Dhirubhai Ambani: from a petrol station job to Reliance

A village boy who left home at 17

Dhirubhai Ambani was born on 28 December 1932 in Chorwad, a village in present-day Gujarat. He was the third of five children. His father was a school teacher, and the family did not have much money.

At 17 he left home to join his elder brother in Aden, in Yemen. His first job there was at a petrol station, filling fuel for customers. He later worked as a clerk for a local business linked to Burmah Shell. He also worked for Besse, a French trading company that was then the biggest firm in Aden.

These years abroad gave him savings and contacts in trade. Both would matter when he started on his own.

“Our dreams have to be bigger. Our ambitions higher. Our commitment deeper. And our efforts greater.”

— Dhirubhai Ambani, via Reliance Industries Limited

Back to Mumbai with small savings

In 1958 he returned to Mumbai and set up a small trading business. US broadcaster Voice of America later reported that he started with about 300 dollars.

The first office of his Reliance Commercial Corporation was a room of about 350 square feet in the Masjid Bunder area of Mumbai. It had a telephone, one table and three chairs. With his cousin Champaklal Damani, he traded polyester yarn and sent spices to Yemen, using the links he had made in Aden. The two later went their separate ways.

There was no factory, no big office and no family fortune. The business grew out of buying and selling, one deal after another.

From trading to making cloth

In 1966 he moved from trading into manufacturing. Reliance opened its first textile mill at Naroda, near Ahmedabad, to make fabric from polyester yarn.

He then built a brand for the cloth. He named it Vimal, after his nephew Vimal Ambani, the son of his elder brother Ramniklal. Vimal gave Reliance its own name in the textile market, and the cloth was sold under that brand.

Over the following decades Reliance kept moving into bigger industries. By 2002 the group included a refinery, petrochemicals, synthetic fibres, and new work in telecoms.

Ordinary Indians as shareholders

In those years, Indian industry was mostly funded by loans from financial institutions to a small number of established business families. Dhirubhai Ambani took a different route. He raised money by selling Reliance shares to the public, including many middle-class families.

Voice of America reported that he built a base of about 3.5 million shareholders. A tribute read in the US Congress in July 2002 noted that, at his death, the group accounted for almost 3 percent of India's GDP and 16 percent of the value of the Bombay Stock Exchange.

His rise also drew criticism. Critics accused him of using his influence with government to help his businesses. He rejected these charges. A stroke in 1986 left him partly paralysed. He had a second stroke in June 2002 and died in Mumbai on 6 July 2002, aged 69. His sons Mukesh and Anil had already been running the company's daily work. In 2016 he was posthumously awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian honour.

The skills and habits that made the difference

He started small and used what he had. He began with a single room, a phone and the trade contacts from his years in Aden. He did not wait for a big office or large funding before he started trading.

He understood money and investors. Reliance's own website describes him as probably the first Indian businessman to see the importance of investors and to use the capital markets to grow industry. Instead of depending only on bank loans, he invited ordinary people to own a part of his company.

He thought in terms of brands and scale. Moving from trading yarn to making cloth, and then giving that cloth a brand name, meant Reliance handled more steps of the business, from making the cloth to selling it under its own name. Reliance sums up his business philosophy as thinking big, thinking differently, thinking fast, thinking ahead and aiming for the best.