According to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, Yang Huiyan, vice chairman of Country Garden Holdings, is real estate — and China’s — richest woman.
Her tremendous wealth was inherited from her father, Yang Guoqiang, or Yeung Kwok Keung (his Cantonese name), who co-founded Country Garden, the largest developer (according to sales) in China, in 1992. He transferred his controlling stake to Yang in 2005, just two years before the company’s IPO, Bloomberg notes.
Now, at the age of 36, Yang’s total net worth is $29.4 billion, which makes her the 28th richest person in the world and the youngest billionaire in China, though the title with all its trappings is relatively recent: as of April 2017 Yang’s net worth was only $12.6 billion according to a report in the South China Morning Post.
But she’s more than doubled her worth since then, with an extra boost in the first four days of trading in 2018, according to Bloomberg. In that period of time, Yang’s personal worth increased by $2.1 billion with the developer’s share values rising by 7.4 percent making the company’s year-to-date gain 17 percent. [Bloomberg] — Erin Hudson