Originally published 2007, part of a series I did for a biography website. Can’t even remember who now, but it’s long gone.
Mukesh Ambani is the world’s eighteenth richest person, with an estimated net worth of $44 billion USD.
His father, Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani, was himself one of India’s greatest business tycoons and the founder of Reliance Industries, India’s largest private sector conglomerate. Born in relative poverty, Dhirajlal worked his way up and built the business empire, which his sons Mukesh and Anil have since taken over to spur on to even greater success.
Mukesh Ambani was born April 19, 1957, in the colony of Aden, Yemen, as the firstborn of four siblings. Anil Ambani was born June 4, 1959, in Mumbai, India. Although his position as firstborn gave Mukesh “first pick” of the opportunities to inherit from his father, so to speak, the advantage does not seem to have been large over his younger sibling and the two do not appear to rival.
As the family settled down in Mumbai, India, the father, Dhirajlal, tutored his sons well at his side while he built his corporate empire. Beginning in 1962, he founded Reliance Industries with the original aim of importing polyester yarn and exporting spices. By 1966, he had started the company’s first textile mill in Gujarat, India. Its chief mission was the production of polyester fiber yarn, which was sold under the brand name Vimal, becoming a household brand name in India.
Meanwhile, Mukesh Ambani attended school, and graduated from the Mumbai University Institute of Chemical Technology with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. He was later to set sail off to America where he attended Stanford business school to obtain a Master of Business Administration degree. Anil also attained a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Mumbai and a Master of Business Administration degree from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. The two sons then joined into the family business.
Reliance Industries, under the guidance of father and both sons Ambani, pursued a strategy of “backward vertical integration” Which is to say that they started in polyester, moved on to fiber intermediates, then plastics, petrochemicals, and petroleum refining, and finally to oil and gas exploration and production. Thus, they asserted themselves in place along the entire materials and energy production chain, from raw resources to finished product.
The primary focus of the company in the 2000s was petroleum refining and petrochemicals, and Mukesh Ambani started this trend rolling when he created the Reliance oil refinery, in Jamnagar, Gujarat, in 1999. This act, at the time, represented the most ambitious construction project to ever happen in India, at a price tag of $6 billion USD. Meanwhile Anil branched into capitol markets overseas with international public offerings of global repository receipts, convertibles and bonds. Anil has also served as the Chairman of Board of Governors of DA-IICT, Gandhinagar and a member of the Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.
The company has also branched out into other diverse fields. Among them is the telecommunications industry, doing business as Reliance Infocom, later Reliance Communications. This conglomeration did not last long, however, as the brother Anil Ambani took over this wing of the company and now runs it separate from Reliance Industries under the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. Finally, Reliance Industries has also branched off into retail with the wholly-owned subsidiary Reliance Retail, operating a chain of stores called Delight.
The brothers Mukesh and Anil Ambani have done very much what you would expect in the situation of a father who struggled his way up from poverty to riches and then passed the business on to his sons. Today, they are both somewhat private and reclusive, but happily running their slices of the business empire founded by their family.
