Wang tops Hurun wealthy list

Ma owns a 10.25 percent stake of Tencent. The company made a total profit of $2 billion last year and its share price soared about 50 percent year-on-year. Tencent's market value is now as much as $90 billion, and it's the most valuable company on this year's Hurun list.

Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun Report, the Shanghai-based magazine that publishes the list, said that Tencent's growth can be largely attributed to the success of the real-time communication application WeChat.

Ma said in a previous interview that the opportunities provided by WeChat are something to be grabbed "now or never", and that he sees the mobile app as a product that can be launched in the international market.

Despite the fact that the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index has dropped 1.2 percent so far this year, the average wealth of the individuals on the Hurun Top 1,000 list is up about 21 percent year-on-year to a record high of $1.04 billion and has more than doubled since the global financial crisis of 2008, when the average number was $439 million.

The combined wealth of the top five richest people has also doubled.

The number of US dollar billionaires is up a staggering 64 people to 315 individuals this year, from zero a decade ago.

The cut-off level to enter the Top 1,000 list this year also hit a record high of $325 million, up 12 percent year-on-year and more than triple of the 2008 cut-off level. The threshold to make into the Top 50 list is almost 10-fold that of a decade ago.

"Strong performance in real estate and information technology has driven China's richest into new records," said Hoogewerf.