Asia had more billionaires; Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing kept the title of Asia’s richest man with $32 bln, a survey by the wealth magazine Hurun Report showed.
Asia had 608 billionaires, North America 440 and Europe 324, it said in a statement.
Among individual countries, the United States and China dominated the list, having 409 and 317 billionaires respectively, followed by Russia (88 billionaires), Germany, United Kingdom, India, Switzerland, Brazil, Taiwan, France and Turkey (Paris and Ankara are on the tenth place).
According to Hurun Report, Mexican business magnate Carlos Slim was ranked as the Richest Man on the Planet with a fortune of $66 billion. US investor Warren Buffett and Amancio Ortega, a Spanish fashion executive and founding chairman of the Inditex fashion group, were second and third with a net worth of $58 billion and $55 billion. Bill Gates, Bernard Arnault, Larry Ellison, Li Ka-shing, Charles and David Koch as well Liliane Bettencourt are in the top ten.
The Hurun Report estimated the total wealth of 1,453 world’s dollar billionaires at $5.5 trillion. Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun Report, noted that the true number of billionaires in the world could be three times higher as some super-rich hid their worth. Thus, there are about 4,000 dollar billionaires in the world nowadays.
According to a separate research published less than six month ago, Asia had the world’s most billionaires. At the end of September 2012, Royal Bank of Canada and the IT services group Capgemini in a survey announced the number of millionaires in Asia came up to 3.37 million in 2011. Meanwhile, North America, the former leader, was on the second place, having 3.35 million citizens with a net worth of $1 million or more.
