Reliance Retail arm receives ₹3,675 crore from General Atlantic for 0.84% stake sale

Reliance Industries Limited (Reliance Industries) and Reliance Retail Ventures Limited (RRVL) on Wednesday announced General Atlantic will invest ₹3,675 crore into RRVL. The investment values Reliance Retail at a pre-value equity value of ₹4.285 lakh crore. General Atlantic will acquire 0.84% equity stake in RRVL on a fully diluted basis.

Morgan Stanley acted as financial advisor to Reliance Retail and Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas and Davis Polk & Wardwell acted as legal counsels. Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP acted as legal counsel to General Atlantic.

This is also General Atlantic’s second investment in Reliance. The equity firm had invested ₹6,598.38 crore in Jio Platforms earlier this year.

Reliance Retail recently raised ₹7,500 crore investment from Silver Lake for 1.75% stake sale. KKR has also invested ₹5,550 crore in RRVL and acquired 1.28% stake.

“I am pleased to extend our relationship with General Atlantic as we work towards empowering both merchants and consumers alike, and ultimately transforming Indian Retail. Like Reliance Retail, General Atlantic believes in the fundamental ability of digital enablement to drive progress, growth, and inclusion across India and the world. We look forward to leveraging General Atlantic’s extensive expertise at the intersection of technology and consumer businesses, and two decades of experience investing in India, as we create a disruptive New Commerce platform to redefine retail in the country,” said Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries in a release.

The investment will add fire to Ambani's battle for dominance in the retail market that is also being eyed by Jeff Bezos' Amazon.com and Walmart Inc's Flipkart.

General Atlantic has a longstanding tradition of backing disruptive entrepreneurs and companies around the world, including Airbnb, Alibaba, Ant Financial, Box, ByteDance, Facebook, Slack, Snapchat, Uber and other global technology leaders.

Following the sell-down in its digital unit Jio Platforms, Reliance's focus has shifted to retail with the acquisition of retail & wholesale biz of Future Group and investment by global private equity firms/strategic investors.

All the 13 investors, who had poured in a combined ₹1.52 lakh crore in Jio Platforms, have been offered a chance to explore investing in the retail unit.

Besides Silver Lake, KKR and General Atlantic, the other investors in Jio Platforms - which houses India's youngest but largest telecom operator Jio - include Facebook, Google and Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund Mubadala.

Reliance Retail has consolidated its dominant market positioning in offline retail through its recent acquisition of retail, wholesale, logistics and warehouse business of Future Group for an enterprise value of ₹24,173 crore.

The firm in May this year launched JioMart, the e-commerce platform. Reliance aims to digitize Kirana stores through its new commerce business. In July, JioMart was serving 4,00,000 orders a day and is currently operational in 200 cities.

With this, Jio Platforms and Reliance Retail account for over ₹9 lakh crore of RIL's valuation.

Monetisation of retail, complemented by the capitalization of Jio's tech assets, is expected to enable Reliance to take on Amazon and Walmart in India's online retail space.

The evolution of the organized retail industry in India has lagged infrastructure growth and improvement in demographics. Despite the large size of the consumption basket at USD 0.8-1.0 trillion, the share of organized retail is only 8 per cent of the total market, which offers a long growth runway.

Food and grocery (F&G) forms about 60 per cent of the overall consumption basket - a USD 600 billion market - but only 4-5 per cent is organised.

Analysts expect a break-up of the company in the next 3-4 years through the IPO of Jio and retail business segments which should unlock additional shareholder value.

At the Reliance Industries' recent annual general meeting, Ambani had stated that it had been approached by strategic/financial investors for a stake in Reliance Retail.

(With inputs from PTI)