IN OCTOBER 2002, Mukesh Ambani stood before Reliance Industries’ shareholders for the first time as chairman after the death of his father, Dhirubhai Ambani. He had inherited a company that had already acquired a reputation for extraordinary growth. His immediate task was to persuade shareholders that the pace was not a matter of chance.

Reliance, he told them, had grown because of its ability to “anticipate the nature and direction of opportunities in the marketplace”. It was equally necessary, he added, to leverage those opportunities.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, that statement reads less like an explanation of Reliance’s past and more like a blueprint for Ambani’s career.

Over the past 24 years — Ambani will complete 25 years at the helm in July 2027 — he has relentlessly pursued new opportunities for expanding the empire. Following the split in the family in 2005-06, Ambani founded the retail business, built the second refinery in Jamnagar (Gujarat), acquired spectrum licences aggressively and launched data-centric telecom and digital businesses. It is, therefore, no surprise that Ambani leads Fortune India’s 2026 list of India’s Top 100 Billionaires, with a net worth of ₹8,67,624 crore ($91.12 billion).

The refining- and petrochemicals-focussed B2B group gradually transformed into a more consumer-centric conglomerate as retail and telecom scaled up. These businesses now contribute half of its cash flow, and Ambani is preparing to unlock value through the IPO of Jio Platforms Ltd (JPL).

The numbers capture the scale of that transformation. RIL increased its revenues 20x to ₹11.76 lakh crore (FY26) from ₹57,120 crore in the last 24 years; profit grew 30x to ₹95,754 crore from ₹3,243 crore; market capitalisation expanded 50x to ₹17.8 lakh crore.

For Ambani, it has always been about the next big opportunity.

RIL is investing ₹1.5 lakh crore in renewable energy to build five giga factories in Jamnagar. The company has operationalised solar PV cell and module manufacturing lines and is building towards 20 GW per annum of fully integrated capacity — from polysilicon to ingots, wafers, cells, modules, and glass. Battery storage, green electricity, and green chemicals are also part of Ambani’s renewable energy plans. In the arid Kutch region, RIL is developing a renewable energy hub across 550,000 acres, where it will generate more than 40 billion units of green electricity every year — approximately 3% of India’s annual electricity requirement. Overall, the renewable energy portfolio is aimed at helping RIL achieve its zero-emission targets by 2035.

Another project underway is the creation of a global FMCG company. Within three years of its launch, Reliance Consumer Products achieved a gross revenue of ₹22,000 crore — doubling year-on-year — and began exporting to 40 countries. Beyond FMCG exports, RIL wants to use its merchandise export capabilities to become an anchor institution for developing a multi-sector export hub, with a target of enabling $125-150 billion in exports by 2032.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is another opportunity Ambani has zeroed in on. He has created Reliance Intelligence to pursue profitable AI infrastructure and platforms, and has partnered with Google, Meta and NVIDIA. “Now, we are entering the next phase — execution,” said Akash Ambani, chairman, Reliance Jio Infocomm, at the recently held AGM.

The latest foray is military aviation. RIL recently announced a partnership plan with British giant Rolls-Royce for the design, development, manufacturing and delivery of combat engines for India’s Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) programme. The JV will explore the formation of a dedicated Aerospace Gas Turbine Complex.

“The next decade could see new opportunities and aggressive deployment of capital, with RIL becoming less vulnerable to the cyclicality of any one or two sectors, and increasingly resembling a collection of large, interconnected growth platforms,” says Deven Choksey, MD, DRChoksey FinServ.

People often ask Ambani about the secret of growth in such a short span of time. His answer is, “founder’s mindset”. Every new generation has to believe they are the founder of RIL and the first generation, he said at the company’s recent AGM. He reinvented RIL with a two-pronged strategy — innovating and expanding existing businesses, and building new growth engines.

The biggest examples are data, digital, and retail. With the launch of Jio in 2016, the telecom industry underwent tremendous disruption, with a number of players failing to survive. Around the same time, Ambani found an opportunity to scale up Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd (RRVL) through store additions and portfolio expansion.

Investors backed the strategy. Jio Platforms raised ₹1.52 lakh crore from investors, including Google, Meta, Silver Lake, KKR, and General Atlantic. RRVL raised another ₹47,265 crore during the Covid-induced economic slowdown, while RIL launched India’s largest rights issue of ₹53,125 crore, which was subscribed 1.59 times.

Ambani has never looked back since. As existing businesses flourished, he added new ones to the basket.

