Chasing China's new emperors

Behind the compilation of a chinese rich list

Cataloging Chinese billionaires gets harder by the year in this fast-changing country, where today's financial statement is increasingly made redundant by tomorrow's initial public offering (IPO), says Shanghai-based Forbes Senior Editor Russell Flannery.

The World's Billionaires list that Forbes published on March 10 - the eighth such list that Flannery has contributed to since he opened the company's Shanghai bureau in 2003 - featured 115 people from the Chinese mainland, compared to 64 in the previous year.

Russell Flannery says many of the new-generation Chinese tycoons boast diversified portfolios. [Yong Kai/for China Daily]

Part of this dramatic rise was due to China seeing more IPOs than any other country in the world in 2010, says Flannery.

He uses the example of the 12 new Chinese names on the list that got there by virtue of listing their companies on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) last year, one of China's three bourses.

These 12 alone exceeded the total increase in new American billionaires (10) over the previous year. Nonetheless, US billionaires still outnumber their Chinese counterparts by more than 3:1 (413 versus 115).

The fact that Chinese companies are geared toward going global at such speed presents another problem: The list, which this year took Feb 14 (Valentine's Day) as its cut-off date for compiling financial data, can be rendered inaccurate within as little as 24 hours.

Take Qiu Guanghe, chairman of Zhejiang Semir Garment, as a case in point.

When Flannery issued his annual China Rich list in October (he also compiles the lists for Taiwan and Hong Kong), Qiu's personal wealth stood at $900 million.

Four months later, this figure was upwardly revised to $1.4 billion for inclusion in the World's Billionaires list, with Qiu taking a share of 879th place.

One day after the global list was published, Semir went public. This catapulted Qiu's wealth to $2.1 billion and effectively shifted him up more than 300 slots to joint 564th.

"That's just an example of how things can change so quickly," Flannery says. "We had him at 1.4 (billion dollars), and now he's at 2.1."

But who's quibbling over a few 100 million dollars at the top of the money tree anyway?

The point, Flannery says, is how quickly China has exploded. When he relocated to its bustling business hub from Taiwan, where he worked for the Asian Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, there were only one or two mainland Chinese names on the list. Now they are gobbling up slots like there's no tomorrow.

However it is Robin Li, co-founder of China's leading search engine Baidu, who draws attention to one of the biggest changes witnessed here in the last few years: The rise of the Internet. China now has the largest number of Internet and mobile phone users in the world, with hundreds of millions more waiting to get online.

"He really symbolizes the transformation of the communications and telecommunications industry in China by the Web," Flannery says.