Damani controls Avenue Supermarts, a Mumbai-based retailer specializing in low-priced consumer goods. The publicly traded business sells food, clothing and other consumer products in almost 200 D-Mart shops across India. It reported revenue of 199 billion rupees ($2.9 billion) in the year-ended March 31, 2019.
Radhakishan Damani's net worth of $12.4B can buy ...
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Damani's fortune is derived from publicly traded Avenue Supermarts, the Indian retailer that operates D-Mart retail stores in almost 200 locations, according to its website.
The 58% stake attributed to him is held by a promoter group, which includes Mumbai-based Bright Star, which he owns with his wife, and three trusts in the names his children, according to a September 2019 filing with the Bombay Stock Exchange. Only the stakes held by his immediate family are included in the net worth calculation.
The billionaire has a history of active investments in publicly traded Indian companies. He maintains minimum stakes of 1% in at least nine other companies, according to a March 21, 2017 story from Bloomberg Quint. The valuation assumes no outflow for the equity holdings.
A company representative said in January 2019 that he wasn't available for comment.
Radhakishan Damani was born in Mumbai, in 1956, where he was raised in a one-room apartment in a tenement block. He dropped out of commerce college after his first year, and entered the stock market as a broker and trader in the late 1980s.
Damani exited the stock market in 2000 and began building a retail business by buying cheap land in Navi Mumbai. He tested the ground with his first D-Mart store in 2002, seeing slow growth for almost a decade, opening 25 stores in its first 9 years, compared to 21 stores opened by Avenue Supermarts in 2016 alone. Damani operates 118 D-Mart-branded stores in 45 Indian cities, as of March 2017, according to a March 31, 2017 Bloomberg News report.
He lives in Mumbai.