Ambani this week put in motion his own succession plan -- eldest Akash to helm Jio, twin Isha expected to head retail while youngest Anant to preside over oil-to-chemicals business.
Beating Amazon, Disney and Sony to the Indian Premier League was only half the battle. Now the world’s seventh-richest man needs to work out how to make money from it.
From Walt Disney to Sony, Viacom18 — a joint venture between Paramount Global & Ambani’s RIL — outbid all to bag the streaming rights, while Disney acquired the TV broadcast rights.
Amazon’s surprise pullout leaves the field open for Ambani’s Reliance, Disney & Sony Group, who’re betting the game will help them dominate an Indian consumer market increasingly going online.
Ambani is aiming for consumers while Adani is sticking mostly to infrastructure, which helps India generate fiscal resources by monetising public assets and also as a foreign-policy tool.
Adani’s conglomerate is expanding a controversial mine in Australia to meet demand. While Ambani is snapping up distressed crude-oil cargoes at discounts to feed Reliance's refining complex.
Debt-laden Future Retail's offshore bondholders were promised 100% payment in the rescue offer from Ambani but Indian lenders were asked to take a haircut of as much as 66%.
The top 10 Indians in the Forbes list also include Shiv Nader, Cyrus Poonawalla, Radhakishan Damani, Lakshmi Mittal, Savitri Jindal, Kumarmangalam Birla, Dilip Sanghvi and Uday Kotak.
For the first time, the rights to broadcast IPL matches on television and to stream them online will be sold separately, opening the door to Amazon and its Prime video service.
What is Shiv Sena’s ideology? We might say it’s been a convenient mix of extreme ethnic chauvinism & unforgiving Hindutva. Within the second, the party retained space to manoeuvre.