HTLS 2017 speaker Mukesh Ambani: India’s richest man with clear goals
Under Ambani’s leadership, Reliance boasts of being the single largest exporter, accounting for 8% of India’s total merchandise exports and the highest corporate tax payer in the private sector.
Mukesh Ambani, 60, the chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Ltd is India’s richest man with a net worth of Rs 2.5 trillion ($38 billion). He controls 40% of Reliance, which operates the largest refinery in the world, and is India’s most valuable company.
Apart from Reliance Industries, he also owns the Mumbai Indians cricket team and property worth $400 million in Mumbai, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Earlier this year, he overtook Hong Kong’s Li Ka Shing to become Asia’s second richest man.
Ambani is also the chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, his most audacious gamble yet. Reliance is proposing to invest nearly Rs 3 trillion in this telecom venture (including planned capital expenditure) to set up a 4G wireless network and broadband lines across India.
“Data is the new oil. India does not need to import it. We have it in super-abundance,” Ambani said while speaking at the Indian Mobile Congress on 28 September.
Indeed, the telecom venture is not the first area which Ambani pioneered at Reliance. He is also credited with starting Reliance Communications Ltd (now a part of younger brother Anil Ambani’s group), and building the firm’s refinery and petrochemical factory at Jamnagar, Gujarat.
Under Ambani’s leadership, Reliance boasts of being the single largest exporter, accounting for 8% of India’s total merchandise exports and the highest corporate tax payer in the private sector.
Ambani holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemical Engineering from University of Mumbai and MBA degree from Stanford University, USA.
According to Bloomberg, Ambani also serves as a member of advisory council of Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Prime Minister’s Advisory Council on Trade and Industry, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Board of Governors of National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), Advisory Council of Indian Banks’ Association and Advisory Council of Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai.