HONG KONG • The prediction was vintage Jack Ma, as provocative as it was prescient. This is the era of the Internet, the Chinese billionaire proclaimed in October 2013, just weeks after his plan to take Alibaba Group Holding public in Hong Kong had been scuttled by regulators. It no longer belongs to Li Ka-shing.
Mr Ma s dig at the famed Hong Kong tycoon raised plenty of eyebrows at the time, but few would disagree with him now. The past few years have seen a remarkable shift in fortunes between China s tech-savvy moguls and their old-school Hong Kong counterparts - a trend that shows few signs of fading any time soon.
Old-school tycoons of Hong Kong are losing to China s moguls straitstimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from straitstimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Gautam Adani
Billionaire Gautam Adani is likely to see three more companies from his coal mining-to-data centres conglomerate join the MSCI India Index after shares in each one of them more than doubled this year, according to analysts.
The group’s flagship Adani Enterprises, gas supplier Adani Total Gas and power distributor Adani Transmission may get included in MSCI s country benchmark after the index provider’s semi-annual review of its gauges in May, according to broker Edelweiss Financial Services and independent research provider Smartkarma. Adani Green Energy and Adani Ports & Special Economic Zone are already there.
The potential inclusions are seen further boosting wealth for Mr Adani, who has added $20.2 billion to his net worth this year, the second-biggest increase among the world’s billionaires.
ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming
Just last year, the world’s most valuable start-up, ByteDance, was being squeezed from all sides. The Trump administration wanted the Chinese firm, which owns the ubiquitous TikTok video-sharing platform, to get rid of assets. Beijing was cracking down on tech businesses, and India had blacklisted some of its social media apps.
For all the obstacles, ByteDance kept growing. Now its founder, 38-year-old Zhang Yiming, is among the world’s richest people a distinction that lately has carried increased risks in China.
Shares of the company trade in the private market at a valuation of more than US$250-billion, people familiar with the dealings have said. At that level, Zhang, who owns about a quarter of ByteDance, could be worth more than $60-billion, placing him alongside Tencent Holdings’ Pony Ma, bottled-water king Zhong Shanshan and members of the Walton and Koch families in the US, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.