India’s super-rich see wealth grow 20% during Covid | Economic Times

NEW DELHI| BENGALURU: India’s super-rich have grown their wealth by 20% during Covid, which is twice as fast as the growth in the net market capitalisation of all listed companies. Also, the number of people having more than Rs 1,000 crore in the IIFL Wealth Hurun Rich List has increased by 94 in 2020 to 828.Mukesh Ambani, chairman of India’s most valued company Reliance Industries, continues to top the list with a wealth of Rs 6.6 lakh crore. His total wealth increased by 73% in the last 12 months, making him the richest Asian and the fourth-richest in the world.The cumulative value of the 828 individuals on the list stood at $821 billion (Rs 60,59,500 crore), an increase of $140 billion (Rs 10,29,400 crore) over the 2019 count, a large part of which was due to the rise in share price of Reliance Industries.Among the startups, with a wealth of Rs 13,100 crore each, Amod Malviya, Sujeet Kumar and Vaibhav Gupta — former Flipkart executives — had their wealth increase by 274% on account of strong investor interest in their new venture Udaan, a B2B e-commerce portal, and topped the list of biggest gainers for the second consecutive year. The valuation of Udaan increased from Rs 20,000 crore in October 2019 to Rs 52,500 crore in February 2020. 78397026Interestingly, many professionals were featured too. These included Thomas Kurian of Google Cloud who, with a wealth of Rs 1,300 crore, topped this list. Others of Indian origin include Ajaypal Singh Banga of Mastercard (Rs 7,200 crore), Nikesh Arora of Palo Alto Networks (Rs 6,500 crore), Satya Nadella of Microsoft (Rs 5,900 crore), Sundar Pichai of Alphabet (Rs 5,900 crore), and Indra Nooyi formerly of PepsiCo (Rs 3,500 crore). With Rs 3,200 crore, Ignatius Navil Noronha of Avenue Supermarts is the richest CEO based in India.The cut-off for the top 10 rose by 6% to Rs 76,000 crore this year. Top 100 individuals in the list account for nearly 64% wealth of the latest edition of the rich list for 2020.The ninth edition of the IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List 2020 compiled the richest individuals having a wealth of Rs 1,000 crore or more as on August 31, 2020. However, Hurun India MD and chief researcher Anas Rahman Junaid felt that this was not an exhaustive list. He said, “Assuming that for every one Hurun rich lister we have found, we have probably missed two, it is likely that India today has 3,000 individuals with Rs 1,000 crore”.Among the sectors, pharmaceuticals, with 122 super-rich individuals on the list, leads the pack, followed by chemicals & petrochemicals with 55 individuals and software & services with 50 individuals. Automobile & auto components, food & beverages, manufacturing, construction & engineering, etc, are some of the other significant contributors to the IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List 2020. Interestingly, this time the super-rich came from 111 cities of the country.