Ambani’s biggest risk and dreams powering Reliance today

Reliance Industries Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani said investments in building the telecom major Jio were the "biggest risk" he took, despite scepticism from analysts who doubted India's readiness for the necessary digital infrastructure.

In an interview with McKinsey & Company, Ambani said that some thought India was unprepared for the most advanced digital technology. Still, the decision was made with Reliance Industries' philanthropic philosophy kept in mind.

He said that even in the worst-case scenario, even if the investments don't deliver the expected returns, it would still be Reliance's greatest act of philanthropy--contributing to India's digital transformation.

"We've always taken big risks because, for us, scale is important. The biggest risk we have taken so far was Jio. At the time, it was our own money that we were investing, and I was the majority shareholder," Ambani said.

"Our worst-case scenario was that it might not work out financially because some analysts thought India wasn't ready for the most advanced digital technology," he added.

I told my board, Ambani said, "In the worst case, we will not earn much return. That's okay because it's our own money. But then, as Reliance, this will be the best philanthropy that we will have ever done in India because we will have digitised India and thereby completely transformed India."

Reliance's North Star

Talking about the future, Ambani said businesses of the future will have to be good at harnessing technologies of the future. So, "our North Star always has been that our vision and purpose of doing business have to be impact-led."

Ambani quoted his father, "My father used to say that if you want to start a business to be a billionaire, you are an idiot; you will never get there. If you want to start a business to impact a billion people, then you have a good chance of success, and, as a by-product, you can make a reasonable amount of money."

The principle is whether one can survive in the worst-comes-to-the-worst situation, he stated. "You start off by thinking in terms of what the worst is that could happen, and then you have to survive that. This has been one of my principles."

Change for Reliance

The change now for Reliance is that we are going to be a deep-tech and advanced manufacturing company, the India billionaire said.

"We started with telecom. In 2021, we launched 5G. We built everything ourselves, end to end—the core, the hardware, the software, every single piece. We used Ericsson and Nokia to help us on 20 percent, just to make sure that the 80 percent that we put in was good."

I also wanted to make sure that our people were not too full of themselves, he stated during the interview. "I said to them, “You have to be better than these guys.” And we are now. That gives us unique capabilities today that we are launching in the market. As it’s our own technology, we will now be able to offer unique services."

'Reliance can build business of future'

Ambani asserted that Reliance can build businesses of the future. "With our experience, we can extrapolate the future 20 years from today. That’s why we didn’t hesitate to build polyester first or to build 4G before its time. The same is now true about our newest business venture in new energy."

We are building one of the world’s largest manufacturing ecosystems for green and clean energy, he added. "It covers solar, batteries, hydrogen, bio-energy and much more. This is our contribution to saving planet Earth from the looming climate crisis."