Nadar is the founder and majority shareholder of HCL Technologies, a software developer and outsourcing provider. The New Delhi-based company had revenue of $8.6 billion in the year to March 31, 2019. He also has a majority stake in publicly traded HCL Infosystems, a manufacturer of personal computers and tablets.
Shiv Nadar's net worth of $15.6B can buy ...
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The majority of Nadar's fortune is held in publicly traded HCL Technologies, an Indian software developer. He and his family control 58% of the company through promoter groups. They also have 34% of HCL Infosystems, a computer maker and services company, according to March 2019 filings with the Bombay stock exchange.
Nadar is credited with all the shares held by his family to reflect his strategic control as chairman of the company.
The value of his cash holdings is based on an analysis of dividends, insider transactions, taxes and market performance. His personal investments are calculated by subtracting the cash balance from the figure provided by Gupta.
Spokesperson Rita Gupta confirmed the family's shareholdings in August 2017, adding that the billionaire's cash, other assets and paintings have a combined value of more than $2.1 billion. She declined to comment in May 2019.
Born in a village Tamil Nadu in 1945, Nadar had a rural upbringing, traveling all over the southern Indian state as his father moved around as a district judge. He obtained an electrical engineering degree from PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore and joined textile company DCM in New Delhi in the 1960s as a management trainee, where he met his future partners. They set up Hindustan Computers in 1976, with an investment of about $20,000 and began selling micro-computers two years later, following IBM's exit from India.
HCL Technologies, based in the New Delhi suburb of Noida, raised $170 million in an initial public offering in 1999, two years after Nadar spun off the company's research and development division. Three years later, he combined the software businesses of software developer HCL Technologies and HCL Infosystems, India's largest personal computer seller then. HCL outbid larger Indian rival Infosys in 2008 to buy Axon Group Plc, a U.K. business management software provider for about $600 million.
The billionaire started the Shiv Nadar Foundation in 1994, setting up schools and universities. The VidyaGyan schools that his foundation runs pick the brightest students from hundreds of villages in Uttar Pradesh and provides them with free education. He has increasingly turned his attention toward philanthropy as his only child, Roshni Nadar, prepares to take over the reins of the family's holding company.
HCL Corp. is the biggest shareholder of HCL Technologies and HCL Infosystems. The holding company sold a 2.5 percent stake in HCL Technologies in 2010, raising about $125 million. The billionaire donated the money to his foundation. That year, he pledged to set aside more than 10 percent of his wealth toward philanthropy; he said in an interview with the Hindu newspaper in 2013 that it will probably be 20 percent of his net worth.
Nadar's wife, Kiran, was a competitive bridge player before she became an art collector. She opened the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art inside a shopping mall in New Delhi in 2010, showcasing the family's collection of modern and contemporary Indian work.