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.

Damani left a commerce degree at the University of Mumbai unfinished and worked in his family's ball-bearing business before turning to the stock market after his father died. Through the 1980s and 1990s he built a reputation as a trader and long-term investor, and he is often described as a mentor to the late Rakesh Jhunjhunwala. He opened the first DMart store in Powai, Mumbai, in 2002.

Before DMart he had tested retail as a franchisee of the Apna Bazaar cooperative stores, and studied other formats closely before opening his own. When Avenue Supermarts listed in 2017, the offer was among the most heavily subscribed of its time, and the shares more than doubled on their first day of trading.

The company has added DMart Ready, an online grocery service concentrated in large cities, but its physical stores still account for most of its sales. Damani stepped back from day-to-day management early, leaving the business to a professional team led for many years by Ignatius Navil Noronha, and kept his own role to the board and to capital allocation.