Want Want Group chairman Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明) remained the richest person in Taiwan, according to this year’s list of the world’s billionaires released by Forbes magazine.
While Tsai continued to be the wealthiest person in Taiwan, his net worth fell to US$6 billion from US$8.9 billion last year.
Analysts said the decline of Tsai’s wealth reflected an economic slowdown in China, where many Taiwanese entrepreneurs, including Tsai, have invested heavily.
Tsai was ranked 201st on the latest global billionaire list, down from 147th a year earlier.
Forbes said Tsai transformed his father’s small trading firm I Lan Foods Industrial into the snack food giant Want Want China Times Group, which sells beverages and snacks ranging from rice crackers to spicy peanuts.
Tsai has also diversified his business into other industries, including the finance and media sectors.
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co founder and chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘) was ranked second-richest among the Taiwanese on the list, unchanged from a year earlier, though his net worth fell to US$5.6 billion from US$6.1 billion.
Gou ranked 228th on the Forbes list, up from 240th last year.
Hon Hai, known as Foxconn outside Taiwan, is the world’s largest contract electronics maker whose main client is Apple.
A total of 25 Taiwanese entrepreneurs made it onto Forbes’ list of 1,810 billionaires, down from 38 last year, according to Forbes.
The leading Taiwanese on the list after Tsai and Gou was Lin Yu-lin (林堉璘), head of property developer Hong Tai Group, with US$5 billion in net worth, ranking him 270th in the world.
Barry Lam (林百里), chairman of the world’s largest notebook computer contract maker, Quanta Computer, came in fourth among Taiwanese and 549th globally with a net worth totaling US$3.1 billion.
Cheng Shin Rubber Industry Co chairman Luo Jye (羅結) was ranked fifth among Taiwanese and 569th in the world on the Forbes billionaire list with a net worth of US$3 billion.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater