Ogunsanwo: There was such a positive impact on consumers and the tech ecosystem. How can we have something similar in Africa? And it doesn't have to follow the exact same playbook, but at least how can we get the same outcome, even if it follows a different playbook? So I'm super excited to talk about it. I've been trying to convince Bankole to do this topic for weeks.