London has more billionaires than any other city in the world, and Britain has more billionaires per capita than any other country, new data showed on Saturday.
The survey of Britain’s super-rich compiled for the Sunday Times newspaper is likely to prompt debate in a country where many still struggle financially and where food banks are a fact of life, despite economic growth recently returning to levels not seen since the 2008 financial crash.
London is home to 72 of Britain’s 104 sterling billionaires, well ahead of Moscow in second place with 48 people worth the equivalent of £1 billion (US$1.68 billion) or more. New York is in third place with 43 billionaires, San Francisco in fourth place with 42, Los Angeles next with 38 and Hong Kong in sixth place with 34.
Indian-born brothers Sri and Gopi Hinduja top the British list with a fortune of £11.9 billion, amassed through the family-owned Hinduja Group, which has interests in oil, banking, the automotive industry, property and the media.
The pair nudged last year’s list leader, Alisher Usmanov, to second place. The Uzbekistan-born Russian’s fortune has been hit by the fall in value of the ruble and Russian stock prices due to the Ukraine crisis.
Others in the top 25 include Ukrainian-born Internet, chemicals and music industry investor Len Blavatnik in fourth place, property magnate the Duke of Westminster, Gerald Grosvenor, in 10th place, and Saudi-born Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber and his family in 13th place.
This year is the first year the minimum wealth of Britain’s 50 richest people has topped £1.5 billion. Just £700 million was needed to join the exclusive club a decade ago.
Britain’s 104 billionaires have a total wealth of £301.13 billion, compared with 88 a year ago having a combined worth of £245.66 billion.
The combined wealth of Britain’s super-rich is now well ahead of pre-recession levels of 2008, which then totaled £201.99 billion.
On Friday independent think tank the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said British per capita GDP — often used to indicate a population’s average wealth — was “well below” the pre-2008 peak and unlikely to exceed it before 2017.
The Trussell Trust, Britain’s largest food bank network, said the number of people that had approached them for emergency food had risen 163 percent in the year to the end of March to just over 913,000 people.
The group labeled the figure “shocking,” particularly as it does not include those helped by other food providers or the large number of people too ashamed to seek help and who cope by eating less food.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day