Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Totally Together Divas

You are the complete package! You have all the attributes above and you are loving life! Tell us how did you accomplished it?
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Ju Ju said...

Someone you should know...Yang Huiyan

China: A rags-to-riches story to dream about
By Olivia Chung

HONG KONG - With the listing of Country Garden, a major Chinese property developer based in southern China's Guangdong province, on Hong Kong's main board last Friday, a new richest woman in China was born.

But unlike the average tai tai - a middle-aged lady with short, black hair dressed in a black Chanel suit - this richest female tycoon is only 25 years old and fresh out of Ohio State University.
Yang Huiyan, was virtually unknown China until recently, when
her father, Yeung Kwok-keung (Yang Guoqiang in Mandarin), founder and chairman of the Country Garden, planned to raise up to HK$12.9 billion (US$1.6 billion) by issuing 2.4 billion new shares, or 15% of its enlarged share capital, in an initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong.

She joined her father's company in 2005 after obtaining a degree in marketing and logistics and served as the manager of the procurement department. That same year, Yeung transferred his entire holdings in the company, which comprised 9.52 billion shares, to Yang, his second daughter. (Yeung has three daughters, the eldest one suffering from brain damage for lack of medical care due to the family's early poverty.)

Yang's ownership was diluted to 59.5% from 70% by the Hong Kong IPO, which was 255 times oversubscribed, freezing HK$329 billion of funds from retail investors and making it the second-most-popular IPO after the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China's HK$410 billion offering last October.

When Country Garden made its trading debut last Friday, the share price rose by about 35% to HK$7.27, boosting her wealth to HK$69.2 billion (US$8.85 billion), which is more than the combined wealth of both China's richest man Wong Kwong-yu (Huang Kuangyu) and the former richest woman in China (Cheung Yan Zhang Yan).

Last year, Cheung, Nine Dragons Paper (Holdings) chairwoman, was named China's richest woman, with an estimated US$3.4 billion fortune, by a Hurun Report list of the mainland's richest people. Wong, chairman of Gome Electrical Appliances Holding, topped the male list with US$2.3 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

The public offering set off a media frenzy to find out more about this young woman and her elusive family. It appears that the family is extremely media-shy, and no image of the daughter could be obtained through an online search.

Indeed, Yang's extremely low profile has allowed some pranksters to put photographs on the Internet of a beautiful model or a young lady lining up at a bank to apply for units in the property developer. Some outlets reported that she got married last year and recently delivered a baby.

That may be why she did not personally take part in the IPO - the second-largest, in terms of funds frozen, in the history of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange - even though as a director Yang is primarily responsible for the overall supervision of procurement, enterprise resources management, and formulation of development strategies.

Her father did meet with about 300 potential investors in the pre-marketing phase, but he mainly let his staff do the talking and refused interviews, and after the meetings he quickly left the hall to avoid any photo sessions. So it has taken some enterprise to piece together a skeleton biography.

Like most of the China's super-rich, Yeung was born into a poor family, in his case in the rice-growing, fish-farming township of Beijiao in Shunde city, Guangdong province. Some reports have said he was so poor that he never wore a pair of shoes until he was 17. But he clarified that in a meeting with potential investors in Hong Kong, saying he simply had never put on a new shirt until 18.

He got his start when he was 20-odd years old, working for a construction company affiliated with the township government. Following the trend of privatization of state-owned enterprises in the early 1990s, Yeung, by that time manager of the construction company, raised some capital with others to buy the company.

Favored by the government, the company bought large pieces of land in the countryside at a very low price and started developing a large-scale residential project called Bi Gui Yuan, the brand owned by Country Garden. But it wasn't all plain sailing.

When the property-market bubble burst, it almost put paid to the high-end residential project with 4,000 villas. "At that time, the site of Bi Gui Yuan was very remote, far from the thriving city of Shunde, only a few villas were sold, which almost led to the whole project being unable to complete," a Hong Kong businessman owning a plant in Shunde said.

Success of the Bi Gui Yuan came with the establishment of an international school, which attracted many wealthy families with children, each willing to provide an education fund of 300,000 yuan (nearly US$39,000 at current rates) in advance. This gave the property project a much-needed cash flow.

Yeung applied the business model to other second-tier cities in Guangdong by maintaining a close contact with local governments, obtaining large portions of land on the outskirts of developed areas at very low prices and waiting for the urban sprawl to reach it.

Apart from the fact that Country Garden's land cost is only about 10% of the company's average selling price, while the average in the industry is four times that. The popular advertisement slogan "offering you a five-star home" of the Bi Gui Yuan project was created by Yeung himself.

The Guangdong property developer with 22 projects in the province is developing five residential sites outside its base - in the provinces of Hunan, Jiangsu, Inner Mongolia and Liaoning - with a total land area of 2.7 million square meters, Yeung said at the share debut ceremony last Friday.

Apart from being popular with Hong Kong people, many of whom came from Yeung's home town, the IPO frenzy was sparked by remarks made by property tycoon Lee Shau-kee, known as "Asia's Warren Buffett", chairman of Henderson Land Development, Hong Kong's third-largest developer. He chose Country Garden as one of the five hottest picks among mainland property stocks.

Lee was brought in as a cornerstone investor, along with Malaysian billionaire Robert Kuok, CITIC Pacific's Larry Yung Chi-kin, Singapore's state-run investment arm Temasek Holdings, and Chow Tai Fook Enterprises. Together, they agreed to buy HK$3.5 billion worth of shares.

The trading frenzy abated on Monday when the share price of the two-day-old listed firm closed 0.68% lower at HK$7.22, but not before it created a new "richest woman in China" and another rags-to-riches story for people to dream about.

Olivia Chung is a senior Asia Times Online reporter.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/ID27Cb02.html

July 13, 2008 at 10:47 AM

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