Reliance juggernaut rolls into e-commerce

Should Flipkart and Amazon be worried? And is there a case for reining in cross-industry dominance?

After telecom, Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries is reportedly planning to disrupt the country’s Rs 2 lakh-crore e-commerce market. Reliance is already the country’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer, with a footprint that spans 750 cities, 3,679 stores and profitable industry-leading sales of Rs 33,765 crore.

Should the current e-commerce leaders in home-grown Flipkart and the $136-billion global e-commerce giant Amazon be worried? A cursory look at new technology disruptors and markets it has created shows that incumbents have usually missed the bus.

So Google’s dominance in search helped it little to spot the new wave in social media, and it needed new