RIL’s rise to Rs 6 lakh crore market capitalisation

Reliance Industries hit a staggering Rs 6 lakh crore market cap in intra-day trade on Tuesday. (Image: Reuters)

Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Ltd reached a new milestone today, as the company’s market capitalisation topped a staggering Rs 6 lakh crore, even as the shares hit all-time high levels. Reliance Industries shares hit a fresh all-time high of Rs 947.7 on NSE which helped the company to achieve this new feat of crossing the Rs 6 lakh crore market-capitalisation for the first time ever. At such a market capitalisation, Reliance Industries is India’s most valued company far ahead of TCS which has a market capitalisation of Rs 4.95 lakh crore. (Track RIL’s live stock price)

Interestingly, in this year alone RIL has added more than Rs 2 lakh crore to its market capitalisation. On February 27th this year, RIL crossed the 4 lakh crore market capitalisation, and very soon rose to Rs 5 lakh crore, to trump TCS to become India’s most valued company in July this year.

The oil-to-telecom conglomerate had the unique distinction of being India’s most valued company in 2007 too, when the BSE Sensex had crossed the 20,000 mark. The company was the second-most valuable company when the benchmark index had touched 10,000 for the first time in 2006. Though the RIL stock had been underperforming the benchmark for almost eight years till April this year, there had been a sudden spurt in its movement following the launch of its telecom subsidiary Reliance Jio, which started generating cash. RIl shares have returned more than 68% since January, compared to BSE Sensex returns of 22% in the same period. Notably, the shares are up by more than 25% in the last three months alone. Reliance Industries ranks 203rd in Fortune Global 500 list, a ranking based on total revenue. RIL is one among the only 7 Indian companies in the list.

At International Advertising Association’s (IAA) Leadership Awards held in October this year, Mukesh Ambani shared his insights on the company’s rise, “Reliance completes 40 years of being a public company. I have been fortunate to be part of the journey from year one. I still remember that when I started off, I was a student of chemical engineering. At that time Reliance was less than 5 million dollars in enterprise value. And in 40 years within India, as an Indian company, we are now over 250 billion dollar in enterprise value. That has been a phenomenal journey,” Mukesh Ambani said.  

Elaborating on the vision of Dhirubhai Ambani to always invest in the businesses of the future, Mukesh Ambani said, “He (Dhirubhai Ambani) founded Reliance and he believed in the principle that as Reliance we will always remain invested in the businesses of the future and will always invest in talent. Over the last 40 years, we have done that. We believe in the power of youth. One consistent thing is that over the last 40 years, the average age at Reliance has consistently remained at around 30 years.”

The Chairman and MD of Reliance Industries, Mukesh Ambani also recently topped the Forbes India Rich list 2017 with a staggering net worth of $38 billion. Notably, he topped the charts for the tenth consecutive time, as is likely to remain there, as Azim Premji, the second in the list has half the net worth at $19 billion, according to Forbes.