Business Trailblazers of India

It was a breezy yet sunny day of January 28, 2009 when the Greek God of Bollywood (or so he is called) when Hrithik Roshan was faced with a challenge during the shoot of the movie Kites where he had to break a piece of glass with his hands. The upshot was a profusely bleeding Hrithik with his arms slit, and it was a sight. The shoot happening in Filmistan Studio of Goregaon West, it was Papa Roshan’s choice to get him treated at Tina Ambani’s freshly inaugurated hospital Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital. All he did was make a phone call to Tina was in Delhi at the time and lo! All the arrangements were made. For the uninitiated, Hrithik was the first patient to be treated there. But with that incident, there was no looking back. Soon enough, the hospital turned out to be the one of the most preferred hospitals by the celebrities. The multispecialty hospital today has most of the celebrities frequenting the hospital lest any emergency arises. But who all are those, who have be...

Courage doesn’t always roar. It’s a quiet voice in some of us that leads us on telling us to silently keep on going till the hardwork doesn’t pay off and the miracles that we have long believed in do not present themselves to us. For Anil Ambani, this rung true every time his some business developed a chronic fault line. While his other businesses may have suffered wreckage due to colossal debts, owing to his wizardry in the sphere of finance has helped him to make it successful in finance business, if not anything else. Anil ventured into Reliance Capital the finance business with Reliance Capital which he got after the 2002 demerger post his father’s demise.   In 2006, Reliance Capital Ventures Limited merged with Reliance Capital. With this merger the shareholder base of Reliance Capital rose from 0.15 million shareholders to 1.3 million.   At the onset during the years of 2006-2007, Reliance Capital started off as an asset management. During those years, Anil was...

Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines. Once a business magnate, now the chairperson of Reliance Group, Anil Ambani seem to have taken cue from this saying a lot and had continued toeing the line from the problems that kept surfacing in his life. Somehow, his ‘never say die’ conduct has helped him to scramble his way out from the deepest pits of hard luck, failing times, people failing him and dust off all the negativity and start yet again. And this is precisely why his entertainment business is doing phenomenally well even as he walks the tight ropes of debt. Anil made an advent into the world of entertainment in 2005 with his acquisition of a majority share in Adlabs Films. At that time, he looked like a self-starter tapping into the massive potential of the entertainment sector that it had to offer. Albeit he started off with cashing in on with the connections that his wife Tina Ambani already had in the industry, overseas, he carved out a niche for himself and ...

How can people trust the harvest unless they see it sown? For the business tycoon Anil Ambani and the Chairperson of Reliance Group, the seeds of mistrust were sown in such a white-collar fashion that he could judge that the harvest for it would be so faulty, it would do him more loss than it would do him any good. Anil was once a proud owner of a flourishing telecomm business named Reliance Communications.   At that time, the empire lying in wait to be built by Anil with the soon burgeoning telecom stretched out a couple of billion dollars at the time in the form of revenues with a net income of say approximately $7 million, but one may contend here that the business was still in its nascent stage.   One would imagine that with a fast-growing and liberalising India with an incessant longing for electricity and cheap communication, Anil couldn't really lose. But the only quandary over here was more like his other businesses, were capital hungry. R-Com, nonetheless, d...

There’s this story that goes about having a great vision in business. It goes like this: once up on a time there lived 3 fishes in a pond. One was named “Plan Ahead”, another was “Think Fast”, and the third was named “Wait and See”. One day they heard a fisherman say that he was going to cast his net in their pond the next day. Plan Ahead said, “I’m swimming down the river tonight!” and so he did. Think Fast said, “I’m sure I’ll come up with a plan.” Wait and See lazily said, “I just can’t think about it now!” When the fisherman cast his nets, Plan Ahead was long gone. But “Think Fast” and “Wait and See” were caught! Think Fast quickly rolled his belly up and pretended to be dead. “Oh, this fish is no good!” said the fisherman, and threw him safely back into the water. But, Wait and See ended up in the fish market. That is why they say, “In times of danger, when the net is cast, plan ahead or plan to think fast!” The moral of the story is too obvious yet it states one thing...