Dhirubhai Ambani

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Reliance Industries founder Dhirubhai Ambani.

Dinodia/age fotostock

Dhirubhai Ambani was an Indian industrialist who was the founder of Reliance Industries, a giant petrochemicals, communications, power, and textiles conglomerate that was the biggest exporter in India and the first privately owned Indian company in the Fortune 500.

Ambani was the third of five children born to a village schoolteacher and his wife, and he grew up in a family of modest means. At the age of 17, he migrated to the British colony of Aden to join his brother. He started his career as a clerk at A. Besse & Co., which in the 1950s was the largest transcontinental trading firm east of Suez. There he learned trading, accounting, and other business skills. He married Kokila Patel, who came to be referred to as Kokilaben Ambani (ben in Gujarati means “sister,” and the word is often used as a suffix to women’s names), in 1955. In 1958 Ambani returned to India and settled in Bombay (now Mumbai).

Ambani began a business trading in spices in the late 1950s, calling his nascent venture Reliance Commercial Corporation. He soon expanded into other commodities, following a strategy of offering higher-quality products and accepting smaller profits than his competitors. His business grew quickly. After deciding that the corporation had gone as far as it could with commodities, Ambani turned his attention to synthetic textiles. He made his first foray into backward integration with the opening of the first Reliance textile mill in 1966. Continuing a policy of backward integration and diversification, he gradually shaped Reliance into a petrochemicals behemoth and later added plastics and power generation to the company’s businesses.

In 1977 Ambani took Reliance public after nationalized banks refused to finance him. His agility in navigating a stodgy economy and crippling government regulations and bureaucracy led to allegations of political manipulation, corruption, and engineered raids on competitors, but investor confidence in Reliance remained unshaken—owing in part to the handsome dividends the company offered, as well as the founder’s charisma and vision. Ambani was credited with introducing the stock market to the average investor in India, and thousands attended the Reliance annual general meetings, which were sometimes held in a sports stadium, with many more watching on television.

Ambani handed over the day-to-day running of the company to his sons, Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani, in the mid-1980s but continued to oversee the company until shortly before his death in 2002. Following a feud over control between the brothers, Kokilaben Ambani decided to split Reliance’s assets via a noncompetition agreement (2006–10), under which Mukesh Ambani assumed control of the gas, oil, and petrochemicals units as Reliance Industries Limited. Anil Ambani gained control of the telecommunications, power generation, and financial services and headed the Reliance Dhirubhai Ambani Group.

Dhirubhai Ambani was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second highest civilian award, posthumously in 2016.