Image source, Getty Images
- author, Nikhil Inamdar
- role, BBC Business Correspondent
- Reported by Mumbai
In recent months, Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, has been in the spotlight in India.
It wasn’t any major acquisition he made or any huge charitable donations, but the lavish wedding of his son that captivated the entire country and the world.
The pre-wedding parties, which began in March, have placed the Ambani family firmly at the center of conversations at the breakfast, lunch and dinner tables.
Mukesh Ambani’s youngest son, Anant Ambani, married his longtime girlfriend Radhika Merchant on Friday at the family’s convention centre in Mumbai, the culmination of six months of celebrations across the globe.
Indian weddings are lavish, but the scale and enthusiasm of the Ambani family’s lavish party may eclipse the celebratory frenzy shown by previous royals.
The roster of Bollywood A-listers who attend every party, the multi-million dollar performances by global pop stars like Rihanna and Justin Bieber, and the hordes of A-list dignitaries who flock to the celebrations provide a never-ending source of fodder for the paparazzi.
Consider the global elite who attended the event: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Samsung CEO Han Jung-hee, Bill Gates, former US President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, former British Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Tony Blair, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, and the Kardashian sisters.
“They are very busy people. They’re not just here to have fun,” James Crabtree, author of The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age, told the BBC.
“This shows that global business leaders view the Ambani family as strategically important and see India as a very large market.”
The Ambani family is well known as one of India’s most prominent business families.
They run Reliance Industries, an oil-to-telecoms conglomerate founded by Dhirubhai Ambani, father of Mukesh Ambani, a controversial figure whose history has seen him navigate India’s contentious pre-liberalization politics to make vast fortunes for his company’s shareholders and achieve legendary status.
Dhirubhai died in 2002 and the empire he built was divided between his two sons, Anil and Mukesh, after one of the fiercest succession battles in Indian history.
Since then, the brothers’ fortunes have diverged, with Anil declaring bankruptcy and Mukesh shifting increasingly to consumer businesses while retaining a leading position in Reliance’s mainstay petrochemicals business.
His oil refinery in the western town of Jamnagar is the world’s largest.
In recent years, Reliance has brought some of the world’s most well-known luxury brands to India, from Valentino to Versace, Burberry to Bottega.
The company currently owns the team that plays in the world’s richest cricket tournament and Britain’s leading toy retailer Hamleys.
In 2021, it bought Stoke Park, a historic country club in Buckinghamshire, for £57 million.
Earlier this year, Reliance signed a binding agreement with Disney to combine its entertainment platform, the latest attempt to transform the company’s industry base. The deal gave Mukesh Ambani rights to cricket tournaments and international programming, making him a powerful player in the digital streaming space.
But the conglomerate really started to get into shopping fiat during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it received billions of dollars in investment from over a dozen global companies, including Meta and Google. The plan with Meta was to connect WhatsApp’s over 400 million users in India with its online grocery platform, JioMart.
The company’s aggressive pricing strategy poses a major threat to overseas entrants such as Netflix and Amazon.
Foreign companies competing in the same sector as Reliance have sometimes privately complained about the lack of a level playing field, arguing that the Ambani family are among a select few who benefit from an Indian government policy of awarding preferential contracts to local tycoons.
“Foreign companies face a tough choice,” Crabtree said. “Fight Reliance or partner with Reliance. Zuckerberg chose to partner with them, while Amazon decided to fight. But these fights are often very expensive and the foreign companies end up losing.”
Now, Mukesh Ambani’s next target is financial services, with Reliance set to enter into a joint venture with US-based BlackRock for brokerage and asset management businesses.
Not surprisingly, for the Ambanis, this is much more than just a wedding.
It’s a display of their power and influence, says brand strategy expert Harish Bijoor: “It’s a display of the fact that this family is a magnet for people from all walks of life — business, politics, showbiz.”
He added that the media barrage surrounding the event was also a way to make it a personal event “even more personal for the whole world”, including those who did not receive an invitation, such as consumers of Reliance’s products and services.
If Ambani patriarch Dhirubhai is credited with introducing India’s retail investors to the stock market, his son Mukesh is best known for creating countless connections between his businesses and the average Indian consumer.
So much of what Indians consume today — from the shows they watch to the clothes they wear to how they will do business in the future — comes from the Ambani family.
So what better opportunity than this glitzy wedding to promote their brand to India’s fast-growing consumer base?
And sure enough, the wedding captivated people not only in India but across the world.
