A list released by Forbes magazine on Monday, Oct. 26, has placed Wang Jianlin, chairman of conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group, on top of the 2015 Forbes China Rich List, followed by Alibaba chairman Jack Ma Yun in second place, the Global Times reported.
The list posted on forbeschina.com showed that Wang, whose business involves real estate and entertainment, has a net worth of 190.5 billion yuan ($30 billion) in 2015, a significant increase from 2014's 80.8 billion yuan.
According to experts, the rise in Wang's net worth indicated that Wanda's shift to an "asset-light" strategy has been effective, with improvement in the domestic real estate sector also helping.
"This showed the asset-light strategy is working for Wanda," Liu Yuan, an analyst at real estate information provider Centaline, said.
Wanda's asset-light strategy involves soliciting outside investment to finance new property developments and then sell them off after five or seven years, the report said.
Liu said that following Wanda's expansion into entertainment and other industries, real estate has just become part of its business and the increase in Wang's net worth showed that the real estate business is improving.
Wang's real estate holdings are worth $18.8 billion, according to the 2015 Hurun Property Rich List released on Oct. 21, an increase of 9 percent from last year's list. The Hurun list said that the real estate sector was still offering strong profits for top developers.
The Forbes report also showed that Internet entrepreneurs still dominate the list, with Jack Ma Yun and Ma Huateng, respective chairmen of Alibaba and Tencent Holdings, taking second and third spots with net worth of 138.4 billion yuan and 111.8 billion yuan.
Fu Liang, an independent IT expert, said that the domination of the top 10 by Internet magnates showed the sector's stable and fast growth in China.
Fu said that the trend will continue as the country's consumption tries to increase and the Internet sector continues to combine with conventional industries. He added that the full implementation of the "Internet Plus" strategy will provide new opportunities for both traditional businesses and online firms.
The list further showed that with the exception of Li Yanhong, chairman of Baidu Inc., the net worth of all the Internet magnates in the Forbes top 10 increased. Li ranked sixth this year with a net worth dropping to $10.4 billion from last year's $14.7 billion.
Russell Flannery, Shanghai bureau chief for Forbes, said in a Forbes report that most of the net worth of people in the Forbes top 100 increased, with their total net worth rising 20 percent to $450 billion this year, despite the sluggish economy and the stock market slump.
Flannery noted that the Shanghai Composite Index is still up 50 percent from last year, which is partly due to investor confidence in technology, health care and entertainment sectors.