India’s Wealthy And Wise
In the ever-lengthening global list of billionaires, India is more and more fairly — and demonstrably — represented. For starters, make a guesstimate (educated or uneducated) about how many dollar billionaires are in the country. You would be astonished at the numbers. Read on.
With a large proportion of the accolades naturally falling to the stockmarkets, the year 2017 saw the country’s super rich ballooning, both in terms of their sheer numbers and growth. On the pillars of a booming economy, the super rich have increased their fortunes by 51 per cent in 2017. In absolute figures, the wealthy have seen their combined promoter wealth rise to a staggeringly huge Rs 36.63 lakh crore.
Still, 2017 was a very good year to be a millionaire. India’s richest added a whopping Rs 12.37 lakh crore to their fortunes. This is a mere fraction of the total entrepreneurial wealth generated, as we restricted and researched and gathered data only regarding the top-listed entities with promoter stakes of Rs 300 crore and above, and not the entire scale of entrepreneurship, which would encompass the universes of both the small-scale and private sectors.
In our universe, 414 promoters and their families made the cut. The exhaustive research and number crunching has been done by Edelweiss Private Wealth Management.
To argue that India’s super rich have been merely swimming with the rising tide of liquidity would be looking at only half the equation — the top half. Some of the wealth the top Indian entrepreneurs and businesses created in 2017 reflects their sheer risk-taking derring-do and their enormous abilities in bringing the potential of their businesses to a satisfying fruitfulness.
The Indian economy continues to be stable and growing and, despite some headwinds, the super rich entrepreneurs have not shied away from taking risk after risk and managed to earn a profit for themselves.
The Who’s Who of Super Rich
Some of the rich Indians stand out for creating and growing some of the biggest corporations in the globe. Mukesh Ambani, for instance, added Rs 1.15 lakh crore to his personal wealth. The years of investments in strengthening his oil and gas capacities and his gargantuan investments in his telecom business, so often dismissed as merely a punt, are now beginning to bear temptingly attractive and delicious fruit.
Many of the super rich in our universe are also self-made billionaires exhibiting the true potential of entrepreneurship such as the new comer on the list Radhakishan Damani. He has been known as an investor, but his entrepreneurial acumen through the massively successful Avenue Supermarts, the owners of DMart, shows his brilliance.
If a business is successful and massively value accretive, it is not only good for the economy but also for the entrepreneur. Mukesh Ambani, not long ago, noted, “I see a billion people as a billion potential consumers, an opportunity to generate value for them and to make a return for myself.”
Hits and Misses
Sure, the Indian stock market has been on what seems to be a tireless upward journey, but that has been all across the universe. The rise in the global markets has seen Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, climbing to the top of the global list of wealthiest individuals as his net worth zoomed past the $100 billion mark.
While, globally, the technology sector throws up billionaire after billionaire, in India the super rich spring forth from widely diverse sectors of the economy. The technology sector in India accounts for just about 5.8 per cent of promoter wealth for the Top 400 promoters about whom we crunched all the figures available.
The majority of India’s wealthy come from the materials sector (18.1 per cent) followed by consumer discretionaries (such as white goods at 16.2 per cent), while about 12.3 per cent has been claimed by the industrial sector. India’s healthcare millionaires, of course, lost a significant fortune as compared to last year. Healthcare promoters now comprise 10 per cent of the wealth in 2017 as compared to nearly 15 per cent in 2016.
Like across the globe, and true to the Pareto Principle, the top 20 per cent of India’s wealthy in our universe own nearly 80 per cent of the wealth.
For this exercise, we have not factored in the wealth of some of the richest Indians across the globe. For instance, Lakshmi Mittal gets a respectable mention as the second richest Indian across with a wealth of $21.6 billion, while Cyrus Poonawala’s wealth stands at $9.5 billion according to the data from Bloomberg. However, as we have only taken the wealth of the entrepreneurs who have their enterprises listed on the stock exchanges, some of the top entrepreneurs have not made it to our list.
Still, we reckon that our list of listed promoters, captures the raw entrepreneurial ability of the businessman, their enormous appetite for growth, and their grit and determination to think big and turn their enterprises into giant wealth creating machines. Read on to see who the cream of the wealthy are, and how they have earned their fortunes.
