Radhakishan Shivkishan Damani, born on 12 July 1955, is an Indian billionaire businessman and investor and the founder and chairman of the retail chain DMart. His net worth was estimated at $14.8 billion as of September 2026, according to Wikipedia’s citation of Forbes. Estimates differ between sources, and other figures, including $15.7 billion for July 2026 and much higher family totals, appear in other reports, depending on whether they cover him alone or his family and on the share price of Avenue Supermarts.
He was raised in a Maheshwari Marwari Hindu family in a single-room apartment in Mumbai. He studied commerce at the University of Mumbai but dropped out after one year. After the death of his father, who worked on Dalal Street, he left the family’s ball-bearing business and became a stock market broker and investor.
In the early 1990s he made big profits by short-selling stocks that Harshad Mehta had artificially inflated. He was reportedly the largest individual shareholder of HDFC Bank after it went public in 1995. In 1999 he ran a franchise of the cooperative department store Apna Bazaar in Nerul, but was “unconvinced” by its business model. He quit the stock market in 2000 to start his own hypermarket chain, DMart, and opened the first store in Powai in 2002.
The chain had 25 stores in 2010, after which the company grew rapidly and went public in 2017. Avenue Supermarts, which owns DMart, had an initial public offering in March 2017, priced in a band of Rs 295 to Rs 299 between 8 and 10 March, and listed at more than Rs 600, according to reports. By March 2026 DMart had 518 stores in 12 states and union territories, according to Wikipedia, while Business Standard reported that the chain touched 500 stores in April 2026, so the exact count depends on the date and the counting method.
In 2020 he became the fourth-richest Indian, with a net worth of $16.5 billion, and ranked 117th on the global billionaire list. In 2022 Forbes placed him 87th globally with $18.9 billion. In October 2024 he and his family ranked sixth on the Forbes list of India’s 100 richest tycoons, with a net worth of $31.5 billion.
He also holds stakes in other companies, including VST Industries and India Cements, and publicly held stakes in 14 companies; the value of his shareholding was about Rs 2,140.49 billion, or $22 billion, in June 2024. In 2020 he bought a 1 percent stake in Andhra Paper and 15 percent of India Cements in May 2020, taking his holding there to 19.89 percent. In 2023 he bought 28 housing units in the luxury apartment building Three Sixty West for Rs 12.38 billion.
His story is often cited as an example of patient capital: a trader who bet against a market bubble, then spent years building a business that sells everyday groceries and household goods at modest margins. DMart avoids heavy discounting and owns most of its premises, which is a different approach from many rivals that rent their stores. Readers should treat headline wealth figures as estimates that move with the share price of Avenue Supermarts.
He is married to Shrikantadevi, and they have three daughters. Known for a low public profile, he is often described as a quiet trader who became a retail pioneer, and DMart’s focus on low prices and ownership of its stores has been a model for Indian retail.
Featured image: A DMart store in Hafeezpet, Hyderabad (file photo; not a photo of Radhakishan Damani). Photo by Curvasingh, licensed under CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
