A few months after Jeff Bezos finalized the costliest divorce in history, he has lost the title of ‘World’s richest person’. In July this year, Bezos divorced MacKenzie S. Bezos which cost him 25 per cent of the company’s stocks held by the couple. After divorce, MacKenzie became one of the richest people in the world and fourth richest women with a net worth of 36 billion dollars.
The couple held 12 per cent stake in Amazon Inc, the e-commerce behemoth founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. The 16 per cent stake was valued at around 150 billion dollars, and shares worth 36 billion dollars were transferred to MacKenzie. It is the largest e-commerce company by revenue as well as market capitalization with a total market value of near 1 trillion dollars and revenue of 253 billion dollars in the last fiscal year.
As per the latest Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, Bill Gates replaced Bezos as the richest person in the world with a total worth of 110 billion dollars. Bezos is ranked just below Bill Gates with a net worth of 109 billion dollars and his ex-wife MacKenzie Bezos is placed at 24th in the list with 35 billion dollars.
Bezos’s company is aggressively expanding in India and is among top e-commerce companies in the country. Led by Amit Agrawal, Amazon India has performed exceptionally well in the last few years.
“Regulatory stability is the thing that we would always hope for India. Whatever the regulations are … they are stable in time and that’s one of the things we’re hoping will now be true. We’ll see,” said the 55-year-old billionaire, on India based operations.
Amazon was started in 1994 by Jeff Bezos to sell things over the internet. Today it is the world’s largest Internet-based retailer and is popularly called the “Walmart of the Web”, while Jeff Bezos is hailed as the “Sam Walton of the Internet Age”. Amazon entered the Indian market in 2012; the company is growing exponentially in India and it is the fastest-growing unit of Amazon in the world.
Amazon revolutionized retailing by using the Internet to sell things. The e-commerce ventures across the world like Alibaba in China, B2W in Brazil were inspired by the Amazon. The Flipkart in India was started by two ex-Amazon employees. Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States by market capitalization. Amazon is the fourth most valuable public company in the world (behind only Apple, Alphabet, and Microsoft) and the largest Internet Company by revenue in the world.
The markets across the world no longer present great growth opportunities because they are moving towards saturation. So, the next big thing lies in large developing economies like China and India. But the Chinese market already has a near-monopoly situation due to state protection to Alibaba Group.
The competition is not fair in China and a struggle with Alibaba Group does not seem feasible for Amazon, so it has expanded its wings in India. The group has grown exponentially since its entry despite competition from the Flipkart and Snapdeal. These companies have not been able to give a tough competition due to deep pockets of Amazon and its decades’ long experience in e-commerce. The Indian companies have not been able to cope up with ruthless pricing strategies of Amazon.