Creating A Colossus
Reliance prepares for a competitive era with a mega merger that catapults it into the Fortune 500
From the time he started work as a 17-year-old attendant at a gasoline station in Aden to last week when he implemented Project Aden, Dhirubhai Ambani, patriarch of Reliance Industries, has always nursed dreams on a gigantic scale.
On Friday, a day after the Union Budget, he finally achieved his ambition of entering the hallowed Fortune 500 club. When the group announced the merger of the Rs 30,963 crore Reliance Petroleum Ltd (RPL) with Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) to become a Rs 60,000 crore turnover behemoth, it was once again the reiteration of the fact that size matters.
The merger, codenamed Project Aden, makes RIL the second-largest Indian firm after public sector oil major Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) in terms of market capitalisation, sales, net profits and assets. It will also be the country