Reliance, Aramco and Jio

Why read this story?

Editor's note: I have been on Reliance Jio’s tail so to speak for a good few weeks now. If you are fresh into the subject, I’d recommend you read two of my earlier pieces, Reliance Jio and Facebook, and a note on the eventual Facebook-Jio investment. Both are subscriber-only stories. That said, a quick recap is in order. In the Facebook-Jio investment note following the transaction, I had said:  ...In fact, I could not help but notice that in the announcements both Ambani and Zuckerberg stayed far away from making any super app claims. Executives I spoke with said that Facebook isn’t likely to open the WhatsApp API to developers from Jio to build an app within an app. A. The company has never done this in the past. B. There is no reason to play around with the WhatsApp chat experience by introducing an e-commerce layer. JioMart is the key player here, with its own app ecosystem, and I see it more likely that a chat application will be built in it. Essentially replacing the call to the neighbourhood kirana with …