Mukesh Ambani
Chairman and Managing Director
Reliance Industries Limited
Mukesh Ambani holds a chemical engineering degree from the University of Bombay
and pursued an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is the son of
Dhirubhai H. Ambani, founder chairman of the company. Mr. Ambani joined Reliance
in 1981. He directed and led the creation of the world’s largest grassroots petroleum
refinery at Jamnagar, India. He is also steering Reliance’s initiatives in deep water oil and
gas exploration and production programs, and setting up a second petroleum refinery
at Jamnagar.
Mr. Ambani had set up one of the largest and most complex information and communications
technology initiatives in the world in the form of Reliance Infocomm Limited (now
Reliance Communications Limited). He is the chairman of Reliance Petroleum Limited
and Reliance Retail Limited, and a director of Reliance Europe Limited and Pratham
India Education Initiative.
Mr. Ambani is a member of the Prime Minister’s Council on Trade and Industry,
Government of India, and the board of governors of the National Council of Applied
Economic Research, New Delhi. He is a member of the Indo-U.S. CEOs Forum, the
international advisory board of Citigroup, the international advisory board of the National
Board of Kuwait, and the McKinsey Advisory Council. He is the chairman of the board
of governors of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and a member of the
advisory council of the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai.
His honors include the U.S.-India Business Council’s 2007 Global Vision Award for
Leadership, the 2006 Business Leader of the Year Award by the Economic Times (India),
the Asia Society’s 2004 Leadership Award (Washington D.C.), the India Business
Leadership Award by CNBC-TV18 in 2007, and the first Global Indian Leader Award
by NDTV-Profit from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2006. In addition, Mr. Ambani
was cochair at the 2006 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland; he was ranked 42nd
among the World’s Most Respected Business Leaders and second among the four Indian
CEOs featured in a survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers and published in the
Financial Times, London, in 2004; he was invited to be a member of the World Business
Council for Sustainable Development as the only Indian CEO council member; and
he was conferred the World Communication Award for the Most Influential Person in
Telecommunications by Total Telecom in 2004. He was conferred an honorary doctorate
by the Maharaja Sayajirao University in 2007.