The Polyster Price

and the possible artificiality of profits in some bad years. The emphasis on absolute numbers of sales, assets, profits and so on distracted attention from the ratios that measure the relative profitability or efficiency of a company, such as return on capital.

Transactions with the more than 200 'trading and investment' companies controlled or owned by the family management might point to investment profits being taken from Reliance to these companies. In other words, the Ambanis at least sometimes treated a company in which they have had normally a 26 per cent sharcholding as their personal property.

The huge private placement to the government financial institutions and the instances of funding from banks against pledged management shares undercuts the claim that Dhirubhai successfully by-passed the banks and raised capital chiefly from the public.

The long delays in completing projects after the early success at Patalganga in 1984 and the insatiable appetite for funds have raised questions about the company's efficiency in managing capital-even whether fundralsing and deployment had not become a more important activity for Reliance than making petrochemicals and textiles.

From late 1994 the Indian sharemarkets had gone into a malaise. There were objective external factors: a rise in interest rates attracting money into deposits, a sense that the economic reforms had stalled, political uncertainties, the Mexican crisis and its impact on other emerging markets, the bull run on Wall Street. But a feeling that Indian markets had not got. their house in order, and perhaps a sense of exploitation by the country's most traded company, had something to do with it as well.

Markets and sentiments turn around, but the widespread thinking in Bombay financial circles by the end of the 1995-96 crisis was that Dhirubhai Ambani and Reliance could no longer look either to Indian investors for the cheap equity capital that had financed their early growth or to the foreign portfolio funds that were so enthusiastic about them in 1992-93.

This is implicit in the company's resort to debt-raising in a completely new market from the middle of 1996. In five issues of pure-debt securities in New York between June 1996 and January 1997, Reliance raised US$614 million from international investors, with terms ranging up to 100 years-making it the first Asian company and one, of a handful worldwide to raise debt of such long maturity. A notable trend was a resort to the