Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Childhood
Dhirubhai Ambani (Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani) was born on 28 December 1932, at
Chorwad, Junagadh in the now state of Gujarat (India).
Parents Name: Hirachand Gordhanbhai Ambani and Jamnaben.
Entrepreneurship
Dhirubhai was the second son of a school teacher and started his entrepreneurial career by
selling "pakora" to pilgrims in Mount Girnar.
At the age of 17, Dhirubhai went to Aden (now part of Yemen) and worked for A. Besse &
Co. Ltd., the sole selling distributor of Shell products.
Two years later Dhirubhai was promoted to manage the companys filling station at the port
of Aden.
In the year 1958,Dhirubhai Ambani returned to Mumbai and started his first company,
Reliance Commercial Corporation, a commodity trading and export house.
The first office was set up at the Narsinathan Street in Masjid Bunder. It was a 350 Sq.in
partnership with Champaklal Damani.
In the year 1965, Dhirubhai Ambani started his own company.
In the year 1966, as a first step in Reliance's highly successful strategy of backward
integration, he started the textile mill in Naroda, Ahmedabad.
Textiles were manufactured using polyester fibre yarn. Dhirubhai started the brand "Vimal".
Dhirubhai diversified his business with the core specialisation being in petrochemicals and
additional interests in telecommunications, information technology, energy, power, retail,
textiles, infrastructure services, capital markets, and logistics.
In the year 1975, a technical team from the World Bank certified that the Reliance textile
plant was "excellent by developed country standards".
The company went public in 1997. The group is credited with a number of financial
innovations in the Indian capital market. Today the group has the largest family of
shareholders in the world.
With an investment of Rs 360 billion in petroleum refining, petrochemicals, power
generation, telecommunication services and a port terminal in a three-year time frame, the
late Dhirubhai Ambani had steered the Group to its current status as India's leading textilespetrochemicals-telecommunications player.
Reliance Group is India's largest business house with total revenues of over Rs 600 billion,
cash flow of Rs 70 billion, net profit of Rs 45 billion and exports of Rs 93.70 billion.
The company as a whole was described by the BBC as "a business empire with an estimated
annual turnover of $12bn, and an 85,000-strong workforce in the year 2002.
End of an era
The final phase of Reliances diversification occurred in the 1990s when the company turned
aggressively towards petrochemicals and telecommunications. But, like most business
people, Dhirubhai 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.
For the year ended March 1991, Reliance Industries is understood to have recorded a sales
turnover of Rs. 2,300 crores (more than US $ 1 billion), making it the third largest private
corporation in the country to day. Those who predicted that he was a conman, a confidence
trickster, have had to eat their words. I am the double that burst! chortles Dhirubhai,
sarcastically referring to the negative headlines that greeted his forays into the primary capital
market in the early- 1980s.
Reliance was also the first Indian company to successfully tap the Global Depository Receipt
(GDR) market in 1992. It is also the only Indian company to raise 50 and 100 year bonds in
the U.S. debt markets. Thus, it successfully raised cheaper funds overseas with lower
borrowing costs to repay higher cost Indian borrowings.
The Passing away of Dhirubhai Ambani, Chairman of the Reliance group on July 6 2002,
signals the end of an era in Indian corporate history.
Wife: Kokilaben.Four children : two sons Mukesh and Anil, and two daughters, Dipti
Salgaocar who lives in Goa and Nina Kothari who resides in Chennai.
Mukesh Ambani, the current chairman of the Reliance group, and Anil Ambani, the vice
chairman.
Achievements
Voted India's 'Top Businessman' in the 'Best of India' poll conducted by Zee News, August
2003.
Reliance is the only Indian private company to make the Fortune 500 list of the worlds
largest corporations, and Dhirubhai Ambani was listed by Forbes as the 138th richest person
in the world in 2002.
http://www.forbes.com/static_html/bill/2002/print/rank.html
Petrotech Society conferred posthumously the 'Lifetime Achievement Award' for his
outstanding contribution to Downstream Petroleum Industry in India, January 2003.
Rated as one of 'India's Most Admired CEOs' for the fourth consecutive year in the Business
Barons - Taylor Nelson Sofres - Mode Survey, July 2002.
Conferred the 'Lifetime Achievement Award' by India HRD Congress, February 2002.
Conferred 'The Economic Times Award for Corporate Excellence for Lifetime Achievement',
August 2001.
Awarded the Companion Membership of the Textile Institute, UK, an award which is limited
to 50 living members who have "substantially advanced the general interests of the industries
based on fibres", 1994
Chosen as 'Star of Asia' by Business Week, USA, June 1998.
Awarded the Dean's Medal by The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, for setting
an outstanding example of leadership, June 1998.
Inspiration coupled with hard work and the can-do spirit can take one to great heights. One
of the main reasons for his success.