20
A SPECIAL INDUSTRY TRIBUTE TO
RELIANCE RETAIL
ON ITS 20TH ANNIVERSARY
This independently produced commemorative publication celebrates 20 years of Reliance Retail by providing an impartial and objective overview of its achievements, current operations and future plans, as it continues to cement its position at the forefront of India’s retail sector in the coming years.
01
In the early 2000s, Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, a prominent force in the country’s textiles, petrochemicals and telecoms sectors, decided to diversify into the retail market, beginning with groceries. Since then, the company it created, Reliance Retail, has become a leader in multiple retail streams, as India’s dominant retailer.
Company Evolution
Company Evolution
Reliance Retail launched in 2006 with its Reliance Fresh store in Hyderabad, established by parent company Reliance Industries.
Soon afterwards, the company established its consumer electronics chain Reliance Digital in 2007, followed by Reliance Trends for fashion and lifestyle in 2008.
In 2017, Reliance Retail launched a multi-channel e-commerce platform for Reliance Trends, while earning more than US$5 billion in annual revenue.
Company Evolution
In 2019, the company acquired British toy retailer Hamleys, then launched multi-category online shopping platform JioMart in 2020 and entered the pharmaceuticals market in 2021.
Reliance Retail now has more than 45 subsidiaries and more than 19,000 stores in over 7000 cities: the largest store network in India.
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The story of Reliance Retail’s growth has been one of consistent achievement, resulting in multiple awards for the quality of its service and products, the speed of its expansion, its attractiveness as a workplace and the popularity of its many brands, covering groceries, fashion, household goods and electronics.
Awards and Recognition
Awards and Recognition
Reliance Retail won the Annapoorna Food Retailer of the Year Award 2019 from the Retailers Association of India.
The company headed the list of the 50 fastest growing global retailers in Deloitte’s Global Powers of Retailing Report for 2020, and has continued to rank highly in subsequent years.
In 2023, Reliance Retail won Retail Company of the Year in the ET Retail Awards, while Reliance Jewels won Brand of the Decade at the BARC Asia Awards.
Awards and Recognition
The company is certified as a Great Place to Work, and featured in the top ten list of India’s Best Workplaces in Retail in 2023 and 2024.
In 2023, Reliance Digital was named India’s Most Admired Retailer of the Year for consumer durables and information technology at MAPIC India, the country’s premier retail annual event.
03
Customers are at the heart of everything that Reliance Retail does, and of its corporate culture. The company strives to improve customer experience, provide outstanding service, deliver high-quality goods at a competitive price and offer an attractive shopping environment. It also has a strong commitment to nurturing the talents of its employees.
Corporate Culture
Growth and Expansion
Reliance Retail bases its corporate culture around three concepts: Service, Solution and Consumer Experience.
The company works with a huge network of merchants, manufacturers, vendors, small store owners and global companies, promoting inclusive growth.
It offers customers excellent choice, value, quality and an attractive shopping experience across its many stores.
Growth and Expansion
Reliance Retail is committed to creating ‘one of the world’s most people-friendly, performance-driven, and process-efficient learning organisations’, and to foster a ‘respectful and delightful work environment’ for employees.
Through association with Indian sports and movie stars, Reliance Retail has boosted its media profile across the country, gaining a competitive advantage.
04
Reliance Retail has earned an international reputation as one of the world’s most dynamic retailers. In recent years it has acquired the iconic London-based toy store Hamleys and formed partnerships with numerous global fashion and retail brands. Its subsidiary Reliance Brands Limited has become the partner of choice for luxury brands from around the world.
International Presence
Growth and Expansion
Reliance Retail is among the fastest-growing international retailers and the only Indian retailer in the Global Top 100, recently ranking at number 53.
Reliance Brands Limited, a company subsidiary, is India’s largest retailer of luxury goods, partnering with 85 prestigious global brands including Armani, Balenciaga, Burberry, Versace and Tiffany & Co.
Reliance Retail’s 2019 acquisition of UK toy retailer Hamleys, with its flagship store on London’s Regent Street, was the company’s first international acquisition.
Growth and Expansion
In 2022, Reliance Retail signed a franchise agreement with Pret A Manger to establish up to 100 coffee and sandwich shops in India over the following five years.
In 2023, the company signed a deal with fashion retailer Superdry, in which Reliance acquired its intellectual property assets for India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
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One of Reliance Retail’s key achievements is nurturing and growing a large number of consumer retail brands, each with its own personality and reputation, and targeted at a specific consumer demographic. Marketing campaigns, leveraging a mix of traditional and digital strategies, ensure that its brands are familiar to Indian consumers.
