Mukesh Ambani no longer among top 10 richest billionaires in the world

Billionaires of the world, Dec 27: Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest person, and the chairman and managing director of oil-to-retail-to-telecom conglomerate Reliance Industries, who earlier this year rose to the fourth spot on the Bloomberg Billionaire Index is no longer among the top 10 richest billionaires in the world.

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.

At present, the RIL top boss is the 11th richest person in the world bellow Larry Ellison of Oracle Corporation and Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, who stood at 10th and 9th position respectively with $79.2 billion net worth.

The drop in Mukesh Ambani’s net worth is because of the correction in RIL shares, which have fallen nearly 16% from their all-time high of Rs 2,369.35 touched after the announcement of its deal to buy retail and wholesale assets of Future group.

Shares of RIL closed at Rs 1,994.15. Over the last two months, RIL shares have witnessed profit booking after US e-commerce 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 to 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.