Blood, sweat and now, tears @Ambani Inc

Blood, sweat and now, tears @Ambani Inc

Bloomberg

April 26: Producing $22.6 bn in revenue in 2004 and contributing 3.5% of India's GDP, Reliance reached the top of the business world through a policy that its founder Dhirubhai Ambani spelled out: ‘If its not the biggest, its not worth my while.’ All of that is in danger as sons Mukesh and Anil don't see eye to eye on politics, or their lifestyles, let alone the direction in which they want to take Reliance. On a trip to India's west coast before his death in July 2002, Reliance Industries Ltd. Founder Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani surveyed the mango trees separating the company's Jamnagar oil refinery, No. 3 in the world, from a highway. The 66,000 trees not only served as a green buffer; they also gave India's largest non-government company another thing to brag about: owning the country's biggest mango grove. Ambani, 69, popularly known as Dhirubhai, wanted more. ``Reliance doesn't work like that,'' I.M. Thimaiah, Reliance's vice president in charge of agriculture, recalls the chairman saying. ``I want it to be the biggest in the world.'' Thimaiah discovered that four centuries ago, Mogul Emperor Akbar had owned 100,000 mango trees, making him the record holder. Thimaiah ordered 36,800 more trees for Jamnagar, eliminating any doubt about Reliance's place in history. ``We thought, `We'll make Dhirubhai the new emperor,''' Thimaiah says. Three years after Dhirubhai's death, his empire is in peril of splitting apart, endangering an icon in which one of every four Indian investors owns stock. Dhirubhai's two sons are feuding over who will run Reliance's interests in oil and gas exploration, petroleum refining, chemical manufacturing, telecommunications and power generation. The businesses produced $22.6 billion in revenue last year and contributed 3.5 percent of India's gross domestic product. Reliance is scheduled to report fourth-quarter earnings for the period ended March 31 on Wednesday. Mukesh and Anil Mukesh Ambani, 47, a chemical engineering graduate from Mumbai University who loves street food and shuns the limelight, took over as chairman. Vice Chairman Anil Ambani, 45, is a Parliament member and was MTV India's Youth Icon for 2003. The two don't see eye to eye on politics or their lifestyles, let alone the direction in which they want to take Reliance. Mukesh shuttles 46 kilometers (29 miles) by helicopter between Reliance's 140-acre (57-hectare) campus at Vashi on the outskirts of Mumbai and the chairman's office in the city's financial center at Nariman Point. Anil divides his time between offices in Ballard Estate, a Mumbai business district with European facades, and the steel-and-glass headquarters of power company Reliance Energy Ltd. Their mother, Kokila Ambani, is attempting mediation, spokesmen for the brothers say. Mukesh and Anil declined to comment for this story. Demystifying the Market By the time the brothers joined Reliance in the early 1980s, Dhirubhai had helped demystify the secrets of investing in India's stock market. He held shareholder meetings in a Mumbai soccer stadium and delivered his addresses on TV monitors. Before then, companies hadn't focused on share price or courted small investors, says Kisan Ratilal Choksey, chairman of a Mumbai brokerage that bears his name. Dhirubhai drummed up enthusiasm for each of his ventures. ``Dhirubhai conceived large projects, and whenever a project was started, he publicized it and attracted people,'' Choksey says. ``That wasn't the case earlier.'' In 1978, the first year Reliance traded on the Mumbai stock exchange, the stock surged fivefold to 50 rupees a share. By 1980, the price had doubled to 104 rupees, according to ``The Polyester Prince: The Rise of Dhirubhai Ambani'' (Allen & Unwin, 1998), an unauthorized biography by Australian journalist Hamish McDonald. `Whatever Dhirubhai Said, Happened' An investor in Reliance's 1977 initial public offering would have earned a compounded annual return of 23.4 per cent, the company said in February. ``Whatever Dhirubhai said, happened,'' Choksey says. Since Dhirubhai's death, Reliance shares have lagged behind those of competitors. In the past 12 months, the stock fell 3.6 percent to trade at 546.55 rupees on Monday compared with a 7.6 per cent gain in India's 30-company benchmark Sensitive Index. Reliance was the fourth-worst performer in the index last year. Shares of Beijing-based rival PetroChina Co, which last year reported the biggest profit in Asia -- $12.4 billion -- surged 31 per cent during the same period. ``There's a war going on, and all wars are ugly --they leave casualties,'' says Jon Thorn, who manages $170 million at India Capital Fund Ltd. in Hong Kong and owns Reliance Industries shares. ``The stock has and will underperform the broader market until the dispute is fixed.'' Family Control Investors worry about the feud because the