The handover of the day-to-day operations of Reliance Industries Ltd to the third generation of the founding Ambani family is near complete, chairman Mukesh Ambani said at the company’s 49th annual general meeting (AGM).
Ambani’s three children—Isha (34), Akash (34) and Anant (31)—who have been on the Reliance Industries board for three years now, will look after the company’s consumer, technology and energy businesses, respectively, he said.
Ambani, 69, said the next generation of promoters have the same “founder’s mindset” that he had when he took over 25 years ago. They will also have his guidance and mentorship as well as that of the company’s other directors, allaying potential shareholder concerns over the transition. Moreover, the company has trained around 500 leaders in their 30s and 40s to assist the next generation, he added.
“Even as I continue to provide hands-on leadership, the generational transfer of day-to-day management at Reliance is almost complete,” Ambani said in his address.
Although carefully scripted, investors keenly follow the Reliance chairperson’s AGM speech, as it is one of the rare occasions where he directly speaks to shareholders on camera.
Ambani rejected any potential concern over whether the group’s businesses would go separate ways under the next generation: “While leading individual business verticals, they are simultaneously working towards the holistic growth of everything under the Reliance ecosystem. They are three bodies, one soul. Their soul is Reliance. One single indivisible Reliance.”
Just over two decades ago, the Reliance group split into two separate business groups, after the sudden demise of founder Dhirubhai Ambani.
On Friday, shares closed 1.39% lower on the BSE at ₹1,309.35, compared with a 0.78% slip in benchmark Sensex. It has lost nearly 17% since the beginning of 2026. The Reliance scrip has lost between 1% and 2.3% on four out of the previous five AGMs, making an exceptional 1.64% gain in 2024.
“There have been talks of demerging three verticals (retail, energy and telecom) for a long time, and it is likely to happen now that Jio’s IPO DRHP is out. However, it does not appear, as of now, that this demerger is a legal segregation of business and ownership between the siblings. In other words, whether through the parent company or another structure, the Ambanis plan to keep legal ownership joint. Definitely not now, but in the longer term, this may make the markets nervous, since any dispute will jeopardize operations across all verticals. That is why Mr Ambani probably wants to make it clear that no such possibility exists and that the Reliance group has proven that siblings can remain under one legal umbrella, function autonomously, and succeed,” said Ajit Joshi, chartered accountant and professor of finance at L.N. Welingkar Institute of Management Development and Research.
Aiming for the bourses and the stars
The biggest AGM announcement was the one regarding the initial public offering of Jio Platforms Ltd, which operates the country’s largest mobile services provider Jio. The third-generation promoters were leading the Jio IPO process, Ambani said.
Jio was considering a plan to go toe-to-toe with American trillionaire Elon Musk’s Starlink with its own fleet of low-earth orbit communication satellites, Akash Ambani said at the meeting. “Jio connected India on the ground. Now, we must connect India from the skies.”
Simultaneously, the telco was also considering leasing satellite capacity from global constellation providers to speed up its satellite internet market entry, he said. To that end, Jio was already building ground station infrastructure in India, he said.
On the artificial intelligence (AI) front, Reliance Intelligence, the AI arm of the company, is looking to operationalize 120-megawatts of data centre capacity at Jamnagar in Gujarat by the end of 2026, Akash Ambani said. This is the first time that Reliance has put a date to having functional AI data centre ambitions, three years after it first disclosed its ambitions at the 2023 AGM.
Besides having the infrastructure that runs AI, Reliance Intelligence is also working on AI applications in partnership with global companies. This includes an AI voice agent that will be paired with Jio’s voice calling service that works in key Indian languages. While a demo was showcased at the AGM, the actual service would only be launched to Jio subscribers later this year, he said.
Delays in the desert
While Jio is aiming for the stars, literally, Reliance’s clean energy ambitions in Jamnagar and in the deserts of Kutch continue to be marred by delays. The company’s solar cell and module plant in Jamnagar is operational, but remains far off the target of ramping up to 20GW-per year capacity by 2026, as stated in 2022. Nor is there any firm timeline to complete backward integration with manufacturing of wafers, ingots and polysilicon, the precursors to cells.
Reliance is setting up a renewable energy farm spread across 550,000 acres of Kutch desert land. It had guided in 2022 to have 20GW of renewable energy capacity by 2025, but the latest guidance has been revised down to 120MW by the end of 2026 before being ramped up.
Similar delays are present in Reliance’s planned energy storage battery facility, 40 GWh capacity of which is expected to be operational by the end of 2026. All the equipment for the facility had reached the site, the company said.
The new energy business will begin to meaningfully contribute to the financial performance of Reliance Industries from FY27 onwards, Anant Ambani said at the AGM.
Reliance’s retail business plans to set up a manufacturing platform, said Isha Ambani, spanning beverages, daily essentials, fresh fruits and vegetables, electronics and garments. The company will also set up an exports platform to reign in India’s current account deficit, she said. However, she did not elaborate how these platforms will function.
Meanwhile, the stated target of Reliance Consumer Products Ltd, the fast-moving consumer goods division, to achieve ₹1 trillion in revenues by FY30 remains a priority, she said. The company reported revenues of ₹22,000 crore in FY26, which was double the previous year.