Zhang Imine (Zhang Yiming)

Zhang Imine (Zhang Yiming)

Biography

2024: The richest man in China. Fortune - $49.3 billion

Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance (owns TikTok), has become the richest man in China with a fortune of $49.3 billion. This is stated in the materials of the Hurun Research Institute, published on October 29, 2024.

Yiming was born on April 1, 1983 in Fujiang. In 2001, he entered Nankai University in Tianjin, where he specialized in microelectronics and software engineering. In 2005, he received a bachelor's degree, after which he worked for various companies, including Microsoft. Imin founded ByteDance in 2012, developed news aggregator Toutiao and video-sharing platform Douyin, which is known worldwide as TikTok.

According to the Hurun Research Institute, ByteDance's global revenue in 2023 grew by 30%, reaching $110 billion, and the number of users of the TikTok application in the United States approached 200 million. These positively affected the size of the state of Imin, who as a result became a leader among the richest people in China. In second place in the ranking is bottled water tycoon Zhong Shanshan with $47.9 billion, and the founder of TencentMa Huateng closes the top three, whose capital is estimated at $44.4 billion.

According to the Hurun Research Institute, the number of dollar billionaires in China in 2024 decreased by 142 people - to 753 billionaires. The authors of the study counted 1,094 people in the country with a fortune of more than 5 billion yuan (equivalent to $700 million), which is 12%, or 147 people less than in 2023. Their total wealth for the year decreased by 10% - to $2.97 trillion. In 331 people, the condition increased, and in 967 people the condition decreased or remained unchanged, more than 200 of them dropped out of the list. The top three cities with the highest concentration of entrepreneurs on the list included Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, followed by Hong Kong and Hangzhou.^[1]

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