Billionaire Zara founder Amancio Ortega to receive €3.23bn dividend | Retail industry
Zara’s billionaire founder will receive a company-record €3.23bn (£2.8bn) in dividends from the world’s biggest fashion retailer this year.
Amancio Ortega, who currently controls 59% of Spanish Inditex and is currently chaired by his daughter Marta Ortega Pérez, will receive half his dividend in May and half in November, like other shareholders.
Inditex, which owns numerous high street chains including Bershka, Massimo Dutti, Pull&Bear, Stradivarius and Oysho, said on Wednesday it would increase its dividend by 4% following “strong operating performance” in 2025.
The payout narrowly surpasses the €3.1 billion dividend given to Ortega last year. He has a net worth of around $126.7bn (£94bn), making him the 15th richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index.
Sales of Inditex, which has 5,460 stores in more than 90 countries and employs more than 160,000 people, increased by 3.2% in the year to 31 January 2026 to €39.9 billion. According to the results announced on Wednesday, profit before tax increased by 5.8% to 8 billion euros.
Although Inditex closed 103 stores worldwide last year, it shifted units to larger stores, meaning total sales area increased.
Ortega, who turns 90 this month, launched Zara in 1975 from a small store in La Coruña, Galicia, in northern Spain. He is still regularly seen chatting with staff at Inditex head office. He was a local clothing manufacturer who started as a delivery boy for a shirt manufacturer and opened his first store.
According to Bloomberg, Ortega had used the dividend in previous years to finance property purchases such as The Post Building in London, the Haughwout Building in New York and the Southeast Financial Center in Miami.
Ortega is reportedly racing to spend last year’s dividend on real estate in the face of Spain’s wealth tax. Turkey, the only country in the EU with a full-fledged wealth tax, is exempt from the tax if its residents invest their income in assets deemed “economic activity” within a 12-month period.
Inditex said Wednesday it expects to open 5% more store space this year and continue to grow online. He stated that he started the new year strongly, with sales increasing by 9% between February 1 and March 8, excluding exchange rate effects.
Inditex told analysts it had yet to see any disruption to stock flows due to disruption in the Middle East, which often acts as a hub for fashion from producing countries such as Bangladesh.
The group plans to bring its cut-price brand Lefties to the UK this year and is also looking for more sites for The Apartment, a concept that combines premium Zara clothing and homewares in a store laid out like an influencer’s home. Inditex is also opening new sales points in the USA, Norway and Denmark and is opening its first store on the Caribbean island of Curaçao.
Inditex is investing in technology and launching an AI-based virtual fitting system that allows online shoppers to create an avatar from their own photos and create images of themselves wearing real products.
