He has several properties that can be found in Madrid, London, Miami Beach, New York City, Chicago, and Seattle. The Spanish billionaire enjoys a life away from the limelight and often gives little chance for interviews to the press. Most recently in August, Ortega bought a 45-storey apartment tower in Chicago for a cool US$232 million.

  1. Aside from real estate, Ortega has also invested in energy and telecommunications, buying a 5% stake in Enagas last year.
  2. Ortega is very private about his personal life, and as of 2012 he has only given three interviews to journalists.
  3. Ortega reportedly frequents the same coffee shop every day and eats lunch in his company’s cafeteria.
  4. Spanish publications called the ceremony, which reportedly included a socialite-studded guest list, the “wedding of the year”.

The building has 492 flats along with a fitness centre, yoga studio, dog park and pet spa. In the Big Apple, he also bought the ornate and landmarked cast-iron building at 490 Broadway on the corner of Broome Street for US$145 million in the same year. Ortega picked up another New York property a year later, this time a hotel at 70 Park Avenue in Murray Hill for US$67.6 million. In 2015, he paid US$370 million for an entire block of prime property in Miami Beach. He reportedly bought an office block in London’s affluent Mayfair neighbourhood that borders Hyde Park and a property on London’s prime shopping street, Oxford Street.

He was always ambitious for his business but he never focused on personal wealth, and has often expressed his astonishment at how things have turned out, he reports. Sometimes he sits down with the Zara Woman design team and they kick around ideas for the coming weeks and months – the new layout for a store, a new design for the upcoming winter collection. After all, he has 60 years’ experience in fashion retail, built up from humble beginnings. Zara, the Spanish fashion empire, is primarily owned by Inditex, a holding company founded by Amancio Ortega as part of his “instant fashion” strategy. In the process, he developed one of the earliest versions of the fast fashion business model.

Ortega is very private about his personal life, and as of 2012 he has only given three interviews to journalists. Ortega is very reclusive and keeps a very low profile.[25] Until 1999, no photograph of Ortega had ever been published. According to Business Insider, he temporarily unseated Bill Gates as the richest person in the world in 2015. Due to the variations of his business, the Zara founder typically earns $400 million in dividends per year.

Shares Of Zara Parent Hit Record High As Fast Fashion Nets Big Money

Marta Ortega Pérez, 37, will step into the position in April, according to a Tuesday statement released by the chain’s parent company, Inditex. She will replace company veteran Pablo Isla, who has worked at Inditex for nearly two decades, first as chief executive officer and most recently as executive chair. Inditex shares dropped 6% on the news, wiping more than $3 billion from founder Amancio Ortega’s fortune.

Otherwise his life revolves around life with his children and grandchildren. He seldom ventures far from A Coruna – he has a second home nearby – and if he does go for a stroll around La Marina, locals know he prefers no fuss. « One day [he and] his mother went to pick up some groceries, » according to Covadonga O’Shea, author of a biography of the Zara founder. Every day he still makes the 10km journey from his town centre house to the Inditex headquarters, based just outside the coastal town of A Coruna where he first launched the Zara brand. The line has been extremely successful, with sales in Spain alone amounting to €493 million in 2020.

Inditex’s establishment marked the beginning of the “instant fashion” strategy, which prioritized quick turnaround times for fashion production and distribution. Zara is a Spanish clothing and accessories retailer that was founded in 1975 by Amancio Ortega and Rosalía Mera in the city of A Coruña, Galicia, Spain. The group also announced the appointment owner of zara net worth of new chief executive Óscar García Maceiras on Tuesday. Mr Ortega is one of the world’s richest men, with an estimated net worth of $77.8bn (£58.3bn), according to Forbes. (Bloomberg)—After making a fortune in clothing, Amancio Ortega turned his attention to real estate. Ortega managed to leverage the success of Zara and invested in other businesses.

Who is Zara founder Amancio Ortega?

That was an integral part of Zara’s quick turnaround business model, which Ortega instituted from the beginning. Early on he insisted the system be nimble enough to be able to restock any store within 48 hours and turn designs into https://1investing.in/ clothing within 10 days. Bill Gates has returned to the top of Forbes magazine’s annual list of the world’s richest people, as rising stock markets swelled the ranks of billionaires, which included a record number of women.

