Amitabh Bachchan has been a showbiz trendsetter for decades, and now he seems to be extending that tag to investing as well.
Last week, Ziddu.com – an asset owned by Singapore-based Meridian Tech, in which Amitabh and his son Abhishek had invested USD 250,000 back in 2015 – was acquired by LongFin Corp, according to a report by The Economic Times.
The deal went through just two days after the LongFin stock got listed on NASDAQ. Between Wednesday and Monday, the stock rose 1,000 percent after surging over 2,500 percent on Friday, when the company announced its decision to acquire Ziddu.
When the Bachchans invested in Meridian, Ziddu was described as a "cloud storage and e-distribution startup". However, this month, the description changed to "a Blockchain technology empowered solutions provider" that offers microfinance using "crypto currencies across continents."
So when LongFin announced the Ziddu acquisition, the Bachchans, who had received 250,000 shares of LongFin in lieu of their holding in Meridian Tech, saw their USD 250,000 investment skyrocket to USD 17.5 million in value.
LongFin is not the first stock to zoom thanks to the rise of Blockchain and cryptocurrencies this year. Many technology companies, that earlier had different names of descriptions, have added one or both of these words to their names or descriptions and have seen their stock prices rise exponentially in a very short span of time.
"It's crazy... the global euphoria over Blockchain is sweeping the world...no intrinsic value can be attached," Venkat Meenavalli, Chairman and CEO of LongFin Corp, was quoted as saying.
The newspaper also tried getting in touch with Amitabh Bachchan to know what he intends to do with the investment now that it has multiplied so much, but the text message sent to him went unanswered.