From left: Low Tuck Kwong of Indonesia, Colin Zheng Huang of China and Gautam Adani of India.
ILLUSTRATION BY HEVAN CHAN FOR FORBES; Photos by MUHAMMAD FADLI FOR FORBES ASIA; BLOOMBERG; GETTY IMAGES
Global billionaires lost nearly $2 trillion this year. Not these five winners, who are $93 billion richer than last year.
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his past year has been a volatile one for the world’s richest people. As a group, the world’s billionaires lost more than $1.9 trillion in wealth, driven primarily by tumbling stock prices due largely to higher inflation and slower economic growth.
But amid the overall downturn, a subset of billionaires bucked the trend. The five biggest gainers of 2022 are together worth over $200 billion – $93 billion more than at the beginning of the year. All five of them hail from Asia.
The biggest gainer by far is Gautam Adani of India, whose Adani Group encompasses a network of publicly traded companies active in power generation, cement, real estate and more. In early February 2022, Adani became the richest person in Asia and the tenth richest person in the world worth $90.1 billion. As of mid-December, he ranked as the world’s third richest person. The other big gainers are not nearly as well known, and operate in fields like food distribution and coal, which don’t draw nearly as much media coverage as technology. One other gainer is from India, another is from Indonesia, and two are from China.
How quickly things change. Last year, four of the top five gainers hailed from the U.S. and had fortunes in tech or tech-adjacent fields like electric vehicles (i.e., Elon Musk). This year, only one–Colin Zheng Huang of China, who founded and formerly chaired e-commerce firm Pinduoduo–is a tech billionaire.
To measure the biggest gainers, Forbes looked at people who were billionaires at the start of the year (2,671 at the start of 2022), and who hold half or more of their fortune in publicly-traded stocks.
Forbes measured the change in net worths on December 9, 2022.
Here are the five billionaires who gained the most in dollar terms in 2022 (data is as of December 9, 2022):
1. Gautam Adani
Country: India
Net worth: $133.9 billion
Gain in 2022: +$55.1 billion
Adani is the biggest dollar gainer by far this year, up $55 billion– more than three times the increase of the next biggest gainer. He’s pulled off a repeat performance. Last year, Adani was up by $52.5 billion – second only to Elon Musk. Shares of Adani Group’s flagship Adani Enterprises rose 57% as it continued an expansion binge. Adani Group became India’s second largest cement producer in May after acquiring the Indian arm of Swiss cement company, Holcim. In early December, Adani Group became a majority shareholder in one of India’s largest television networks, New Delhi Television Ltd., furthering its share in India’s media industry.
2. Low Tuck Kwong
Country: Indonesia
Net worth: $18.6 billion
Gain in 2022: +$16 billion
Low, known as the coal king of Indonesia, defied expectations in what some deem a dying industry. The share price of his listed coal mining firm, Bayan Resources, tripled in 2022, bolstered by an increase in demand for coal following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Low, who owns a majority of Bayan Resources, is now the second richest billionaire in Indonesia as of late 2022, up from 18th a year ago.
3. Colin Zheng Huang
Country: China
Net worth: $31.6 billion
Gain in 2022: +$11.1 billion
Despite China’s economic and pandemic woes, Huang’s discount e-commerce giant, Pinduoduo, flourished. The company, which is listed on the Nasdaq, reported a 65% increase in third-quarter revenues after attracting consumers with its low prices. In the same report, the company cautioned that its growth rate is unsustainable. That news didn’t dissuade many; shares rose 35% this year.
4. Wu Yiling
Country: China
Net worth: $6.8 billion
Gain in 2022: +$4.1 billion
Wu’s gain this year is tied to Lianhua Qingwen, an herbal Covid-19 remedy created by Shenzhen-listed Shijiazhuang Yiling Pharmaceutical, which Wu chairs. Shares rose 61% this year as Chinese stockpiled treatments in the wake of weakening Covid-19 restrictions. The treatment accounts for 46% of the company’s sales, according to Yiling’s mid-year filing.
5. Ravi Jaipuria
Country: India
Net worth: $9.3 billion
Gain in 2022: +$3.9 billion
Jaipuria, India’s reigning cola king, chairs RJ Corp, a multinational conglomerate with footholds in beverages, healthcare and more. Shares of his flagship Varun Beverages–one of PepsiCo’s largest international bottlers–more than doubled this year amid rising sales and profit margins. Another of Jaipuria’s ventures, Devyani International Limited, which operates fast-food favorites like KFC, Pizza Hut and Costa Coffee, is also on the upswing, with shares up 12% this year.