By
Temitope Olatunji
March 28th, 2024
China’s latest wealth boom has emanated from the tech sector’s surging growth, initial public offerings’ flood as well as soaring stock markets.
The total worth of billionaires in China has now reached $4 trillion after an additional $1.5 trillion added. A quite surprising development in a country where Chinese lawmakers possess very minute political power while the Communist Party determines all major decisions.
Hurun Rich List 2020 released its annual findings revealing robust tech growth and the emergence of several IPOs enabled the uber-rich in China to attain the fastest growth increase ever- of $1.5 trillion.
Billionaires Club Concentrated in China
On Tuesday, Hurun China Rich List showed that China had minted 257 billionaires as of August pushing the billionaire club member number from 621 to now 878. China has surpassed the U.S., which Wealth-X – a company that uses different metrics for china – says it has 788 billionaires. In 2015, the number of billionaires in China first exceeded that of the U.S. Therefore, there are more billionaires now in China than in any part of the world. According to the firm that has been tracking the wealth of the superrich for over 22 years, China had no single billionaire back in 1999, but now it has recorded the highest number ever seen.
“The world has never seen this much wealth created in just one year. China’s entrepreneurs have done much better than expected. Despite Covid-19, they have risen to record levels,” said Hurun Report chairman and chief researcher Rupert Hoogewerf.
Individuals in China whose net worth surpassed the cut-off for appearing on the list – 2 billion yuan ($290 million) – were 2,398. The combined wealth of the super-rich amounting to $4 trillion is equated to present Germany’s GDP, which has risen from the figure it was in 2019 of $2.6 trillion.
Fortune of China’s Prominent Entrepreneurs Increases Significantly
China’s latest wealth boom has emanated from the tech sector’s surging growth, initial public offerings’ flood as well as soaring stock markets. Alibaba co-founder and former executive chairman Jack Ma comfortably retained his top spot for the third year in a row with a net worth of almost $60 billion. The good performance of Alibaba and the upcoming IPO of his fintech giant Ant Group made his wealth to soar by 45% from last year.
Second in the list of China’s billionaires, was tech conglomerate Tencent founder, chairman and CEO Pony Ma. Growth in WeChat as well as the strong gaming business of Tencent, Alibaba’s strong rival, pushed the founder’s wealth to $57.4 billion an increase of nearly 50%. Renowned bottled water producing company YST chairman Zhong Shanshan closed the top three rankings.
Meituan, Dianping’s Wang Xing, dubbed China’s “food delivery king”, was one of the big wealth winners having won a market share from Alibaba which made his wealth quadruple to $25 billion. Another was SF Express’ China’s Wang Wei, famously known as “express delivery king”, more than doubled his wealth for the past year reach to $35.3 billion. Touchscreen maker Lens Zhou Qunfei was also identified in the Hurun report since her fortune more than tripled to total $17 billion. For that reason, she is now one of the three richest world’s self-made women.
Hoogewerf stated that the economic structure is evolving, moving away from traditional sectors such as real estate and manufacturing and heading towards a new economy where tech reigns. Therefore, more wealth creation occurred this year than the previous five years combined according to the Hurun report. China’s rapid economic recovery from Covid-19 after the first two months of massive wealth destruction painted a striking picture as there has been a massive digital boom and stock market recovery.
