He is currently the richest man in China and one of the richest in the world. Zhong Shanshan, founder and president of Nongfu Spring, a bottled water company, and Chinese pharmaceutical giant Wantai, with a fortune valued at 58 billion euros, according to Forbes.
Zhong Shanshan was born in December 1954, in Hangzhou, China. He dropped out of primary school due to China’s Cultural Revolution, especially because his parents were persecuted at the time. Given this, he ended up having several jobs throughout his career, especially in the construction sector. He later managed to enter Zhejiang Radio and TV University, and later got a job as a journalist at Zhejiang Daily.
Later he ended up working at a beverage company, Wahaha, where he gained a taste for the area.
Eight years after starting to work at this company, in 1996, Zhong Shanshan ended up founding his own company in this field, Nongfu Spring. At the time, the idea adopted by Zhong Shanshan of maintaining all the minerals that the water already had helped him to grow the brand, following the success he achieved in a marketing campaign.
Over time and the growth of Nongfu Spring, it became the largest bottled water manufacturer in the entire Chinese territory, having also become one of the largest in the beverage segment in the world, passing giant brands such as Coca-Cola itself.
Completing the Top3 of the richest in China is Zhang Yiming, the boss of TikTok, with a fortune valued at 37 billion, and finishing the podium is Ma Huateng, a Chinese tycoon, investor, politician and philanthropist and co-founder and president on the board of Tencent, one of the largest Internet, communications, media and technology companies in China, with 34 billion in portfolio. It should be said that Ma Huateng was once the richest man in China.
The PLATAFORMA Rankings are updated annually by our team of professionals. Every month we launch a new Ranking, seeking to portray what unites and separates the geographies we cover, namely Portuguese-speaking Countries and China.