Ambani family controls 46.76 percent of Reliance Industries, the flagship company that owns the Jamnagar refinery and makes chemicals for plastics and synthetic fibers. Reliance's four main subsidiaries are themselves among India's biggest companies. Reliance Energy is the No. 2 power producer by market value. Indian Petrochemicals Corp. is the second-largest chemicals maker. Reliance Infocomm Ltd. is the No. 2 cellular phone service company. And Reliance Capital Ltd. runs India's fifth-biggest mutual fund when government-run funds are excluded. Reliance plans to grow even larger. During the next five years, the company will invest $2 billion to boost petrochemical capacity to 15 million tons a year from 12 million tons. Another $7.5 billion will go to explore for oil and gas off India's east coast and overseas, to build a chain of gas stations, and for other initiatives, Executive Director Nikhil Meswani says. Nikhil and his brother, Hital Meswani, another executive director, are sons of Dhirubhai's nephew Rasiklal Meswani and round out the family quartet that runs Reliance and its units. The Ambani brothers are managing directors at Reliance. Mukesh is chairman of Infocomm and Indian Petrochemicals; Anil is chairman of Reliance Energy. Power Plant Mixup The Ambanis' dispute may already have caused one mixup. In January 2004, Anil held a news conference to unveil a $2.5 billion gas-fired power plant project in northern India. He made the solo presentation without first consulting Reliance Industries' board, a board member who declined to be identified says. Now, because Reliance is waiting for regulatory approval to lay a pipeline linking its gas fields to the plant, production at the 3,740-megawatt plant may be delayed for at least two years, until 2009. The feud at Reliance underscores how shareholder interests can suffer when family members lock horns. In India, 22 of the 50 companies that make up the S&P CNX Nifty index of the Mumbai-based National Stock Exchange are family controlled. Because India has no tradition of shareholder lawsuits, investing in the country's family-run companies is riskier than elsewhere, says Jayanth Varma, a professor of finance at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. Pile on Pressure ``There has to be pressure from outside boards of family-controlled companies, typically from big investors, to force good corporate governance,'' Varma says. ``These investors can pile on pressure of a different order of magnitude than what you can expect from company directors.'' In one recent family feud, shareholders of Canada's biggest brewer, Molson Inc., were able to win a special payout. In June 2004, Ian Molson resigned as deputy chairman in a succession battle with his cousin, Chairman Eric Molson. A month later, the company agreed to merge with Adolph Coors Co, then the No. 3 U.S. brewer, in a $3.4 billion share swap. Shareholders eventually won a one-time dividend of C$5.44 a share before approving the merger. Thorn says he fears the Ambanis' quarrel may force a split between Reliance's chemical and oil businesses, eliminating a tie that has cushioned Reliance's earnings. In the quarter ended on Dec. 31, Reliance Industries reported a 52 percent increase in profit to 20.9 billion rupees ($477 million), its seventh straight record, as oil prices reached $55.67 a barrel in New York. Operating margins in oil refining widened to 11.8 per cent from 8.2 per cent a year earlier even as margins for the chemicals business narrowed to 8 percent from 12 per cent. Not an Ideal Situation ``A split is not an ideal situation,'' Thorn says. ``Energy companies worldwide are integrating. Why would you want to break up a company that's already integrated from oil exploration to fuel retailing?'' A big bone of contention is whether to use the $2.1 billion in cash profit that Reliance generated last year to expand the energy business, which Anil heads, or the telecommunications unit, which Mukesh started. ``Reliance Industries is the biggest cash cow in the group,'' says John Band, who tracks Reliance as president of Mumbai-based investment consultant Zoom Cortex Ltd. ``Anil wants a piece of it for his energy business. Mukesh wants to recast Reliance as a new-technology group by expanding the telecom business.'' Gerald Smith of Baillie Gifford & Co in Edinburgh says the conflicting visions are troubling for investors. ``We have concerns about who's going to own what and what the position of minority shareholders is going to be,'' says Smith, who manages almost $4 billion in emerging-market funds and who bought 858,000 Reliance shares in December. Celebrity Friends Anil's lifestyle may be contributing to the rift, Thorn says. The younger Ambani is married to former Bollywood actress Tina Munim and is friends with Bollywood's biggest film star, Amitabh Bachchan. He's often photographed indulging his passion for marathons, running on the streets of Mumbai wearing shorts