Brand Portfolio
Brand Portfolio
In grocery, Reliance Retail has Fresh Signature, Smart Bazaar, Smart Point, Freshpik, Shree Kannan Departmental, 7-Eleven and Jayasurya stores.
In consumer goods, the company owns beverage independence brands including Campa, Raskik and Sosyo, plus Enzo, Glimmer, Puric, Get Real and Dozo for home and personal care products.
Reliance Digital and Jio stores offer consumer electronics, home appliances, computing and mobility products, gadgets and accessories.
Brand Portfolio
Its fashion and lifestyle outlets include India’s largest fashion retail chain Trends, with an array of own brands. Other notable brands are Yousta, Azorte and Reliance Jewels.
Reliance Retail operates the Netmeds digital channel and chain of pharmacies, providing medicines, beauty essentials and wellness products.
In 2022, the company launched Independence, an indigenous made-for-India consumer packaged goods brand focused on categories including staples, processed foods and other daily essentials.
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Phenomenal growth in recent years means that Reliance Retail is now by far India’s largest retailer, with almost 19,000 stores in more than 7000 towns and cities, providing grocery, fashion, home and personal care, and electronic goods. This geographic coverage is unprecedented and has given consumers much increased choice and quality.
Store Network
Store Network
As of June 2024, Reliance Retail operated more than 19,000 stores with 77.4 million square feet of retail space.
Reliance Smart stores offer fresh produce, bakery, dairy, home and personal care products, clothing and general merchandise, and are often colocated with Reliance Trends and Digital stores.
Reliance has more than 5000 fashion stores in India and more than 8000 consumer electronics stores. In both areas, it is the country’s largest retailer.
Store Network
Reliance Digital stores offer more than 200 national and international brands across a product portfolio including audio and video, digital cameras, computers, laptops, tablets, mobile phones and household white goods.
Through Jio Stores, the company offers Reliance Digital’s range of consumer electronics and technology products in more remote areas of India, expanding access to these goods throughout the country.
Reliance Retail has over 304 million registered customers across all its formats, and in 2024 it achieved footfall of more than 1.06 billion in its stores.
07
From the mid-2010s onwards, Reliance Retail invested heavily in its online presence, developing a suite of digital platforms to give consumers even greater choice and convenience. The company now offers hyperlocal delivery services and a range of payment options, while its fashion and lifestyle websites are extremely popular.
Digital Platforms
Digital Platforms
The company’s digital channels include AJIO, with fashion and lifestyle brands, along with JioMart, selling goods from across the Reliance Retail network.
To give customers greater options and convenience, JioMart offers payment by debit card, credit card, internet banking, loyalty points and e-wallets.
New commerce and digital business contributed 18 per cent of Reliance Retail’s revenue in financial year 2024.
Digital Platforms
In August 2022, Reliance Retail formed a partnership with Meta to offer JioMart transactions over WhatsApp. Orders placed via this platform increased nine-fold by the end of that year.
In 2023, the company launched Tira, an omni-channel platform for beauty products, offering a curated selection of Indian and global brands.
In 2024, JioMart piloted a one-hour delivery service in selected areas of Mumbai via a ‘hyperlocal delivery’ option on its app.
08
With thousands of suppliers, including businesses of all sizes, both from India and worldwide, Reliance Retail has one of the world’s most sophisticated and extensive supply chain networks. Its fashion operation delivers products from raw materials through to finished products.
Sourcing and Supply Chain
Sourcing and Supply Chain
Reliance Retail’s sourcing ecosystem includes local producers, small and medium-sized businesses, regional, national and global brands across its product categories.
The company’s ‘fibre to wardrobe’ model delivers the latest and most up-to-date fashions from around the world to Indian customers in the most cost-efficient way.
In consumer electronics, the company leverages its relationships with global brands, original equipment manufacturers, chip makers and contract manufacturers to deliver the widest range of products at the most competitive prices.
Sourcing and Supply Chain
Reliance Retail operates a warehouse network to facilitate its pan-Indian supply chain.
The company has integrated India’s small neighbourhood stores into its supply chain as delivery centres for its JioMart online shopping platform, and encourages them to sell on the platform.
09
As Reliance Retail has grown, the company has developed an increasingly broad expertise in product design and development, spanning fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), fashion and consumer electronics. To further strengthen its in-house capabilities, it has formed partnerships with some of the world’s leading brands and collaborated with noted designers to deliver high-quality results.
Product Design and Development
Product Design and Development
Reliance Retail has nurtured a powerful in-house product design and development competence in food, FMCG, fashion, general merchandise and consumer electronics.
