Jack Ma.jpg (Photo : www.bbc.com)
Alibaba Group's founder and executive chairman Jack Ma (or Ma Yun) is now China's richest person with a fortune of $19.5 billion, said Forbes Media.
The 50-year-old Jack Ma, a former English school teacher, tops the 2014 Forbes China Rich List for the first time. His net worth soared to $19.5 billion, up from $7.1 billion last year, after the record-breaking IPO of his e-commerce company on the New York Stock Exchange this year.
Last year's richest Chinese tycoon, entertainment company Dalian Wanda Group's chief executive Wang Jianlin was pulled down to fourth place.
Ma is followed by the 45-year-old Robin Li at second place with a net worth of $14.7 billion, up from $11.1 billion the year before. Li is the chairman of China's number one search engine, Baidu.
At third place is 43-year-old Ma Huateng (also known as Pony Ma), founder and CEO of Chinese Internet giant Tencent. Inc., with a fortune of $14.4 billion, up from $10.2 billion a year ago. Last year, he was ranked fifth on the list. Ma Huateng's Tencent made big profits from the online games which are being offered alongside free messaging services. His company's WeChat mobile texting service has nearly 440 million users.
The Forbes China Rich List shows a huge increase in the number of Chinese billionaires--a total of 242 billionaires, as against last year's 168 billionaires.
Internet entrepreneurs dominate this year's tally with Jack Ma of Alibaba, Robin Li of Baidu and Ma Huateng of Tencent at the top three positions.
As observed by Russell Flannery, Shanghai bureau chief for Forbes, "China's Internet entrepreneurs have started to catch up with iconic people in the industry in the United States such as Paul Allen, Eric Schmidt, Jerry Yang and Sheryl Sandberg. In the era that e-commerce and mobile services become more and more popular, even if China can't surpass the United States, it can share a large amount of fortune."
On the other hand, China's billionaires from the more traditional sectors of the market, especially real estate, were hit by the country's overall economic slowdown along with the drop in real estate prices partly on account of the government's own cooling measures which have come into effect this year.
