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One of the world's richest men is on a breathtaking spending spree. The Business Herald reported yesterday that Indian tycoon Mukesh Ambani had apparently bought his wife a splashy gift that's a giant-sized token of his love and affection: a US$60 million ($78.5 million) luxury Airbus 319 fitted out like a palace in the sky.
In a country that prizes asceticism - think of Mahatma Gandhi, who visited Buckingham Palace in a loincloth and little else - Ambani is setting spectacular new standards for conspicuous consumption. In Mumbai he's constructing a 27-storey, US$150 million high-rise apartment block that will house his family of six.
Ambani's high-spending ways have drawn fire, but nobody is about to accuse him of living beyond his means. As the Indian stockmarket soars into an entirely new orbit, Ambani's on his way to becoming one of the world's richest men.
Reports conflict about Ambani's wealth. The country's biggest news agency and several newspapers have already reported that he's the richest man in the world, worth about US$63 billion. A spokesman for Ambani's Reliance Industries says there's been some double counting and that he isn't laying claim yet to the crown that has belonged to Bill Gates for a dozen years.
Ambani is one of the biggest winners as India's stockmarket zooms into the stratosphere - but he isn't the only one. The booming stockmarket is making some of India's richest men even richer. So valuations are climbing for tycoons like Ambani and telecom czar Sunil Mittal, whose company, Bharti Airtel, has already sold about 50 million mobile phone connections in different corners of the country. Mittal was recently reckoned to be worth in the neighbourhood of US$30 billion.
At a completely different level, look at wind energy baron Tulsi Tanti, who has emerged almost out of nowhere to create a giant global empire. His company, Suzlon, made headlines when it scooped up German energy company REpower Systems this year, beating French nuclear power giant Areva in a fierce bidding war.
Tanti, who was almost unknown even in India until about two years ago, is reckoned by Forbes magazine to be worth about US$2.4 billion.
In March, Forbes declared India had - against all expectations - become the country with the most billionaires in Asia. It listed 36 men and women who had a collective worth of US$188 billion. That put it ahead of much more prosperous nations like Japan and even China, which is usually ahead of India in the growth stakes.
Now, China has moved into pole position once again - showing how quickly explosive economic growth is creating huge wealth. The latest issue of Forbes on China's Richest says the country has 66 billionaires - up from 15 a year ago.
What does this explosion of billionaires mean for countries like India and China? For the men and women at the bottom of society, the answer is brutal: nothing. As economist Jeffrey Sachs acidly remarked: "We need a Forbes One Billion for the other end of the scale - the superpoor."
But studying India's super-rich can tell you lots about the way the economy's going and which sectors are growing the fastest.
Look, for instance, at Grandhi Mallikarjun Rao, who has parlayed a tiny jute yarn business into a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure company in less than two decades. Rao multiplied his money by investing it in a small south Indian bank and then watching as its shares soared. He then took a smart bet and invested the proceeds from his banking foray into the infrastructure sector.
While bigger groups hesitated about getting into sectors like power and road building, Rao leapt in boldly. Today, his GMR Group is building a new airport in Hyderabad, south India, that's scheduled to open by March next year. It's also renovating Delhi's Indira Gandhi Airport in time for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. In March, Forbes reckoned Rao was worth about US$2.6 billion.
Then, of course, there are the real estate barons who've turned into giants on the Indian landscape. The biggest is K. P. Singh, the 78-year-old chief of DLF, one of the country's biggest real estate developers. He's now worth about US$33 billion after a highly successful IPO in July.
On a smaller scale there are other developers like Pallonji Mistry (US$5.6 billion) and Ramesh Chandra, of Unitech, who's worth about US$6.4 billion. India's real estate sector was, until two years ago, highly disorganised, and none of its companies were listed on the stock market. Today, the world's top banks and institutions are taking crucial positions in the sector.
One bright spot in the chart of India's wealth is that it's spread out over many different sectors. There are telecom and real estate czars and pharmaceutical industry pill-pushers such as brothers Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, of Ranbaxy.
The airline industry is represented by Naresh Goyal, of Jet Airways, and forging by Baba Kalyani, of Bharat Forge. Software has Azim Premji, of Wipro, who's worth about US$17 billion.
Contrast this with China. For a start, the richest person in China, Yang Huiyan, is worth just US$16 billion, and the top 40 put together are worth US$120 billion (compared to India's US$188 billion worth of assets held by 36 people in March). And the Chinese list is dominated to an extraordinary extent by real estate barons - 14 out of the top 40.
India's stockmarket has risen by about 45 per cent this year, so it's safe to predict the number of billionaires will also double when the next Indian list is tallied - if shares don't go into a swoon.
If we assume that wealth charts are somehow linked to the economy, what does this huge wealth accretion in India mean? Is India getting ready to give the Chinese dragon a run for its money? The Chinese are, of course, far ahead in the growth game but keep your eye on the Indian elephant as it breaks into a trot.
