India’s Mukesh Ambani becomes Asia’s richest man again
Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) a company owned by the Mukesh Ambani is one of India’s most valuable companies by market value and despite the past weeks being brutal in the market scenario RIL was relatively left unscathed as it had informed that it would spin off its oil-to-chemicals business to an independent unit. Ambani with a net worth of 80-billion dollars took the first spot from China’s Zhong Shanshan, whose bottled water company tanked a record of 20 per cent this week. The Bloomberg Billionaire Index states that the Chinese tycoon took a blow of more than 22 billion dollars last week from a peak and is now worth 76.6 billion dollars.
Moving away from energy Ambani has focused to swing his empire to tech and e-commerce. He sold stakes in Relaince’s digital and retail units worth 27 billion dollars last year to investors’ from Google and Facebook Inc., this lifted his fortune by 18 billion dollars. The announcements made this week of the spin off from the oil-to-chemicals unit accounted for more than 60 per cent of the conglomerate’ revenue in the last financial year. This will help Ambani to bring more investors and expedite a proposed stake sale to Saudi Arabian Oil Co.
It is not Zhong and Ambani swapping titles lately. Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla Inc. in the start of January became the world’s richest person before Jeff Bezos of Amazon Inc. regained the spot number one earlier this month as the shares of the electric car maker fell in the market.
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