Isha Ambani, Anand Piramal's Dec wedding has the undertones of a royal wedding in the making

Business stole a march over Bollywood last week when the buzz around the engagement of Isha Ambani with Anand Piramal overshadowed the Sonam Kapoor-Anand Ahuja wedding.

After all, Isha is the daughter of Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani and Anand is the son of Piramal Group chief Ajay Piramal. The marriage, due in December, of the scions of two big business families has the undertones of a royal wedding in the making.


The bonhomie between the families of Mukesh Ambani and Ajay Piramal started much before the children were born. The ties are almost three decades old. In the eighties, the Piramal House, the original family house of the Piramal Group promoters, was where Mukesh Ambani would come to court Nita.

Ajay Piramal’s wife Swati had recounted those meetings in an earlier interview to ET Magazine. Nita is related to the Piramal family, through one of Swati’s sister-in-laws. These meetings helped the couples form a friendship and led them to also spending time together — like for instance when the four visited Antarctica in the mid-nineties.

It is most likely a coincidence that the businesses led by the two families were eyeing similar sectors earlier in this decade. It was in 2011, Mukesh Ambani had said, that the idea of setting up Jio was firmed up in his mind, after a conversation with daughter Isha, who was then studying at Yale.

Isha had complained that the quality internet connectivity at home was poor when compared with what she was used to in Yale. It encouraged Mukesh Ambani to his second foray into telecom. The first one was demerged in 2005. In 2012, RIL announced a tie-up with Himachal Futuristic, which had bagged a pan-India 4G licence. And Reliance Jio was launched in 2016.

When Mukesh Ambani was thinking of entering telecom, Ajay Piramal had already dipped his toe in the sector. In 2011, the Piramal group invested Rs 5,864 crore for an 11% stake in Vodafone. A year ago, Piramal had sold the domestic pharmaceutical formulations business to Abbott for about Rs 16,000 crore. Many analysts were trying to make sense of the Vodafone investment of the cash-rich company. They started wondering if Piramal was serious about a telecom play.

Ajay Piramal clarified in an interview with ET Magazine recently that the investment was indeed an entry into a new area — the structured finance business — but not telecom, as many had thought it to be. Piramal sold the Vodafone stake in 2014 for Rs 8,900 crore, a 52% gain.

Ajay Piramal then bought stakes in multiple Shriram Group companies, expanding the group’s presence in financial services, and subsequently growing that business into multiple areas, such as home loans. Financial services has slowly emerged as one of the pillars of the Piramal Group. This was another area where, like Piramal, Mukesh Ambani, too, saw an opportunity, and at the same time.

In 2011, Reliance Industries had reentered the financial services business by inking a joint venture with global financial services firm DE Shaw. After brothers Mukesh and Anil split the Reliance Group in 2005, a non-compete agreement was signed. This pact was annulled in 2010, allowing Mukesh Ambani the freedom to enter telecom and financial services (businesses that had gone with his brother in 2005). But DE Shaw scaled down its India ambitions after 2013 and Reliance Industries prioritised telecom over financial services. Riding on its telecom platform, it started its financial services play, Jio Payments Bank, in April.

Business Interest
The one Piramal business where Mukesh Ambani had a say in, albeit, an indirect manner was real estate. Ajay Piramal was already dabbling in it for a while. But a discussion with Mukesh Ambani steered the young Anand into the sector.

Anand was yet to make up his mind between joining the family businesses and going back to New York to make a career as a banker. The junior Piramal had tried his hand with a healthcare venture in 2008, which was later subsumed into the Piramal corporate social responsibility umbrella.

He was unsure of what he should do, when the RIL chairman told him he should make up his mind fast and achieve some of his goals before turning 30. This made Anand Piramal focus on Piramal Realty. The group raised money from Warburg Pincus and has made it one of the most promising businesses in the Piramal stable.

Now, it is probably the turn of Isha Ambani to decide her career choice. She sits on the boards of Reliance Retail and Reliance Jio Infocomm. It remains to be seen if she will carry on with those duties after her marriage or decide to pick up on a new business, like Anand.