China’s Internet Founders Ascend The Forbes Billionaires List

The founders of China’s internet giants are skyrocketing up the Forbes’ list of the country’s wealthiest people with Tencent’s Pony Ma making it into the top 10 and Jack Ma of Alibaba close behind in 11th place.

As you would expect the tech kings are still behind the real estate tycoons on the new Forbes rich list, but the continued expansion of the internet industry has seen the internet magnates climb up the ranks.

Whilst China has experienced a significant period of economic growth, that growth has slowed a little this past year which has led to a slide of 7% amongst the top 100 billionaires – their combined worth came to $220 billion.

Founder of Chinese search engine Baidu, Robin Li, held his 2nd place spot with an estimated net worth of $8.1 billion! Beverage magnate Zong Qinghou who is worth an estimated $10 billion retained top spot. However it’s not all good news for Baidu, Li’s holdings were down from the $9.2 billion they were in 2011 after a new search engine competitor caused his stock to fall in the last few months.

Pony Ma of Tencent, which specializes in instant messaging, social networking and gaming, rose from 13th place in 2011 all the way up to number 4 with an estimated worth of $6.4 billion.

The Chinese Forbes list clearly shows that China’s tech giants are seeing the financial rewards of their success however they still have a long way to go to catch up to their western equivalents. Baidu’s Li is only ranked 86th on the worldwide list for example and one only needs to look at the estimated worth of top western tech billionaires like Bill Gates ($61 billion), Larry Ellison ($36 billion) and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page ($18.7 billion each) to see that there is still a massive difference.

Source: The Next Web

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