Mukesh Ambani Quotes

The US and Europe saw large players in foods by the '50s and '60s; but in India, food has always been a disorganised, fragmented value chain. We believe that India's purchasing power will be food-dominated. The first thing we need is safe to eat food that will, in turn, meet many other needs.

The Treaty of India is that all our billion people count and they have aspirations.

We were clear that we had to be internationally competitive and were passionate about building competencies that were the best in the world even when the tariffs were very high. It was an obsession with me to beat the Taiwanese and the Koreans who dominated the polyester business in the '70s.

When we started work on setting up a polyester filament yarn project, my chemical engineering and business school background helped me in organizing the work, creating reporting structures, motivating people... in all this, my father and Rasikbhai were two steps ahead of me.

The performance of Reliance shows an amazing trend when mapped against time. The inflection point was 1991. We grew exponentially, eventually becoming India’s biggest private enterprise, on the basis of freedom to compete against the best in the world.

People first want to spend money on food -- that is common across the world. The second, in India, is education. In many parts of the world, it comes way down the list of priorities. So, there is a huge opportunity.

The food market is much bigger than the software services market. And the money goes straight into the hands of millions of farmers. The spinoffs are enormous -- jobs, houses, durables, a whole new consumption boom will start in rural areas.

Then, we stumbled on human and plant biotech. We were fortunate to have some good people and decided that Reliance can build this business over 5-10 years without any great revenue pressures. In the mainstream business, there was telecom or what I call infocomm.

a leader is only recognized when he can resolve all differences. My father had the veto power over all decisions and that veto power is mine. But in the last ten years, he never used his veto power. He would say, once you have fired you gun you no longer have the bullet with you...My father’s biggest legacy was his leadership. He used to say, a leader must have followers. Respect can not be demanded . I have to get others to say what I want to say.

As my father was privileged to have witnessed in 1947, independence of India from Britain, I was privileged to have seen in 1991 India embracing economic reforms that liberated our country’s entrepreneurial energies. These two transitions set India on the path of development and had a profound on the world both political economic terms.

Mahatma Gandhi’s dream of self-reliance can be attained by making use of Internet and technology.

Mukesh is the hands-on manufacturing and operations man

My reference points were US companies. We were hugely influenced by large US chemical companies, especially DuPont. It was a very open company and we could take advantage of their learnings. The US is also a very open society. I could to go the US Association of Chemical Engineers and get the standards, data, etc.

So, these were the four components of my upbringing -- the academic stuff where I was left to myself, Mahendrabhai, my father's passion for creating Reliance and the last piece was his deep links with the family.

Mukesh has to his credit the direction and leading the creation of the world’s largest petroleum refinery at Jamnagar, India with a capacity of 540,000 barrels per day integrated with petrochemicals, power generation, port and related infrastructure at an investment of 25,000 crores.