Who is China’s richest executive? She’s not an executive at Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu or any of the technology companies
- Women made up 11 of China’s 50 wealthiest professional managers, according to the Hurun China Richest Professional Managers 2021 report
- Cheng, 50, tops the list with a personal fortune estimated at 65 billion yuan, due to her 9 per cent stake in Foshan Haitian Flavouring, which quadrupled since its 2014 stock offer
Cheng Xue, the vice-chairwoman of Foshan Haitian Flavouring, has displaced dozens of technology executives as China’s highest-paid corporate chieftain, according to the inaugural Hurun China Richest Professional Managers 2021 report.
The personal wealth of Cheng, 50, is estimated at 65 billion yuan (US$10 billion), due to her 9 per cent stake in Haitian according to Forbes, which quadrupled in value since its 2014 initial public offering in Shanghai. Cheng is also at the apex of a growing legion of female executives who made up 11 of the 50 wealthiest professional managers, according to the report that excluded majority shareholders and corporate founder-owners.
“Chinese female professional managers are very successful,” said Hurun’s chairman and chief researcher Rupert Hoogewerf. “Of the top 50 Chinese professional managers, one-fifth is female, which is higher than the 15 per cent of self-made female entrepreneurs on the Hurun Report.”
Three women made it to the top 10 on Hurun’s 2021 list. Yang Lijuan, the chief operating officer of the hot pot chain Haidilao International Holding, was the second-richest woman with 12.5 billion yuan, in seventh place overall. Yang, 42, was also the youngest executive to make the list.
“From our list of professional managers, we can find several roads to success,” said Hoogewerf. “The more common one is to directly enter an early entrepreneurial team after graduating from university, and follow the team to grow, like Haidilao’s Yang,” who joined the company in 1994, he said.
Haitian, based in Foshan city in Guangdong province in southern China, produces soy sauce, chilli sauce and a range of condiments and flavourings used in Chinese cuisine. It began as a state-owned collective until it was turned into a stockholding company in 1995, and then had its shares listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2014.
Lau’s position extends the dominance of China’s technology companies among the most generous employers. Allen Zhang Xiaolong, the 51-year-old head of Tencent’s WeChat social-networking application, was ranked fourth with a fortune of 14 billion yuan.
Ant Group’s chairman Eric Jing Xiandong, 48, was in third place overall with 17.5 billion yuan in wealth, while Alibaba’s chairman Daniel Zhang Yong was in eighth place with 11 billion yuan, according to Hurun.
“There are very few current professional managers with wealth reaching the threshold of 4 billion yuan,” said Hoogewerf. “The most successful professional managers in the world are Steve Ballmer of Microsoft and Eric Schmidt of Google.”
The mystery is partly due to the lack of remuneration details among Chinese companies, even in publicly traded companies and those on the Hurun China 500 list, including Tencent, Alibaba, Ping An Insurance, Meituan, Pinduoduo and Huawei Technologies.
Alibaba, with US$658 billion in market value, has 16 professional managers among Hurun’s top 50, the company with the highest number of wealthy executives.
“We must rely on the value of the shareholding to make it on our list of professional managers, not just income. As long as you hold one to two-thousandths of the shares of these companies, one can make it to the list,” Hoogewerf said.
The 50 wealthiest managers came from 24 Chinese companies, all of which are listed in the Hurun China 500 of the largest corporations, 11 of which are among the Hurun Global 500. Good employees and exceptional executives are likely to leave to strike out on their own, like China Evergrande Group’s founder Hui Ka-yan, if companies don’t structure their incentives and remuneration mechanisms to retain talent, he said.
“We hope that professional managers can understand that creating value for their company can bring wealth to themselves, and let corporate leaders understand that a good corporate incentive mechanism can generate greater value for their enterprise,” Hoogewerf said.
