At first glance, the Indian name on the multi-billionaire list, compiled by the Hurun report, reinforces the picture of a more prosperous, Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani (born 19 April 1957). He is Reliance Industries Limited’s (RIL) Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Managing Officer. Today, Reliance stands at a firm position in the Fortune Global 500 group and is the most valuable company in India by market value. With a net worth of US$ 83.1 billion, Mukesh Ambani is Asia’s richest individual and the world’s tenth richest as of March 14, 2021. And, giving neck to neck competition to him is the Chairman and Founder of the Ahmedabad multinational corporation that has been active in port construction and operations in India, Gautam Shantilal Adani (born 24 June 1962), an Indian billionaire industrialist. Adani is the chairman of the Adani Foundation, mostly headed by his wife Priti Adani, and was in the top rankings with no surprise.
Mr Mukesh Ambani is an owner of multiple companies such as:
Reliance Retail: It includes Reliance New, Reliance Market, Reliance Wellness, Reliance Time Out, and Reliance Auto Zone. Reliance Retail is one of the largest retail brands in India.
Reliance Life is an organization that works in the medical, commercial, and biotech fields.
Reliance Logistics specializes in shipping, distribution, manufacturing, and supply chain goods.
Hathway Cable & Datacom Ltd., formerly BITV Cable Networks, is a Mumbai-based Indian cable television service provider. It was the first cable provider in India to introduce a digital portal in 2006, and it was the first company in India to provide Internet through the CATV network.
Den Networks Ltd. – DEN Networks Limited is an Indian cable television distributor. Reliance Industries reported on 17 October 2018 that it had purchased a 66 per cent stake in DEN for Rs 2,290 crore.
Reliance Solar– This firm specializes in renewable energy generation and installs solar plants in various locations.
Adani isn’t behind in this either. He also owns some of the most profitable companies in India. Some of them are:
Adani Enterprises Limited– Adani Enterprises is a business incubator specialized in the infrastructure and energy markets.
Adani Ports & Special Economic Zone Ltd– It is India’s biggest commercial port operator, handling about a quarter of the country’s freight. In the Adani Group Subsidiaries, it is the largest entity.
Adani Power Ltd– It is the largest private thermal power producer in India is Adani Power Limited (APL).
Adani Transmission Ltd.– The path into the transmission business of the Adani Group started in 2006, long before the incorporation of Adani Transmission Limited (ATL).
Adani Green Energy Ltd.– It is one of the largest renewable companies in India.
Adani Gas Limited– Adani Gas is constructing City Gas Delivery (CGD) networks to supply Piped Natural Gas (PNG) to the manufacturing, commercial, residential, and transportation sectors, as well as Compressed Natural Gas (CNG).
They both have a knack for the stalwart courts and bureaucracy in India. Both work primarily in the commercial heartlands of the western subcontinent of Maharashtra and Gujarat.
Yet look closer and India’s evolving economy is seen in the rich list. The fortune of Mr Ambani has risen due to his company, Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, commonly also known as Jio, an Indian telecommunications company and an affiliate of Jio Platforms headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. It runs a national LTE network that covers all 22 telecom circles in the country. It does not have 2G or 3G connectivity, instead opting for voice over LTE on its 4G network.
In addition to heavy-duty companies, the other members of India’s billionaire list increasingly serve drug and technology businesses of the future.
Hurun’s list last year was joined by a record of 50 while just ten fell out. There are currently 209 billionaires in India, up from 100 in 2017 and only China (having about 1,058 billionaires) and America (having nearly 700 billionaires) are ahead of India. Add 30 billionaires of the Indian diaspora, and over time their total assets almost doubled to 740 billion dollars. Newcomers, as well as dropouts, tell a transition tale.
Let’s start this tale with the story of business tycoons who had been deposed from their positions. It was enough for Netflix to make a documentary, “Bad Boy Billionaires: India,” that was charged with fraud. Many more owe their relegation to overcrowded borrowing. The valuation of its debt, a retail Empire called the Future Group, has fallen to Kishore Biyani’s core. Anil Ambani, the younger brother of Mukesh, has seen his wealth in the past 12 years decreased to a fraction. Fortunes based on the physical properties of intellectual resources and customer spending are being overtaken. Industries that used to mint tycoons, including buildings, are now relatively decreasing.
Twelve of the latest billionaires in India this year owe their status to drug manufacturing, taking their number to 39. Software fortunes have been boosted by the worldwide increase in technology supplies. Now it accounts for $95 trillion of Indian billionaires, relative to $30 trillion in 2016, including the Diaspora. Jay Chaudhry, who owns Zscaler, a California-based cyber protection firm with a market capitalisation of 25 billion dollars, and the HCL Technologies family of Shiv Nadar, a consultation company whose stocks valuation has doubled in the last year to almost 40 billion dollars, are the latest in the software magnates. Their numbers are expected to rise when corporations that have more private holdings, worth $1 billion or more, will become public, notes Anas Rahman Junaid of Hurun and two-thirds of these startups work in foreign countries, mainly in America.
Not all Indian billionaires are entrepreneurs who have founded profitable companies. Some are experts, particularly in the diaspora, who have successfully operated other businesses. They are Thomas Kurian (a former head of Oracle who leads the Google Cloud Infrastructure Division), Jayshree Ullal (the boss of Ajaypal Banga) and Arista Networks (former chief executive of Mastercard). Other prominent names in the global corporate world having an Indian origin are Sundar Pichai, Mr Kurian’s boss at Google’s member firm, Alphabet, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella (with an estimated $800 million worth of network) and Nikesh Arora, Palo Alto’s ceo networks, another major cyber-security firm.