and sunglasses. In June, India's Samajwadi Party, a rival to the Congress Party, which leads the country's ruling coalition government, backed Anil to become a member of the Indian Parliament's upper house. Amar Singh, general secretary of the Samajwadi Party, is one of Anil's friends. In contrast, Mukesh spends his free time with his family. He's married to Nita Ambani, who runs the Dhirubhai Ambani International School and the Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital, both funded by the Dhirubhai Ambani Foundation, a Mumbai-based charity. ``Anil's hanging out with politicians and socialites may have been a flash point in the relationship with his brother,'' Thorn says. Power Struggle Like many family conflicts, the Ambani brothers' spat involves power. Mukesh joined Reliance in 1981 at age 24, getting his feet wet by helping build a polyester yarn factory in Patalganga, 70 kilometers north of Mumbai. He later supervised construction of a chemicals complex at Hazira and the Jamnagar refinery, both in the western state of Gujarat. After a cyclone struck Jamnagar in 1998, Mukesh got the construction started again in 12 days. Anil joined Reliance in 1983 after completing his master of business administration at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. He helped raise $9 billion to pay for petrochemical and refining plants, selling debt to overseas and local investors. 100-Year Bond Reliance, which hasn't issued new shares since October 1994, is one of 23 companies globally to have sold a 100-year bond in the U.S., the Indian Institute of Management's Varma says. Coca-Cola Co, International Business Machines Corp. and Walt Disney Co are among the others. When Dhirubhai was alive, he kept a lid on any squabbling between his sons. Hints of a rift surfaced six months after his death. In December 2002, Anil didn't attend the public unveiling of Reliance's Infocomm mobile phone venture. Mukesh had started the venture in 1999 as a way to lead Reliance into consumer-oriented businesses and away from a dependency on oil. A Reliance spokesman said later that Anil wasn't available because he was presenting one of Reliance's new cell phones to then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. When Vajpayee addressed the gathering via videoconference from New Delhi, the younger Ambani wasn't anywhere in sight. Since then, Anil has scrapped his Infocomm mobile phone and service in favor of rivals including New Delhi-based Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd. On July 27, 2004, a board meeting brought the division to a head. Reliance directors approved a proposal to give Mukesh power to overrule Anil's decisions and alter the younger brother's role in the company. Mukesh Gains Power The proposal, which Bloomberg News obtained, stated, ``Mukesh D. Ambani, as chairman and managing director, being accountable and responsible to the board, will exercise the specific power to allocate, delegate or assign specific duties, responsibilities and powers to managing directors, whole-time directors and all executives and employees.'' As for Anil, ``his functions will be under the overall authority of the chairman and managing director,'' the proposal stated. Anil shot back in e-mails to Mukesh on July 29 and 30, asking for the proposal to be suspended. He said the plan hadn't been circulated before the meeting, the brothers had never discussed altering their roles and the document hadn't gotten a fair hearing because it was listed in the agenda under Health, Safety and Environment Committee, according to the e-mails, which Bloomberg News obtained. In the Dark Anil followed with a letter on Oct. 25. ``The supplementary agenda was introduced without my knowledge and consent, keeping me completely in the dark,'' he wrote in the letter, which was obtained by Bloomberg News. On Nov. 16, the rift spilled into the public. Mukesh told a journalist at the Hilton Towers in Mumbai that there were ``ownership issues'' inside Reliance. The news sparked the biggest drop in Reliance shares in three months -- a 3.4 per cent decline to Rs 527.15 on Nov. 19, the day the comments were widely circulated in newspapers. Just six weeks earlier, on Oct. 6, Mukesh had denied there was a dispute when money manager Nandita Parker questioned him in New York. ``He told me I shouldn't believe everything I read in the papers,'' says Parker, who manages $12 million at Karma Capital Management LLC in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. Directors Resign On Nov. 25, six of 14 directors of Reliance Energy resigned without giving a reason. Reliance Energy's shares tumbled 6 percent, their biggest drop in six months. Anil got a break for his side in December. India's Business Standard newspaper, the country's second-largest business paper by circulation, reported that Mukesh owned more of Infocomm than Reliance Industries did. Basudeb Sen, former executive director of Unit Trust