EV maker BYD’s co-founder Wang Chuanfu, center, topped the latest Forbes China list of the country’s … [+]
Wang Chuanfu, the CEO of China electric vehicle leader BYD, repeated at the top of the annual ranking of the country’s top 50 CEOs published this month by Forbes China, the licensed Chinese-language edition.
Born in a farm village in one of China’s poorest provinces in 1966, Wang was orphaned as a teen and raised by his elder brother and sister. The high achiever made it to college, excelling as he trained his sights on battery technology. He cofounded BYD as a rechargeable battery company in the mid-1990s.
BYD, backed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, said on Friday net profit in the first six months of 2023 may have more than tripled from a year ago amid rising sales of EVs and improved market share, the company said on Friday (see full post here).
Robin Zeng, the CEO of electric vehicle battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology, better known as CATL, ranked second on the new list. Chen Lei and Zhao Jiazhen, co-CEOs of e-commerce platform PDD, took the third spot. Wang and Zeng are also billionaires.
Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns about 6% of BYD, which ranked No. 170 on the Forbes Global 2000 ranking of the world’s top publicly traded companies earlier this year. CATL ranked No. 121, and PDD came in at No. 336.
The new Forbes China’s Best CEOs List took into account a company’s stock price performance, market value, revenue, net profit, profit growth, return on assets and return on equity for listed businesses based on available data from 2020 through May 2023. Click here for the Chinese version.
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—Russell Flannery