- After the investment of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Inc. in Reliance Jio platforms, Mukesh Ambani is once again Asia’s richest man overtaking Jack Ma.
After the investment of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Inc. in Reliance Jio platforms, Mukesh Ambani is once again Asia’s richest man overtaking Jack Ma.
Ambani’s fortune grew on Wednesday from around $4.7 billion to $49.2 billion, after 10 percent of Reliance Industries Ltd. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the leap placed Ambani around $3.2 billion ahead of China’s Jack Ma. After the end of each trading day in the U.S. the rating changes.
Facebook Inc. will be investing $5.7 billion in Jio in the biggest deal for the U.S. social networking giant since WhatsApp’s acquisition in 2014 as it seeks a deeper foothold in the largest global market. The U.S. firm will purchase about 10 percent of Jio Platforms, putting together digital applications and a broadband platform under one umbrella, the company headquartered in Mumbai said Wednesday in a statement.
Ambani — who owns the world’s largest oil refinery — had declined on the index by $14 billion before Wednesday in 2020, the biggest dollar decline in anybody in Asia.
“At the heart of our relationship is the passion that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and I share for India’s all-around digital transformation,” said Ambani in a web video posted on Jio’s Facebook page, adding that Facebook brands have become household names in India. “WhatsApp, in particular, has entered the everyday vocabulary of our people in all of India’s 23 official languages.” The partnership with Jio will allow Zuckerberg to step up its expansion into a country that quickly embraces online payment and e-commerce as more people get smartphones. Jio Infocomm moved quickly into a dominant position by offering free plans and undercutting rivals on the wireless market.
The South Asian country with its half-billion Internet users is a major market for the world’s largest technology firms, including Google’s Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Alphabet Inc. Facebook has over 250 million users in India, while WhatsApp has over 400 million users.
According to James Crabtree, author of ‘The Billionaire Raj,’ a book about the richest people in the world, this should help Jio bolster its scope. But the transaction also demonstrates the degree to which Ambani controls himself, he said.
“This deal clearly shows you need to play nice with Mukesh Ambani if you want to be playing big in Indian tech.”
As of March 31, Net worth of India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani fell 28 percent or $300 million a day for two months to $48 billion due to major stock market correction, a study said Monday. The diversified Reliance Industries chairman and managing director saw his wealth decline to $19 billion, taking his global ranking down eight positions to seventeenth.
This Facebook investment has come as a boost for the suffering Ambani and his Reliance Industries. It will be interesting to watch how this partnership fares in upcoming times.