of India, the nation's biggest mutual fund, questioned the setup because Reliance Industries had spent more than any other investor on Infocomm stock -- $2.85 billion as of March 31, 2004, according to Reliance's April 2004 report to investors on earnings. ``It was a surprise to know that Infocomm was held in majority by Mukesh Ambani in his personal capacity,'' Sen says. ``That was never the case with any Reliance group ventures in the past. The shareholdings were always split between Reliance Industries and the Ambani family.'' Today, Reliance owns 45 per cent of Infocomm; Mukesh and companies he controls own the rest, says Infocomm spokesman Jimmy Mogal. Unit Trust, which was broken into two funds in 2003, owns about 1 per cent of Reliance Industries' shares. Buyback Plan Later in December, Reliance's plan to spend as much as 30 billion rupees to buy back 10 percent of its shares stirred up further animosity. ``A buyback at this stage is completely inappropriate,'' Anil told journalists when he arrived at the company's Nariman Point office for the Dec. 27 board meeting called to discuss the proposal. He ended his comments with a reference to Sun Tzu, a Chinese general who wrote ``The Art of War'' more than 2,000 years ago. ``I am reminded of the Chinese philosopher who said the objective of war is peace,'' he told the group. ``I would like to add two more elements to it, which is dignity and, above all, self-respect. The Reliance group is the dream of my father, Dhirubhai Ambani, and I will endeavor to protect and enhance his legacy.'' Concerned about further turbulence, Indian Finance Minister P. Chidambaram urged the brothers to resolve their dispute quickly and privately. ``I have advised both of them to sort out problems within the four walls of their house,'' Chidambaram told reporters on Jan. 7 at an event organized by the Mumbai stock exchange. Nose for Profit Dhirubhai, son of a schoolteacher father in the village of Chorwad in western India, started Reliance with a 15,000 rupee investment and built it over four decades. Too poor to pursue college, he left for Aden, Yemen, at age 16. He worked in a gas station, sold petroleum lubricants and, as a young man, dreamed of someday owning his own refinery, Mukesh said in a November 2003 speech. ``Aden was the Dubai of that time,'' Mukesh recalled in an interview with Bloomberg News in April 2004, referring to Aden's role as a trading port in the British Empire. ``My father went there to get savings.'' In Aden, Dhirubhai demonstrated his ability to smell a profit. In the 1950s, he started buying Yemenese rials, a silver coin and the country's main currency. He'd figured out that the silver content was worth more than the coin's exchange value. Dhirubhai melted the coins into ingots and sold them to bullion dealers in London before he was stopped three months later, according to ``The Polyester Prince.'' One-Room Apartment After eight years in Aden, he returned to India and set up base in Mumbai in 1958. ``He'd earned 10,000 rupees,'' Mukesh said in the interview. ``He started with one table, one chair and a shared telephone because he couldn't afford one just for himself.'' In 1959, Dhirubhai founded Reliance Commercial Corp to trade spices and yarn. Anil was born in 1959, followed by daughters Dipti in 1961 and Nina in 1962. The family including Dhirubhai, his wife and four children lived in a one-room apartment in Jai Hind Society, a building that housed 500 families. Anil and Mukesh shared each other's clothes, Anil said in an interview posted on his Web site. By 1966, Reliance had begun making fabrics for suits and saris at a textile mill at Naroda in Gujarat. In 1967, the first full year of production, Reliance had a profit of 1.3 million rupees on sales of 9 million rupees, according to ``The Polyester Prince.'' Dhirubhai plowed money back into the mill to buy more machines, selling its fabric under the Vimal brand, named for the son of his older brother, Ramniklal Ambani. Cadillac, Mercedes In 1968, the Ambani family moved out of Jai Hind Society building to a bigger apartment. Dhirubhai started driving a Cadillac and later a Mercedes-Benz, according to ``The Polyester Prince.'' In 1977, Reliance made a profit of 12.8 million rupees on sales of 687 million rupees. The company changed its name to Reliance Textile Industries Ltd. That year, Reliance sold shares for the first time, raising 28 million rupees. The IPO was the start of Dhirubhai's relationship with the stock market. He decided to run his own share recording service to track his stockholders, recalls V.V. Bhat, Reliance's group president of management services. Trouble was, he needed a computer, an almost impossible feat because of India's import and export controls, Bhat says. The closest he could come was a word processor, so Dhirubhai imported a computer by calling it a word processor, Bhat says. ``I don't know how it was managed or by whom,'' he says. ``This