Throughout history, endeavours to partition shared wealth has always been tricky, dividing families and estranging siblings, leaving a trail of bitterness and loss of focus, lost opportunities and decay and decline of enterprises.
India is replete with stories of brothers killing each other for kingdoms in the past. In this era of people’s rule, when kingdoms no longer exist, brothers and sisters fight out for their share in ancestral property or a family-run business empire.
One of the classic examples was the feud between the Ambani brothers — Mukesh and Anil — in 2004 over Rs 94.968 crores worth of shared business empire.
Nearly 20 years after the division of the business empire that his father Dhirubhai Ambani built, Mukesh Ambani, who found himself staring at the same question once again on how to divide his Rs 16.36 lakh crore empire between his three children, seems to have created a great example of a benchmark-worthy succession plan.
He was determined to chart out a smooth succession plan for his two sons and a daughter, in a way as to not lead to any conflict or doubt. He broadly divided his business empire into three broad segments — energy, retail and digital. He set the succession planning in motion in 2021 by inducting his elder son Akash into Reliance Jio Infocomm, daughter Isha into retail and youngest son Anant into the new energy business.
As a next step, the three Ambani siblings were inducted into the board of Reliance Industries — the mothership of the Reliance empire — as “non-executive directors”. While 66-year-old Mukesh Ambani will continue to remain the chairman of the Reliance Group for another five years, he could take more steps to formalise his succession planning to ensure that his children do not have to endure any protracted family feuds.
Though the exact format of succession is not clear, Mukesh Ambani is likely to instal guardrails to ensure that his children manage their respective businesses without any interference from others. If Mukesh Ambani succeeds in this endeavour, he will set a new template for the Indian business houses to follow in the future.