The estate was the site of his daughter Marta’s first wedding, but it’s unclear whether he still owns it. In 2011, he bought the tallest skyscraper in Spain, the 157-metre Torre Picasso in Madrid, for US$536 million. In 2016, he bought another Madrid skyscraper, Cepsa Tower, for US$551 million, and invested in the Epic Residences and Hotel, a luxurious, 54-storey skyscraper in Miami. Spanish publications called the ceremony, which reportedly included a socialite-studded guest list, the “wedding of the year”. He was planning to name it Zorba after the film Zorba the Greek, but there was already a local bar with the same name.

Because he’d already bought moulds of the letters Z-O-R-B-A, he made do with what he had and ended up with the name Zara. One Zara employee who worked with him told The Economist in 2016 that “the true story of Amancio Ortega has not been told”. « He’s not one of the rich people who looks at you from the height of his success. » When she pointed out to him the positive news coverage his company had received, he played it down, she says, saying it gave him « vertigo ». Covadonga O’Shea, who has known Mr Ortega for 20 years, says his shyness is rooted in humility, that he feels the company’s success is only partly down to what he has done.

The two of them opened the company’s first fashion store in Galicia Spain. « They’ve got two people there who have relevant and long experience of the company – Carlos Crespo and Oscar Maceiras, » she told the BBC. Instead the man known as « The Boss » has remained very much involved in the company.

Elsewhere on the BBC

He has been living his life peacefully as one of the richest people on the planet. While he is not the richest person in the world, he is one of the richest individuals alive with a net worth of $70 billion. Ortega, 84, the founder and owner of fashion label Zara, invested 2.1 billion euros in real estate last year through various subsidiaries of his holding company Pontegadea, according to an emailed statement. Pontegadea, which owns 59.3% of Zara parent Inditex SA, had a net income of 1.8 billion euros for 2019, including 1.64 billion euros in Inditex dividends and 621 million euros from real estate assets. Amancio Ortega owns around 59% of Inditex, which is the world’s largest clothing retailer. Apart from Zara, he owns other companies such as Massimo Dutti, Pull&Bear, Stradivarius, and more.

Inditex

A record 1,645 billionaires with a total net worth of $6.4 trillion made Forbes’ list, up from 1,426 last year. Amancio Ortega, the Spanish founder of clothing conglomerate Inditex SA, which includes the Zara fashion chain, ranked third at $64 billion. Since Inditex’s initial public offering in 2001, Ortega has received more than 9 billion euros, or about US$10 billion, in dividends, according to Bloomberg. Most of his cash has been reinvested in property through his company’s investment arm, Pontegadea. « But in 10 to 15 years’ time there are likely to be more competitors operating a similar business model. »

Amancio Ortega’s Sources of Income

Six years later, in 1999, Inditex acquired a 65% stake in the lingerie company Oysho to incorporate its production capabilities. The store proved a success and expanded into several Spanish cities in the 1980s, with the first shop outside the country opening in Portugal in 1985. He intended to call the store Zorba after the 1964 film Zorba the Greek, but with a bar of the same name nearby, the chose Zara instead. Ortega was also a fashion designer who initially worked out of his sister’s home.

Despite Ortega’s impressive net worth, many people have never heard of him. The 82-year-old Spaniard fiercely guards his privacy and gives few interviews to the press. Shoppers remain wary over safety concerns and this effectively brought down foot traffic in malls. Stores under Inditex are not the only ones that are suffering, as Forever 21, Pier 1, Papyrus, A.C. Moore, Macy’s, and Sears have all announced store closures at some point, per Fast Company. One Zara employee who worked with him told The Economist in 2016 that « the true story of Amancio Ortega has not been told. »

Zara, under the ownership of Inditex, is a leading Spanish clothing and accessories retailer with a strong global presence. Over the 2000s, Zara expanded further with new stores opened in numerous key markets such as Brazil, Singapore, Japan, Russia, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, and India. To ensure distribution to worldwide stores in just a few days, Zara also implemented a just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing system inspired by Toyota in 1990. Inditex owns Zara, the Spanish fashion empire owned by Amancio Ortega, whose net worth in 2022 stood at over $50 billion, making him the wealthiest man in Spain. Zara is the most important asset of Inditex, contributing to over 70% of the group’s revenues. Inditex generated almost €28 billion in 2022, and Zara generated almost €20 billion in the same period.