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How a Chinese billionaire went from making $16 per month in a factory to being one of the world's richest self-made women with an $8.3 billion real-estate empire
How a Chinese billionaire went from making $16 per month in a factory to being one of the world's richest self-made women with an $8.3 billion real-estate empire
Katie WarrenFeb 26, 2019, 20:49 IST
Wu Yajun, founder and chairman of Longfor PropertiesCourtesy Longfor Properties
Wu is the co-founder of property development company Longfor Properties, now called Longfor Group Holdings. She served as the company's CEO for six years and has been chairperson of the board since 2007.
In November 2018, Wu stepped down as chairperson and passed her 44% stake in the company to her daughter, Cai Xinyi, "for the purpose of family wealth and succession planning," according to a statement by the company. Her daughter is believed to be in her early 20s.
While Bloomberg still attributes the $8.34 billion fortune to Wu and not her daughter, "to reflect her status as founder of the business," Wu's net worth without her Longfor shares is unknown.
Based on Bloomberg's Billionaires Index, Wu is currently the richest self-made woman in the world. Diane Hendricks, the richest self-made woman in the US, is worth $5.52 billion — about $2.82 billion less than Wu. Hendricks is the chairman sole owner, and co-founder of ABC Supply, the largest wholesale distributor of roofing materials in the U.S.
When she was 16 years old, she started studying at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an, which she left with a bachelor's degree in engineering. After graduation, Wu was assigned to work at a state-owned factory in her hometown that made instruments and meters. She worked there for four years, earning about $16 per month.
In 1988, when she was 24, Wu started a six-year stint working as a journalist covering real estate at the China Shirong News Agency, during what was a "golden age of profitability" for Chinese newspaper, according to The Economist.
In 1993, after experiencing a plethora of problems trying to buy her first apartment, from a lack of natural gas to poor lighting and elevator service, Wu was inspired to start what would later become Longfor Properties with her then-husband, Cai Kui.
Four years later, in 1997, Longfor sold its first residential project in Wu's home city, Chongqing. It sold for $157 per square meter, which was more than twice the average Chinese household income at the time.
Longfor was one of the earliest shopping mall developers in China. An estimated 300 million people had visited the group's malls as of 2017, according to the company.
Wu served as CEO from 2005 to 2011 and then stayed on as chairperson. In 2012, she was the richest woman in China until her divorce that year from Cai Kui, when she lost nearly $3 billion after transferring about 40% of her shares in the company to him.
But Wu's wealth continued to grow. In 2017, she was ranked seventh on a global list of female self-made billionaires, with a net worth of $4.6 billion. Today, Wu ranks above the other six women on Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.
The billionaire is famously discreet. In 2003, because there was such a lack of public information about her, her name was misspelled on a list of China's wealthiest people and she was mistaken for a man. When she was reportedly asked why she avoids publicity, Wu said, "Well, I have nothing to talk about. I am just a person focusing on my own business."
