King's Comeback: Will 2025 Be the Year of RIL?

After underperforming the benchmark in 2023 and 2024, the conglomerate is staging a sharp rebound this year

- Abhishek Mukherjee

May 1985. Cooperage Football Ground, Nariman Point, Mumbai. Around 12,000 people are waiting patiently under canvas awnings put up over the ground. Some stands are also spilling over. On one side of the ground, a dais is set up, on which is placed a long table and some chairs. There's a restless energy in the air. Some fan themselves with folded newspapers, others sip water from steel flasks.

Suddenly, heads turn towards the dais. A portly man in a dark suit steps up, followed by a few others. The crowd instinctively breaks out into applause.

The intensity of the cheer grows as the man gets up to speak into the microphone. Many stand on their seats to get a better look. The man raises his hand in greeting, adjusts the microphone and peers into the sea of faces. Their excitement is palpable, driven by an acute sense of being part of history in the making.

The event was no ordinary gathering—it was the first time an Indian company was holding its annual general meeting in a stadium to accommodate its growing legion of faithful shareholders.

The company, as it was known then, was Reliance Textiles. And the unassuming man standing on the dais was none other than Dhirubhai Hirachand Ambani, the man who didn't just build India's largest company, but also laid the foundation for the country's modern equity culture.

Reliance has come a long way today from its textile days, but if there is one thing which has remained common throughout its decades-long journey, is that the stock has never shied away from testing investors' patience with prolonged spells of underperformance, be it in the 1980s, 1990s, or mid-2000s.

Of course, every stock tests its investors' patience at times—cycles of underperformance are, after all, part of the market's nature. But with Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), these pauses feel larger than life, thanks to the company's sheer size and heft, which makes it a proxy for the India growth story itself.