Company executives in China were the big winners of last year's soaring stock market, with the top 50 executives worth nearly 40 billion yuan (US$5.1 billion), state media said yesterday.
None of the top 50 was worth less than 200 million yuan and half of the top 50 saw their stock portfolios break the 500 million yuan mark, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Zhang Jindong (
The 210 million shares he holds in the company quadrupled in value last year, pushing his estimated wealth to nearly 9 billion yuan, it added.
Lu Guanqiu (
The take off in executive fortunes has been set off by shareholder reforms which allow previously non-tradable state-owned shares to be converted into ordinary stock and turned into cash, the report said.
After stagnating for the past five years, China's stock markets finally boomed in the second half of last year.
The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index hit a record 2,675 points on the last trading day last year, bringing gains for a remarkable year to 130 percent.
The State Information Center, the Cabinet's brains trust, predicted that the value of China's stock markets could grow by 20 percent this year, Xinhua said in a recent report.
News that some Chinese manage to make literally billions without having to work extra comes amid signs that the wealth gap is deepening in China, with the poor becoming even poorer.
An analysis of poverty in the period from 2001 to 2003 showed a slight decline in the income of the most destitute 10 percent of China's population, the World Bank said last month.
Joseph Cheng (
"Many average citizens doubt the legitimacy of the wealth accumulation by some of the plutocrats and that is where discontent is likely to rise," he said. "Therefore the operation of the stock market and company management needs to be regulated and supervised so that they can be more transparent and the manipulation of share prices can be prevented."
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