Across numerous sectors, the company has developed a highly successful portfolio of own brands, many of which have outperformed competing national brands in their respective categories.
Through Trends stores for men, women, juniors and Trends Footwear, Reliance Retail is India’s leading value fashion chain, with an extensive range of own-brand products.
Product Design and Development
The company announced plans in 2024 to expand its presence in the jewellery market, with curated design-led products and those tailored for specific occasions and regional tastes.
In September 2024, Reliance Retail formed a partnership with underwear and sportswear manufacturer Delta Galil, enabling it to tap into the Israeli company’s design and innovation expertise.
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Strategic Partnerships
From its inception, Reliance Retail’s operating model has been one of widespread partnerships, with suppliers, merchants, franchise holders and other retailers. In recent years, this model has extended to globally leading corporates and luxury brands, as well as home-grown companies, large and small, with expertise that can benefit its operations.
Strategic Partnerships
Reliance Retail operates a business model based upon thousands of relationships with merchants, helping them to modernise and prosper.
In 2022–2023, Reliance Retail passed the milestone of 4 million merchant partners, as its network grew across multiple geographies.
In 2024, Reliance Retail signed an exclusive country-wide partnership with British online fast-fashion retailer ASOS, which will introduce ASOS’s own-brand labels to Indian consumers via multiple retail formats.
Strategic Partnerships
Reliance Retail has agreed a major deal to relaunch Chinese fashion retailer Shein in India via its stores and online channels.
The company partnered with Indian credit card company SBI Card in 2023 to launch the Reliance SBI Card, offering a wide range of rewards and benefits for Reliance Retail customers.
In 2022, Reliance Retail acquired a 54 per cent stake in Indian robotics company Addverb, and is now utilising its technology to expand and optimise its business operations.
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Combining the best of traditional retailing with the convenience and technology of the digital age, Reliance Retail has earned a reputation as the most innovative of Indian retailers, able to attract tens of millions of customers, both offline and online, by offering new formats, new products and new shopping experiences.
Harnessing Innovation
Harnessing Innovation
Reliance Retail ‘remains steadfast to innovation across formats and products to improve customer experience and serve evolving consumer needs’, it states in its 2023–2024 annual report.
In 2024, Reliance Retail introduced the Swadesh store format, promoting traditional art forms and artisans in a new context, attracting high demand.
Harnessing Innovation
The JioMart online shopping platform leverages data analytics and artificial intelligence to personalise recommendations for customers, optimise inventory management and enable efficient logistics operations.
Reliance Retail is investing in state-of-the-art supply chain infrastructure across India to develop an automated warehousing and logistics system connecting all its major sourcing and consumption locations.
12
Reliance Retail bases its approach to corporate responsibility on a series of environmental, social and workplace commitments. These include a target of net-zero carbon by 2035 and initiatives promoting health, education, sport and community development, together with a dedication to the well-being of its thousands of employees and partners.
Corporate Responsibility
Corporate Responsibility
Reliance Retail offers a ‘nurturing, inclusive and high-growth work environment’ which enables its employees to deliver the best results to customers and communities.
Through its corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme, the company aims to improve the lives of Indian citizens through initiatives in health, education, sports for development and rural transformation.
The company is mandated to spend a minimum of 2 per cent of its average net profits for the previous three years on CSR programmes and activities.
Corporate Responsibility
In 2023–2024, it directed around 41 per cent of its CSR investments into education and skills development, and 33 per cent to healthcare initiatives.
In 2020, company chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani announced plans to make Reliance Industries net-zero carbon by 2035.
13
From its earliest beginnings, Reliance Retail has enjoyed consistent growth. Yet once it embarked on a journey to diversify into digital distribution channels, the company grew at an exceptional rate, with hundreds of millions of new customers and transactions, reaching a valuation of around US$100 billion in 2023, with further extensive growth in prospect.
Maintaining Growth
Maintaining Growth
Reliance Retail leads the Indian market in grocery, electronics and fashion, outselling all competitors.
Since the 2015 launch of its 2.0 multi-channel initiatives, the company has grown extremely fast, now recording more than 1 billion transactions per year.
In its most recent annual report, Reliance Retail states that all its product categories witnessed growth in 2023–2024, from consumer electronics to grocery to apparel and footwear.
Maintaining Growth
Its customer base grew to over 300 million in 2023–2024, up by 22 per cent from the previous year, while transactions grew by 19 per cent to 1.23 billion.
In grocery, the company has grown 2.5 times faster than its competitors, thanks largely to its focus on smaller towns, where over two-thirds of its new stores have been established.
Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund invested US$1 billion in Reliance Retail in August 2023, saying that it supports ‘innovative companies with high growth potential’.