Reliance Retail details blueprint to double operating EBITDA in three-year plan

Reliance Industries’ retail arm announced on Friday a three-year roadmap aimed at doubling its operating EBITDA through a calculated mix of aggressive scaling and refined unit economics.

Announced alongside its latest quarterly financial results, the retail behemoth outlined a distinct two-phase strategic shift designed to systematically transform massive market scale into higher profitability and robust cash generation by fiscal year 2029.

The opening gambit of the strategy centres on fiscal year 2027, which the company is treating as a foundational period to scale online capabilities with operational discipline.


Key to this initial phase is the expansive push of JioMart alongside its wider omni-channel ecosystem.

To anchor this expansion, Reliance is focusing heavily on enhancing product availability, ensuring seamless store integration, and fulfilling delivery promises to secure high customer satisfaction.

The conglomerate is committing to "scale with discipline" by analysing micro-market contribution margins, keeping fulfillment costs in check, and rapidly expanding its network of dark stores to optimize local delivery speed.

Once this digital and operational groundwork is solidified, the strategy shifts toward value conversion during fiscal years 2028 and 2029.

During this secondary phase, Reliance Retail intends to extract maximum profitability from its massive footprint by driving up fulfillment node density—meaning more consumer orders packed into every route.

The business will lean into higher-margin avenues, actively expanding its portfolio of own brands and rolling out premium retail formats. By boosting customer repeat rates, expanding the average shopping basket size, and utilizing automated supply chains to lower the overall cost to serve, Reliance expects to see a compounding effect on its revenue and cash reserves.

Financially, the latter half of the three-year plan introduces highly sophisticated monetization levers and capital strictness.

The Isha Ambani-led company plans to maximize auxiliary revenue by optimizing its digital marketplace take-rates and tapping into supplier-funded media channels.

On the back-end, inventory management will undergo a strict tightening, pushing for quicker inventory turns and disciplined markdowns to prevent capital from getting locked up in aging stock.

Ultimately, every rupee deployed will be strictly prioritized based on its potential Return on Capital, ensuring that the journey toward doubling operating EBITDA builds a highly efficient, self-sustaining retail empire.

Q1 reflects digital commerce push

The long-term strategy was unveiled as Reliance Retail reported a 7.4% year-on-year increase in gross revenue to Rs 90,408 crore for the June quarter. However, profit after tax declined 14.2% to Rs 2,806 crore, reflecting higher investments and cash burn in its rapidly expanding quick commerce business.

EBITDA margin narrowed by 80 basis points to 7.9%, primarily due to the increasing contribution of digital commerce to overall revenue and continued investments in fulfilment infrastructure, which raised fixed costs.

Excluding the impact of the demerger of the Consumer Brands business, adjusted gross revenue rose 11.6% year-on-year, driven by double-digit underlying growth across grocery, fashion and lifestyle, and consumer electronics.

The retailer continued to expand its physical footprint, opening 252 new stores during the quarter to take its total network to 20,169 stores spanning 78.4 million square feet.

Digital commerce remained a key growth engine. Grocery digital commerce recorded a 116% year-on-year increase in average daily orders, while digital channels accounted for 13.4% of grocery B2C revenue, up 160 basis points from a year earlier. JioMart now serves around 5,500 pin codes, supported by over 2,500 digital and fashion & lifestyle stores offering two-hour delivery.