Mukesh Ambani: the Indian billionaire eyeing global expansion

Mukesh Ambani is already the richest man in India by a large margin, but his ambitions do not end there. He wants India to be at the front of the world’s next great leap forward.

Mukesh Ambani © Subhankar Chakraborty/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
(Image credit: © Subhankar Chakraborty/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

Bad news for lovers of British department stores, says Bloomberg: India’s richest man has lost interest in Debenhams. Reports that Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail had emerged as a leading suitor for the dowdy chain, which collapsed into administration for the second time in a year in April, always seemed somewhat surprising. Ambani, after all, has plenty of other stuff to be getting on with – not least consolidating the extraordinary economic power he has amassed in India, where his Reliance conglomerate, juiced by a game-changing move into digital technology, is now increasingly described as “a state within a state”. As a former employee told the Financial Times: Ambani “wants to be Netflix, he wants to be Alibaba…He wants to be everything”.

Leading the fourth industrial revolution

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.