Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani alias Dhirubhai Ambani was one of the most influential business men of India. He built the destinies of innumerable unemployed people of our country and made them self-sufficient. He expanded his business empire with his brain power and became one of the wealthiest men of India.
Dhirubhai Ambani was born on 28 December 1932 near Chorvad, situated in Gujarat. He was the third son born to a village school teacher and was very ambitious from his childhood. He wanted to achieve big goals, become a big man through big ideas generated by his powerful brain.
To achieve his goals, he proceeded towards Aden to work with the Shell Oil Agents in the year 1949. He gave up the job of clerk in the year 1958 and went back to Bombay (Mumbai). Over there he established a company named ‘Reliance Commercial Corporation’ with a small capital of Rs. 15000 and began to export various spices to West Asia.
Dhirubhai is not just the usual rags-to-riches story. He will be remembered as the one who rewrote Indian corporate history and built a truly global corporate group.
Dhirubhai changed the rules of the game in the industry in an era when the private sector was hampered by the licence regime.
A matriculate, he started his career as a worker at a Shell service station in Aden (Yemen) but returned to the country to build an empire that now boasts of a net worth of over Rs 300 billion with a net profit of over Rs 2,800 crore.
His Jamnagar refinery complex in Gujarat houses the world’s largest greenfield project with a capacity to refine 27 million tones of crude every year.
Starting from a scratch in 1966, Ambani and his two US-educated sons—Mukesh and Anil—have built brick by brick an empire that has outstripped older venerable groups.
Ambani is also credited with shaping India’s equity culture, attracting millions of retail investors in a market till then dominated by financial institutions.
More than the fact that he built India’s largest private sector company from a scratch, Ambani will be remembered for revolutionising capital markets. From nothing, he generated billions of rupees in wealth for those who put their trust in his companies.
Ambani is also credited with being the man whose efforts helped create an ‘equity cult’ in the Indian capital market.
With innovative instruments like the convertible debenture, Reliance quickly became a darling of the stock market in the 1980s. Today, the group has close to five million individual shareholders.
In 1992, Reliance became the first Indian company to raise money in global markets, its high credit-taking in international markets limited only by India’s sovereign rating.
He went for his heavenly abode on 6 July 2002. He would be remembered for his great achievements.
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