A leadership change for one of the richest corporate families in the world was announced on Tuesday when Akash Ambani, Mukesh Ambani’s son, was named chairman of the board of Reliance Jio. A day after his father’s resignation, Akash Ambani, 30, a non-executive director of Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd., was named chairman, the firm announced in an exchange filing. Mukesh Ambani will continue to serve as the chairman of Jio Platforms Ltd., the parent company of all Reliance Jio digital services businesses.
Mukesh Ambani hinted last year that his children will assume more responsibility, but Tuesday’s declaration was the first time he did it in writing. Along with overseeing other significant acquisitions, Akash Ambani was a member of the teams that negotiated investment into the parent company of Jio by Meta Platforms Inc., formerly known as Facebook Inc.
The promotion of Akash Ambani coincides with the Reliance group’s shift away from fossil fuel profitability and toward consumer products. Since Jio’s 2016 debut, when low-cost data sparked a price war that drove several competitors out of the market and transformed earnings into losses, the Indian telecom sector has been rattled. Jio, which began by providing mobile teleservices, has since made significant investments in services like internet access and formed partnerships with handset manufacturers to introduce low-cost devices and offer 5G services.
Plan for Mukesh Ambani’s Succession
Mukesh Ambani has spent years researching how wealthy families, handed their wealth down to succeeding generations. That process has recently been more intense; according to reports last year, Mukesh Ambani was looking at a plan to make sure his enterprise, which is worth over $200 billion, is not torn apart in a succession conflict.
Akash Ambani is a former student of economics at Brown University in the United States. In a spectacular ceremony, he wed Shloka Mehta, his childhood sweetheart and the daughter of a diamond trader and jeweller from Mumbai, in March 2019. The couple welcomed their son Prithvi in 2020.
Image Credit: flickr.com
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