Stock market selloff: Not Adani or Ambani, this billionaire took biggest hit in 2025

Not Mukesh Ambani or Gautam Adani, the two richest Indians, but Shiv Nadar of HCL Technologies Ltd has seen the biggest drop in notional wealth in 2025, as per the publicly available data with Bloomberg Billionaire index. 

Nadar lost $9.71 billion of notional wealth in 2025. He was last valued at $33.4 billion. The fall in his notional fortune was higher than the combined loss seen by Gautam Adani ($4.45 billion) and Mukesh Ambani ($3.77 billion) together. Nadar still was the third richest Indian at $33.4 billion after Ambani's $86.8 billion and Adani's $74.2 billion, as per the Bloomberg data. 

Nadar is a billionaire businessman and philanthropist, who founded HCL in 1976. On Monday, HCL Tech shares were down 6.26 per cent at Rs 1,333.05, taking their 2025 fall past 30 per cent-mark. This is against a 7.3 per cent drop in the BSE Sensex during the same period. Promoters of HCL Tech, led by Shiv Nadar & family, held 60.81 per cent stake in the IT major that was valued at Rs 3,61,283 crore, following the Monday's fall. 

IT players, like HCL Tech, are running out of levers for margin expansion given already low attrition and high utilisation. Pricing strain does exist in new deals, which may cap meaningful margin expansion in FY26, Elara Securities said in a note. It see dollar revenue for HCL Tech should drop in Q4 sequentially due to seasonality-led weakness and uncertain demand environment. HCL Tech is seen guiding for 3-5 per cent revenue growth in FY26. Margin guidance is seen in the 18-19 per cent range, similar to FY25. 

Kotak Institutional Equities said the Trump administration has increased tariffs significantly on several countries, which could lead to higher inflation and slower economic growth globally with an increased risk of recession in the US and other developed economies.

"Additionally, responses by target countries toward US tariffs can alter the tariff scene significantly in the near term, leading to a highly uncertain macro environment. Uncertainty at the beginning of the year would lead to deferral of decisions and impact growth in the crucial and seasonally strong quarter of June," Kotak said.

This new reality would mean that FY2026 could now end up being worse than FY2025 for many of the companies, the domestic brokerage said adding that a recession means that the downside risks in stocks exist, while a slowdown leads to reasonable upsides.