On Sept. 29, Forbes Magazine released its annual Forbes 400 List and detailed the 400 richest men in the U.S. Here is a brief I wrote and recorded about who’s on the list, and because I call the Show-Me State home right now, I started the brief with Missouri businessman, Jack Taylor. Here’s the clip.
To find out more about the Forbes 400 list, click here.
This post, however, is not about Forbes 400, but about the richest men in China. The list is based on a report released by Shanghai-based research firm Hurun. According to this report, and this may come as a surprise to you, Aliababa’s Jack Ma is no longer the richest man in China.
But if not him, who?
The answer to that question is: Wang Jianlin, founder and CEO of Dalia Wanda Group (3699.HK – HKSE), a leading real estate and entertainment company in China.
FROM 1988 TO 2015
Wang’s father was one of the earliest members of Mao’s Communist party. Senior Wang fought alongside Mao, an act that determined the family’s privileged state when the communist party took over Kuomingtang and established People’s Republic of China in 1949. Wang later joined the army, where he spent 17 years, training, fighting and also contemplating on his future. He worked as a public servant for a little while, and shortly after, he left government to start his company, Dalian Wanda. Originally started in the north-eastern city of Dalian (which is part of the company name), Wanda was funded in 1988 with $80,000.
Today, Wang’s person net worth has risen to $24.2 billion. According to Forbes, this is almost twice as much as his personal net worth last year this time, which was $13.2 billion. This figure made him the wealthiest man in China, upping Jack Ma, who has a net worth of $21 billion.
MORE THAN AN ACQUISITION
If it’s not for an event in May 2012, Wang has little to do with the every day life of Americans.
Three years ago, Wang’s company acquired the U.S. movie theater chain AMC Entertainment Holdings (AMC – NYSE) at around $2.6 billion. The Wall Street Journal called it one of the biggest moves any Chinese company had made by then with an effort to break into the U.S. market.
Wanda’s development in China, both in mainland and in Hong Kong, has previously focused on building and managing shopping malls and entertainment centers, luxury hotels as well as office buildings and apartments. Real estate, after all, is one of the most profitable industries in the Chinese market. Besides that, Wanda has the largest market share in the movie theater industry in mainland China, but its involvement in entertainment content production has been minimal.
But that has changed along with the acquisition of AMC.
A little over a year after this acquisition was announced, in September 2013, Wanda launched its new real estate project in the Northeastern Chinese coastal city, Qingdao. I say real estate, but it turned out that real estate was just the initial, and small, part of this ambitious project. Named “the Oriental Movie Metropolis (later, “the Metropolis”),” Wanda’s project in Qingdao has a sprawling budget of ¥50 billion (RMB, and that’s almost $8 billion in dollars). Wanda plans to build a 1300-acre entertainment production site, where the company will combine studios for film and television production and a theme park all in one location. Some of the planned developments on site include China’s largest film museum, the nation’s largest celebrity wax museum, an Imax research laboratory and theaters that can accommodate as many as 3,000 people. The project is planned to open next year, in 2017.
What came as shocking news for many people around the world who heard about this event, however, is not the sheer scale of this development (after all, we’ve all seen enough of those in China), but a whole bunch of world-known celebrities who showed up at the project’s groundbreaking ceremony in 2013. Besides Chinese celebrities like Ziyi Zhang and Jet Li, international movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman also traveled across the Pacific to attend the event. Many found out about the scale of Wanda’s financial power and international influence through this ceremony.
Yet this is only the beginning of Wang’s vision for the Metropolis. Wang didn’t just want to build a tourist site, as the Hengdian World Studios in southeastern China has been slowly deteriorated into. Through the Metropolis, Wang wants to put made-in-China stamps on entertainment products around the world.
Almost around the same time of the launch of the Metropolis, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released an announcement that it accepted a $20-million gift from Wanda for the construction of its movie museum. This kind of relationship is not built for nothing. In fact, Wang plans to have about 30 foreign movies produced at the Metropolis, plus more than 100 local ones, each year.
Growth in Wealth and Shift in Gears
Hurun said in its report this year that Wang’s wealth growth was “driven mainly by the recent listings of his real estate and cinema businesses.” To elaborate on an explanation that could not be any more vague, Dalia Wanda Commercial Properties, part of the Wanda Group empire, raised $3.7 billion in IPO last December at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, making it the largest listing in Asia in 2014.
For anyone to be a billionaire, being strategic is one of the prerequisites. Wang is no exception. His recent moves into the entertainment production industry makes it clear that the the Chinese businessman is no longer satisfied with building platforms. Moreover, he wants to create content.
Play with RMB 