Reliance Industries gets ₹7,500 crore from Silver Lake for 1.75% stake in retail

RRVL has received “the subscription amount of ₹7,500 crore from SLP Rainbow Holdings Pte Ltd (Silver Lake)”, the company said in a regulatory filing on Saturday. Following the allotment of equity stake, “SLP Rainbow Holdings holds 1.75% of the fully diluted equity share capital” of RRVL, it said. This investment had valued RRVL at a pre-money equity value of ₹4.21 lakh crore.

This marks the second investment by Silver Lake in a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, following a ₹10,202.55 crore investment in Jio Platforms announced earlier this year. It was the first US private equity firm to invest in Jio Platforms after tech giant Facebook took a 9.99% stake in the company for ₹43,573.62 crore. Silver Lake bought 2.08% in Jio in two tranches.

Spread across the country, Reliance Retail operates India’s largest, fastest growing and most profitable retail business serving close to 640 million footfalls. “Reliance Retail, through its new commerce strategy, has started a transformational digitalisation of small and unorganised merchants and is committed to expanding the network to over 20 million of these merchants, helping them benefit from the use of technology tools and efficient supply chain infrastructure to deliver a superior value proposition to their own customers,” the company said in a statement.

Silver Lake is a global technology investment firm, with more than $60 billion in combined assets under management and committed capital and a focus on the world’s great tech and tech-enabled opportunities. Its other investments have included Airbnb, Alibaba, Alphabet’s Verily and Waymo units, Dell Technologies, Twitter and numerous other global technology leaders.

Commenting on the transaction with Silver Lake, billionaire Mukesh Amabni earlier said, “I am delighted to extend our relationship with Silver Lake to our transformational efforts of building an inclusive partnership with millions of small merchants while providing value to Indian consumers across the country in the Indian retail sector.”

“We believe technology will be key to bringing the much-needed transformation in this sector so that various constituents of the retail ecosystem can collaborate to build inclusive growth platforms. Silver Lake will be an invaluable partner in implementing our vision for Indian Retail,” Amabni added.

Last month, Reliance acquired the retail and logistics businesses of Future Group for ₹24,713 crore to boost its retail vertical. Earlier this week, Reliance Industries raised ₹5,550 crore by selling a 1.28% stake in its retail business to US private equity (PE) firm KKR and Co.