Indian millionaire Mukesh Ambani has resigned from the Reliance Industries communications unit, handed over the reins to his son Akash and set the stage for a leadership transformation in his power-to-sales circles. Mukesh’s son, 30, Akash, has been elected board chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, the company said on Tuesday. Akash was already a non-executive director of communications.
Mukesh Ambani, ranked 10th in Forbes’ global billionaire, signed last year that his children would play a key role in the family business, which has grown sixfold over the past decade to reach $ 218 billion.
Reliance is “on the cusp of transforming key leadership,” he said at an event in December. Analysts say the 65-year-old has appointed experienced officials and longtime friends and family to guide his children in this change, and to play a key role in regular annual meetings and lead company announcements.
On Wednesday, shares in Reliance Industries increased by 2.7%.Akash Ambani, a graduate of Brown University, was part of a group that traded $ 5.7 billion by 2020 by Meta Platforms in Jio Platforms, a Reliance division.
Akash’s twin Isha is a director on Jio boards and Reliance Retail, which maintains conglomerate bets in the Indian area of brick and mortar. Media reports have alerted him as the next chairman of the retail business. The youngest sister, Anant, is the director of Reliance’s renewable energy, as well as oil and chemical units.
Tuesday’s departure is a major step for Mukesh Ambani to return to business for now. However, he will continue as chairman of Jio Platforms, a Reliance unit owned by Jio Infocomm and other digital assets. It comes two decades after Mukesh’s father Dhirubhai Ambani, a well-known industrialist, died, sparking a long-running civil and property dispute over Mukesh and his younger brother Anil.
Disagreements, and years of lawsuits and failed agreements, funded Anil Ambani, who in 2008 was number 6 on Forbes’ richest list and once owned a promising phone company called Reliance Communications which exploded a few years before JioInfocomm entered the industry. Jio Infocomm boosted the Indian telecommunications sector at its lowest cost, forcing some competitors out of the market and pushing the red ones.
Jio which is started out as a mobile phone provider, invested heavily in services such as broadband internet and formed relationships with handset manufacturers to deliver cheaper smartphones and provide 5G services. Now India’s largest Telecom operator, Jio Infocomm has 405.7 million wireless broadband subscribers as of April 30, and controls 35.5% of the market. In the last financial year, Jio Infocomm made 10% of the total revenue of Reliance Industries and a quarter of its profits.
