Reliance Industries Integrated Annual Report 2025-26: A Review

Official report: Download the Reliance Industries Integrated Annual Report 2025-26 (PDF). This page is The Footnotes' independent review of it.

Verdict: Reliance accounts for the value it has already created better than almost any Indian company, and explains where the next rupee goes worse than it should. Its biggest block of capex sits in a segment called "Others". Score: 27 of 35.

The PDF is 147 two-page spreads, about 290 printed pages. Page numbers below are the printed ones. The narrative, capitals and governance take roughly the first 100 pages, and the BRSR and CSR report are published as separate documents. Screenshots are small excerpts reproduced for review and remain the copyright of Reliance Industries Limited; the full report is on the company's investor relations pages.

Where last year's value went: page 3

The Value Added Statement is the page other companies should copy first. It shows ₹4,63,448 crore of value added in FY 2025-26 and where it went:

Source: Reliance Industries Limited, Integrated Annual Report 2025-26, p. 3.

This turns "stakeholder value" from a slogan into a table. It also says something blunt: the government took nearly 30 times what shareholders received in dividends.

Next to it, "Reliance at a Glance" (p. 2) gives each growth engine its own colour, a two-line description, and revenue and EBITDA in rupees and dollars. A reader who knows nothing about Reliance leaves that spread knowing the shape of the group.

Where the next rupee goes: pages 254-255

Reliance spent ₹1,44,271 crore on capex in the year while carrying ₹3,74,421 crore of gross debt (p. 7). The narrative explains each business's plans. It never explains how capital is split between them. You have to go to the segment note in the consolidated accounts to find out.

Source: Reliance Industries Limited, Integrated Annual Report 2025-26, consolidated segment information, pp. 254-255.

The largest single block of capex, about 36%, went to "Others", which the note defines as businesses "not separately reportable". That segment earned ₹3,448 crore. The at-a-glance page shows media as a growth engine with ₹40,682 crore of revenue. New energy, which gets its own net-zero chapter and a giga-complex at Jamnagar, has no segment and no revenue line anywhere.

That may be accounting-correct while the giga-factories are still being built. But an integrated report exists to answer exactly this question: how a company turns cash from old businesses into new ones. Reliance has the numbers. It puts them on page 255 instead of page 5.

The chairman's letter, and a listing it set up

The Chairman and Managing Director's statement is one spread (pp. 4-5), the right length. It reports profit of ₹95,754 crore (US$10.1 billion in the ten-year table, p. 7), launches "Reliance Intelligence" for AI, and includes a carefully worded line: the company "will continue to evaluate strategic pathways that can broaden stakeholder participation and support Jio's long-term growth".

That was the signal for a Jio listing. Jio Platforms filed its red herring prospectus on 14 October 2026 for a fresh issue of up to 27 crore shares at ₹1,065 to ₹1,119 a share, up to about ₹30,213 crore. It listed on BSE and NSE on 28 October 2026.

The report gives readers the operating numbers behind that valuation. Jio served more than 524 million subscribers (p. 3), and its network carried over 241 exabytes of data in the year, up 30.8% (pp. 16-17).

Retail is the business where the numbers tell a harder story (pp. 10-11). It opened 1,564 stores, taking the total to 20,160, and has 387 million registered customers. Revenue grew 12.8%, but EBITDA grew only 7.7%, and the margin fell 40 basis points to 8.2%. The report prints all of this. It doesn't discuss why growth got more expensive.

Risks tagged to the capitals they hit

Every enterprise risk (pp. 26-29) carries an "Impact on" line with small icons for the capitals it affects: F, M, H, S, N and I. Cybersecurity hits intellectual capital. Health, safety and environment hits human, manufactured and natural. It is a simple device, and it forces whoever owns a risk to say which part of the business is at stake.

What is missing is the <IR> Framework's centrepiece: one page showing inputs by capital, business activities, outputs and outcomes. Reliance has all the parts. It hasn't put them together. (Our guide to value creation models in Indian integrated reports shows what that page can look like.)

Materiality from 2022, and no Scope 3

The report lists 25 material topics, each with the page where it is addressed (p. 33). That is better cross-referencing than most Nifty 50 reports.

But the method behind them is old. The report says the assessment used "a double materiality lens", then sends readers to "Pg 164 of the Integrated Annual Report 2022-23" for how topics were chosen (pp. 32-33). Since then the group has added a large media business, an AI business and a giga-scale manufacturing complex. A reader of the 2025-26 report can't see who was consulted or what changed.

The climate numbers have two gaps:

• No Scope 3. Scope 1 and 2 are 45.52 million tonnes CO2e, market-based (pp. 36-37). For a refiner, emissions from customers burning its products will be far larger, and they are not in the integrated report.
• No pathway. Net Carbon Zero 2035 is described as milestones: HJT solar modules, giga-factories, 100 GW enabled by 2030 (pp. 34-35). There is no interim target and no chart of where 45.52 million tonnes needs to be by 2030.

The process side is strong. Deloitte Haskins & Sells LLP gives reasonable assurance on some sustainability metrics and limited assurance on the rest, a higher bar than most Indian reports reach. The climate chapter follows the four TCFD pillars.

Governance, stated plainly

The corporate governance report is complete and legible. Each director's appointment date, shareholding, other directorships and committee roles are listed. The Board met five times and the audit committee twelve. Executive pay is tabulated: the Chairman draws nil, the two Meswanis ₹25 crore each, P.M.S. Prasad ₹20.58 crore and Anant Ambani ₹12.17 crore from May 2025.

Family relationships on the Board are stated without euphemism: Mukesh Ambani is the father of the three promoter directors, and the Meswanis are brothers. More governance reports should be this direct. What is missing is a page on board evaluation results rather than criteria, and a skills matrix as a grid.

Design and the digital edition

The design system is consistent: one colour per business, carried from the cover through the segment tiles into the capital chapters, with small "Read on PG" cross-references. The awards section takes two full spreads that would be better used for a business model page.

The PDF is exported as spreads, which looks right on a desktop and awkward on a phone. Reliance also publishes an online integrated report, and the PDF carries navigation icons for on-screen use.

What other companies can copy

• A value-added statement (p. 3). Six lines that show who received the value a company created, with the prior year alongside.
• Risk-to-capital icons (pp. 26-29). They cost nothing and change how risk owners write.
• Material topics with page numbers (p. 33). Every topic points to where it is discussed.
• BRSR-principle tags on each chapter if the BRSR is published separately.
• One-spread chairman's letter with actual news (pp. 4-5).

What not to copy: capex allocation left in the segment note, a materiality method from three years ago, and a net-zero target without an emissions path.

The score

How it compares

Every review on The Footnotes uses the same seven-point card, so scores can be compared. Scores are editorial opinion of the published document.