MOSCOW, October 28 (RIA Novosti) — Alibaba’s Jack Ma heads the 2014 Forbes China Rich List, in which four of the top ten made their wealth from the internet.
Forbes remarked that, in a sign of increasing Chinese strength, “ten icons of US business wouldn’t have enough wealth to make even the top 25 of the 2014 Forbes China Rich List”, including Donald Trump and Steven Spielberg.
Jack Ma topped the list with $19.5 billion, jumping from last year’s eighth place and $7.1 billion after a record-breaking IPO raised nearly $22 billion in September, the largest ever offering for a US listed company.
In second place with $14.7 billion was Robin Li, founder of China’s most popular search engine, Baidu, while Ma Huateng, worth $14.4 billion, took third place. Huateng is CEO of Tencent, one of China’s largest Internet service portals.
According to Forbes, the number of Chinese billionaires this year soared by 69 percent, to 244 from last year’s 168, despite an economic slowdown in the country. This rise reflected a trend of increasing profits for the richest also seen in the USA this year, caused by rising returns on the stock market.
In their USA Rich List, published last month, Forbes reported that the richest 400 Americans together are worth $2.27 trillion, a number up $270 billion on last year. The 400 richest Chinese have an aggregate wealth of $680 billion.
Russell Flannery, senior editor for Forbes Asia told CNBC that the success of Chinese internet entrepreneurs is outpacing that of well-known American figures in the technology business. “That is telling us that China will compete with, if not surpass, the US for the lion's share of new wealth to be made in an era when e-commerce and mobile services are going to become a lot more pervasive.”
Last month Hurun, a Chinese luxury publishing group, published its own China Rich List, which said that China has 354 dollar billionaires, up from 315 last year, and representing a massive increase from only three billionaires ten years ago.
Hurun also pointed out that while five of the top ten richest have made their wealth from IT, seven of these ten are some of the most popular bloggers in Chinese social media, a reflection of the increasing influence held by these figures in Chinese society.
