China's e-commerce industry has been flourishing for the recent years as the country grows to be the world's largest Internet user populace. (Photo : Reuters)
Even this early, China has already minted yet another e-commerce billionaire in the person of Sun Deliang, chairman of Zhejiang NetSun.
The 42-year-old tycoon entered the Forbes' list of world's billionaires in the second week of February after his firm almost tripled its stock price in the Shenzhen Stock Exchange during 2014.
Zhejiang NetSun, a Hangzhou-based company, specializes in "vertical" e-commerce platforms for textile, chemical and pharmaceutical industries.
For the first nine months of 2014, NetSun's revenue amounted to 125.4 million yuan ($20 million), a 23-percent decrease from the 2013's statistic. However, the firm's net profit, which totaled to 29.4 million yuan ($5 million), was a 4.4.-percent increase from the previous figure.
Analysts forecast that for this year alone, the e-commerce giant is trading at a 300-plus times its likely earnings.
Sun's 44-percent share in the firm has appreciated to 6.8 billion yuan ($1.1 billion) pegged at Feb. 11's closing stock price of 79.6 yuan.
For the past years, China has been producing some of the world's new set of billionaires. On the Forbes China Rich list published in Oct. 2014, records show that a total of 242 billionaires, led by Jack Ma of the e-commerce firm Alibaba, made it to the elite rank.
China, apart from being the world's most populous nation, is also the home of world's largest Internet user populace. This is one reason why investors and entrepreneurs alike venture on e-commerce undertakings.
In 1997, Sun founded "ChinaChemNet," a professional chemical industry website. The online platform was the predecessor of Zhejiang NetSun.
