MUMBAI: Retail entrepreneur Radhakishan Damani leapfrogged storied business family tycoons to emerge among the top 20 Indian billionaires on Tuesday as investor craze for consumer stocks drove retail chain Avenue Supermarts to the best listing-day performance in 13 years.Damani raced past Anil Agarwal, Anil Ambani and Rahul Bajaj to become the 17th richest Indian largely based on the first-day performance of Avenue Supermarts, Bloomberg and ET data analysis shows. Avenue owns DMart, one of India’s most profitable retail chains.Avenue’s shares listed at Rs 604.40, a whopping 102 per cent premium to the issue price of Rs 299. The stock rose as much as 117 per cent to an intraday high of Rs 650, giving the company a market cap of Rs 40,000 crore.The reclusive Damani, who is well known as the guru of stock market Big Bull Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, is worth $5.2 billion, as measured by Avenue’s Tuesday closing price of Rs 640.75 as well as the other stocks in his portfolio.Avenue’s market cap of Rs 39,988 crore — based on the stock’s Tuesday closing — also makes it the 65th most valuable Indian company ahead of Britannia Industries, Marico and Bank of Baroda.Damani, known among stock market veterans as ‘Mr White and White’ for his penchant for dressing in white, branched out into the retail sector in 1999, well ahead of many industry giants such as Ambani, Kumar Mangalam Birla and Future Group’s Kishore Biyani “RK is a low-profile, shrewd, intelligent and bright investor who studies in depth the company he invests in,” said well-known investment banker Hemendra Kothari. “He always analyses a stock with a certain vision.”Damani, who joined his brother’s stockbroking business at the age of 32 following their father’s death, built his fortune by buying multinational stocks during the late ’80s and early ’90s.The high point of Damani’s career came when he began shorting stocks owned by Harshad Mehta after they soared during the Mehta-inspired bull run. The astronomical stock valuations convinced Damani that something was wrong. When the market collapsed after Mehta’s scam was exposed, Damani made a killing and a name in the markets as a canny investor.He focused on MNC stocks and kept an eye out for companies with high-quality businesses that were available for a reasonable price, said a close friend.“In the ’90s, 50 per cent of the wealth created in the market came from MNCs, 30 per cent from PSUs (public sector undertakings) and the rest from new companies, before technology, pharma and private banks took over,” said Raamdeo Agrawal, joint MD, Motilal Oswal Financial Services.“I once asked him what would he choose: a 5-6 PE (price-earnings ratio) company or Nestle, which was at 50 times (PE), and he replied, neither. Also, he was ahead of the curve in identifying good-quality businesses.”Sometimes, Damani would come out of his shell and shock the market with a bold move, but he was seldom reckless. For instance, in February 2001, he made an open offer to buy 20 per cent stake in cigarette maker VST Industries, belonging to ITC’s parent British American Tobacco. The offer failed, and Damani didn’t pursue it. But his investment of Rs 51crore in the business is today worth Rs 1,168 crore.In 1999, Damani and Damodar Mall, then a brand manager in Hindustan Unilever , took up a 5,000 sq ft Apna Bazaar franchisee in Nerul near Mumbai and added one more in Navi Mumbai.Two years on, DMart was set up and it took over Apna Bazaar. Damani also has the ability to spot talent. In 2004, Hindustan Unilever executive Neville Noronha used to interact with Damani as a vendor. The latter convinced him to jump ship, and today Noronha is the go-to man at DMart. Noronha, unlike several top executives at many big companies, has neither an IIT nor an IIM degree.DMart’s results are impressive by retail industry standards. It boasts financials that would be the envy of many of the country’s best-performing firms. Its same-store sales growth in FY16 of 21 per cent was head of Future’s 9 per cent and Spencer’s 8 per cent.And its EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) of Rs 657 crore was several times bigger than Future Group, Star Bazaar and HyperCity.