Reliance Industries Ltd on Thursday completed 25 years of trading on the Indian exchanges.

Though RIL may not be the first company to celebrate its silver jubilee on the bourses, the day is particularly significant since the late founder chairman Dhirubhai Ambani is credited with creating an equity cult in the country.

When the company went public in 1978, it had 57,949 shareholders, no small figure by the standards of those days. Even today not many companies can boast of such a investor base.

Today, Reliance has 33 lakh (3.3 million) shareholders, making it the largest shareholder base of any company in the world. Simply put, one out every four investors in India is a Reliance investor.

On its first day of trading on the Bombay Stock Exchange, the scrip traded at around Rs 17-18 for a Rs 10 paid-up share.

Those initial investors have seen the value of their investments grow by a compounded annual growth rate of 22.8 per cent. An investment of Rs 1,000 in the company in 1978 is worth over Rs 1,73,000 today.

The scrip all through these years has been a traders and speculators' delight. So much was the trading fraternity hung up on the stock and the company that on several occasions even a casual visit by Dhirubhai to his doctor could cause the stock's price to gyrate.

And who can forget the innumerable battles between the bulls and the bears in this stock, not to mention the famous 'bear traps' orchestrated to put short sellers on the mat.

Remarkably, the stock has managed to hold centrestage through all these years, unlike many of its peers which were once darlings on the bourses but have now faded into oblivion.

In these 25 years, the company's market capitalisation on the Bombay Stock Exchange has grown from about 0.3 per cent of Rs 3,100 crore (Rs 31 billion) in 1978 to about 7 per cent of the nearly Rs 6,10,000 capitalisation at present.