As anyone familiar with the Indian business scene knows, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani’s speeches at his company’s annual shar...
As anyone familiar with the Indian business scene knows, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani’s speeches at his company’s annual shareholder meetings are major news events, with television channels often streaming them live. Some of this, of course, has to do with Ambani’s investments in the news media.
But it is also a reflection of the attention commanded by India’s richest man – whose net worth has surged past that of Tesla founder Elon Musk and renowned investor Warren Buffet – ever since he unveiled Reliance Jio in 2016.
The telecom company, with the benefit of regulations working in Ambani’s favour, transformed India by offering free voice calling and data at dirt-cheap prices, making it the largest player in both revenue and market share less than four years since it was launched.
With his gamble having paid off, Ambani on Wednesday announced that the oil-to-retail-to-telecom group had become “zero net debt”, an aim that he had announced at the shareholder meeting a year before. He got there by securing investments from some of the world’s largest firms such as Google, Facebook and Intel, as well as major investment outfits like sovereign wealth funds from Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, firms like KKR, Silver Lake Partners and more....
