He was already a celebrated stock-market investor when he started DMart. Radhakishan Damani then built it into one of India's most profitable retailers while giving almost no interviews, which in Indian business is close to a disappearing act.
The model is deliberately boring. Own the stores instead of renting them. Keep costs down. Negotiate hard with suppliers and hand the savings to customers as everyday low prices. Rivals with more capital and louder marketing have never quite matched the margins that produces.
While rivals chased scale and headlines, he chased margins and silence — and won on both.
Expansion came slowly, store by store, only where the numbers worked — the opposite of the land-grab their venture-funded competitors ran. When parent company Avenue Supermarts listed in 2017, he became one of the richest people in the country.
It reads as a rebuke to growth at all costs. A value investor applied the patience he used for picking stocks to building a company instead, then waited while compounding did the rest.