Zuckerberg Praises Reliance’s Ambani For Transforming India’s Telecom Field

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is talking up the ability of Reliance Industries and the Ambani family to transform India’s digital payments landscape just as they did in the telecom business.

Facebook hosted the widely reported Facebook Fuel for India 2020 event in India on Tuesday (Dec. 15). At the live event, Zuckerberg spoke with billionaire Mukesh Ambani, the Reliance Industries chairman. They touched on a range of topics, from WhatsApp Pay to Facebook’s big investment in Reliance’s Jio Platforms.

This summer, Indian regulators approved the acquisition of a roughly 9.99 percent share of Jio by a newly formed subsidiary of Facebook called Jaadhu Holdings. The Competition Commission of India said Jaadhu is a wholly owned Facebook subsidiary that was started in March of this year under Delaware state laws, according to a press release.

In the online event, Zuckerberg talked about Dhirubhai Ambani, saying that Reliance’s late founder had envisioned phone calls in India as cheap as postcards, priced at less than a cent at the time. His son Mukesh Ambani’s ability to make that wish come true has inspired him, Zuckerberg said, as reported by Bloomberg.

Zuckerberg told Ambani that Facebook has tried to do something similar with messaging. “Hopefully we can do that together with payments,” he said.

The telecom unit helmed by Ambani disrupted the sector in 2016 when it entered with free calls and dirt-cheap data tariffs. Bloomberg reported that Reliance’s moves led to rivals bowing out of the market or even going bankrupt. Now, Reliance is the country’s top wireless carrier.

Ambani and Zuckerberg are now looking to India’s billion-plus consumers, hoping they get hooked on their smartphones and start to use them for a wide range of things, from making online money transfers to buying groceries.

“I firmly believe that in the next two decades, India will grow to be among the top three economies in the world,” Ambani said at the event. “But more importantly, it will become a premier digital society.”

“A big part of why I was excited to partner with you is [that] there are not many people around the world who’ve just gone industry after industry and revolutionized them and improved them, and continue to do it,” Zuckerberg told Ambani.