Mukesh Ambani to telcos: You cannot break the law beyond few weeks

Days after acknowledging at Reliance Industries' annual general meeting that Jio's customers had "suffered over five crore call failures to other networks because of insufficient interconnect capacity" in one week alone, RIL chairman Mukesh Ambani told TOI that he expected the problem to be solved in a few weeks. "In the long run, you cannot take violation of legal licence obligations lightly," he said.

In This Pic : Reliance Jio, Mukesh Ambani

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"It's like saying that because you are a dominant person, you violate traffic lights. You can be let off once or twice, maybe...Our view is that interconnect is an issue of a few weeks. You cannot break the law beyond that. It is there in the licence that you are supposed to provide inter connect, irrespective of traffic," Ambani said in the course of an almost two-hour long interview.

In This Pic : Reliance Jio, Mukesh Ambani

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He described Jio as the "world's largest startup" before adding wryly that no startup has ever "invested Rs 1.5 lakh crore without seeing one dollar of revenue".

In This Pic : Reliance Jio, Mukesh Ambani

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Asked how soon he expected Jio to start making profits, Ambani replied, "We are not looking for a killer return...But we believe it will give us adequate and robust returns... So, we are looking at a high teens return on our capital and that's pretty good at this size."

In This Pic : Reliance Jio, Mukesh Ambani

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Has RIL stock's performance in recent times been a matter of concern to him, we asked. "There are a handful of companies in the world which have delivered a compounded annual growth rate of 20% or more in shareholder returns. RIL has done it consistently for 39 years...We are currently at the end of the largest capital cycle in our history. In fact, the ongoing capital cycle is the first time we're having two major capex programs simultaneously (Jio as well as the refinery and petrochem). This is setting up the company for stronger returns in the next decade or two. The numbers will look much better as we enter our 40th year," he responded.

In This Pic : Reliance Jio, Mukesh Ambani

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