Mukesh Ambani Quotes

We got into life sciences as a defence mechanism in the late '90s

We all know India has a huge competitive advantage -- we have the largest arable land, focused sunshine, sensible utilisation of water in 30% of land. The question is what should we do to make the US market -- the most difficult market in the world -- accept our produce. For that, we need traceability. It is a simple technology, which we are giving the farmers. It needs certification and verification processes -- to us it is like a process plant. You can then get the output, sort it and grade it.

Internet the biggest discovery after printing press.

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.

I am very bullish on India because it is really the aspiration of a billion people and ours is a county where all the billion count. There are some countries in the world where one person counts, there are some where the Politburo or 12 people count.

The first 200-odd people who built Patalganga with me are still around, running different businesses. It has gone into their psyche that we do things differently here. We have taken money from ordinary Indians and we are their trustees. When this is drilled into thousands of people, you automatically get performance.

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.

Reliance will get listed on wall street because we want to benchmark ourselves with the top 100 companies of the world.

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.

Even the managers. It was all a feudal style of management. If we had accepted that style, we would not have grown. It was simply not a scalable model. Of course, the easiest thing would have been to follow it. But we had a disruptive style of management. So we said, 'we don't want people carrying their wisdom in notebooks as if it is some kind of secretive operation.'

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.

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

But this doesn't work without a scheme. If you ask me to build a power plant, I cannot give that power at 3 cents or 4 cents, unless I put up a 2000 MW project. It's the same for an airport, seaport and all the other stuff. You need to spread costs over a sensible size to keep unit costs low.

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.

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.