Chairman of India’s oil-to-telecom major Mukesh Ambani has overtaken Alibaba Group’s founder Jack Ma to become the richest person in Asia.
A day after Reliance Industries’ stock entered the $100 billion market-capitalisation club, the stock went on to rally to breach the 7 lakh-crore market valuation on Friday.
With Reliance Industries trading up by 1.6%, Ambani’s net worth stood at $44.3 billion as per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Meanwhile, Jack Ma’s wealth was at $44 billion. Alibaba Group Holding’s Ma has lost $1.4 billion in 2018, as per the report.
As per a Bloomberg report, Ambani added $4 billion to his fortune this year thanks to its petrochemical capacity doubling. In addition, investors have also lauded the success of his disruptive telecom venture Reliance Jio. Moreover, Ambani recently also unveiled his plans on entering the ecommerce space by leveraging the 200+ million telecom subscribers that the company has amassed. After taking on incumbents such as Idea, Airtel and Vodafone in the telecom space, Ambani now wants to take on Amazon.com, Walmart, Paytm and the likes.
Ambani took over Reliance Industries from his father Dhirubhai Ambani and has played an important role in the company foraying into refining and petrochemicals in the 1990s and telecom and retail in the 2000s. However, the telecom, asset management, entertainment, power businesses went to younger brother Anil Ambani after both the brothers split.
However, for investors, the biggest boost came from Reliance Industries’ and Ambani’s launch of Reliance Jio. Seen as a disruptive player in the space, with free calls and cheap data, Jio has been seeing immense success and has been instrumental in the shares of the company soaring up. Jio also announced the launch of fiber-based broadband service across 1,100 cities, which will be rolled out in August taking on broadband players as well.
Ambani now plans on integrating his consumer business with Telecom and media, something he announced during the company’s AGM last week.