[News Inside] Who Is the Person Who Maintained the No.1 Spot Among Chinese Young Billionaires for 3 Consecutive Years?

Jiang Yiming, ByteDance Founder
Ranked No.1 for 3 Consecutive Years Among Chinese Young Billionaires Under 40 by Fortune China

▲Jiang Yiming, Founder of ByteDance

[Asia Economy Reporter Kwon Jae-hee] The wealthiest person under 40 in China.

He is Zhang Yiming (38), the founder of ByteDance.

Zhang Yiming (38), founder of ByteDance, ranked first for the third consecutive year in the list of the 40 richest young people under 40 in China, selected by Fortune China, the Chinese edition of the American business magazine Fortune.

Zhang Yiming's fortune is estimated at 350 billion yuan (approximately 60.095 trillion KRW).

Zhang Yiming founded ByteDance in 2012 and grew it into a giant tech company valued at around 400 billion dollars in just nine years.

ByteDance, a startup established in March 2012 in Beijing, China, is a giant tech company that owns China's representative short video platform TikTok and its Chinese version Douyin, as well as the news platform Jinri Toutiao and the long video platform Xigua Spin.

Zhang Yiming is considered a representative entrepreneur of the post-80s generation (Barin Hou) in China.

Born in 1983 in the Longyan area of Fujian Province, China, Zhang Yiming was an avid reader from a young age. As a middle school student, he meticulously read 20 to 30 newspapers every week, and after entering Nankai University in 2001, he was known to spend most of his time in the library every week. This later became a major source of nourishment that helped him successfully read global trends and succeed in entrepreneurship. Especially, his experience is reflected in ByteDance's flagship news service.

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

Zhang Yiming cited textbooks and autobiographies as the most valuable books, explaining, "Textbooks systematically explain human knowledge best and serve as the foundation for understanding the core, while autobiographies and biographies allow indirect experience of how others seized opportunities and endured difficult times."

Zhang Yiming's father was a government official in the Longyan area of Fujian Province but later founded an electronics parts factory in Dongguan, Guangdong Province.

Dongguan, along with neighboring Guangzhou and Shenzhen, rose as a core base of Chinese manufacturing after the reform and opening-up in the 1980s. Zhang recalled spending his childhood there, enjoying listening to his father’s stories about introducing foreign technology to his mother.

Zhang Yiming is of Hakka descent, known for their high educational zeal, and is counted among three renowned figures in the internet industry alongside Wang Xing, founder of Meituan, China’s largest restaurant reservation and delivery app, and Fang Sanwen, founder of Xueqiu (Snowball), a Chinese investment community and platform.

In 2001, Zhang entered the prestigious Nankai University in Tianjin, majoring in microelectronics engineering. However, he lost interest in his major and later switched to software engineering.

After graduating in 2005, Zhang worked as a Microsoft (MS) developer and co-founded the Chinese version of Twitter, "Fanfou," with Meituan’s founder Wang Xing. The platform attracted famous users including Hewlett-Packard (HP) and reached one million users within months but was shut down in 2009 due to Chinese government measures. In 2009, he co-founded the online real estate transaction service "99fang.com," left after three years, and then founded ByteDance.

Zhang once expressed his unique ambition, saying, "I started this company to create a service and enterprise that would dominate the world like Google."

[Image source=AP Yonhap News]

ByteDance’s core competitive edge lies in artificial intelligence (AI). Its flagship product is the news service "Jinri Toutiao," which uses AI to analyze the types of news content users view, the time spent reading, and news categories to provide personalized services. It is so popular that it has 200 million monthly active users. The service is provided solely by AI without news editors or journalists. The key is to offer personalized services to readers rather than the one-sided editorial function of traditional media.

Jinri Toutiao’s user base exploded exponentially, and within four years of its founding, it received an $8 billion (approximately 9 trillion KRW) acquisition offer from Tencent, the operator of the mobile messenger WeChat. However, Zhang immediately rejected the offer, drawing attention once again. It was unprecedented to refuse acquisition offers from China’s three internet giants (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent).

Additionally, ByteDance’s bold and aggressive mergers and acquisitions (M&A) strategy proved effective. In 2016, ByteDance launched TikTok, a service that allows users to easily create and share short videos of about 10 seconds. One year later, it acquired Musical.ly, the original service of this type in the U.S., for about $800 million (approximately 890 billion KRW), expanding into markets in Korea, Southeast Asia, the U.S., and Europe. TikTok became the most downloaded app worldwide on app stores, leveraging the acquisition of Musical.ly.

ByteDance is also famous for its corporate culture that boosts employee morale. Employees living within a 20-minute walk receive 1,000 yuan (about 170,000 KRW) monthly housing support to help them focus more on work. Additionally, all three meals a day are provided free of charge, allowing employees to discuss work even during meals. Zhang attracted attention by granting stock options to the cafeteria chef, aiming to instill a sense of responsibility in the chef who takes care of employees’ health. Zhang still advises startup founders that there is no time to waste on the street and that they should spend as much time as possible in the office to focus on work.

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

Meanwhile, the second richest young person in China selected by Fortune China was Su Hua (39), founder and chairman of Kuaishou. Su Hua’s fortune is estimated at 155 billion yuan (approximately 26.6 trillion KRW).

The third richest young person in China was Cheng Yixiao (39), founder of Didi Chuxing, China’s largest ride-sharing service. Cheng Yixiao’s fortune was estimated at 125 billion yuan (approximately 21.46 trillion KRW).

Among the 40 richest young people in China, 35 were born in the 1980s. The remaining five were entrepreneurs born in the 1980s, with the youngest being 29 years old.