On 12 June, China’s 2024 New Fortune 500 Wealth Creation List (新财富500创富榜) was officially published. This time, the threshold of the list was 6.63 billion RMB (approx. 0.91 billion USD).
- Zhong Shanshan of Nongfu Spring ranked first with a market value of 456.27 billion RMB (approx. 62.91 billion USD) shareholding, topping the list for the fourth consecutive year.
- PDD Holdings’ Huang Zheng, ByteDance’s Zhang Yiming, Tencent’s Ma Huateng, and Alibaba’s Ma Yun ranked second to fifth.
- Wanda Group’s Wang Jianlin and Wang Sicong, father and son, with a 140.84 billion RMB (approx. 19.42 billion USD) market value of shareholdings, ranked ninth.
- In the new energy vehicle sector, Li Xiang of Li Auto, preceded Wang Xing of Meituan, Li Yanhong of Baidu and Liu Qiangdong of JD.com, with 65.17 billion RMB (approx. 8.99 billion USD).
Currently, at the top of the list, Zhong Shanshan holds 83.98% in Nongfu Spring and 73.31% in Beijing Wantai Biolog Pha Ent Co Ltd. Since 2020, Nongfu Spring has been listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Nongfu Spring’s 2023 annual report shows that in the past year, its revenue reached 42.67 billion RMB (approx. 5.88 billion USD), a year-on-year increase of 28.4%. Today, Nongfu Spring’s price-to-sales ratio is as high as 11 times, and its price-to-earnings ratio is as high as 40 times, even surpassing that of Kweichow Moutai (贵州茅台).
The second-ranked Huang Zheng is likewise the second-ranked Chinese tycoon on the 2024 Hurun Global Rich List (24th globally). PDD Holdings was founded less than 10 years ago but has grown rapidly. Its cross-border e-commerce platform, Temu, had 467 million unique visitors in December 2023, on par with AliExpress and ranked second globally.
Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, ranked third. In April this year, ByteDance became the world’s most valuable unicorn for the third consecutive year with a value of 1.56 trillion (approx. 0.22 trillion USD). According to the latest disclosure, Zhang Yiming holds 21% of the shares in ByteDance.
The Wanda Group’s Wang Jianlin and his son suffered a double downturn in China’s capital market and real estate market in 2023. That year, Wang Jianlin successfully ceded control of Wanda Film and Zhuhai Wanda Business Management to return cash and absorb new investment. Surprisingly, the hashtag that sparked the most discussion on Weibo after the release of this list was #Wang Jianlin and Wang Sicong Back In Top 10 Of Wealth Creation List# (王健林王思聪父子重回创富榜前十), which garnered 160 million views. However, most of the discussion under the topic centred around the recent scandal of Wang Sicong’s illegitimate child with an actress in the entertainment industry.
The New Fortune 500 Wealth Creation List has been released yearly since 2003. On the list, the main structure of entrepreneurs has changed many times, from manufacturing to real estate, to TMT (technology, media, and telecom), to today’s new energy as the pivot, clearly reflecting the path of China’s industrial progress.
