The Filipino billionaire funneled $200 million of his own money into the Solaire Resort & Casino, a $1.2 billion gambling complex with 1,200 slot machines and 300 gaming tables that opened last March. He also owns half of International Container Terminal Services Inc., a port operator with facilities stretching from Brazil to Madagascar to India, which he inherited when his father died in 1995.
The billionaire said the biggest challenge facing the global economy is “liquidity,” and that central banks will not be able to keep interest rates at their low rates for the year.
Davos Veteran
“I hope to network and update myself on regional and global issues,” he said of his second time at the WEF annual meeting.
Billionaire Adi Godrej, 71, agreed interest rates would rise “somewhat in the developed world,” though he expects them to “come down in the developing world.”
Godrej, who has visited Davos for more than 20 years, forecast that the bull market in stocks would continue. His family’s holdings, which include real estate and consumer goods, had revenue of $4.1 billion in the year ended March 2013 and are used by more than half a billion Indians every day.
His cousin, Jamshyd Godrej, crossed paths with Bajaj Auto Ltd. chairman Rahul Bajaj at last year’s meeting, one of many meetings among the 17 Indian billionaires in attendance, topped only by the U.S. contingent last year.
Nineteen Indian billionaires are expected at the gathering in 2014. The 75-year-old Bajaj won’t be among them. After coming to Davos for 35 years, he said in an e-mail to Bloomberg News that he won’t be making the trip this week.
‘Finest Minds’
“I see the bull market continuing,” billionaire Malvinder Singh, executive chairman of New Delhi-based Fortis Healthcare Ltd., India’s second-biggest hospital operator, said in an e- mail. “Interest rates will continue to remain low through 2014 as economies work out ways of kick-starting recovery by boosting demand.”