Wang is the founder and largest shareholder of BYD, a Chinese maker of electric cars. The Shenzhen-based company employs over 570,000 people and had revenue of 424 billion yuan ($63.1 billion) in 2022. Aside from cars and buses, it also makes rechargeable and nickel-cadmium batteries for use in mobile phones.
The majority of Wang's fortune is derived from a 19% stake in BYD, a car maker that trades publicly in Shanghai and Hong Kong. He holds the shares directly and through an asset management plan, according to the company's 2023 first-quarter report. The company employs more than 570,000 people, according to its 2022 annual report.
The value of his cash investments is based on an analysis of these proceeds, as well as taxes and market performance.
According to a Hong Kong stock exchange filing dated June 18, 2015, Wang sold 25.7 million BYD shares and loaned the proceeds to employees to facilitate their share purchases. The amount he loaned to his workers is included as an asset in the net worth analysis.
Mia Gu, a spokeswoman at BYD, said the billionaire declined to comment on his net worth.
Wang Chuan-Fu was born into a farming family in China's Anhui province in 1966. He graduated from Central South Industrial University, now known as Central South University, with a bachelor's degree in metallurgical physical chemistry in 1987. He received a master's degree in materials from the Beijing General Research Institute of Nonferrous Metals, where he worked as a deputy director, according to his profile at the Boao Forum.
He worked as the general manager of Bige Battery for a year and a half before using about $400,000 that he borrowed from his cousin to found BYD as a battery maker with 20 employees in 1995. The company was making lithium-ion batteries for handsets by 1997, and later expanded to cars, joining billionaire Li Shufu's Geely Automobile Holdings as one of country's first non-state owned electric carmakers.
BYD began trading on the Hong Kong stock exchange in 2002. It attracted the attention of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who purchased 225 million shares for HK$8 (about $1) each through a unit of Berkshire Hathaway six years later. The company has benefited from some of the Chinese government's air pollution policies, including mandates that electric cars make up a certain amount of state vehicle purchases.