Mumbai: Towards the end of Reliance Industries<\/a>’ FY19-20 earnings presentation last week, an interesting information nugget popped up. In the last 10 years, three global technology giants – Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have each notched up trillion dollar market caps while all S&P energy companies put together are not worth more than $582 billion. These asset light technology companies have created more value than legacy
businesses and investors have lapped them up.
There is a reason why this data<\/a> point finds a place in the presentation of a predominantly energy and petrochem company. There was a time when RIL<\/a> and its founder Dhirubhai Ambani wanted to emulate the exploits of global energy super giants like Exxon and Royal Dutch\/Shell and RIL’s own journey from a small textile firm to a global energy and petchem major is testimony to that.
But today, as tastes, preferences and habits change, data<\/a> is the new oil, and digital technology the new superhighway to trillion-dollar success. Mukesh Ambani, Dhirubhai’s eldest son, clearly wants the same story to play out in his business empire.
Facebook<\/a>’s $5.7 bln investment two weeks back and Silver Lake Partners<\/a>’ 1.15% stake buy for Rs 5655.7 crore on Monday have created third party valuation benchmarking ahead of the proposed $100 billion mega listing of Reliance Jio a few years down the line. More importantly, it underpins the pivot away from hydrocarbons and energy towards new economy.
As the world battles a pandemic, oil demand will remain lukewarm for months and a sector that is already battling refining overcapacity will see muted recovery at best. This will result in RIL’s non-oil income going up and the shift towards technology getting more pronounced.
A few months back, Bernstein Research described RIL as India’s answer to Exxon, AT&T and Amazon all rolled into one. Its clearly becoming the other way round.
OILING THE NEW DATA
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Based on Monday’s announcement, Silver Lake has valued Jio at $65 billion excluding $3.3 billion of debt. That
is at a 12.5% premium to the value implied by the Facebook<\/a> investment, signed just two weeks back. So on the back of this benchmarking, Jio is single handedly contributing 53% of RIL’s total market capitalisation of $121 billion. Reliance will own 90% of the business once both these deals get consummated.
In retail, no external investor has logged in yet, even though speculation of dialogues with Amazon and Google<\/a> keeps surfacing time and again. RIL owns 94.4% of the business. Last December’s share swap scheme for the unlisted Reliance Retail<\/a>’s shareholders did offer a sneak peek at the valuations, which came to about ₹2.5 lakh crore ($35 billion taking rupee at₹70 levels to the dollar). At current levels, it would come to $33 billion.
Most foreign and domestic brokerages attribute the $30-40 billion to the retail business while calculating the sum of the parts valuation. This includes debt and is based on the average multiple of the listed universe of home grown retail companies like Trent, Avenue Supermarts (D-Mart), Future Retail among others.
The consumer pieces, therefore, cumulatively are contributing at least $90-95 billion or around 78% of the market capitalisation, if not more.
The consumer pieces therefore cumulatively is contributing at least $95 billion or 78% of the market capitalisation, if not more.
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