Reliance and Meta announced a partnership at Reliance Industries’ 45th annual general meeting, which will see JioMart offer grocery shopping to people on Whatsapp in India.

Whatsapp users in India can now browse and shop JioMart’s grocery catalogue in the app. They can also pay in the app via UPI.

Meta and Reliance struck a partnership in 2020 and have been working towards this collaboration for the past two years, with a pilot test being run with limited users.

“The Jiomart on Whatsapp experience further our commitment to enabling a simple and convenient way of online shopping to millions of India,” said Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries.

With over 420 million people using Jio’s telecom service and significantly more using Whatsapp as their go-to instant chat service, the companies are looking to provide Indian consumers with an easy alternative to grocery delivery services like Big Basket, Zomato’s Blinkit or Swiggy’s Instamart — all of which require the use of another app.

“Excited to launch our partnership with Jiomart in India. This is our first-ever end-to-end shopping experience on Whatsapp — people can now buy groceries from Jiomart right in a chat. Business messaging is an area with real momentum, and chat-based experiences like this will be the go-to way people and businesses communicate in the years to come,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO, Meta.

Jio’s 5G plans afoot

At the 45th AGM, the company announced that Jio will be spending $25 billion to bring 5G to consumers. Jio’s 5G service will start deploying in October 2022 — probably in metro cities — and a pan-India rollout is expected by the end of 2023.

Jio announced its collaboration with Google in June 2021 to bring accessible 5G service to India, alongwith an affordable 5G smartphone.

During the event, the company announced their partnerships with Microsoft, Intel, Ericsson, Nokia and Qualcomm too, which will also help them with 5G deployment and associated services.

In the News: Lockbit suffers DDoS attack; hits back with triple-extortion tactic