India's Super Rich: Celebrating Success

The great American author, William Feather, noted that “wealth flows from energy and ideas”. In essence, entrepreneurs can only do so much, but without crystal-clear ideas and the energy to see them to fruition, becoming rich can remain just a dream.

This issue of BW Businessworld celebrates the super-rich promoters and their innate ability to turn their dreams into reality — i.e. create wealth. For in the end, the spirit of wealth generation benefits not only the promoters but society at large, which in turn generates employment, lifts living standards and provides economic growth for future generations.

BW Businessworld has put in the same high standards that your magazine is known for and which go into the making of such mammoth exercises. We planned the issue three months ago and worked rigorously on huge excel sheets — finally putting together this elite list of high-flying promoters.

Our analysis has been, of course, aided and supplemented by IIFL Wealth, whose research team put in pain-staking hours and burnt the proverbial midnight oil to analyse and evaluate and re-evaluate the data. The first step in this vast exercise was to consider all the companies listed on the stock exchanges without any filters for market capitalisation or sales. This has been done ensuring that we do not miss any promoters.

This Super Rich issue has been restricted to only those companies that are listed on the exchanges. The idea behind this is to recognize enterprising promoters who share the fruits of labour with minority shareholders. The rationale was further fine-tuned to include even those who have stakes in various other listed enterprises, which meant that all of an entrepreneur’s listed wealth is accurately reflected in the issue.

The first step was to trawl through the 37,000-strong promoter list of 4,180 listed companies, excluding PSUs and MNCs. The former fall in a separate category, and we conducted the exercise again to assess how wealthy the government of India is via its holdings in listed companies. For the broad list (excluding PSUs), we identified promoters (and/or promoter groups) who/which owned the companies on the list.

On identifying these, we sorted them on the basis of promoter names. This helped us spot promoters’ multiple holdings in various listed enterprises.

Companies belonging to an individual or promoter groups have been clubbed together. Wherever possible, we have also segregated the promoter list to reflect current ownership patterns and splits within various business houses. However, for representation purposes crossholdings within a group but in different companies have not been adjusted because of the enormity of the exercise involved, and because it could lead to a specious estimate.

Wherever there are multiple companies, we aggregated all the promoter stakes of all group companies under one umbrella. The IIFL Wealth team fed in the figures for this list. The calculation methodology for the super rich was the number of shares held multiplied by the company’s stock price as on 30 September 2016, and on 30 September 2015. The data was then sorted on the basis of promoter wealth in 2016, and the percentage change over 2015.

From our list of 4,180 companies, we eliminated all promoters whose individual listed wealth was less than Rs 100 crore. The promoter value, again, was derived in three stages. First, we analysed the promoter group holdings, identified the dominant promoter and segregated his stake, including promoter holdings as compiled by the company. Next, family stakes and values of shares held by families were combined to arrive at family wealth. The promoter holding was taken as that given to stock exchanges and in the shareholding pattern released to exchanges every quarter.

We segregated the promoter groups to account for the stakes of different promoters. We ran a check for the new entrants and compiled the percentage change in the wealth of these promoters over the last year. In some companies, the exact shareholding of co-promoters could not be ascertained because either the data are not available or major stakes were held through corporate bodies. These promoters are listed separately in ‘Other Billionaires.’

The fresh entrants have been ranked on the basis of their wealth and holdings in 2016 at the latest market cap, while the increase or decrease in their wealth has been ignored. Cases where groups have undergone a re-structuring may have an increase or decrease in their wealth.

While adequate care has been taken not to miss out on eligible companies or promoters, some may have escaped our close and wide-ranging scrutiny; hence, the list may require further fine-tuning. Errors of omission may have slipped in due to unclear shareholding patterns, governance and the enormity of the exercise we undertook.

Having said that, the results are like a laser beam focusing on the wealth of India’s top-545 promoters and promoter groups. This is our idea of commending the immense energy of our entrepreneurs!