Mukesh Ambani Loses Its Crown of Asia’s Richest to Jack Ma

Indianbusiness tycoon Mukesh Ambani has lost its crown of Asia's richest man, relinquishingthe title to Jack Ma after oil prices collapsed along with global stocks.

Therout exacerbated by mounting fears that the spread of the novel coronaviruswill thrust the world into a recession, erased $5.8 billion from Ambani's networth on Monday and dropped him to No. 2 on the list of Asia's richest people,according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Ma, the founder of Alibaba GroupHolding Ltd. who relinquished the No. 1 ranking in mid-2018, is back on topwith a $44.5 billion fortune, about $2.6 billion more than Ambani.

Oilplunge the most in 29 years as Saudi Arabia and Russia vowed to pump more in astruggle for market share just as the coronavirus is spurring the first declinein demand in more than a decade.

Whilethe coronavirus has curtailed some of Alibaba's businesses, the damage has beenmitigated by increased demand for its cloud computing services and mobile apps.

RelianceIndustries, by comparison, has no such silver lining. The Indian company'sshares plunged 12% on Monday, the most since 2009, extending this year's declineto 26%. Alibaba's American depositary receipts have slipped 6.8% so far in2020.

Reliance Industries expected the Aramco transactionto be completed by March, but people familiar with the matter said in Februarythat talks were still ongoing to bridge differences between the two partiesover the deal's structure.