There are over 800 billionaires living in Asia, and while the continent’s richest woman is nowhere near the top of the ranking, her wealth is still massive.
Zhong Huijuan is a Chinese pharmaceutical tycoon and Asia’s richest woman with a net worth of £15.8 billion.
To put that in perspective, her fortune is roughly £15billion higher than Hollywood actors Tom Cruise and George Clooney combined – Cruise is reportedly worth £473million, while Clooney sits at around £400million.
Born in April 1961 in Jiangsu Province, Zhong Huijuan didn’t come from money. She started her career as a chemistry teacher at Yan’an Middle School in her hometown of Lianyungang.
But her life changed completely in 1995, when she entered the pharmaceutical industry, leaving teaching behind to run a small startup company.
That company became Hansoh Pharmaceutical, and it would make her one of the wealthiest people on the planet.
Hansoh Pharmaceutical, headquartered in Lianyungang and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, specialises in producing cancer treatments, antibiotics, and psychotropic drugs. Zhong holds a 66% stake in the company.
The company grew quickly, thanks to Zhong’s clever strategy of reinvesting a big portion of revenue – initially 5%, later increasing to 10% – into research and development.
That figure is unusually high for a Chinese pharmaceutical company and helped Hansoh become a household name in the industry.
In 2019, Hansoh Pharmaceutical went public, raising $1 billion in its initial offering. That same year, Zhong was crowned the richest self-made woman in Asia, with her net worth surpassing $10 billion.
By 2020, as demand for pharmaceuticals soared during the pandemic, Zhong’s wealth grew even further, placing her among the world’s richest women.
Despite her enormous success, Zhong remains relatively private, rarely giving interviews or making public appearances.
Her husband, Sun Piaoyang, is also a billionaire and chairman of Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine, one of China’s largest pharmaceutical companies.
Their daughter, Sun Yuan, works alongside Zhong as an executive director at Hansoh Pharmaceutical.
Zhong’s company is now the largest producer of psychotropic drugs in China and a major name in cancer treatments.
