The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

The rich (Chinese) also cry

2023-05-06T05:00:29.362Z


229 businessmen from the Asian giant have seen their status as billionaires vanish due to Beijing's anti-covid policy and the war in Ukraine


Chinese tycoons accounted for more than half of the 445 businessmen from all corners of the world who have lost their billionaire status

.

, in English).

At the end of March, 229 residents of the Asian giant who had accumulated a fortune equal to or greater than 1,000 million dollars in the previous year left the list produced annually by Hurun, considered the Chinese version of Forbes magazine.

This is the most pronounced reduction in the assets of Chinese billionaires since the list began to be published in 2013, reflecting, among other factors, the uncertainty caused, at a national level, by the strict application of the zero covid policy, since international scale, due to events such as the war in Ukraine, which triggered inflation and precipitated the fall of the stock markets and the increase in interest rates.

According to the Hurun report, last January the total capital of the world's wealthiest decreased by 10%, a drop that was more pronounced (15%) in the case of the Chinese members of this superclub of nine zeros.

The richest man in China and fifteenth in the world is Zhong Shanshan, creator of the Nongfu Spring bottled water empire.

Zhong, who has ranked first in the national ranking since 2020, saw his net worth decline 4% year-on-year.

On the local ladder they are followed by Pony Ma, founder of Tencent, and Zhang Yiming, at the helm of ByteDance, whose fortunes fell by 25% and 31%, respectively.

This collapse compared to its international peers has been directly related to the confinements implemented by Beijing to stop the spread of covid-19 in 2022, a black year in which the economy grew at a rate of 3%, the worst data since 1976 (only behind the 2.2% of the 2020 pandemic).

Added to this situation is the harsh surveillance campaign that the Government launched against private companies in 2020, a crusade that has caused large firms in sectors such as real estate, technology or education to lose billions in market value in Hong Kong and Wall Street.

In fact, among the Chinese tycoons who have seen their fortunes shrink the most include Xu Jiaying, the former king of bricks with the Evergrande real estate company, or Jack Ma, the brain behind the creation of the digital giant Alibaba.

The weakness of the yuan

But, although it is true that all this has contributed to the contraction of wealth, it must be taken into account that many of those Chinese businessmen who came out of the exclusive group of billionaires have their capital defined in yuan, a currency that has yielded with respect to the dollar in the last year.

To illustrate our readers, in April 2022, a Chinese tycoon needed the equivalent of about 6.3 billion yuan to enter the Hurun list (which is made in dollars);

a few months later, in September, 7.3 billion yuan and, in recent days, about 6.9 billion yuan.

He means that, without having carried out any type of financial operation, those fortunes have suffered an exponential drop if they are computed in the US currency due to the depreciation of the yuan.

However, despite the relegation to the second division of these two hundred super-rich from the Asian giant, China continues to be, for the seventh consecutive year, the country where the largest number of billionaires resided, with a total of 969, 26 of whom which occupied the top 100. It is also the main nation of origin of the 216 newcomers on the list, with a total of 69. The US, with 691 billionaires, ranks second.

Here you can consult the latest Letters from the correspondent

Follow all the information on

Economy

and

Business

on

Facebook

and

Twitter

, or in our

weekly newsletter

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber

Source: elparis

All business articles on 2023-05-06

You may like

News/Politics 2024-01-31T17:29:49.931Z

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.