The Greenliness of Mukesh Ambani: Sincere or Synthetic?

Like the royalty of yore, Mukesh Ambani, Chairman & Managing Director, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), carries many epithets. Business tycoon, Billionaire Businessman, Asia’s Richest Man, Richest Indian for the past 14 years, and so on. Depending on the headwinds of the bourses, Mukesh Ambani’s net worth falls or rises by a few billion dollars on a daily basis, more than the GDP of Polynesian countries like Tonga, Tuvalu, or Samoa. He is the CMD of RIL and the largest shareholder (50.4%) in the $200 Billion (in market capitalization) multinational conglomerate. So when Mukesh Ambani speaks, the world pays attention.

Though Mukesh Ambani owns many media entities, he seems to be reticent. He seldom gives interviews, except when he is making a big-ticket announcement, like Facebook or Google investing in the company. But the one time he does speak is at the annual general meeting (AGM) of RIL. This tradition was established by his father, Late Dhirubhai Ambani, many decades back. Through his speech, one gets a snapshot of RIL’s performance and a hint at which direction it is heading. For instance, at an AGM a few years back, Ambani had laid down the plans of moving into the telecom space with Jio. In a short span of 3-4 years, Jio has become the largest telecom operator in India, crossing the 400 million subscriber mark and garnering approximately $20 Billion in investments. No wonder everyone pays attention when Mukesh Ambani gives his speech at the AGM, its even broadcast live on news channels (many of which are owned by him) in its entirety.

Interestingly, there has been a subtle shift in the content of the address made by the CMD in the past couple of years. While it has retained all the basics of investments, profits, family, wealth creation, children, and so on, there’s also the talk of sustainability, nature, and the environment. Now, for a company that owns the biggest crude oil refinery in the world, also known as the de facto petroleum hub of the world. Not-to-forget, RIL is also ranked as the 8th globally top producer of single-use plastics, with a total annual contribution of almost 3.18 MT, accounting for nearly 56% of India’s single-use plastic production. So, when Mukesh Ambani talks about a shift to a green future, one really wonders about the route the company will take. At the last year AGM, Ambani had announced that RIL would turn net zero in carbon emissions by 2035.

This year, at the 44th AGM, the green quotient of the speech has higher; many more concrete ideas were shared by Ambani that gave an inclination of the company’s route. Indeed, as can be expected by Asia’s richest man, there were quite a handful of big-ticket announcements.

• Launch of world’s largest green energy complex to be set up Jamnagar along with four Giga factories with an investment overlay of 75,000 crores ($10 Billion)
• Strident investment in solar, as the company aims to enable at least 100 GW of solar energy by 2030
• Investment in Hydrogen fuel cells and solar modules

“The age of fossil fuels cannot continue much longer, our world has only one option rapid transition to green energy. It is not enough to be carbon neutral, we need to drastically cut emissions. We are launching a new energy business with the aim of bridging green energy divided between India and globally”

Mukesh Ambani (44th AGM)

With a world beset by global warming and climate change challenges, companies like RIL have come under increased pressure to adopt green, even as they need to cut down on their carbon footprint. According to a story in Aljazeera, Ambani was ranked fourth among global fossil-fuel billionaires by Bloomberg Green last year. This only makes it all the more urgent for him to show his green shades.

But then, there are many shades of green, and it can mean different things to different people. From an environmentally conscious way of doing business to making profits through green products, it could be anything under the sun. So, it becomes incumbent to analyze what exactly Ambani means when he lays out the roadmap of a green future. Since there are no interviews or Q&As, one has to rely on the speech made at the AGM and try to create the overall picture.

One empirical way to build a picture is to make a word cloud based on broad terminology. The repeated usage of terms can be an indication of the amount of seriousness of the speaker. A person contemplating or projecting a particular ideal will keep talking about it in different manners. Also, to evaluate a shift, a simple comparison with a speech made by the same person in the past can be a good starting point.

Yet, let me reiterate, repetition analysis or word clouds are not the best way to make a pronouncement; they are only indications of what could possibly be.

First, let’s begin with analyzing the speech that Mukesh Ambani made last year at the 43rd AGM. But, first, take a look at the word cloud below:

A cursory look at the chart, and one can easily find that Ambani was not sure about which green route to take last year. There’s much emphasis on the words Energy, Planet, Chemical, Carbon, Clean, Petrochemical. All these words seem a bit all over the place. This could mean that RIL was still formulating its green strategy and figuring out what to do.

Now, let’s shift our focus to the latest AGM, namely the 44th one. First, here’s a look at the word cloud:

The words that stand out this time are Energy, Green, Renewable, Solar, Carbon. If you look at the set, one sees a pattern. All of them talk about an energy shift. Simply put, RIL’s idea of going green means embracing a new business line, namely renewable energy (solar). The ethos of green, per se, is centered around profitability and growth.

The shift from last year to this year becomes all the more apparent when you put the two-word clouds together, like here:

The Green Vision could simply mean greener (read better) business. Ambani gave an idea of that vision when he spoke about setting up a Renewable Energy Project Finance Division that will finance projects by building a platform to source long-term global capital. He even sought support from banking institutions and green funds to aid in this endeavor. That’s the green picture.

Terms that denote seriousness of purpose like sustainability, climate change, pollution, circular economy hardly find any mention in the speeches made by Ambani. For a company to go genuinely green, it needs to change at its very core. Given the nature of its core business — which is detrimental to the planet per se– the challenge for RIL even more exacerbated. 

But then, defying conventions is not unusual for Ambani. After failing in his first telecom launch (subsequently charted to younger brother as part of the settlement), Ambani has created a new behemoth. There are no resources or talent that RIL can not source if it decides to make a foray. In the end, what’s really needed is a genuine intent, a realization of purpose, a feeling of responsibility. Building Billion Dollar houses, gifting a customized airplane to the spouse, or marrying off the daughter by spending 100s of crores is one way to be remembered. But there’s one more way of leaving a legacy, by creating an impact by touching lives. Isn’t that why we still respect Tata’s name, even though it has been more than a century since Jamshetji Tata, the founder, left this world. It all depends on how you wish to be remembered as…