With Reliance Industries (RIL) subsidiary Viacom18 merging with Walt Disney’s local unit Star India to create the country’s biggest media and entertainment business valued at about $8.5 billion, RIL Chairman Mukesh Ambani has made his signature move — think big and act big. The merged entity will have a staggering 750 million viewers across the country, almost half the population of India.
If one thing can define the entrepreneurial style of India’s richest businessman, it’s scale. He has a penchant for creating humongous businesses with an amazing sweep across the country’s 140 crore population. Ambani’s ambition of achieving massive scale comes from his visionary father Dhirubhai Ambani who built the world’s biggest oil refinery at Jamnagar in Gujarat which has been run, and grown, by Mukesh for nearly two decades after his father’s death in 2002.
Ambani has gone a step ahead of his father. He has not only grown his ancestral refining and petrochemicals business but also reinvented the staid textile-to-oil company into a tech and retail behemoth and now looks to shape-shift into a decarbonised business empire with a mega green energy and renewables plans. In the nearly two decades that Stanford University-drop out Ambani, 66, has been at the helm of RIL, the company saw a 17-fold jump in revenues, 20-times surge in profit.
The India scale
With the Disney-Reliance deal, Ambani has underlined his hunger for massive scale, adding to his refinery, telecom and retail businesses another one as big as to be synonymous with India. For the country’s biggest industrial house, which is actively searching for new avenues of growth, it’s natural to have its trajectory run parallel to that of the country’s economy which has been on a high-growth trajectory for the past many years.The growth of Reliance has run parallel to the trends in the Indian economy. “In the ’70s, Reliance’s dream was to make the colourful, long-lasting and aspirational polyester textiles available to all Indians. In the ’80s, Reliance dreamt of a largely self-sufficient India in the wonder materials of that era – polyester, polymers and petrochemicals,” Ambani once remarked.
“In the ’90s, Reliance dreamt of eliminating India’s dependency on imported fuels refined abroad. In the first decade of the 21st century, Reliance was focused on enhancing India’s energy security by exploring hydrocarbons in the depths of oceans. In the last 15-odd years, Reliance has pursued two big dreams – bringing the power of digital technology to every Indian, and to create an omni-channel retail network – aimed at benefiting hundreds of millions of consumers,” he said.
Ambani’s desire for his company to mirror the nation has not only taken him to businesses starkly different from oil and chemicals but also to build everything to a national scale. The deal with Disney will create another market-dominating business for Ambani, with an arc that embraces the whole of India like his other businesses.
The ambitions of Ambani
Ambani’s gigantic ambitions are symbolised by his trademark white short-sleeve shirts which means he is always on the execution mode, not needing to roll up his sleeves. His execution prowess has helped him never fail with scale. If it’s big, it works for Ambani.
“He likes to do things on a large scale which will have a large impact,” Hemendra Kothari, a doyen of investment banking, had told ET when Ambani had launched Reliance Jio,. the telecom venture which shook the sector. “In the initial years, when he had joined Reliance, he was involved in the setting up of the company’s refinery , which was the largest project in the country then. During Dhirubhai’s times, he was always behind the chair, involved in execution and operations. He had a big hand in creating the giant Reliance.”
Reliance Jio was Ambani’s first display of grand ambition. If Jamnagar, the single biggest investment in post-liberalized India at the time, marked a milestone for Reliance Industries and India Inc, Ambani believed Reliance Jio’s free voice calling and cheap data strategy would catapult the country’s billion-plus population into the digital age. And it did. In nearly two years of its launch in 2016, India became the world’s largest mobile broadband data consuming nation. With its dirt-cheap data, Jio proved to be a big disruptor, sweeping aside the incumbents in the telecom sector and soon gaining the dominant position. Jio’s user base is 424.51 million, much ahead of its rival Airtel’s 377.54 million. Its market share is 39.69% while Airtel’s is 32.95%.
Jio triggered a tectonic shift in the telecom sector. Before its entry, India had more than 10 wireless providers, with the smallest five accounting for about 21 percent and Bharti, the largest, taking up 25 percent. Ambani’s grand dream to dominate the telecom sector shrank the market to just three big providers. The consumer was the gainer since data and call rates nosedived and became affordable for even the poor people in remote areas.
Ambani likes his businesses to touch a large number of people. “In my view, real power means the ability to make an impact on the quality of life of the people,” Ambani had once said. “Power needs to be measured by the impact of an individual’s contribution to the movement of history.”
Reliance Retail, another of Ambani’s India-sized bet, has become the country’s largest retailer with the widest reach, selling clothes, food and electronics. It has 249 million registered customers buying across all its formats, as per the company website. It recorded more than 780 million footfalls across all its stores in FY23, a scale unmatched by any other retailer in India. With nearly 3 million daily transactions, Reliance Retail operates at a scale unparalleled in the Indian retail industry. It is the largest apparel retailer with over 4,000 stores across multiple brands. It sold 430 million pieces of garment in 2022, enough to clothe the entire population of the US and Canada.
After his gigantic oil, telecom and retail businesses, Ambani has entered the world of finance. Last year, following a demerger from incubator RIL, Jio Financial Services immediately occupied the No.2 slot in the list of India’s largest NBFCs by market capitalisation at Rs 1.66 lakh crore or about $20.3 billion. It is seen as another disruptive play to unseat big players and sweep across the sector with verticals such as insurance, payments, digital broking and asset management. Its first strategic partner is BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager, which indicates Ambani’s ambition to dominate the growing asset management sector in India.
With India’s biggest refiner, biggest telecom brand and biggest retailer already under his arm, Ambani is now aiming to lead India’s green energy and renewables sector. He is investing Rs 75,000 crore into renewables, storage and hydrogen, including what he claims will be the world’s largest green energy equipment ‘giga-complex’, aiming at 100-gigawatt capacity goal.
Ambani desires to repeat the Jio feat in the green energy and renewables sector. “Just as India has the world’s most affordable wireless broadband today, we will have the world’s most affordable green energy within this decade. And these solutions will then be exported to other countries, helping them contain carbon emissions,” Ambani has said. He has set a target for Reliance to become net carbon neutral by 2035.
Ambani has pegged his giga-scale ambitions to the trajectory of a growing India which is expected to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2027, 16 years earlier than the goal of 2043 set by the previous government. “As India races ahead to become the world’s third-largest economy, an unprecedented opportunity awaits Reliance. Reliance can …. and Reliance will … grow to be among the top 10 business conglomerates of the world,” Ambani had said last year in December while addressing employees on Reliance Family Day, the birthday of group founder Dhirubhai Ambani.
Thinking big and not afraid of complex, daunting goals, Ambani’s company has come to mirror the energy of new India which is massive as well as on the move.
