While bar charts, line graphs and simple numbers are hardly capable of providing the defining answer to many economic, social and political questions, they are certainly a good way of obtaining a general overview of any particular subject.
Each month the Business Supplement will look into a brace of statistical information and provide readers with what we consider to be the central elements of these figures.
The world’s millionaires
Millionaires, that is, those with a net worth of more than US$1million, can be found all across the globe, but most are in the United States. The U.S. is home to 18.61 million millionaires, (that’s over 5 per cent of the population).
China follows in second place with 4.44 million, less than half of one percent of the country’s population. Japan, The UK and Germany follow in third, fourth and fifth positions with 3.02 million, 2.44 million, and 2.18 million millionaires respectively.
Much of the wealth can be found in high property prices across the said countries and possibly well inflated stock holdings. The rest of the top 10 countries all fall in those categories with France, Italy, Canada, Australia and Spain ranking 6th to 10th in that order.
Asia’s other millionaires were mainly concentrated in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, with India also high on the list.
In total, worldwide there are 46.6 million millionaires and 168,030 are of them are considered to be ultra rich with a net worth of over US$50 million. Fully half of these ultra rich individuals are to be found in the USA.
Highest value “Unicorn” Start-ups in 2019
2019 saw plenty of startup companies emerging from venture capitalists and hitting the stock market, or even remaining in private hands awaiting a possible IPO at the right time.
Those that are valued above US$1 billion are referred to as “Unicorns”, and there were more than 400 of them last year.
23 of those were valued at above the US$10 billion mark, amongst them famous names such as AirBNB worth US$35 Billion, SpaceX worth US$33 Billion and Drone maker DJI worth some US$15 Billion.
Grab came in at US$14.3 billion, even though there was competition from Uber, which itself is a prior unicorn, and now listed on the stock market.
Chinese internet giant, Bytedance (Tiktok), is the largest start up of the year worth some US$75 billion, and an IPO is expected to take place when conditions are right.
In the end, for all unicorns, the stock market will ultimately decide on their final valuations, but most startups have managed to largely maintain their initial stock prices after coming to the market.
