A 34-year-old entrepreneur based in Buckinghamshire has been named among the richest people under 40 in the UK on The Sunday Times’ annual rich list.

Vishal Karia, whose global perfume brand Affinity Fragrances operates from a unit in Iver, was ranked 25th on the newspaper’s list of the 40 wealthiest people under 40 in Southeast England.

The 34-year-old is a relatively new entry on the list – making his debut last year – and is among a group of millionaires who have risen through the ranks from humble beginnings.

Mr Karia spoke to The Times last year about “feeling like a bit of a misfit” when he was younger because his family were “not well off”.

He recounted how he was dismissed from the high-flying Merchant Taylors’ School in Middlesex after his father worked hard to get him a place, due to his “inability to focus” in class – something that was later diagnosed as attention deficiency hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

The businessman said that while it had negatively impacted his academic years, he believed the condition had been an asset that had helped him to build the large-scale fragrance company he has today.

“It’s a superpower. My bandwidth is huge, I can shoot off in lots of different directions and cover a lot of ground very quickly. I can also retain an incredible amount of information.”

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He founded Affinity Fragrances in 2016 and has since worked with high-end brands including Gucci, Hugo Boss and Giorgio Armani.

The rest, as they say, is history, with the wholesaler earning a whopping £116 million in the last seven years.

The 34-year-old is in good company on this year’s list, with David and Victoria Beckham, Elton John and Ed Sheeran also ranking among the wealthiest Brits in 2024.

However, the overall number of billionaires in the country has fallen by the largest amount on record from a 2022 peak of 177 to a low of 165.

Robert Watts, compiler of the Rich List, said: “This year’s list suggests Britain’s billionaire boom has come to an end. Many of our home-grown entrepreneurs have seen their fortunes fall and some of the global super-rich who came here are moving away.

“Thousands of British livelihoods rely on the super-rich to some extent. We’ll have to wait and see whether we have now reached peak billionaire, and what that means for our economy.”