Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani has emerged the wealthiest person in India — a net worth of $32 billion — on Forbes’ list of 100 Richest Indians.
Says Forbes: “The combined fortune of India’s 100 richest is $276 billion, almost one-fourth the country’s GDP. That is well below the total worth of $775 billion for the 100 richest Americans, but well ahead of the equivalent sum for China’s top 100. Although China has more billionaires–79 vs. India’s 52–India’s wealthiest are worth over $100 billion more than the $170 billion total net worth of their Chinese counterparts.”
London-based steel baron Lakshmi N Mittal with $30 billion, Anil Ambani with $17.5 billion, Azim Premji with $14.9 billion, Shashi and Ravi Ruia with $13.6 billion and KP Singh with $13.5 billion make up the top five billionaires on this year’s list.
1. Mukesh Ambani
2. Lakshmi Mittal
3. Anil Ambani
4. Azim Premji
5. Shashi & Ravi Ruia
6. Kushal Pal Singh
7. Savitri Jindal
8. Sunil Mittal
9. Kumar Birla
10.Gautam Adani
[Full list here]
Full story in Forbes
Reliance Industries chief Mukesh Ambani has been ranked the third-richest chief executive in the world in a list of 10 wealthiest CEOs compiled by Forbes magazine. Steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, Anil Ambani and Sunil Mittal are the other Indians in the list.
Warren Buffett is the richest (value of stake $35.9 billion)
Mukesh Ambani / Reliance Industries: Value of stake $16.8 billion
Lakshmi Mittal / ArcelorMittal: Value of stake $13.2 billion
Anil Ambani / Reliance Communications, Reliance Power, Reliance Capital, Reliance Natural Resources: Value of stakes $9 billion
Sunil Mittal / Bharti Airtel: Value of stake $6.9 billion
Click here for the Forbes story
Lakshmi Mittal is no longer the richest Indian in the world. According to the latest list out by Forbes, that position now goes to Mukesh Ambani (photo). But the global financial crisis has hit the subcontinent hard — with the wealthiest Indians being 60 per cent less wealthy than they were a year ago. Naazneen Karmali has the story in Forbes.
These are painful times for India’s richest as the ongoing global turmoil drastically reshapes their fortunes. The country’s once soaring stock market fell 48% in the 12 months, the rupee depreciated 24% against the dollar and gross domestic product growth is expected to slow down to 7.5%, partly owing to double-digit inflation.
All of this conspired to knock 60% off the combined fortunes of the nation’s 40 wealthiest. Their total net worth fell $212 billion, to $139 billion, down from $351 billion a year ago.
Last year’s No. 1, U.K. resident Lakshmi Mittal, dropped $30.5 billion amid plunging steel prices, but he slips only a bit, to No. 2. Mukesh Ambani, who oversees petrochemicals giant Reliance Industries, grabs the top spot for the first time, despite losing $28.2 billion in the past year. His estranged brother, Anil, ranked third, is the biggest dollar loser, down $32.5 billion.
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In The Times, a report on the big spenders. Among them we spotted a few names from this part of the world. Read on:
Only the Indians can match the Russians in the spending marathon. Their preferred stakes are buildings and weddings. Lakshmi Mittal, Britain’s richest man, has bought the nation’s most expensive home, a £117m mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens, from Noam Gottesman, 47, the Israeli-American financier. Mittal also owns the previous most expensive house in Britain, on the same road, which he picked up for £70m. The Indian steel boss blew £34m on a six-day wedding party in Paris for his daughter, Vanisha. It was held at the Palace of Versailles, and Kylie Minogue gave a private performance for 1,000 guests, who drank their way through 5,000 bottles of vintage champagne.
Not to be outdone, India’s richest man, the metals-to-mobiles entrepreneur Mukesh Ambani, whose £43 billion puts him in the top five in the global wealth list, is building the most extravagant private home since William Randolph Hearst built Hearst Castle: a £500m, 60-storey, twin-tower skyscraper on Mumbai’s harbour front. Six floors will be devoted to his 168 imported cars, and there will be a private health centre, an entire floor for entertaining, three floors of Babylon-inspired hanging gardens and three rooftop helipads. About 600 staff will run the gleaming mini-city on the hill.
