Amid protests by farmers over the new farm laws, there is a bad news for Mukesh Ambani. The chairman of Reliance Industries, who earlier this year rose to the fourth wealthiest person in the world, is no longer among the top 10 richest billionaires in the world.
However, Ambani still retains the position of richest in Asia. He has now dropped down to eleventh position in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, after reaching the fourth spot earlier this year. According to the Bloomberg ranking, Ambani’s current net worth is $76.5 billion (Rs 5.63 lakh crore), down from nearly $90 billion (Rs 6.62 lakh crore) earlier this year.
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, and Larry Ellison, Executive Chairman of Oracle Corporation, held the ninth and tenth positions, respectively, with total net worth of $76.2 billion each.
The drop in Mukesh Ambani’s net worth is because of the correction in RIL shares, which have fallen nearly 16% from its all-time high of Rs 2,369.35 touched after the announcement of its deal to buy retail and wholesale assets of Future group. On Thursday, shares of RIL closed at Rs 1,994.15. Over the last two months RIL shares have witnessed profit booking after US ecommerce giant Amazon challenged its deal with Future group.
Amazon says its 2019 deal in which it invested nearly $200 million in Future Coupons, a Future group company, had clauses saying the Kishore Biyani-led group could not sell its retail assets to anyone on a “restricted persons” list, which included Reliance.
Despite the recent drop in RIL share price, it is still up 33% year till date, creating over Rs 3 lakh crore wealth for investors. This is half of the wealth created by the conglomerate over the last 25 years. According to Motilal Oswal’s annual wealth creation study, the oil-to-telecom conglomerate has created a wealth of Rs 6.3 lakh crore between 1995-2020. In the past 25 years (from March 1995-2020), Reliance Industries Ltd has posted a cumulative net profit of Rs 3.78 lakh crore.
