Cheung Yan

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Cheung Yan (Hong Kong spelling, other: Zhang Yin ; * 1957 in Shaoguan ) is the founder and owner of the private Chinese packaging paper company Nine Dragons Paper Holdings Ltd. and one of the richest Chinese .

Life

She was born the eldest of eight children to Cheung Deen, an officer in the Chinese Red Army (now the People's Liberation Army ). His good contacts with the ruling Communist Party helped to open many doors for her in the course of her career. After retiring from the army, her father became the general manager of a mining company in Guangdong . In 1985, she moved from Guangdong to Hong Kong , where she initially worked as an accountant for a company that went bankrupt that same year . She was then offered another job by a businessman with an annual salary ten times the median Hong Kong salary, but turned it down. Instead, with start-up capital of 30,000 yuan , without any clue about the industry and without a bit of English, she set up a company through intermediaries to import waste paper from the USA to China. In China, the waste paper was processed into urgently needed corrugated cardboard base paper for the booming export industry in China (China itself cut down its own huge forests in the course of the industrialization policy of the " great leap forward " under Mao). In 1990 the company relocated to Pomona (California) . Together with her husband Liu Ming Chung, a doctor who was born in Taiwan and grew up in Brazil, she managed the export company “American Chung Nam” from her simple apartment.

It soon became the largest exporter of recovered paper in the United States by volume. She also founded a paper mill in China, which is now the largest packaging paper manufacturer in China. Because the waste paper was (and is) considered to be waste rather than recyclable material, the cost of the deal was (and is) extremely low. For the transport, she took advantage of the fact that the freighters that brought goods from China to the USA were practically empty on the way back. They therefore offered transport capacities at very affordable prices.

Today she holds 72% of the shares in the company, together with her husband and brother Cheung Chengfei (as of August 2006). One of her sons, Lau Chun Shun, is also a member of the company's management team. When her company went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in March 2006 , her assets increased ninefold to 3.4 billion US dollars (as of the end of 2006). One of the company's largest remaining shareholders is the Baring Hong Kong China Fund .

Cheung Yan ousts the previous placeholder, Huang Guangyu (owner of GOME Electrical Appliances ), by far from the top spot as the richest person in China. It is noteworthy in this context that the ranks of the richest Chinese previously held only men and heads of state-owned companies. In addition, as the richest self-made woman in the world , she relegated “competitors” such as Joanne K. Rowling , Meg Whitman ( eBay boss) and Oprah Winfrey to their places.

Cheung Yan is a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference . However, she has lived near Los Angeles for a long time .

Quotes

  • “Other people saw waste paper as garbage. I saw it as a forest of trees. ” (Cheung Yan, November 2006)
  • "Money is not so important to me, maybe because I think that I can earn it again and again" (quoted from Stern, see web links)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Cheung, Yan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Zhang Yin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chinese entrepreneur, richest woman in China
DATE OF BIRTH 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH Shaoguan