Every year only a few selected companies make them into TIME100 Most Influential Companies list as this is one of the most prestigious lists to get into.
TIME solicited nominations across various sectors, including healthcare, entertainment, transportation, technology, and evaluated each one on key factors, including relevance, impact, innovation, leadership, ambition and success.
Only two Indian firms, Reliance’s Jio Platforms and e-learning startup Byju’s have made it into Time Magazine’s list of 100 most influential firms worldwide.
Interestingly, Jio Platforms was listed under the Innovators category alongside Zoom, Adidas, TikTok, Ikea, Moderna and Netflix. Jio has already become India’s largest 4G network and drastically reducing data rates in the country, costing less than 5 cents a month for 1 GB.
Jio has already raised billions of dollars to make more innovations like work with Facebook, develop a WhatsApp-based e-commerce platform or partner with Google to roll out a low-cost 5G smartphone market with JioFiber and diversify the Indian entertainment portfolio that has gone digital off-late.
Another Indian firm that is actually surpassed all expectations to make it into the TIME100 Most Influential Companies has to be Byju’s. It was listed alongside Tesla, Huawei, Shopify, Airbnb and DiDi Chuxing in the Disruptors category.
“Byju Raveendran, the founder of Indian e-learning startup BYJU’S, knows how to press an advantage. As users of his company’s signature app nearly doubled to 80 million during the COVID-19 pandemic, he went on a spending spree, fuelled by funding from investors like Tencent and BlackRock,” Time said.
Obviously, BYJU’S now wants to create a global footprint with acquisitions of WhiteHat Jr and Osmo, particularly targeting the US e-learning market. Also, it wants to bring the same one-on-one lessons it introduced in India to other countries like the US, the UK, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil.
