What does the future hold for Reliance, India’s biggest firm?

business calendar has only one contender to rival Berkshire Hathaway’s famous shareholder gathering. The subcontinent’s equivalent of that “Woodstock for capitalists” is the annual general meeting of Reliance Industries. Like Warren Buffett’s shindig it usually features a celebratory crowd of devoted investors (although not the same quality of corporate-finance insights). The company’s founder, Dhirubhai Ambani, an upstart entrepreneur from Gujarat, was also an outsider with a nose for opportunities. He built India’s largest company from a humble trading and textiles firm into a vast conglomerate. It has continued to expand after his death under the leadership of his son Mukesh Ambani and today encompasses petrochemicals, refining, telecoms, a shopping app and retail stores—among other things. The importance of the resulting entity to India is impossible to overstate. With a market value of $206bn, the firm’s revenues are the equivalent of 3% of the country’s . Among India’s largest 500 public companies, it is responsible for 6% of sales and profits, 7% of total capitalisation and a staggering 18% of capital investment. Jio, the telecoms division, provides service to 410m Indians, and is the latest in a series of massive, stomach-churning capital-intensive bets that have paid off over the years. The retail operations are by far the largest in India, encompassing 15,000 shops. Its refinery and petrochemicals operation in the north-west of the country is among the biggest in the world. In short, any change at Reliance affects India as a whole—and it appears that change may well be on the way.