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Yes, there have been cost over-runs but no, Lakshmi Mittal is not put off by the protests against Tata Motors at Singur. ArcelorMittal is pressing ahead with plans to build two steel plants in eastern India reports The Wall Street Journal.
Elsewhere, The Economic Times reports on Lakshmi Mittal’s ‘homecoming parade’ with 700 of his senior managers from all over the world converging in on New Delhi.
It couldn’t be a bigger homecoming parade than this: top executives of the world’s largest steel maker, ArcelorMittal, have gathered in the homeland of the world’s richest Indian for their annual leadership summit.
Yes, India is obviously special for ArcelorMittal chairman Laxmi Niwas Mittal, for not only has he decided to locate his first-ever greenfield projects in India, he’s brought his top management — some 700 senior managers drawn from 60 nationalities — to experience the country first hand.
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Daughters of three Indian tycoons the Forbes list of The World’s Billionaire Heiresses (To Be): Vanisha Mittal, Isha Ambani and Pia Singh, daughters of Lakshmi Mittal, Mukesh Ambani and K P Singh respectively.
No. 1: Vanisha Mittal Bhatia, daughter of Lakshmi Mittal, $45 billion
The second child and only daughter of the world’s fourth-richest man, Vanisha serves on the board of directors of her father’s $103 billion (market cap) company, ArcelorMittal.
No. 2: Isha Ambani, Daughter of Mukesh Ambani, $43 billion
The only daughter of the world’s fifth-richest man, Isha, 16, already holds a stake worth about $80 million in Reliance Industries, the petrochemicals giant her father runs.
No. 3: Pia Singh, Daughter of K.P. Singh, $30 billion
A graduate of Wharton School, Singh pursued a six-week filmmaking course at NYU and later worked in the risk-underwriting department at GE Capital. She now works for her father’s DLF group.
Click here for the full list:
Foreign Policy lists the five countries with the worst Olympics medals record. Read, and weep.
India
Medal count: 17
Score card: Think of India as the Washington Nationals of Olympic sport. India is by far the worst-performing Olympic country—no matter how you slice it. It’s not for lack of trying. A games participant since 1900, India still ranks behind Nigeria, a country with an economy one twentieth India’s size, in total medals. The country’s athletic ineptitude is so profound that a parliamentarian called for two minutes of silence to “lament the demise of Indian sports” after the squad failed to win any medals in Barcelona in 1992.
What’s wrong? Few sports venues (roughly 33 stadiums and sports complexes for 1.1 billion people), a lack of school sports programs, stingy government funding, and a narrow talent base. The result? A country whose most celebrated claim to Olympic greatness is “The Flying Sikh,” a track-and-field star who broke hearts by placing fourth at the 1960 Rome Games. It’s not that Indians can’t excel at athletics. Since 1933, the state of Punjab has hosted its own “rural Olympics,” where competitors vie for glory in tug of war, mule-cart racing, sack lifting, tent pegging, and various feats of strength. And there’s hope in the air. Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal has established a trust to fund athletes’ training and medical care and “put India firmly on the medal grid” for 2012.
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eel magnate Lakshmi Mittal is underwriting an ambitious push to put India on the map after decades of Olympic underachievement. From The Christian Science Monitor:
All India hopes that Virdhawal Khade will not become a software engineer. On his broad swimmer’s shoulders sit the country’s desires to become something other than an Olympic also-ran.
Never has the nation of India won more than two medals in an Olympic Games – and it did that only once. In a country home to one-third of the world’s poor, parents dream of children with steady jobs, not Olympic medals. But India is changing, and with the country’s rising affluence, athletes such as Khade are finding that, for the first time, they have the support to chase their Olympic dreams.
