[RahulNagaraj]

Reliance Industries (RIL) on Friday announced that its retail arm Reliance Retail Ventures Limited (RRVL) will acquire a controlling stake (66.95%) in India's leading local search engine platform Just Dial for Rs 3,497 crore.

Reliance Retail will hold 40.95 per cent and would make an open offer to acquire up to 26 per cent in accordance with takeover regulations.

VSS Mani will continue as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer to lead Just Dial through the next phase of growth, Reliance said in a stock exchange filing.

“Reliance is excited to partner with Justdial and VSS Mani, a first-generation entrepreneur, who has created a strong business through his business acumen and perseverance, Isha Ambani, Director of RRVL, said.

"The investment in Just Dial underlines our commitment to new commerce by further boosting the digital ecosystem for millions of our partner merchants, micro, small and medium enterprises. We look forward to working with the highly experienced management team of Just Dial as we further expand the business going forward." she said.

The capital infused by Reliance Retail will help drive the growth and expansion of Just Dial into a comprehensive local listing and commerce platform. Just Dial would expand discovery on its platform and enhance transactions for millions of products and services, Reliance said.

"These investments will leverage Just Dial’s existing database of 30.4 million listings and its existing consumer traffic of 129.1 million quarterly unique users," it said.

VSS Mani, Founder and CEO at Justdial, said “Nearly 25 years ago, we had a vision to build a connected single platform dedicated to providing fast, free, reliable and comprehensive information to our users and connect buyers to sellers. Our vision has evolved to not only provide search and discovery but drive commerce across merchants through our B2B platform and enable further consumer to merchant commerce given our platform engagement. Our strategic partnership with Reliance enables us to realise this vision and transform the business going forward.

Source: Business-Standard

[condor]

Data is the New Oil. A statement that Ambani picked up and echoed. Just Dial has a lot of business related data - suppliers etc. Their other recent socialmedia related tie-ups and this all point towards harnessing the above statement.

Hopefully, they will stream-line and clean-up the information. And we are possibly looking at Google-styled ads for stuff in the location we are in. For the customer/end-user, the information may get better, and not the dump that Just Dial gives when we do a query for some business or supplier.

[SmartCat]

I thought JustDial would come under Jio Platforms - since they already own a number of internet related apps, websites and services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jio_Platforms

I'm not able to figure out how JustDial will help Reliance Retail (or vice versa).

[kraken]

I think Reliance retail is gearing up for some kind of UPI/QR based payments system aimed at merchants for accepting payments. With Justdial's enormous database of businesses across every segment imaginable, rollout would be a piece of cake.

Or as condor said, Data is the new oil. Imagine the kind of information Justdial holds. They are very active even in tier 3 cities, across every kind of business.

[JoshMachine]

Maybe Reliance Retail/Platforms/Industries wants to tap into the huge database & readymade business ecosystem of the small/medium/large set of players that exists on the Just Dial platform.
Just Dial has been one of the pioneers in this 'corporate yellow pages' equivalent, and anybody who gets to mine this information should benefit from it immensely.

[anjan_c2007]

I read a joke on Whats App this morning, which said that Ms Nita was asking for some numbers from her husband Mr Mukesh for plumbing jobs for their Antilia building.

The latter pleaded ignorance and for forgiveness. Very soon he soon took the decision to Justbuy Justdial.

[IamNikhil]

Data is the new gold! Reliance will acquire tons of data and listings with this acquisition f Just Dial.

[Arun_S]

Originally Posted by SmartCat

I thought JustDial would come under Jio Platforms - since they already own a number of internet related apps, websites and services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jio_Platforms

I'm not able to figure out how JustDial will help Reliance Retail (or vice versa).

Just a thought, as Jio Platforms has lot of external investment from Tech Companies they would have needed to share the data to them as well. Reliance would have wanted to keep it within them.

[HP-BHP]

JustDial was founded way back in 1996 (that's 25 years ago) when internet penetration was at the minuscule level in India (and across the world). Over the period of 25 years, they have assimilated a huge amount of B2B & B2C data across the country. They have millions of mini-websites/webpages for small to medium scale vendors across various product and services categories in their kitty.

