Savitri Jindal becomes Asia's wealthiest woman
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India: Indian businesswoman Savitri Jindal surpassed Chinese Yang Huiyan to become the wealthiest woman in Asia as per Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Bloomberg reports.
On Friday, Jindal overtook Yang, amounting to an $11.3 billion fortune from her Jindal Group, which deals with metals and power generation industries. Yan also fell behind compatriot Fan Hongwei, who does business in chemical fibre and owns the company Hengli Petrochemical Co.
The 72-year-old India's richest woman and 10th richest in the country, Jindal, became the chairperson of Jindal Group after her husband and company founder OP Jindal's death in a 2005 helicopter crash. Jindal Group, which also deals with cement, energy and infrastructure, is the largest producer of steel in India.
Jindal's net worth fell dramatically to $3.2 billion in April 2020 as Covid-19 broke out and reached $15.6 billion in April 2022 as the Russia-Ukraine war heightened skyrocketing commodity prices.
Bloomberg states that Yang's fall was out of China's property crisis, which hit her company Country Garden Holdings Co. too.
Yang also became part of Country Garden Holdings Co. in 2005. She inherited her father's stake in the estate developer and became one of the youngest billionaires on Earth. She remained Asia's richest woman during the past five years as China's property sector flourished.
But this year, her fortune went below half of what she had before to $11 billion, and the decline sped up this week, causing the stock to plunge to its lowest since 2016. Yang owns a 60 per cent stake in Country Garden and 43 per cent in its management-services unit.
Though Fan Hongwei, the second rich woman, saw a fortune drop this year, she kept her foot better than other Chinese billionaires. This was because of the diversity of her business, which started from a bankrupt state-owned textile factory in the eastern Jiangsu province. Fan was an accountant and established Hengli Group in 1994 with her husband, Chen Jianhua. The company was later expanded into polyester, petrochemicals, oil refining and tourism, and it reported $109 billion in revenue in 2021. Bloomberg wealth index estimated her personal fortune at $6.4 billion.