What An Entry!
One of India’s top billionaires today, Indian investor Radhakishan Damani is the founder of the Mumbai-based hyper-market chain, D-Mart. The Damani family’s holding in the recently-listed Avenue Supermarts is close to Rs 40,000 crore, earning them a spot in the BW Super Rich List for the first time. It would be “safe and conservative”, as one market watcher puts it, to add another Rs 15,000 crore as the value of Damani’s other stock market investments. That is factoring in a few more thousands of crores that Damani may have made in his stock trading career spanning over 40 years.
VST Industries, HDFC, Sundaram Finance, ITC, Gillette, Crisil, ICRA, 3M India, Blue Dart Express, ProzoneIntu Properties, Uniply Industries and India Cements are said to be some of Damani’s best picks over the years. He is also known to have shares of MNCs such as Nestle, Colgate and HUL in his portfolio. Damani had acquired almost 15 per cent of VST shares in 2000 at an average price of Rs 80 a piece; the stock is now trading at Rs 2,985.
Damani’s Avenue Supermarts has expanded its retail network from one store in 2002 to 118 stores in 2017, across 10 Indian states. The uniqueness of Avenue Supermarts is that it owns most of its stores. This strategy enables the company to capture future price appreciation of real estate as well. Avenue Supermarts’ shares have gained 1.62 times since its listing in the third week of March, and are currently trading at Rs 784-levels.
The billionaire promoter of Avenue Supermarts, the parent of D-Mart retail chain, now holds 1.08 per cent stake in Century Textiles. Damani is India’s new retail king after the March 2017 IPO of his supermarket chain D-Mart.
