Behind every billionaire there is a story!

China uneasy billionaires

China also has 300,000 millionaires, according to the World Wealth Report compiled by Merrill Lynch & Co. and Cap Gemini SA. Three hundred million people have been lifted out of poverty since 1978, according to a September United Nations report, and millions more are starting businesses in hopes of joining the country’s rapidly expanding plutocracy.

Advances for the Poor

“In China today, even the poor are richer than the richest people were when I was a boy,” says entrepreneur Huang Guangyu, 37, a peasant’s son who founded retailer Gome Electrical Appliance Holdings Ltd. in 1987. Huang, worth $1.7 billion, is now China’s richest man

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Two years later, Huang, working with his older brother Huang Junqin, had made enough money as a middleman to buy a clothes shop in Beijing named Gome, which means “beautiful country.”

Huang switched to electrical appliances, using his connections in Guangdong to gain access to the scarce inventory. And he invited manufacturers to take space in his stores and staff the shops-within-shops with their own salespeople — saving him the cost of their salaries.

Today, Gome runs 523 stores across China and plans to add as many as 200 more this year. Last year, Gome made a profit of $62 million — a 33 percent increase from 2004 — on revenue of $2.2 billion.