A Dream Fuelled by Strong Desire and Firm Control Led Wang Jianlin to Build a Multibillion Dollar Property Empire, the Wanda Group.
Chinese property magnate Wang Jianlin loves making money. He has unabashedly confessed he was in pursuit of a better life. The year was 1988 and he had just founded the Dalian Wanda Group to get into real estate. With a CNY500,000 loan, he bought a building for residential development. Over the course of 31 years, he translated this initial investment into a CNY634 billion (US$94 billion) business empire with interests in real estate, theme parks, ecommerce and cinema chains.
Along the way, Wang, 64, has amassed a fortune of some US$23.1 billion, becoming China’s fourth-richest man in 2018, according to Forbes magazine. This wealth came from the 2014 public listing of Dalian Wanda Commercial Properties on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Life, indeed, has become better than he expected.
As an ambitious young man, Wang took advantage of China’s economic reform policies of the 1980s and 1990s when the country welcomed foreign investment and encouraged local entrepreneurship. It was the right time and right place. He pursued a military career where he dreamed of becoming a general but after 16 years, he left with another dream: to become a successful businessman.
He started Wanda Group in Dalian in north-eastern China, gradually expanding nationwide. Soon he added properties in the US, Europe and Australia to his portfolio. But real estate, he decided, was a cyclical business with boom and bust years, so he diversified into various entertainment sectors to hedge the business risk. From 2012, he went global in a big way, snapping up cinema chains, sports and other companies.
This story is from the June 2019 edition of The CEO Magazine Asia.
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This story is from the June 2019 edition of The CEO Magazine Asia.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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