SHANGHAI: A 26-year-old woman property developer was on Wednesday listed as the richest person in China this year.
The Forbes magazine had also named the property tycoon as number one in their list published on Monday.
Yang Huiyan, whose father runs the Hong Kong-listed Country Garden Holdings Ltd. for which he is an executive director of the board, has a fortune of 130 billion yuan (about $17 billion), nearly twice as much as the person in second place, according to the Hurun report published.
Yang graduated from the Marketing and Logistics Department of Ohio State University and joined Country Garden as an assistant to her father Yang Guoqiang, then CEO of the company, in 2005.
Yang Guoqiang, 53, was born to a farmer's family in south China's Guangdong province and worked as a bricklayer before becoming a developer in the early 1990s.
He announced he had transferred his shares to his second daughter at a press conference on April 2. "I would give the company to her sooner or later," he said. "She is my daughter and I feel reassured to have her on the company."
Following Yang was Zhang Yin, 50-year-old founder and chairperson of Guangdong-based Nine Dragons Paper Industries Co. Ltd., last year's richest person and the first woman to head the list in China. She has a fortune of 77 billion yuan ($10 billion).
Ranked third was 57-year-old Xu Rongmao, also a real estate developer. Xu started his career as a worker in a drugstore and is now CEO of the Shanghai-based Shimao Group.
Huang Guangyu of China's household electronics giant GOME Electrical Appliances fell to fourth.
The list also shows that the number of tycoons whose fortune exceeds 0.8 billion yuan soared from 500 last year to 800, 24 percent of whom are real estate developers.
Among the top ten, six are involved in real estate.
The combined fortune of the 800 entrepreneurs stood at 3.4 trillion yuan ($453.3 billion), about 16 percent of China's GDP in 2006.
