Mukesh Ambani
Mukesh Ambani chairs and runs $60 billion (revenue) oil and gas giant Reliance Industries, among India’s most valuable companies. Reliance was founded by his late father Dhirubhai Ambani, a yarn trader, in 1966 as a small textile manufacturer. In 2016, Reliance started a price war in India’s hyper-competitive telecom market with the launch of 4G phone service Jio. Jio has signed on 280 million customers by offering free domestic voice calls, very affordable data services and virtually free smartphones. With a real time net worth of $49.9B, he is the world’s 13 richest man.
Azim Premji
Indian tech magnate Azim Premji’s $8.4 billion (revenue) Wipro is India’s third-largest outsourcer. Premji left his studies at Stanford in 1966 to look after the family’s cooking oil business when his father died, expanding it into software. Wipro has an innovation centre in Silicon Valley, which is focused on developing new technologies and collaborating with startups. Premji’s son Rishad, who heads strategy and sits on the board, also chairs industry lobby group NASSCOM. Real time net worth is $19.1B.
Lakshmi Mittal
Lakshmi Mittal serves as chairman and CEO of ArcelorMittal, the world’s biggest steelmaker. Born into a steel clan, he left from his siblings to start Mittal Steel then went on to merge the company with France’s Arcelor in 2006. ArcelorMittal completed the $2.1 billion acquisition of Italy’s loss-making steel group Ilva in November 2018.
Hinduja brothers
Four close-knit siblings, Srichand, Gopichand, Prakash and Ashok, control multinational conglomerate the Hinduja Group. Their group’s businesses range from trucks and lubricants to banking and cable television. The brothers own valuable real estate in London, including their home Carlton House Terrace and the historic Old War Office building in Whitehall. Their real time net worth is $17.1B.
Pallonji Mistry
Reclusive tycoon Pallonji Mistry controls Mumbai-headquartered engineering and construction giant, 154-year-old Shapoorji Pallonji Group. The family’s biggest asset is an 18.4% stake in Tata Sons, with a $100 billion (revenue) Tata Group, a conglomerate of 100 companies. The S.P. Group, run by Mistry’s older son Shapoor, also owns Eureka Forbes, India’s brand of water purifiers.
Shiv Nadar
Indian IT pioneer Shiv Nadar co-founded HCL in a garage in 1976 to make calculators and microprocessors. Today, he chairs HCL Technologies, an $8.2 billion (revenue) company that is India’s fourth-largest software services provider. In December 2018, HCL Technologies had agreed to buy some software products from IBM for $1.8 billion. His real time net worth is$14.4B.
Godrej Family
The Godrej family controls the $4.5 billion (revenue) Godrej Group, a 121-year-old consumer-goods giant. The group was established by lawyer Ardeshir Godrej, who gave up his profession to make locks in 1897. Today the group is chaired by patriarch Adi Godrej, an MIT grad, who took charge as chairman in 2000. Their India’s richest net worth is $14B.
Dilip Shanghvi & family
Son of a pharma distributor, Dilip Shanghvi borrowed $200 from his father to start Sun Pharmaceutical Industries in 1983 to make psychiatric drugs. The company is the world’s fourth largest specialty generics maker and India’s most valuable pharma outfit with March 2018 revenues of $3.6 billion. The company is the world’s fifth largest specialty generics maker and India’s most valuable pharma outfit with March 2018 revenues of $3.6 billion.Their 2018 India’s richest net worth is $12.6B.
Kumar Birla
Commodities king Kumar Birla is the fourth generation head of the storied, $44.3 billion (revenue) Aditya Birla Group. The group’s interests span cement and aluminium to telecom and financial services. Birla inherited the family empire at age 28 when his father Aditya Birla died in 1995. His real time net worth is $11.6B.
Gautam Adani
Ports tycoon Gautam Adani controls Mundra Port, India’s largest, in his home state of Gujarat. His $11.65 billion (revenue) Adani Group’s interests include power generation and transmission, real estate and commodities. Adani’s overseas assets are Australia’s Abbott Point port and the controversial Carmichael coal mine, termed as one of the world’s largest. His 2018 India’s net worth is $11.9B.
