For years, Yang Huiyan’s fortune has been at the center of headlines, comments, and calculations outside of China.

Yang Huiyan, who is only 41 years old, is not only the richest woman in her country, but also the most the richest in all of Asia.

FROM inherited a real estate empire from his father over ten years ago, his fortune continues to grow. But in 2022, everything changed: last year it suffered a real decline.

According to Bloomberg Billionaires Index calculations, Yang saw his net worth drop more than 52% last year.

In 2021, Bloomberg estimated the fortune of a business woman at about $33.9 billion (about 33 billion euros), which fell to around $16.1 billion (about €15.7 billion) in July last year.

Economic analysts saw this not only as a grim sign of the state of the Chinese housing market, but also as a serious warning that The future of the world’s second largest economy.

This comes as the country’s real estate sector has been hit hard by falling home prices, declining buyer demand and a bad debt crisis that has affected some major property developers since 2020.

The situation has reached the point where some banks ran out of moneywhich caused protests in some cities of the Asian country.

And although Yang remains the richest woman in Asia, her position has begun to falter.

Yang is followed by chemical fiber entrepreneur Fan Hongwei, who also has an estimated net worth of around $16 billion, according to Bloomberg.

But who is Yang Huiyan and how did he make one of the biggest fortunes in the world?

heiress

Born in 1981 in Shuntak, a district of Foshan City, Guangzhou Province, in southern China, Yang is the daughter of one of the richest people in the Asian country: Yang Guoqiang.

Raised in one of China’s most influential families, she received an excellent education and was sent to the United States at the time of youth. In 2003, he graduated from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University.

Returning to China, he inherited from his father in 2007. most actions Country Garden Holdings, China’s largest real estate company.

Founded in 1992 in Guangzhou, Country Garden Holdings has been successful since its Hong Kong IPO and has raised about $1.6 billion, about the same as Google’s since its 2004 US IPO.

Although Yang is known for staying out of the public eye and living a low key lifestyle, center of countless headlines inside and outside of China.

One of the most high-profile cases occurred in 2018, when legal documents known as the “Cyprus Papers” were leaked and revealed that he had obtained Cypriot citizenship in 2018, despite China not recognizing dual citizenship.

Problems

Chinese market researchers describe Yang as a creative woman with business acumen.

In June last year, the International Hospitality Institute recognized it in its ranking the most influential people in the global hotel industry.

However, his business was already showing signs of weakness.

The situation in the real estate market in the country since 2020 has become more complicated not only because of the coronavirus pandemic, but also because the Chinese authorities tried to curb over-indebtedness in real estate.

This resulted in large builders facing payment struggles and forcing them to renegotiate a contract with your creditors.

The crisis worsened when Evergrande, the most indebted Chinese real estate company, defaulted on its dollar-denominated bonds in late 2021 after months of liquidity problems.

Since then and this year, several other major groups, including Kaisa and Shimao Group, have also applied for creditor protection.

The crisis has escalated in recent weeks after news of a “buyers’ strike” after thousands of people stopped paying their mortgages due to the delay in starting construction work on the houses. Due to the delay in the delivery of houses, companies did not start receiving mortgage payments on time.

All this led to the fact that Zagorodny Sad, which felt good in the first months of the pandemic, also faced liquidity problemto such an extent that last July he had to sell shares at a discount of almost 13% to raise funds.

And the long-term picture doesn’t look good for Young, his fortune, or the company he represents.

In a July report last year, ratings agency S&P estimated that real estate sales in China may fall by a third this year because of the mortgage strikes, a collective movement in which buyers decided to put mortgage payments on properties that were behind schedule.

Meanwhile, Capital Economics, an independent London-based economics research firm, predicted that “without sales, many other companies will fail, which is financial and economic threat“for China.