Reliance Jio has been Mukesh Ambani's 'dream unfulfilled' for decades

When the Ambani brothers split their father’s business in two parts in 2005, Mukesh Ambani had a hard time letting go of the telecom company Reliance Infocomm, since mobile telephony was all set to grow in leaps and bounds. He had anticipated the growth and had almost made it his personal project, but Anil Ambani walked away with it, renaming it to Reliance Communications (RCom).

It’s been more than a decade to the split, and Mukesh, who meanwhile became India's richest man with an estimated net worth of $23 billion, is all set to relive his long-kept passion. He has re-entered the Indian telecom industry and how.

Also read: How Mukesh Ambani's AGM speech cost other telcos thousands of crores in 45 minutes

The ambitious project, called Jio, might look dreamy, but it’s a dream that the elder Ambani has been seeing for almost six years, asking his team, including his children Isha and Akash, to be careful about the mistakes made in 2002, with Reliance Infocomm. Though this led to Jio being delayed several times, Ambani was okay with the delays, but not with mistakes.

Also read: Reliance Jio has triggered tariff battle; Idea, Vodafone to strike back with attractive pricing

Jio is arguably Ambani’s most ambitious and personal venture after he commissioned the world's largest integrated refinery in Jamnagar, almost two decades back.

"He likes to do things on a large scale which will have large impact. In the initial years, when he had joined Reliance, he was involved in the setting up of the company's refinery, which was the largest project in the country then. During Dhirubhai's times, he was always behind the chair, involved in execution and operations. He had a big hand in creating the giant Reliance," Hemendra Kothari, a doyen of investment banking, told ET.

Image source