Jio Platforms recently filed its draft red herring prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Board of India, marking the beginning of a landmark public float. Based on the proposed deployment of funds, company insiders estimate the IPO size at around ₹37,000 crore, implying a valuation of nearly ₹12.2 lakh crore. RIL holds 66.4% stake in JPL.

The numbers reveal the evolution of the Jio strategy — from building scale at extraordinary speed to converting that scale into a broader, increasingly profitable technology platform. JPL’s revenue rose 14.6% year-on-year to ₹1.47 lakh crore, while Ebitda grew faster, by 18.8%, to ₹76,255 crore.

The 190-basis-point expansion in Ebitda margin to 51.9% is particularly significant — Jio is no longer merely adding customers and traffic; it is extracting greater economic value from an expanding network. The platform now has 533 million subscribers. Its 5G base crossed 285 million in June — up 73 million in the past one year. Per-user data consumption reached 43.7 GB a month in June, while total network traffic stood at 241 exabytes, up 30.8%, in FY26.

“As we embark on our next phase of journey to be a publicly listed company in India, we will continue to maintain our deeptech focus and democratise access to digital connectivity and digital services in India and globally,” Akash Ambani said in the recent Q1 statement.

JioAirFiber, meanwhile, has connected around 14 million homes, with installations running at 60,000 a day.

The numbers illustrate the central feature of Ambani’s strategy — build the infrastructure first, push adoption aggressively, and then use the base as a launch pad for the next business. Telecom, in that sense, is becoming less of an end market and more of an economic and technological foundation.

The next layer is AI. Alongside JPL, Akash Ambani is setting up Reliance Intelligence, and building sovereign AI compute infrastructure in Jamnagar. The initial 120-MW facility is expected to be commissioned by 2026-end. Powered by solar energy, it reflects a strategy to control more of the infrastructure on which India’s next digital cycle could run.

Retail follows a similar trajectory.

Reliance Retail’s FY26 performance offers a clear window into how Ambani turns an opportunity into an ecosystem. The retail business expanded to 20,160 stores spanning 78 million sq. ft, while gross revenue rose 11.8% to ₹3.70 lakh crore in FY26; Ebitda grew 7.9% to ₹27,033 crore, while PAT climbed 12% to ₹13,838 crore.

But the bigger story is the customer and transaction engine.

Registered users increased 11% to 387 million, while transactions surged 39% to 1.93 billion. Smart Bazaar crossed 1,000 stores, and JioMart’s quick commerce network reached more than 3,100 stores across 1,200-plus cities. Average daily orders rose 3.6 times. Fashion and lifestyle e-commerce platform AJIO’s bill value increased 23%, seven-fold in five years.

The playbook is familiar — enter a large opportunity, build infrastructure rapidly and use the group’s ecosystem to compound growth. Retail is no longer just a store network; it is an integrated physical, digital and technology-led consumer platform.

Reliance Consumer follows the same template. Following its demerger in December 2025, revenue doubled in a year. Beverage brand Campa crossed ₹4,700 crore in sales, while daily essentials brand Independence reached ₹2,600 crore. Isha Ambani is targeting a ₹1-lakh-crore revenue business by FY30.

The next opportunity is even larger. RRVL plans to invest ₹30,000 crore over three years in AI-driven integrated food parks across Asia, while expanding exports and pursuing global acquisitions.

The pattern is clear — Ambani keeps searching for the next opportunity and building scale to dominate the market.

RRVL’s expanding customer base, a wider store network and growing omni-channel capabilities position it to fulfil every need of every Indian, every day, Isha Ambani, director, RRVL, said in a recent statement.

In his recent AGM address, Ambani said RIL’s Ebitda will double over the next five years — beyond ₹4 lakh crore by 2031. His confidence is grounded in the conglomerate’s recent growth trajectory: Ebitda doubled over the past five years to ₹2.08 lakh crore in FY26, driven by the expansion of JPL and RRVL.

At 69, Ambani is steadily moving from day-to-day operations towards mentoring the next generation and providing strategic direction. His three children — Isha, Akash and Anant — have completed three years on the RIL board.

“Even as I continue to provide hands-on leadership, the generational transfer of day-to-day management at Reliance is almost complete,” he said.

The roles are clearly defined. Akash leads digital and AI, Isha heads retail and FMCG, while Anant oversees energy and has recently added defence to his portfolio.

Ambani says all three are expanding existing businesses while laying the foundation for new ventures. The ambition is to create businesses capable of generating new opportunities for Reliance and taking its growth global.

That may be perhaps the most important shift underway at Reliance.