China: the number of billionaires on the rise despite the pandemic
Pony Ma, boss of Chinese digital giant Tencent, which owns WeChat messaging, is the 2nd richest man in China, according to the 2021 ranking of the firm Hurun.
© AP Photo / Kin Cheung
Text by: Myriam Berber
3 min
The health crisis is destroying the world economy, but China is doing quite well, with an increase in wealth.
The number of billionaires has jumped, according to the annual ranking of the Hujun firm, the Chinese Forbes.
The super-rich of the Middle Kingdom largely dominate the world rankings, with 992 billionaires in total, including Hong Kong.
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Chinese billionaires do not know the crisis.
As the pandemic has affected the entire world, the country's wealthiest have benefited from the development of digital and e-commerce.
For their part, traditional fortunes in real estate, financial services and entertainment have stalled.
The richest man in China is Zhong Shanshan, the boss of the Nongfu Spring bottled water company.
Next are the CEOs of two internet giants, Tencent and ByteDance, which owns the TikTok app.
In fourth place, we now find the famous
Jack Ma
, founder of the e-commerce giant Alibaba, which has long been the country's first fortune and who has allowed himself to criticize the regime.
Jack Ma's tumble from first to fourth place coincides with his Alibaba group's woes with Chinese regulators.
At the end of 2020, Beijing put an abrupt halt to the IPO of payment giant Ant Group, a financial subsidiary of Alibaba, which should have been the biggest operation of all time.
Outnumber Americans
The pandemic has enriched many billionaires.
Wang Xing, the head of the Meituan meal delivery company, has quadrupled his wealth this year to become the country's thirteenth fortune.
Health was also a promising sector.
Jiang Rensheng, founder of Zhifei, a maker of Covid-19 vaccines, also tripled his wealth.
With 992 billionaires, China far exceeds the United States, which has 696 and India 177, even if the three largest fortunes remain American and French.
We find
in first place Elon Musk
, the fantastic boss of Tesla, in front of Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon who increased his fortune by 74 billion dollars in 2020, and Bernard Arnault at the head of the luxury group LVMH.
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To read also: The number of Chinese billionaires explodes thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic
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