The next global tech giant may come from India
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It occurred to me slowly, then all at once during the aughts, that I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to Alibaba and Tencent. I had a good excuse: the twin giants of the Chinese Internet had no impact on my life, business or personal. I couldn’t use their products, and they made little or no effort in the U.S. market.
Over time, I came to understand why it was so important to be mindful of the duo anyway. Alibaba and Tencent (and Alibaba’s affiliate Ant Group and Tencent’s WeChat service) are innovators and mega-cap powerhouses in the world’s second largest economy. That they’ve built their businesses with discriminatory protection from the Chinese government is a fact that doesn’t minimize their importance.
I raise this now because there’s a similar Internet goliath that has suddenly sprung up in India that absolutely bears watching. It’s called Jio Platforms, and it is the subject of a revelatory feature by Vivienne Walt in the current issue of Fortune.
Jio is the brainchild of Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man and head of a petrochemical-focused empire, Reliance Industries. The story of how Ambani built a modern cell-phone network from scratch, attracted hundreds of millions of subscribers (many of whom had never had a cell phone before), and then raised billions from a who’s who of global strategic and financial investors is epic. As Egon Durban, co-CEO of Jio investor Silver Lake puts it, Jio is “the world’s greatest private tech company hidden in plain sight.”
And yes, there’s a political component to the Jio story. India, like China, has a record of favoring homegrown talent and frustrating outsiders. And Jio, like Alibaba and Tencent, is highly attuned to the vagaries of its own government.
Jio is a just-in-India phenomenon for now. You’ve got plenty of time to catch up with its importance.
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A couple comments on recent news:
1. Maybe I didn’t pay close enough attention, but could someone please explain why there’s any reason Oracle, an enterprise software company that wouldn’t know a consumer interaction, let alone a teenage user, if it saw one would buy Tik Tok? Was this just a run-of-the-mill Trumpian stable genius comment?
2. It’s certainly arguable that California’s law requiring Uber and Lyft drivers be classified as employees is a bad law with unintended consequences. What’s inarguable is that it has been the law of the state since Jan. 1, 2020, and the ride-hailing and contractor delivery companies chose not to abide by it—while also paying for a ballot initiative to overturn it. (Engadget’s Nicole Lee makes this point and has a good summary of the issue here.) Their contention that they didn’t have time to prepare for a more recent court order (since stayed) and therefore needed to shut down temporarily in the state is laughable on the face of it.
Adam Lashinsky
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.