Did you know that there are 537 billionaires in the US? In US$ terms. Yes, they have been number 1 in terms of number of billionaires for as long as anyone could remember. However, the US billionaires where total is concerned has been overtaken in terms of number of billionaires from China this year. The mainland has 596 US-dollar billionaires. There are 119 billionaires in Hong Kong and Taiwan combined. This is despite a slowing growth in China. The survey was done by a wealth ranking company called Hurun Report.
Oh yeah, next year may be an even smaller number 2 for the US because the survey also showed that there are another 1,877 mainland entrepreneurs who are worth at least 2 billion yuan (HK$2.43 billion). Imagine if just 20% of these doubled their wealth? A large proportion of the entrepreneurs in the list were involved in the manufacturing and IT sectors. In 1999, when the ranking first started, half of the top 100 Chinese tycoons were from the property industry but that has dropped to just 16 percent this year.
According to Hurun Report founder Rupert Hoogewerf, one major reason for this is due to the remarkable rally in stocks where despite the sluggish economic growth the number of tycoon numbers are increasing to the highest in history. 20 percent are women. Within the list, there were also 16 entrepreneurs born after 1980 who built their wealth through their own companies and not inheritance. It was not mentioned how many of these were due to the internet but I think the numbers would be huge considering their age.
It’s increasingly easy to note that the growth is fast becoming ASIA centric as the US slowly lose all of its leading positions among all these wealthiest list etc. In fact even where currencies are concerned, according to one recent report, the Chinese Yuan is already a top 5 most used currency in the world, behind the few that it would overtake within just a few years I believe. The top currency may be harder to dislodge, the US$. China will also be launching its China International Payment System by end of 2015. That’s a real ‘currency changer’ thought indeed.
written on 17 Oct 2015
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