Half of the world’s wealthiest female billionaires are Chinese, according to a respected ranking published on Tuesday by a Shanghai-based business magazine.
According to the Hurun Report’s “Hurun China’s Women Rich List 2013,” three of the world’s five wealthiest women with assets of more than US$1 billion — and six of its top 10 — are Chinese. None of the world’s top 10 richest men are from China.
China’s wealthiest woman is Yang Huiyan (楊惠妍), the 32-year-old heiress to Country Garden Holdings Co (碧桂園), an expansive property developer in the affluent Guangdong Province. Yang has assets of 51 billion yuan (US$8.33 billion). Yang is followed by Chen Lihua (陳麗華), 72, of Fu Wah International Group (富華國際), an “industrial investment company” founded in Hong Kong in 1988. Chen, worth 37 billion yuan, was named one of “the world’s 100 most influential people” by Time magazine last year for her philanthropic efforts.
About a quarter of the list’s 50 wealthiest women work in real estate, while 18 percent of them are involved in finance. China’s richest women are generally younger than their male counterparts, with an average age of 48, compared with 52.
“What I’ve asked myself is: Why are Chinese women so successful? I think there are a number of different dynamics at play,” said Rupert Hoogewerf, the Hurun Report’s publisher and chairman. “One is that there’s the one-child policy, which means that they have a very short career break. Plus there’s the fact that in Chinese society, children are brought up by grandparents, traditionally,” giving mothers more time to pursue their careers.
“Another dynamic is that it might just be this generation — relatively speaking, they’re much more successful here than in the rest of the world,” he added.
The ranks of China’s super-rich have grown exponentially in recent years. One decade ago, China had no billionaires. Last year, it had 64. When the Hurun Report unveiled this year’s rich list last week, ranking China’s 1,000 wealthiest individuals, it had 315.
Women have also established a growing presence at the highest rungs of the country’s corporations. This year, women held 51 percent of all senior management positions in China — a higher proportion than any other country, according to a report by the Chicago-based accounting firm Grant Thornton.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained