RIL chairman Mukesh Ambani recently said that there is enormous entrepreneurial power in Indians at the grassroots, and each entrepreneur in the country can become like RIL founder Dhirubhai Ambani or Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. “Every small business and entrepreneur has the potential in India to become Dhirubhai Ambani or Bill Gates. And that is the power that is what differentiates India from the rest of the world,” Asia’s richest man told Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the latter’s recent trip to India. He also drew parallels between today’s start-up culture and his father’s journey towards being an entrepreneur.
Talking about how Reliance Industries was incepted, Mukesh Ambani told Microsoft’s current CEO that RIL was founded as a startup even before startups became popular. RIL started with a table and a chair with an investment of Rs 1,000, five decades ago. “It then became a micro-industry, a small industry, and today you can consider it as a large industry,” he said. India’s small, medium and micro enterprises generate employment for 70% of India and this decade will also deliver big on SME front.
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“They drive 40% of India’s exports. And they are critical to all the economic activity that we see. They have had done this, again, with zero technical enablement and adoption. So the opportunity there is to really go from low technology low digitization, and being really portable to adopt technology,” he said on the significance of SMEs.
RIL and Microsoft had signed a partnership for the US-based technology giant’s cloud infrastructure Azure in August last year. Speaking upon the same, billionaire Mukesh Ambani said: ”our opportunity with Microsoft is to really give them full service to make sure that they are fully enabled with the toolsets and the data sets.” The 10-year deal will power RIL’s data centres with Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
