Reliance Retail

Beyond telecom, Ambani steered Reliance into retail (Reliance Retail, India's largest chain), media through Network18, and sports ownership of Mumbai Indians plus founding the Indian Super League football competition. He also joined Bank of America's board as its first non-American director and was elected a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2016 for his work on refineries and petrochemicals.

The Amazon-Reliance dispute was a high-stakes legal battle over control of Future Retail Ltd, one of India's largest retail chains. The conflict erupted after Amazon's 2019 stake in Future Coupons gave it indirect control over Future Retail and contractual first-refusal rights — rights Amazon claimed were breached when Future agreed to sell itself to Reliance in 2020.

In August 2020 Future announced a Rs 24,713 crore (about $3.3 billion) deal to sell its retail, wholesale and logistics businesses to Reliance Retail Ventures, a Reliance Industries subsidiary. Amazon alleged this breached the Future Coupons agreement, which restricted Future Retail's sale to a list of named competitors including Reliance.

Amazon initiated emergency arbitration at the Singapore International Arbitration Centre, and on 25 October 2020 the emergency arbitrator issued an interim order restraining Future Retail from proceeding with the transaction. In August 2021 India's Supreme Court ruled that emergency arbitration awards are enforceable under Indian arbitration law —.

In August 2020 Future Group signed a roughly $3.4 billion agreement to sell its retail, wholesale and logistics businesses to Reliance Retail Ventures, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries. With Biyani under severe debt pressure after the pandemic hit mall footfalls, the deal looked like the only viable exit — but Amazon immediately alleged the transaction breached its contractual rights under the 2019 Future Coupons investment.

In early 2022 Reliance began physically taking control of more than 200 Future Retail stores, citing unpaid rents and lease breaches and quietly rebranding them under the Reliance banner. Amazon called the move a 'fraudulent and coercive takeover' that violated the SIAC interim order. The episode made plain that courtroom losses did not necessarily translate into ground-level control of retail assets once leases and landlords were in play.

Having broken the ARPU model, Ambani pivoted Jio toward a web-scale stack: JioTV, JioCinema, JioSaavn for music, JioMart e-commerce with sister company Reliance Retail, and quiet SaaS acquisitions. The portfolio — connectivity, content and commerce in one corporate parent — was, in IDC analyst Ravi Sharma's framing, unique among global telcos and pointed toward Jio becoming a consumer-tech company rather than a carrier.