Yang Huiyan Asia’s wealthiest woman has reportedly lost more than Half her Fortune as China Real Estate Sector Crashes due to Cash crunch.
The 41 year old billionaire major shareholder and vice-chairwoman of Chinese property giant Country Garden, saw her net worth plunge by over 52 percentage from $23.7billion to $11.3billion in the past year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Yang’s fortune took a nose dive on Wednesday, July 27, when Country Garden’s Hong Kong-listed shares fell by 15% after the company announced it would sell new shares to raise capital. The property sector in Asia is estimated to account for percentage 18 to 30 of the country’s Gross DomesticProduct ( GDP ) and is a major navigator of growth in the world’s second-largest economy.
Yang Huiyan’s woes began when Chinese authorities discovered excessive debt in the real estate ( property ) sector in 2020, leaving key players such as Evergrande and Sunac battling to make payments and forcing them to negotiate with creditors as they wobbled on the thin edge of bankruptcy.
Yang Guoqiang father of the billionaire heiress was said to have set up the property development company Country Garden in Guangdong, south China, in 1992. He grew it into one of the largest property development companies in China. In 2005, he transferred his shares to daughter Yang Huiyan and she became Asia’s richest woman two years later at the age of 26 after the developer’s initial public offering in Hong Kong gifted her with around $16billion.
As at 2020 Yang Huiyan was worth more than $20billion but she is barely holding onto her title of Asia’s richest woman after China’s property crash cut her wealth in two.
Chemical fibres tycoon Fan Hongwei has become a close runner-up with a net worth of $11.2billion as of Thursday.