“We have enormous potential, but we have not always tapped it properly,” says Randhir Singh, secretary general of the Indian Olympic Association (IOA). “Our emphasis has not been on sports; our emphasis has been on water and roads. But economically, India is doing a lot better, and we have the surplus money now.”
With the help of Lakshmi Mittal, an Indian billionaire desperate for his homeland to make its mark at the medal table, Khade has been given everything he needs – from training in Australia to treatment in South Africa.
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From The Sunday Times, UK:
The wealthiest man in Britain is the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal whose fortune has rocketed to £27.7 billion, up from £19.25 billion last year, thanks to strong global demand for steel. Mittal is now the sixth richest person in the world and far ahead of any other billionaire in Britain.
He is followed by Roman Abramovich, the Russian owner of Chelsea football club, on £11.7 billion, and the Duke of Westminster on £7 billion.
The Sunday Times Rich List, which includes people born or based in the UK, reveals that the native British are being overtaken by foreign billionaires. Only six of the top 20 were born in Britain.
Click here for the full Sunday Times Rich List:
Aditya Mittal has spent a decade helping his father build the world’s biggest steel company. Will he take the top slot? Or could worries over nepotism make him prove himself elsewhere? In the Sunday Times, UK, the Andrew Davidson interview:
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.
“I was in Jakarta last week,” says Aditya Mittal. “I had a meeting with the president at 5pm, and I had to decide whether to go to Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur or Singapore afterwards, and I was driving the flight crew [of Mittal's private jet] mad.
“So after my meeting, I say to the crew, hey, we’ll do dinner in Kuala Lumpur, then take off for Hanoi. I have a nice dinner, then at 1am the crew tell me we have a problem, the immigration guys have gone to sleep in Vietnam, but it’s okay, we can land and they will give me a police escort to my hotel room, stand outside all night, then send in immigration in the morning to stamp my passport.”
Aditya Mittal smiles. He is a billionaire’s boy with serious ambition.
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In The Spectator Richard Orange visits Mahatma Gandhi’s stony homeland in north-west India to find local tycoons competing to build oil refineries that will dwarf capacity in Europe
Gazing out over India’s Gulf of Kutch from the small jetty owned by Essar Oil, you would hardly think you were witnessing the birth of one of the world’s new industrial heartlands. Placid turquoise waters stretch out to the low landmass opposite; behind you lie mile upon mile of shimmering salt pans where flocks of flamingos aimlessly totter.
But this great natural harbour — sheltered to the south by the Kathiawar peninsula, better known as the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi — may soon be the world’s busiest oil terminal. So far, India has made its mark on the global economy by taking on outsourced clerical and call-centre work from the west; now it is turning its hands to the altogether more potent business of oil refining. And the Gulf of Kutch, the closest Indian harbour to the oil fields of the Persian Gulf, is where the crude comes in.
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The Forbes list of billionaires is just out and the Indian billionaire club is thriving. Although China has the most number of new billionaires on The List (28), the wealth amassed by Indian billionaires is more than 3.5 times that of those in China.
India, incidentally, has 19 newbies on The List — with at least one (Sameer Gehlaut of India Bulls) below the age of 40.
And, finally, India has retained its position as Asia’s biggest source of billionaires — 53 of them with a combined wealth of $340.9 billion. India’s Fab Four — Lakshmi Mittal, Mukesh Ambani, Anil Ambani and K.P. Singh — retain their place in The List’s T20 (top 20).
Check out the complete list, edited by Luisa Kroll at Forbes:
After 13 years on top, Bill Gates is no longer the richest man in the world. That honor now belongs to his friend and sometimes bridge partner Warren Buffett.
Riding the surging price of Berkshire Hathaway stock, Buffett has seen his fortune swell to an estimated $62 billion, up $10 billion from a year ago.
Gates is now worth $58 billion and is ranked third richest in the world. He is up $2 billion from a year ago, but would have been as rich–or richer–than Buffett, had Microsoft not made an unsolicited bid for Yahoo! at the beginning of February. Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helú now ranks as the world’s second richest person with a net worth of $60 billion.
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