CHINA VIRUS World's 6th Richest Man Drops to 13th or 14th

Amancio Ortega's Christmases are always similar: the discreet businessman enjoys his family in the privacy of Coruña , with a small outing from the clan on New Year's Eve to the Rialto , and the presence of his daughters and grandchildren in the city. This year, things are different: the risks of the pandemic and the curfew make it difficult for the Ortegas to celebrate more publicly, and his daughter Marta Ortega will not be able to enjoy her occasional participation in the San Silvestre Coruña race, which this year only will have virtual edition.

The pandemic has hit the nature of Ortega's business. In the end, it seems clear that Inditex will end the fiscal year with benefits, but with a drop in turnover that has pushed Ortega back among the richest men in the world: he has fallen to positions 13 and 14, respectively, on the lists of billionaires. from Forbes and Bloomberg . However, it does not appear that the greatest of our entrepreneurs have had, on the whole, a bad year. Especially in the personal field, the most elusive in terms of headlines of the richest man in Spain. In the family, Amancio was able to celebrate on March 21 the birth of the fifth of his grandchildren , Matilda. The second daughter of Marta Ortega, the fruit of her marriage to Carlos Torreta , who was born early but without problems in the land of the Ortega, in Coruña. Good news as soon as the confinement begins.


The businessman has not only received affection and good news from the family part, although he was accompanied by his daughter in the largest demonstration he has received this year. In the tribute, the second that he received this year in his land , which the Inditex employees gave him a few days ago. In the presence of Marta and in the middle of the company's Christmas celebration, the workers gave her an emotional applause that moved the founder , melted into a hug with his daughter. It is the second time that we have seen Amancio Ortega this excited at Inditex headquarters in recent years. In March 2016, the textile giant's employees conspired to pay him another emotional tribute, to celebrate Amancio's 80th birthday.

That birthday gesture had its reply in which the health workers and members of the emergency services rendered him in March of this year, on the occasion of his 84th birthday: a parade of ambulances in front of Amancio Ortega's house in A Coruña, just two weeks after Spain was confined. An initiative in which the health workers also sang happy birthday to him and thanked him for his frequent donations to public health, before and during the pandemic.

A few days before, just a week after the confinement began, the Amancio Ortega Foundation had made its first donation to the public health system to face the first and worst days of the covid: 100,000 protective masks for health workers and 300,000 surgical masks, in a time when protective material was scarce. But it was not enough: a couple of days after his birthday, the Foundation announced the expenditure of 63 million euros in an unprecedented donation in our country: three million masks, 1,500 respirators, about half a thousand hospital beds and a million coronavirus detection tests. Inditex, for its part, contributed another 25 million euros to the fund that the large Spanish companies created to help purchase medical supplies and fight the pandemic.

And all, in a month of March that was the most critical for Ortega's fortune: almost a third of it evaporated in the face of the uncertainty of the global pandemic, which especially affected a still-present business such as fashion retail . The reaction of both Ortega's successor at Inditex, Pablo Isla , and Ortega himself, indicated that the ups and downs in a ranking of millionaires were the founder's least concern: they discarded the application of an ERTE to the company's workers, although the stores of the group were closed and without customers. A move that also provided an injection of hope, the most volatile of economic indicators, that we would recover.


Good PR methinks.