The question is what will Jio do with this data? Does it align with the Reliance retail or Jio vision? On the surface, it looks like that there is no synergy in this deal for Reliance / Jio but if you scratch the surface a bit you will see that there are tons of opportunities opening up for Reliance / Jio.

Right now these B2B / B2C vendors are showcasing their product and services over JustDial but all the transactions (financial as well as operational) happen separately / through other mediums. Reliance / Jio can fill this gap of financial transactions with JioPay and connect the vendors with the prospective client on an eCommerce platform. Similarly, operational aspects can be taken care of by other arms of Reliance. We are talking about extreme local players who now have the option to supply goods and services across India and the world.

While the model looks very indigenous for a country like India but it is basically the same model which Jack Ma adopted with Alibaba (including Alipay, Aliexpress etc.)

[kkunal.shah]

Reliance Retail also has AJIO which has B2C as well as B2B business, thus there is a possibility of using these platforms. Apart from this Reliance Retail also is planning a massive drive of becoming master distributors for all FMCG companies & being a single supplier to kirana/general stores.

[PrasunBannerjee]

Originally Posted by SmartCat

I'm not able to figure out how JustDial will help Reliance Retail (or vice versa).

Originally Posted by kraken

I think Reliance retail is gearing up for some kind of UPI/QR based payments system aimed at merchants for accepting payments. With Justdial's enormous database of businesses across every segment imaginable, rollout would be a piece of cake.

Its a race for 'SUPER APP'. In my eyes, two closes contenders have been Just Dial and PayTM. Couple of other Asian countries already have them. One app doing everything. Its a head-on fight between Tata and Reliance if we look at their acquisition spree. Tata has been working in this direction from quite sometime already. PayTM is already on its way. Reliance acquiring Justdial is a big milestone in this direction.

More bites on the subject:
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/04/1...spac-deal.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLANTiDd8Ok

[SmartCat]

Originally Posted by PrasunBannerjee

Its a race for 'SUPER APP'.

I don't think super app is a great concept. It is unlikely that one company will be "best" at everything (payments, hailing cabs, ordering food, hotel booking, investment etc). Super App maker will end up being jack of all trades and master of none. It ends up cluttering the app, affecting its usability. Clean UI is very important for any app to succeed.

[prajwalmr62]

Originally Posted by SmartCat

I don't think super app is a great concept.

Actually, now we know it doesn't work. I would guess Jio is trying to create it's own ecosystem, something like Google (not a search engine), but very India-specific. Instead of one app, you have multiple apps which can be interlinked, and user hop-on to different apps based on their needs, but within your company apps.

[ashokrajagopal]

Originally Posted by PrasunBannerjee

Its a race for 'SUPER APP'.

Originally Posted by SmartCat

I don't think super app is a great concept.
..
Clean UI is very important for any app to succeed.

I don't think the Super App game is about the App.

Everybody is trying to emulate Alibaba group to create a giant monopoly in all kinds of sundry stuff from delivery to cabs.
GoJek and Tokopedia merged last month to become GoTo specifically for this kind of monopoly.

There was a time "national champion" companies where actual producers of things to compete internationally.
Now, everybody want to be a national monopolist sucking up all the local business.

[allinbalance]

Originally Posted by SmartCat

I thought JustDial would come under Jio Platforms - since they already own a number of internet related apps, websites and services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jio_Platforms

I'm not able to figure out how JustDial will help Reliance Retail (or vice versa).

I think the key is JioMart. My assessment is that JustDial's huge database of small / medium businesses is where JioMart will amplify their online-to-offline horizontal integration of traffic, transaction, billing; backed by hyperlocal delivery from the business to the local customer. Its basically a booster shot to scale.

This approach gives two competitive advantages - a) reduces the need for large and expensive fulfilment centers; b) reduces local haul transportation costs - thus providing an edge over entrenched competition like Amazon and Flipkart.

Don't forget - whatever RIL touches, if it does not have huge scale - it does not interest them. JD will give them a scale boost.

I also think that that, JustDial has real value is in driving potential porting subscribers for Jio mobile - any non-Jio number linked search into JioMart is a subscription and cross-selling opportunity.