After studying in the United States, Isha Ambani gains strength in the family business in the midst of a battle with Amazon to dominate electronic commerce in the Asian country. One of his latest successes was negotiating Facebook’s investment in Jio to create a digital platform capable of competing with Amazon.
The richest men in India have known how to leave their mark on the architecture of the country. Shah Jahan, a Mughal emperor, ordered the construction of an imposing palace in Agra, in memory of his beloved Mumtaz Mahal.
Saving the distances, Mukesh Ambani, the tenth fortune in the world, ordered the construction of the Antilia tower in Bombay, where he lives, a kind of Jenga -a game in which wooden pieces fit together- 170 meters high and 27 floors, designed by the Perkins and Will studio, capable of withstanding major earthquakes, and apparently home to several helipads, a temple, a ballroom, and even floating gardens. According to the Indian press, it is the second most valuable private residence on the planet, only behind Buckingham.
It was there, in Antilia, where the wedding of Isha Ambani, daughter of Mukesh -president, CEO and first shareholder of Reliance Industries, the largest private company in India- took place. As if she were a princess from before, Isha married Anand Piramal in 2018, heir to another of the country’s great industrial dynasties. The wedding was enlivened by Beyoncé and attended by Hillary Clinton and many Bollywood stars.
The coronation of Isha Ambani could be read in a succession key, and here is the crux of the matter. Will she one day be the one appointed to succeed her 64-year-old father at the helm of her family empire? She was born at the same time as her twin brother Akash, in 1991, so she could be considered her firstborn. Will the patriarchal culture that prefers men to women weigh when the time comes? Will she claim her place and take on her brothers Akash and Anant for the reins of the family business, as her father and her uncle Anil have done in the past?
“When Dhirubhai Ambani died, his sons Mukesh and Anil fought for control of the empire. In the end, Mukesh was left with the oil and plastics business and Anil, with telecommunications and financial services,” said journalists Mike Ives and Vindu Goel three years ago in The New York Times, referring to Dhirubhai, founder in the sixties of a synthetic fabrics company.
But the peace brought by the equitable division between brothers did not take long to break. “Mukesh used his share of Reliance to create a new phone company, Reliance Jio, which has turned the industry upside down by offering unlimited talk and lots of data for $2 a month. The price war devastated Anil’s telco,” recounted Ives and Goel.
Reliance Industries is a complex industrial conglomerate dedicated to the exploration, production and distribution of oil, the manufacture of petrochemical and textile products, the marketing of all kinds of products and telecommunications, with all that this entails: telephony, Internet, streaming video and electronic payment.
Its total revenue will reach 90.5 billion euros in 2022, according to the consensus of analysts collected by FactSet. Its stock market value is close to 190,000 million euros, which makes Reliance the most valuable firm in the Indian market. Forbes magazine ranked Mukesh Ambani this year as , valued at 84.5 billion dollars, one position ahead of the Spanish Amancio Ortega.
India: battlefield of ‘e-commerce’
Reliance’s great battle is now in retail and, more specifically, in electronic commerce, in a country that will be inhabited by 1,450 million people in 2028, as pointed out by the UN.
Amazon has a lot of interest in the Indian market. In 2019, it invested 200 million dollars to buy a part of Future Group, owner of 1,500 supermarkets, convenience and fashion stores in 400 cities in the Asian country.
However, a year later, Reliance reached an agreement to buy Future Group outright for $3.4 billion, according to The New York Times. This prompted Amazon to take the case to the Singapore arbitration court and successfully petition the Supreme Court of India to stop the Reliance operation.
He negotiated the purchase by Facebook of 10% in the ‘teleco’ Jio to create a digital platform with which to compete with Amazon and Walmart
Something that did not sit well with the Indian establishment, which opened an antitrust process against Amazon, whose disruptive fame precedes it. “By law, Amazon and other foreign e-commerce companies are required to be neutral markets that depend on independent sellers,” the American newspaper pointed out.
Now, three large families of Indian merchants – the Tatas, the Adanis and the Ambanis – compete to create digital platforms on which to sell their products and services to the customers of their various businesses, something like a superapp where they can order loans, book a vacation or buy movie tickets.
Isha Ambani has already taken part of the reins of the family business. She graduated with a degree in Psychology and South Asian Studies from Yale University and an MBA from Stanford University, both in the United States. In 2014, she was already the director of Jio and Reliance Retail and, according to the South China Morning Post newspaper (owned by Jack Ma), she was among the negotiators of the agreement with Facebook (now Meta Platforms) in 2020, for which the company bought almost a 10% of Jio for 5.7 billion dollars to create that platform capable of competing with Amazon, Flipkart (Walmart) and Paytm in India.
Don’t forget her name: Isha Ambani. His reign in the business world has only just begun.