Mukesh Ambani will stay as chairman of Jio Platforms Ltd. The main company that owns all Jio digital service brands, including Reliance Jio Infocomm.
Akash Ambani, the son of Mukesh Ambani, the new chairman of the board at Reliance Jio on Tuesday. This is a change in leadership for one of the richest business families in the world. Akash Ambani, who is 30 years old, was previously a non-executive director at Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. A day after his father quit, the company said in an exchange filing that Akash was named chairman. Mukesh Ambani will stay as chairman of Jio Platforms Ltd. The main company that owns all Jio digital service brands, including Reliance Jio Infocomm.
Mukesh Ambani took a back seat for the first time when he announced Tuesday. Last year, he said that his children would take on more responsibilities.
Akash Ambani part of the team that got Meta Platforms Inc. Which used to be Facebook Inc., to invest in Jio’s parent company. He also led other important acquisitions.
Kavil Ramachandran, professor and executive director of the Thomas Schmidheiny Centre for Family Enterprise at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, told Reuters, “This is another clear sign that Mukesh Ambani is taking the next step in redefining his role with the group.”
“I hope he has made sure to make this work by putting more people on Akash’s team.”
Akash Ambani’s promotion comes when the Reliance group is moving away from fossil fuels and toward consumer products.
Since its launch in 2016, Jio has shaken up India’s telecom industry. When it started offering cheap data, it caused a price war that drove some competitors out of the market and turned their profits into losses.
Since then, Jio, which started by offering mobile teleservices, has been putting a lot of money into services like broadband internet and making deals with phone makers to make low-cost smartphones and 5G services.
Plan B for Mukesh Ambani’s family
Mukesh Ambani has studied how billionaire families like the Waltons and the Kochs passed on their wealth to the next generation.
Recently, this process has gotten worse. Last year, Bloomberg said that Mukesh Ambani was looking for a plan to ensure that his empire, worth more than $200 billion, doesn’t fall apart in succession wars.
Akash Ambani went to Brown University in the United States to study economics.
In March 2019, he married his childhood sweetheart Shloka Mehta, the daughter of a diamond trader and jeweller in Mumbai. They had a son, Prithvi, in 2020.
