Gautam Adani overtakes Mukesh Ambani, back to the top as Asia's richest person
New Delhi: Indian billionaire Gautam Adani regained his position as the wealthiest person in Asia, overtaking Indian entrepreneur Mukesh Ambani, within a few days of the Supreme Court declaring that new investigations were not needed in relation to the allegations made by Hindenburg Research against Adani.
The chairperson of the Adani Group saw his net worth shoot up by $7.7 billion in a day and reaching $97.6 billion, as per the data provided by Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Mukesh Ambani, who is chairperson of the Reliance Industries Ltd, trails at a close second richest person in Asia, with his net worth being $97 billion. At international level too, Adani and Ambani stand at the 12th and 13th positions as the wealthiest persons, respectively.
Adani had a rough ride through 2023 thanks to the Hindenburg Research allegations of fraud in business, with his company losing more than $150 billion in market value at a point, in spite of strongly denying the allegations against him. The billionaire, who had to work hard at winning back investors and lenders, repaying his debts and assuaging regulatory concerns, got a breather with the Supreme Court of India's order this week to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to complete its probe into two pending cases against the Adani Group within three months, stating that no more probes were needed in the matter.
Ever since the apex court order, Adani, who had what was considered the world's largest loss in wealth for 2023, has regained $13.3 billion. His conglomerate has returned to expanding his work in the business field to data centres, artificial intelligence, urban development, airports and media.
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Amazon to make mega-investment of USD 35 billion in India by 2030 across its business
New Delhi (PTI): E-commerce giant Amazon plans to make a mega-investment of USD 35 billion, over Rs 3.14 lakh crore, in India by 2030 across its businesses with a focus on AI-driven digitization, export growth and job creation, a senior company official said on Wednesday.
Making the announcement during the Amazon Smbhav Summit, Senior VP Emerging Markets, Amit Agarwal, said the company has set a target to quadruple exports from India to USD 80 billion from about USD 20 billion it has facilitated as of now and create an additional one million direct, indirect, induced and seasonal jobs by 2030.
"Amazon to date has invested USD 40 billion in India since 2010. Now we will invest another USD 35 billion by 2030 across all our businesses in India," Agarwal said.
Amazon's investment plan is 2 times of Microsoft's investment plan of USD 17.5 billion and close to 2.3 times that of Google's USD 15 billion investment plan by 2030.
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Agarwal said the company has invested USD 40 billion in India to date and is the largest foreign investor in India, according to a Keystone report compiled from publicly available data.
In May 2023, Amazon announced plans to invest USD 12.7 billion in India by 2030 into its local cloud and AI infrastructure across Telangana and Maharashtra. The company has already invested USD 3.7 billion in India between 2016 and 2022.
Agarwal said that the company has invested at scale towards building physical and digital infrastructure, including fulfilment centres, transportation networks, data centres, digital payments infrastructure and technology development.
According to the Keystone report, Amazon has digitized over 12 million small businesses and enabled USD 20 billion in cumulative ecommerce exports, while supporting approximately 2.8 million direct, indirect, induced and seasonal jobs across industries in India in 2024.
To push export growth from India, Amazon launched a manufacturing-focused initiative, "Accelerate Exports", designed to connect digital entrepreneurs with trusted manufacturers while enabling manufacturers to become successful global sellers.
As part of the program, Amazon will host on-ground onboarding drives in over 10 manufacturing clusters across India, including Tirupur, Kanpur, and Surat.
At the Smbhav summit, Amazon announced a key partnership with the Apparel Export Promotion Council of India to expand and scale the program nationwide.
