Mukesh Ambani’s telecom journey: from losing Reliance Infocomm to listing Jio Platforms

Mumbai: In September 2002, when Bharti Airtel said it had added 100,000 mobile subscribers in Mumbai in 42 days, Mukesh Ambani saw a challenge. The story goes that, after seeing Airtel’s advertisement, Ambani told his team he wanted 10 million subscribers in the city within a year.

It was a startling ambition in a country where mobile phones were expensive and connections a privilege. Now, Jio Platforms Ltd has debuted on the stock market at ₹1,358 a share, with a market capitalization of about ₹12.5 trillion. It is India’s second-most valuable listed company, ahead of Airtel and behind Reliance Industries, the empire his father Dhirubhai Ambani built.

The listing caps a quarter-century pursuit: Mukesh entered telecom late, lost the business in a family settlement and returned with a bigger ambition. Jio’s valuation remains below its parent’s, but it has become a giant in its own right.

The first setback

Reliance’s telecom ambitions began with a wager on regulation. The company stayed out of the 1994 mobile telephony auctions, unwilling to pay the hefty licence fees demanded by the government. Dhirubhai wanted mobile calls to cost about as much as a postcard, but Reliance refused to pay what it considered an unreasonable price of entry.

The National Telecom Policy of 1999 offered a way in, allowing operators with wireless-in-local-loop licences to offer mobility. Reliance entered through this cheaper route before the Unified Access Service Licence regime allowed fixed-line and mobile services under a common licence. The conversion, for a one-time fee of ₹1,658 crore, opened the way to full-fledged mobile telephony.

Mukesh and Manoj Modi, his close associate and one of the most consequential figures in Reliance’s history, built the first version of the business. At the Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge Centre in Navi Mumbai, Mukesh was a frequent visitor, travelling from his Colaba residence in a Mercedes-Benz S-Class. The plans were expansive: more than 60,000 km of optical fibre, internet access through mobile handsets and broadband connections for offices and kiosks.

Reliance chose CDMA technology over the GSM standard used by most rivals, believing it could deliver services with less spectrum and lower capital expenditure. But spectrum allocation and GSM operators' lobbying power constrained the business. Cheap calls could not compensate for a network that struggled to match rivals on reliability and performance.

A dispute over ownership added another complication. Mukesh had granted Modi stock options in Reliance Infocomm, recognizing a trusted executive as a business creator rather than merely a salaried manager. After Dhirubhai’s death, Anil Ambani objected to shares being allocated to an outsider in a business funded by Reliance.

When the brothers divided the empire in 2005-06, Anil received the telecom business. Mukesh had to walk away. A non-compete agreement prevented his immediate return. But the ambition endured. In a conversation with this writer in 2008, Modi said they would return to telecom; they had only scratched the surface the first time.

Back in the game

In 2010, Reliance acquired a 95% stake in Infotel Broadband Services, which had won broadband wireless access spectrum across all 22 circles. The acquisition came days after the auction. Once again, Reliance entered through broadband rather than a conventional mobile licence. The subsequent conversion to a unified access licence drew criticism from rivals and scrutiny from the Comptroller and Auditor General, which estimated an undue benefit of ₹3,367 crore.

The broadband spectrum was not ideal for mobile services, forcing Reliance to buy additional spectrum. A deal with Anil’s Reliance Communications provided access to spectrum and fibre infrastructure, an extraordinary transaction between businesses born of a bitter family separation.

By September 2016, when Jio launched commercially, Reliance had invested more than ₹1.5 trillion over eight years without earning revenue from the service. This time, Mukesh chose 4G LTE, building a network ahead of the market rather than upgrading an existing one. He made voice calls free and priced data aggressively, forcing rivals to respond. Airtel lost customers and spent heavily on network upgrades, while Vodafone and Idea eventually merged as the sector’s economics deteriorated.

Mukesh framed the strategy as something larger than a price war. “Data is the new oil,” he said in 2017, arguing that affordable technology could turn India’s population and growing digital infrastructure into an economic advantage. Jio was no longer merely a telecom operator. It was becoming the foundation of an ecosystem spanning payments, commerce, entertainment and enterprise services.

Scale, however, came at a price. Low tariffs constrained revenue per user, while the network demanded enormous capital. When the pandemic struck, Reliance’s debt and investment needs made external funding more urgent. In 2020, Jio Platforms sold stakes to global investors including Facebook, Google and private-equity firms, raising tens of billions of dollars and validating the digital platform Mukesh had built.

The deal also shaped how the gains would flow to Reliance shareholders. Unlike the family settlement, in which businesses were divided between the brothers, Jio’s outside investors meant its value would remain within a layered corporate structure. Reliance shareholders would own Jio Platforms indirectly through the parent rather than receive shares in the telecom venture directly.

The people behind Jio

At the listing ceremony, Modi was not centre stage, but his presence was unmistakable in the speeches of the next generation. Akash thanked “Manoj Uncle”, describing him as a mentor and a safety net; Isha also acknowledged his guidance. Mukesh did not mention him in his own address.

The contrast was striking given the earlier dispute over Modi’s stock options, which had helped precipitate the loss of Reliance’s original telecom business. Jio’s story is not just about spectrum, capital and technology. It is also about the people who helped build it, the relationships that survived the family split and the willingness to start again after losing a business central to Reliance’s future.

The listing gives Akash the public stage to lead Jio into its next phase. For Mukesh, a business conceived in the shadow of Airtel’s early success has now overtaken Airtel in market value.

Jio Platforms is worth less than Reliance Industries, but that is no small achievement. It is a second giant built within the same empire—and evidence that Mukesh’s ambition was never simply to catch up with competitors. It was to create a business capable of standing alongside the company his father left him.