Only Premji, Nadar make it to Forbes' tech billionaires list, while 20 Chinese make the cut

India may have TCS and Infosys, which export tonnes of software and help global corporations to decrease cost and increase productivity, but when it comes to producing billionaires in the technology space, the country cuts a sorry figure. That’s what the first ever Forbes’ tech billionaires list shows.

According to the list (see here ), there are just two Indians in the 100 tech billionaires list - Azim Premji of Wipro and Shiv Nadar of HCL Technologies. In comparison, there are 20 names from China. The list is dominated by the US, from where 51 names figure in the list. Not surprisingly, the list has many internet entrepreneurs, including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.

Bill Gates of Microsoft tops the list with a net worth of $79.6 billion. He was the top in Forbes Billionaires list too. Larry Ellison of Oracle with a fortune of $50 billion comes the distant second and Bezos ($47.8 billion) of Amazon the third.

Premji, with a $17.4 billion net worth, is ranked 13th and Shiv Nadar (14.4 billion) 14. In Asia ranking, they figure at the third and fourth slots, respectively. In the Forbes global ranking of billionaires, Premji is at the 48th slot and Nadar at 66th.

Interestingly, of the top 10, nine are Americans and just one is Chinese - Jack Ma of Alibaba. Jack Ma has a net worth of $23.2 billion and is ranked 7th, after Mark Zuckerberg ($41.2 billion) of Facebook and Google duo Larry Page ($33.4 billion) and Sergey Brin ($32.8 billion). Jack Ma had witnessed an erosion in his net worth after the stock prices of Alibaba tumbled on the US bourses due to slowdown concerns in China.

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft and Laurene Powell Jobs of Apple and Disney are at 8 and 9.

Writing in Forbes, Jennifer Wang noted that one-third of the 100 richest in the technology space come from Asia. “The next technological revolution may come from outside of Silicon Valley,” Wang said in the report. Jack Ma tops the Asian list, followed by Ma Huateng of QQ and WeChat.

In the global list, there are only seven women. Apart from Loral Powel Jobs, others are Zhou Qunfei ($7.5 billion, rank 30), Dagmar Dolby ($3 billion, 69), Denise Coates ($2.9 billion, 71), Judy Faulkner ($2.6 billion, 80), Eva Maria Bucher-Haefner ($2.5 billion, 82) and Meg Whitman ($2.2 billion, 95).

With inputs from Kishor Kadam