25 Year Old Yang Huiyan is about to Attract Some Major Golddigging Men

After more than two decades of spectacular economic growth, fueled mostly by building factories that export low-cost goods, China has a rising number of entrepreneurs who are forming private companies, going public and getting extremely rich. There are Internet pioneers, like Robin Li of Baidu and Ma Huateng of Tencent; billionaire retailers, like Huang Guangyu of Gome; and real estate barons like Xu Rongmao of Shimao, Zhu Mengyi of Hopson and Country Garden’s Yang Guoqiang, who told journalists a few months ago that for years he planted rice, tended cows and mixed cement before founding Country Garden in 1997.

Mr. Yang’s genius is that he has a created a Wal-Mart approach to housing development for the middle class. The story of Country Garden, which is based in Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong, is much simpler. Mr. Yang grew up poor in the city of Foshan, worked as a farmer and construction worker and married a bricklayer who was in the same construction crew. In the 1990s, he moved into real estate and acquired distressed property or even wastelands at a time when the future of the Chinese real estate market was still uncertain. When the government began reforming the market and allowing companies to acquire public land and sell plots to home buyers in the late 1990s, the market began to take off.

The company has the backing of some of Wall Street’s biggest investment bankers, including Morgan Stanley and UBS, and its profits this year are expected to reach $500 million, putting Country Garden’s earnings in league with the world’s biggest corporations. In 2005 Mr. Yang gave all of his shares in Country Garden to his daughter, Yang Huiyan, now 25, who will someday run the company. After Friday’s listing, those shares are worth about $9 billion, which probably makes her China’s wealthiest individual. Trailing behind at $3 billion is Zhang Yin, who controls Nine Dragons Paper, a company that recycles American waste paper and sells it to factories here in China. That makes Ms. Yang, who studied in the United States and owns 60% of Country Garden, richer even than George Soros, Steven P. Jobs of Apple and Rupert Murdoch. Last year, Hong Kong’s stock market raised more money from public offerings than the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Stock Market combined. Shanghai’s stock market has been even hotter, so hot in fact that the Chinese government is worried that a 200% jump in share prices in the last 16 months is beginning to look like a stock market bubble soon to burst. This is the kind of thing that gets people excited, that encourages people to become more entrepreneurial in China,” said Chen Zhiwu, a professor of finance at Yale University.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Asia, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.