BEIJING (Reuters) – Alibaba and Ant Group founder Jack Ma has lost the title of China’s richest man, a list released on Tuesday as his colleagues prospered as his empire came under intense scrutiny by Chinese regulators.
Ma and her family had ranked China’s richest in the global Hurun rich list in 2020 and 2019, but are now fourth behind bottled water maker Zhong Shanshan Nongfu Spring, Tencent Holding’s Pony Ma and e-commerce, the beginning of Collin Huang from Pinduoduo, showed the last list.
His exit from the top three comes “after Chinese regulators dropped Ant Group and Alibaba on antitrust issues,” the Hurun report said.
Ma’s recent troubles were triggered by a speech on October 24 in which China’s regulatory system exploded, leading to the suspension of its $ 37 billion IPO a few days before the fintech giant’s public listing.
Since then, regulators have tightened antitrust control over the country’s technology sector, with Alibaba taking over much of the heat; the market regulator launched a formal antitrust probe in Alibaba in December.
Chinese regulators have also started to tighten their fintech sector and have asked Ant to split some of its business into a regulated financial holding company like traditional financial firms.
Ma, who is not known to have strayed from the spotlight, then disappeared from public view for about three months, sparking frantic speculation about where he was. He reappeared in January with a 50-second video.
The richest man in China, Zhong, made his first appearance in the first place due to the price performance of Nongfu Spring shares and the vaccine manufacturer Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy Enterprise, which he also controls.
Tencent’s Ma saw its wealth grow 70 percent year-over-year to 480 billion yuan ($ 74.16 billion), while Pinduoduo’s Huang’s wealth rose 283 percent to 450 billion yuan, it said. in the list. In comparison, the wealth of Ma and his family increased by 22% to 360 billion yuan.
Zhang Yiming, the founder of TikTok ByteDance, entered the top five among Chinese billionaires on Hurun’s Global Rich List for the first time, with a personal fortune estimated at $ 54 billion.
(This story goes back to the correct date of Jack Ma’s regulatory speech until October 24, not October 23 in paragraph 4)
Reporting by Yingzhi Yang in Beijing and Brenda Goh in Shanghai; Editing by Gerry Doyle