Asia’s richest woman has lost more than half her fortune after China’s real estate sector was rocked by a money crisis.
Yang Huiyan, 41, a majority shareholder and vice chairman of Chinese real estate giant Country Garden, saw her net worth fall more than 52 percent from $23.7 billion to $11.3 billion in the past year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Yang’s fortunes took another major blow on Wednesday, July 27, when Country Garden’s Hong Kong-listed shares fell 15 percent after the company announced it would sell new shares to raise capital.
The real estate sector is estimated to account for 18 to 30 percent of the country’s GDP and is a key driver of growth in the world’s second largest economy.
According to the report, the crash started when Chinese authorities cracked down on excessive debt in the real estate sector in 2020, leaving major players such as Evergrande and Sunac struggling to make payments and forcing them to negotiate with creditors while on the verge of bankruptcy. faltered.
Yang inherited shares of her father Yang Guoqiang’s multi-billion dollar company. In 1992, he founded Country Garden real estate development company in Guangdong, South China.
Guoqiang grew into one of the largest real estate development companies in China.
He transferred his shares to her in 2005 and two years later she became the richest woman in Asia, just 26 years after the developer donated her about $16 billion through the Hong Kong IPO.
In 2020, she was worth more than $20 billion, but she is barely holding on to her title of richest woman in Asia after the real estate crash in China cut her wealth in half.
Chemical fiber tycoon Fan Hongwei is a close second with a net worth of $11.2 billion as of Thursday.