With a 5.7 billion euro investment, Facebook became the largest minority shareholder (9.99%) of Jio Platforms, a telecommunications company of the Reliance Industries group, owned by Mukesh Ambani and India's largest private company.

The corporation led by Mark Zuckerberg will now have the chance to take on an important role in Indian e-commerce, directly challenging FlipKart, the main player on that market, and the more well-known Amazon. 

Jio Platforms is one of India's main telecom operators, boasting around 380 million users. But this figure is not what attracted Zuckerberg's attention. What led him to make Facebook’s second most expensive acquisition ever after WhatsApp (it cost 22 billion dollars in 2014) is JioMart, the e-commerce platform owned by Jio.

In a note, Facebook explains that one of the planned steps for the near future is to create a partnership between JioMart and WhatsApp, to allow people to connect with companies and, eventually, to buy their products: a non-stop mobile experience.

Thanks to this agreement, Indian users will be able to buy products directly on WhatsApp, an app that has already 400 million users in the country.  

“A marriage between the JioMart and WhatsApp services will help reach India-based users who purchase from small stores”, said to Reuters Tarun Pathak, associate director at Counterpoint Research in Hong Kong.

“In the near future JioMark and WhatsApp will enable almost 30 million small Indian stores to carry out digital transactions with every customer in their neighbourhood”, commented Mukesh Ambani, CEO of Reliance.

Will this be the future of e-commerce throughout the world? 

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