Indian industrialist Dhirubhai Ambani, known to be one of the most influential and most important people in Indian economic history, would have turned 92 on 28 December.
The business tycoon who built the groundwork for one of the world’s most powerful companies – Reliance Industries Limited, had a very interesting journey before becoming a successful entrepreneur.
Being the third of five children born to a village schoolteacher in Gujarat’s Chorwad, Dhirubhai migrated to the British colony of Yemen’s Aden to join his brother.
In the 1950s, he began his career as a dispatch clerk with the largest transcontinental trading firm east of Suez – A. Besse & Co.
When the firm became a distributor for Shell products, Dhirubhai was promoted to manage the company’s oil-filling station at the port of Aden. Then he dreamt of setting up and owning a refinery.
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There he learned trading, accounting, and other business skills. But, in 1958, he returned to India and settled in Bombay – now Mumbai.
Here are some interesting facts about his Indian journey as an entrepreneur to a big conglomerate.
1) In the 1950s, Dhirubhai began a business trading in spices and called his venture Reliance Commercial Corporation. Following this, he expanded his business into other commodities, by offering higher-quality products and accepting smaller profits than his competitors.
2) After this, he opened the first Reliance textile mill in 1966, as he turned his attention to synthetic textiles. he bought land in Naroda. In 1975, the Naroda mill was recognized as one of the best composite textile mills in India and certified as ‘excellent even by developed country standards’, by a technical team of the World Bank. This later became Reliance Industries.
4) In 1977, Dhirubhai took Reliance public after nationalized banks declined to finance him. Having a belief in democratizing money and making it available to the masses through efforts such as the Reliance IPO, he managed to convince a large number of middle-class investors to put their money. He was credited with introducing the stock market to the average investor in India.
He later added plastics and power generation to the company’s businesses.
4) Bringing his Yemen experience into use, Dhirubhai gradually shaped Reliance into a petrochemicals behemoth by setting up Reliance Hazira — for the manufacture of petrochemicals — in 1991. This was the single largest investment made by a private sector group in India at a single location at that time.
Despite many troubles, Dhirubhai’s Reliance commissioned the Jamnagar facility in 1999 at a cost that was significantly lower than the prevailing global benchmark for a project of such magnitude.
5) In the mid-80s, Dhirubhai handed over the day-to-day running of the company to his sons, Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani, though he continued to oversee them until shortly before he died in Mumbai on 6 July 2002. He was honored with the Padma Vibhushan in 2016 for his ‘exceptional and distinguished’ service to trade and industry.
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Published: 28 Dec 2023, 06:00 AM IST