BEIJING (Reuters) - Alibaba and Ant Neighborhood founder Jack Ma has lost the title of China’s richest man, a list published on Tuesday showed, as his guests prospered whereas his empire used to be attach below heavy scrutiny by Chinese language regulators.
Ma and his household had held the discontinue space for China’s richest within the Hurun Global Rich Checklist in 2020 and 2019 nonetheless now drag in fourth space on the help of bottled water maker Nongfu Spring’s Zhong Shanshan, Tencent Retaining’s Pony Ma and e-commerce upstart Pinduoduo’s Collin Huang, the most recent checklist showed.
His drop out of the discontinue three comes “after China’s regulators reined in Ant Neighborhood and Alibaba on anti-trust points,” the Hurun account acknowledged.
Ma’s contemporary woes were attributable to an Oct. 24 speech in which he blasted China’s regulatory machine, leading to the suspension of his Ant Neighborhood’s $37 billion IPO simply days earlier than the fintech vast’s public list.
Regulators be pleased since tightened anti-trust scrutiny on the country’s tech sector, with Alibaba taking powerful of the heat; the market regulator launched an decent anti-trust probe into Alibaba in December.
Chinese language regulators additionally began to tighten their grip on the fintech sector and be pleased asked Ant to fold some of its agencies into a monetary maintaining firm to be regulated fancy primitive monetary firms.
Ma, who's never any longer known for shying a ways from the limelight, then disappeared from the public defend up for about three months, triggering frenzied hypothesis about his whereabouts. He re-emerged in January with a 50-second video look.
China’s contemporary richest man, Zhong, made his first look on the discontinue space with a fortune of 550 billion yuan ($85 billion), largely thanks to the fragment ticket performances of Nongfu Spring and vaccine maker Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy Project, which he additionally controls.
Tencent’s Ma saw his wealth swell 70% over the three hundred and sixty five days to 480 billion whereas Pinduoduo’s Huang’s fortune grew 283% to 450 billion yuan, the checklist acknowledged. When put next, the wealth of Ma and his household grew 22%, to 360 billion yuan.
Zhang Yiming, founding father of TikTok owner ByteDance, broke into the discontinue five rankings amongst Chinese language billionaires in Hurun’s Global Rich Checklist for the first time, with an estimated non-public wealth of $54 billion.
($1 = 6.4696 Chinese language yuan renminbi)
Reporting by Yingzhi Yang in Beijing and Brenda Goh in Shanghai; Editing by Gerry Doyle and Raju Gopalakrishnan