Image source, Getty Images
- Author, Nikhil Inamdar
- Role, BBC Business Correspondent
- Reporting from Mumbai
Over the past few months, Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani has been attracting attention in India.
Not because he had completed a major acquisition or given a large charity check, but because of his son’s extravagant wedding celebration that had captivated the nation and the world.
The pre-wedding festivities, which began in March, have put the Ambani family at the center of many conversations over breakfasts, lunches and dinners.
Anant Ambani, Mukesh Ambani’s youngest son, tied the knot with his long-time girlfriend Radhika Merchant at a family-owned convention center in Mumbai on Friday, culminating six months of celebrations that have spanned the globe.
Weddings in India can be extravagant, but the scale and size of the Ambani party may have surpassed the celebratory fervour displayed by royals of old.
The presence of Bollywood stars who are always present at every party, the multi-million dollar performances by global pop stars like Rihanna and Justin Bieber, and the hordes of VVIP guests of honor who attend the celebrations have become a source of endless laughter for the paparazzi.
Consider some of the global elite who attended the event – Meta’s Mark Zuckerburg, Samsung CEO Han-Jong Hee, Bill Gates, former US President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, former British prime ministers Boris Johnson and Sir Tony Blair, FIFA president Gianni Infantino and the Kardashian sisters.
“They were very busy people. They didn’t come just 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 believe that the Ambani family is strategically important and they also see India as a very large market.”
The Ambani family is often described as India’s most prominent business family.
They run Reliance Industries, the oil-to-telecoms conglomerate founded by Mukesh Ambani’s father, Dhirubhai Ambani — a man with a controversial legacy who achieved legendary status for deftly navigating India’s controversial pre-liberalization policies, while creating enormous wealth for his companies’ shareholders.
Dhirubhai died in 2002, and the empire he founded was divided between his two sons – Anil and Mukesh – after what could be described as one of India’s most bitter succession battles.
Since then, the fortunes of the two brothers have diverged, with the younger Anil declaring bankruptcy and Mukesh increasingly turning to consumer-facing businesses, although retaining his leading position in Reliance’s mainstay – petrochemicals.
Its oil refinery in the western city of Jamnagar is the largest in the world.
In recent years, Reliance has brought some of the world’s most famous luxury brands to India, from Valentino to Versace and Burberry to Bottega.
Among other things, the company now owns a team in the world’s richest cricket tournament and iconic British toy retailer Hamleys.
In 2021, the company acquired historic country club Stoke Park in Buckinghamshire for £57 million.
Earlier this year, Reliance signed a binding agreement to merge its entertainment platform with Disney, in its latest attempt to change the company’s industry landscape. The deal establishes Mukesh Ambani as a formidable player in the digital streaming space, with rights to international cricket tournaments and shows.
But the conglomerate really started its shopping spree during the Covid-19 pandemic, when it secured billions of dollars in investment from more than a dozen global players, including Meta and Google. Its plan with Meta is to connect more than 400 million WhatsApp users in India with its online shopping platform JioMart.
The company’s aggressive pricing strategy has posed a serious challenge to foreign entrants such as Netflix and Amazon.
Privately, foreign players, who compete in the same sector as Reliance, sometimes complain about a lack of equality, claiming the Ambani family is among the few who benefit from Indian government policies that give preferential contracts to local tycoons.
“Foreign players face a difficult choice,” Mr. Crabtree said. “They can either fight Reliance or ally with Reliance. Zuckerburg has chosen to partner with them, while Amazon has chosen to fight. But these battles are often very costly, and the foreigners end up losing.”
Now, Mukesh Ambani’s next target is financial services, with Reliance forming a joint venture with US-based BlackRock for its brokerage and wealth management business.
So it’s no surprise that for the Ambani family, this is more than just a wedding.
It’s a show of the power and influence they have, says Harish Bijoor, a brand strategy specialist. “It’s a show of the fact that this family is a magnet that attracts people from all walks of life — business, politics and entertainment.”
The media blitz around it, he added, was also a way for them to make private events “more personal to the rest of the world” – consumers of Reliance products and services, for example – who would never get an invitation.
If Ambani patriarch Dhirubhai is credited with introducing the stock market to India’s retail investors, his son Mukesh is best known for creating multiple touchpoints between his business and the average Indian consumer.
Much of what Indians consume today, from the shows they watch, the clothes they wear, and possibly even the way they transact in the future, comes from the Ambani house.
And that is why there is no better event than a stunning wedding for a family to market its brand to India’s growing consumer class.
And sure enough, the wedding has captivated many people in India and around the world.
