Every year the list of billionaires makes interesting reading, not only in terms of more and more people amassing eye-popping wealth, but also as an undeclared race between billionaires of different countries. While India and China are frequently compared on different parameters, a comparison between the richest Chinese and richest Indian looks interesting.
Zhang Yiming, who is only 41, has been named as the richest person in China by the Hurun China Rich List. He is the founder of ByteDance, which is an incubator of platforms offering commerce, content, entertainment and enterprise services. Its users are reported to number more than 250 crore that includes TikTok. The enterprise is supposed to operate “content platforms that inform, educate, entertain and inspire people across languages and cultures”.
Zhang Yiming versus Mukesh Ambani
According to the Hurun China Rich List, Zhang Yiming’s net worth stands at $49.3 billion. It is certainly an impressive figure, but it loses a bit of its shine if it is benchmarked against the wealth of Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest person. Ambani, who is a second-generation industrialist, has a reported net worth of more than $102 billion. Unlike Yiming, Ambani’s industrial empire spreads from petrochemicals to green energy, retail to telecom, financial services to media.
China’s rich becoming “poorer”
Who is China’s richest man?
The frequently asked question “Who is the richest man in China” has been settled by the Hurun China Rich List. While it names the young ByteDance boss as the richest in that country, it has also observed that the total wealth of China’s entrepreneurs has shrunk by 10%, to $3 trillion, compared to that of last year. “The Hurun China Rich List has shrunk for an unprecedented third year running, as China’s economy and stock markets had a difficult year,” the report mentioned.
China’s billionaires versus India’s billionaires
According to the Hurun report, a total of 54 new names have been recorded in the billionaires list from China. Significantly, it is the smallest annual addition to the list in 20 years. However, China has a numerical superiority over India in the count of the ultra-rich – it has 753 billionaires compared to 334 from India. “India is emerging as Asia’s wealth-creation engine! While China saw a 25% decline in its number of billionaires, India experienced a 29% increase, reaching a record 334 billionaires,” the report said.
