NEW YORK – The world’s 400 richest people lost almost $194 billion this week as world stock markets began the year with a shudder on poor economic data in China and falling oil prices.
Forty-seven billionaires lost $1 billion or more during the worst week for US stocks since 2011, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The combined drop was almost seven times the $29 billion lost in the first five trading days of 2015. The 400 people on the index had a combined $3.7 trillion at the end of the week, compared with more than $4 trillion a year ago.
Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, the best-performing billionaire in 2015, lost the most, his fortune dropping $5.9 billion this week as shares of the world’s largest online retailer fell more than 10%. Bezos is the world’s fourth-richest person with $53.7 billion.
There were 11 billionaires among the 400 whose fortunes rose this week.
the way for some sort of consolidation in the market; people speculated post the announcement on Tuesday.
ShopClues, which caters largely to customers in tier 2-3 cities and stocks wares of small- and medium-sized merchants, said it will use fresh capital to strengthen its tech backbone, logistics infrastructure and will get on board more merchants. The four-year-old etailer was founded by Sandeep Aggarwal, Radhika Aggarwal and Sanjay Sethi. “We closed December 2015 with $750 million in gross merchandise value, or GMV, and our target is to finish this financial year with $1.2 billion in GMV. In terms of profitability, we should be ebitda-positive by the end of this year and then, accordingly, plan for an IPO next year,” Sethi, CEO and co-founder, ShopClues, told TOI.
The company aims to clock over $3 billion in GMV by 2017 before going public. GMV is the value of goods sold on an e-commerce platform without factoring in discounts and returns – only a percentage of the sales comes to the online retailer.
The Indian e-commerce market, which had been a three-way fight between Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal till not very long ago, has seen Paytm and ShopClues challenging the bigger players. With fresh funds in its kitty, ShopClues emerges as a formidable challenger to the incumbents.
Sethi claimed ShopClues has around 3.5 lakh sellers across non-metro cities and derives 70% of its sales from tier 2 and tier 3 centres. “These towns will continue to drive our major sales as that is our key focus. In order to fulfil our growing scale, we would have to hire another 500 people,” he said, adding to the present 1,000 employees. ShopClues recently launched services for sellers, including working capital loans, ShopClues Connect (chat services), neighbourhood market (hyperlocal discovery platform), logistics and payment services, besides other initiates to drive its scale among merchants.
