Jio was the biggest risk of my life, says Mukesh Ambani

Billionaire industrialist Mukesh Ambani described his 2016 return to the telecom industry with Reliance Jio as the “biggest risk” of his life, saying that even if analysts’ predictions of financial failure had come true, it would still have been worth it for the role it played in transforming India digitally.

In an interview with McKinsey & Co, the richest Asian said Reliance Industries was investing its own billions of dollars in rolling out



4G mobile networks — which some analysts thought might not work out financially as India was not ready for the most advanced digital technology.

“But I told my board, ‘In the worst case, we will not earn much return. That’s okay because it’s our own money. But then, as Reliance, this will be the best philanthropy that we will have ever done in India because we will have digitised India, and thereby completely transformed India’,” he said.