computer could also do word processing.'' Serve Shareholders Customs officials investigated, and Bhat paid a 50,000 rupee fine. ``You call it flouting laws or what you like, but the fact is, I got my computer to serve shareholders,'' says Bhat, who ran the share registry with the Wang Laboratories Inc. machine. Dhirubhai's ambitions turned to chemicals and synthetic fibers, the germs of a strategy to own the raw materials required for his textile business. To fund the growing empire, Reliance offered four issues of partly convertible bonds, a seldom-used instrument at the time. Such a debt security allowed a bondholder to partially exchange some of his holding for equity shares. From 1979 to 1982, Reliance raised a total of 918 million rupees from debentures sold to small investors. In 1982, Dhirubhai moved from making polyester fabric at his mills to manufacturing the polyester filament yarn that goes into the fabric. He pulled Mukesh out of Stanford University in California, where he was studying for an MBA, to help build new plants. They bought the latest machines, which could produce 10,000 tons of polyester yarn a year at a time when total Indian consumption was 6,000 tons a year. Bold Decision ``It was a bold decision, and it stemmed from the fact that growth levels in India will only rise,'' Executive Director Hital Meswani says. The polyester yarn factory set the tone for Reliance's strategy. Dhirubhai sought the newest technology and built large plants capable of competing with the best in the world. Today, the 7,500-acre Jamnagar complex accounts for a quarter of India's refining capacity. Its size and design let Reliance refine crude in a way that makes the plant more competitive than refineries elsewhere in India and in Singapore, a benchmark for the region, Meswani says. Reliance earned an average of $9.80 on each barrel of crude oil it processed into fuels in the December quarter compared with $8.80 for Singapore refiners, the company said on Jan. 21. ``Reliance's refinery is state-of-the-art, equipped with all the necessary gadgets that help it meet the most-stringent fuel norms, unlike other Indian refiners who have only some of the equipment,'' says S. Raghunath, country head of the Indian unit of Trafigura Beheer BV, an Amsterdam-based commodities trader. Soccer Stadium Meeting Reprising a tack he'd taken in melting down silver coins and importing a banned computer, Dhirubhai tested the limits again in 1984: He constructed a plan to convert the nonconvertible portion of Reliance debentures into shares. In April, Reliance offered to exchange every 100 rupees of debentures for 1.4 shares. The move erased 700 million rupees of debt from Reliance's balance sheet and increased share capital by 100 million rupees according to a book on Indian industrialists by Gita Piramal called ``Business Maharajas'' (Viking, 1996). In 1985, Dhirubhai held the company's annual general meeting at a Mumbai soccer stadium. About 12,000 shareholders crammed inside, sitting under canvas awnings as they watched the proceedings on TV monitors, according to ``The Polyester Prince.'' That year, the company had 1.2 million stock and bondholders, and Dhirubhai dropped ``Textile'' from the company's name. Dhirubhai Suffers Stroke In February 1986, a stroke left Dhirubhai's right side partially paralyzed. About the same time, the Indian Express newspaper ran a series of stories that criticized Reliance and questioned why Reliance had been able to convert nonconvertible debentures. The press reports may have persuaded the government of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to refuse to let Reliance change any more nonconvertible bonds, ``Business Maharajas'' says. Dhirubhai again turned to the public, this time with an issue of fully convertible debentures. He raised 4 billion rupees. The new funds marked a resurgence that allowed Dhirubhai to continue his vision of owning the entire chain of production from raw materials to finished goods. In 1991, Reliance built a plant at Hazira to use petrochemicals such as naphtha to produce chemicals for plastics and polyester yarn. In 1996, Reliance made its biggest bet when it invested $6 billion to build the 27-million-ton-a-year oil refinery at Jamnagar. The complex's capacity was roughly equal to the difference between the demand for fuel in India and the existing supply. ``We were about to double the size of the Reliance group almost overnight-both in terms of capital expenditure and group sales,'' Hital Meswani says. World Record Reliance completed the refinery in less than three years, setting a world record, according to a report by Netherlands-based Shell Global Solutions, the engineering consulting firm and unit of Royal Dutch/Shell Group that helped design Jamnagar. The plant required the amount of steel in 16 Eiffel Towers. Today, the complex includes a port, a desalination facility and a power plant. A town with houses, a school and a