Zhang Yin (entrepreneur)

Cheung Yan ( Hong Kong notation, other: Zhang Yin, born 1957 in Shaoguan ) is the founder and owner of the private Chinese wrapping paper company Nine Dragons Paper Holdings Ltd.. and one of the richest Chinese.

Life

She was the oldest of eight children of Cheung Deen, an officer of the Chinese Red Army (now the People's Liberation Army ), was born. His good contacts with the ruling Communist Party helped to open her throughout her career many doors. After he retired from the army, her father was general manager of a mining company in Guangdong. In 1985, she went from Guangdong to Hong Kong, where he was first employed as an accountant of a company that still went into bankruptcy in the same year. She then got out of a businessman making a different location offered with an annual salary according to ten times the average income in Hong Kong, but this struck out. Instead, she founded with an initial capital of 30,000 yuan, without any idea about the industry and without a bit of English knowledge, through an intermediary, a company for importing waste paper from the U.S. to China. In China, the paper was to urgently needed containerboard for the booming export sector, China's processed ( China itself has its own huge forests " Great Leap Forward " cut down during the industrialization policy of Mao ). In 1990 the company moved its headquarters to Pomona ( California). Together with her husband, Liu Ming Chung, a Taiwan -born and raised in Brazil doctor, she steered the export company "American Chung Nam " from their simplistic Apartment apartment.

Soon it became the largest by volume waste paper exporter in the United States. In China, she also founded a paper mill, which is the largest packaging paper producer in China today. Because the paper was not seen as a resource, but as a waste (and will), were (and are ) their money in the business extremely low. For transportation they used the fact that the freighter who brought goods from China to the U.S., on the way back drove practically empty. They therefore offered transport capacities at very reasonable prices.

At the company holds today, along with her husband and her brother Cheung Chengfei, 72 % of the shares (as of August 2006). Also one of her sons, Lau Chun Shun, is a member of the company management. Through the course of their company in March 2006 at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, their assets increased nine-fold in a very short time to 3.4 billion U.S. dollars (as of end of 2006). One of the largest remaining shareholders of the company is the Baring Hong Kong China Fund.

Cheung Yan supplanted the previous place holder, Huang Guangyu (owner of GOME Electrical Appliances ), by far the top position as the richest man in China. It is worth noting in this context that the rank of the richest Chinese previously only men and heads of state-owned enterprises occupied. They also referred as the richest self-made woman in the world " competitors " as Joanne K. Rowling, Meg Whitman ( eBay boss) and Oprah Winfrey on the courts.

Cheung Yan is a member of the Political Consultative Conference of the Chinese people. However long you live in Los Angeles.

Quotes

• " Other people saw as waste paper waste. I have it considered as a forest of trees. " ( Cheung Yan, November 2006)
• "Money is not so important for me, maybe because I think I can make it again and again " (quoted in Stern, see Related links )