How did Asia’s richest woman Yang Huiyan lose half her wealth? With China’s property crisis, the billionaire’s bank account isn’t doing so well – and she’s lost her title to India’s Savitri Jindal

Aug 3 , 2022

Asia’s richest woman Yang Huiyan recently lost billions due to a cash crunch in China’s property market. Photos: @Phattheera_Ging/Twitter, Bloomberg

The major shareholder at Country Garden has seen her net worth drop this year from US$23 billion to US$11.3 billion – and now there’s a new richest woman of Asia

Yang’s fortune may not compare to the world’s richest women, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, Julia Koch or Alice Walton, yet she was still Asia’s No 1

Asia’s wealthiest woman lost more than half her fortune over the past year as China’s real estate sector was rocked by a cash crunch, a billionaire index revealed in late July.

Yang Huiyan is a majority shareholder in Country Garden, a Chinese property company. Photo: Sohu

Yang Huiyan, a majority shareholder in Chinese property giant Country Garden, saw her net worth plunge by more than 52 per cent to US$11.3 billion from US$23.7 billion a year ago, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The logo for Country Garden Holdings Co. at the company’s Fengming Haishang residential development in Shanghai, China. Photo: Bloomberg

Yang’s fortune took a major hit last month when the Guangdong-based Country Garden’s Hong Kong-listed shares fell 15 per cent after the company announced it would sell new shares to raise cash.

How did she get so rich?

Yang Huiyan hails from family wealth. Photo: YouTube

But her billions didn’t come from nowhere. Yang inherited her wealth when her father – Country Garden founder Yang Guoqiang – transferred his shares to her in 2005, according to state media.

Her father is a self-made tycoon. He has reportedly said that he could not afford to pay school fees when he was in his teens, and was forced to go back into farming as a result. He later managed to study with the help of a scholarship grant.

Yang Guoqiang is the founder of Country Garden. Photo: Winson Wong

Yang became Asia’s richest woman in 2007 after the developer’s initial public offering in Hong Kong. But she is now barely holding onto that title, with chemical fibres tycoon Fan Hongwei a close runner-up with a net worth of US$11.2 billion as of late July.