Indian Business Tycoons

Dhirajlal (Dhirubhai) Hirachand Ambani

December 28, 1932,Chorwad,Gujarat
July 6, 2002,Bombay(Mumbai),Maharashtra

Son of a petty trader and school teacher father.
2 Sons - Anil and Mukesh
Both American-educated sons have been in day-to-day control of Reliance since he suffered a stroke in 1986.
2 Daughters
Started Reliance Industries - $13.2 billion+ in annual sales and over four million investors today.
Relliance is India's first privately owned entrant to the Fortune 500 worlds largest corporations.
Business acumen : Think big, think fast and think ahead.

Life:
Used to sell hot snacks to pilgrims outside a temple in his native village.
Moved to Aden as a teenager (at 17) in order to seek his fortune.
He started work as a petrol station attendant before taking up a clerical position for an oil company that was the sole distributor of Shell products there.
While in Aden, he realised that a discrepancy between the rial-sterling exchange rate and the intrinsic value of the silver content in Aden’s coinage afforded an excellent opportunity to make money. This arbitrage generated some $3,000 in seed money for the modest trading enterprise that Ambani set up when he returned to Bombay in 1958.
The trading house Reliance Commercial Corporation began by importing polyester yarn and exporting spices. The company was set up with an investment of 15,000 rupees (about $375). This was the era of India’s infamous “licence-permit raj”, when businessmen with political connections could corner export, import and manufacturing licences and accumulate huge fortunes. Sensing an opportunity in the textile industry — higher disposable incomes were leading to Indians buying better, more expensive clothes — Ambani sought and received the necessary clearances to manufacture cloth from polyester fibre. He opened his first textile mill in Naroda, near Ahmedabad, in 1966 and then concentrated on quietly building up his business. The textile mill won accolades in 1975 from a World Bank technical team, who described it as "excellent by developed country standards". Two years later the company went public, evoking a tremendous response from investors. Invertors fraternity credit the Reliance chairman with introducing a stock market culture in the country. Vimal, the textile brand he established, flourished and remains a household name in India today.

Though Reliance was a profitable enough concern, Ambani quickly calculated that further expansion — especially into related sectors — would depend on access to a cheap source of capital. Rather than turning to the banking system, he decided to tap Bombay’s fledgeling stock exchange, pioneering an equity cult that was to transform the corporate financing system in India. Reliance’s initial public offering in 1977 saw 58,000 investors buying shares; eventually, the number of Reliance shareholders was to climb to some three million.Those fortunate enough to have had faith in the company in the early years eventually became millionaires. Annual general meetings were held in sports stadiums where Ambani would be treated by shareholders with adulation and even reverence. In 1982 Ambani began the process of backward integration, setting up a plant to manufacture polyester filament yarn. He subsequently diversified into chemicals, gas, petrochemicals, plastics, power, telecom services and life sciences.

By the late 1980s the Reliance group was one of India’s most influential and profitable concerns. However, the phenomenal growth of Reliance owed as much to Ambani’s acumen as to the ease with which he was able to get official rules and regulations — including import tariffs — introduced, amended or scrapped in order to undercut his rivals and push his own business interests. His methods earned him many bitter enemies in India’s corporate world. Ambani nevertheless forged ahead, cultivating friends in virtually every Indian political party and managing the media in such a way that critical stories about Reliance’s unconventional business methods seldom made it into the newspapers. The final phase of Reliance’s diversification occurred in the 1990s when the company turned aggressively towards petrochemicals and telecommunications. But, like most business people, Ambani had rivals, the most bitter of whom was Nusli Wadia, of Bombay Dyeing, a patrician entrepreneur whose company was well established in the textile industry. Ambani was also anxious to encourage the spread of information technology among India’s poor. Through Reliance Industries he arranged computer education and training for thousands of students in schools in Bombay. “You are getting an opportunity. Make the best use of it,” he told children in December during one of his last public speeches. “Be daring. Think big. You can be the best. If you believe in this, you will be the best.” Ambani also saw the Indian Government’s privatisation programme as a means of further growth. Two months before his death, Reliance successfully bid for the giant public sector Indian Petro-Chemicals.

For and Against :

Many observers attribute his phenomenal rise to his close contacts with the Congress leadership in the 1970s and 1980s.

Asiaweek magazine voted Ambani amongst the 50 most powerful men in Asia - not once but three times, in 2000, 1998 and 1996. The federation of Indian chambers of commerce and industry (FICCI) conferred on him the Indian entrepreneur of the 20th Century award. A poll conducted by The Times of India in 2000 voted him "creator of wealth in the century". And in December 2000 Ambani was honoured at a civic reception by the municipal corporation of Bombay.

Dhirbhai has responded with stoic silence to rivals and negetive press reports. Lately, he had taken the precaution of shoring up his own strength in the media, not minding the expenditure of huge sums of money, and timing the launches of his products to a nicety.

Well-known newspaper editor Vinod Mehta, who have referred in print to Dhirubhai Ambani as ‘the embodiment of evil'. However, to the Gujarati business community, he assumed the status of demi-god.

Compiled from various sources by Abhijit Pai