NAME: Mukesh Ambani AGE: 48 years DESIGNATION: CMD GROUP: Reliance Industries

You have to hand it to Mukesh Ambani; he doesn't do things by halves. When he gave up his telecom baby to younger brother Anil as part of a family settlement, the market waited with bated breath for the next big announcement from the original Reliance empire. The announcement didn't come, but details of the group's retail plans still trickled out in the media. It was typically Reliance-ambitious, gargantuan and expensive as hell. The elder Ambani plans to roll out an all-India chain of hyper malls, some of them spread over 100 acres; each mall will have food courts, shopping centres and multiplexes; some will even house hotels and hospitals. The rollout schedule: five years; the tab: over Rs 25,000 crore; the turnover target: Rs 90,000 crore.

The span and scale of the plan is vintage Reliance! It's going to be a Herculean effort, but Ambani has an enviable reputation in project implementation; it's something he's earned the hard way under his father's guidance - Dhirubhai Ambani's elder son personally supervised the commissioning of Reliance's first petrochemical unit at Patalganga in the early eighties and has, since, been involved as the hands-on leader of every mega project that Reliance has put up. But the retail rollout is really just a portion of the bigger picture at Reliance. The company is in the process of rolling out a network of 5,849 petrol pumps all over the country, and is spending Rs 25,000 crore on doubling the capacity of its Jamnagar refinery to 60 million tonnes.

Insiders say Mukesh, who is shy and cerebral by nature, is a very hands-on, tech-savvy leader who likes to go deep into issues. He is also comfortable delegating real authority to a small band of handpicked executives and associates. So what's next? He's said to be burning the midnight oil strategising a multi-billion dollar global takeover in the petrochemical sector. When that happens, Reliance will have truly arrived on the world stage.