hospital for workers sprawls out nearby. Jamnagar is one of the few refineries in the world that can process very thick, high-sulfur grades of crude oil into pure, low-polluting gasoline and diesel fuel -- the grades sold in California, Meswani says. Wing It On June 24, 2002, Dhirubhai suffered a second stroke and slipped into a coma. He died 12 days later in a Mumbai hospital. ``He managed to wing it through some very difficult times to sustain extremely fast growth of his company and to build up production in just his own lifetime,'' ``The Polyester Prince'' author McDonald says. Even as the brothers feud, Reliance is pursuing growth by using technology to fulfill Dhirubhai's vision and complete the final leg of the company's petroleum chain. Last year, Reliance began operating 320 gas stations along national highways. The stations, which sell mostly diesel fuel, carry Reliance's flame logo and blue, green and white colors. Reliance expects to have as many as 2,500 outlets by the end of this year and 5,800 in three years, P.M.S. Prasad, CEO of Reliance's petroleum business, says. A sensor in each pump lets workers monitor a gas station's fuel supply from a control room at a new Reliance campus in Vashi. Workers can dispatch trucks to tanks that need filling and change prices at pumps anywhere in the country, Prasad says. Oil and Gas Similar control rooms, with 15-foot-high walls covered with banks of screens, house teams of traders in charge of buying crude oil and engineers who monitor data from drilling platforms in real time. In a smaller room that looks like a movie theater, engineers manipulate three-dimensional images of seismic blocks on a curving concave screen to aid in oil and gas exploration. Just before Dhirubhai died, Reliance made the biggest natural gas discovery of the year, which was off India's east coast. Now, it plans to spend $2.5 billion to develop the field. It's prospecting for oil in the Middle East, Russia, South America and West Africa and has found oil in Yemen, the country where Dhirubhai's fascination with the petroleum industry began. Like their father, the brothers have had some run-ins with authorities. When Reliance Infocomm started selling phone service in February 2003, government regulations limited the company to providing calls within a city's limits. In October 2003, the Vajpayee government freed Infocomm from the limited-range restriction. At the same time, it fined Infocomm 4.85 billion rupees for having provided cell phone services outside the prescribed area when the regulation was in force. 1.5 Billion-Rupee Fine In March 2005, Infocomm paid a further 1.5 billion-rupee fine to the government for routing international calls as local calls. India's Department of Telecommunications charged that Reliance had taken calls that originated outside India, brought them into the country and changed them to local calls before routing them to their final destinations. The method allowed Infocomm to make a smaller payment to state-owned phone companies, which are compensated for providing phone services below cost, the three-member Telecom Dispute Settlement & Appellate Tribunal, which reviewed the case, found in March. Infocomm denied wrongdoing. Infocomm reported a loss of 3.9 billion rupees in the year ended on March 31, 2004, its first year of operation. In March 2005, the company discontinued services to 984,123 subscribers who hadn't paid their bills. 100 Million Subscribers By March 2006, Infocomm plans to double its subscribers, says Kamal Nanavaty, the chief operating officer in charge of wireless businesses. Infocomm has 10.64 million subscribers and is expanding its network to cover two-thirds of India's 600,000 villages and 5,700 towns by the end of this year. Nanavaty estimates Infocomm will have 100 million subscribers, or about 40 per cent of India's total market, in less than five years. ``There are towns where a cellular tower comes up and 500 phones go on,'' he says. Infocomm plans to roll out high-speed Internet and interactive television services to homes by the end of this year. ``The dispute has not had any impact at all,'' Nanavaty says, referring to the brothers' feud. ``They do what they are supposed to do; we do what we are supposed to'' Mukesh is branching into embryonic stem cell research, the creation of synthetic proteins and industrial biotechnology through a company he controls called Reliance Life Sciences Ltd. K.V. Subramaniam, a senior executive vice president at Reliance Industries and head of the life sciences business, says there are plans to invest $200 million in Life Sciences by 2006. ``This opportunity will unfold toward the latter part of this decade,'' Subramaniam says. Investors are worried about more-urgent matters closer to home. They want the two feuding brothers to make up and to take a cue from their father, who put shareholders and his company first.

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