But by 2011, there were at least 170 Chinese and Indian billionaires. According to Forbes, they were worth $477 billion. China accounted for 115 of the billionaires, behind only the United States with 412. But India’s 55 billionaires were richer. Individually, they were worth, on average, $4.5 billion—$2 billion more than the Chinese billionaires. And some were rich beyond imagination. Two—Lakshmi Mittal and Mukesh Ambani, the son of Reliance Industries founder Dhirubhai Ambani—made the world’s top-ten richest list. Only the United States—with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, and Wal-Mart’s Walton family—had more top-ten billionaires. The highest-ranking Chinese billionaire was Robin Li, the forty-two-year-old chief executive of Baidu, China’s answer to Google. He was number 95.3
But this list represented only a snapshot in the rise of the billionaire class. Six months later, it looked very different. No sooner had Li been anointed China’s richest man, with a fortune of $9.4 billion, than another entrepreneur, Liang Wengen, chairman of Sany Heavy Industry, the construction equipment manufacturer, rose to the top of the Forbes China’s richest list, his wealth soaring as China’s construction market boomed.
Moreover, the number of Chinese billionaires increased to 146. In other words, 31 billionaires were “created” in China between March and September—more than 1 per week.4 Collectively worth $60 billion, the top ten built their fortunes by pursuing business opportunities in some of the high-growth sectors of China’s rapidly diversifying domestic economy, including the Internet, real estate, retail and consumer goods, home appliances, pharmaceuticals, and manufacturing. In India, most of the top ten are leaders of conglomerates with interests in diverse sectors ranging from commodities such as aluminum, cement, petrochemicals, and steel to service businesses such as IT, construction, and financial services.
These billionaires and multimillionaires are not just statistics. They are men and women with ambition, drive, energy, and vision. Adi Godrej, chairman of the Godrej Group, is one of them. His company, as he puts it, is 114 years young—having started out as a lock manufacturer. Today, it is a conglomerate with a presence in fast-moving consumer goods and durables, chemicals, and real estate. He inherited a small household products company nearly forty years ago. Since then, he has grown the company from $25 million in sales to $3 billion today. Now aged sixty-nine, he is still ambitious for his company and his country. “Today, we have just annunciated what we call a ten-by-ten vision—ten times bigger in ten years,” he calmly says. He believes in this vision and says it is possible because India is at a “tipping point”—providing unprecedented opportunities for massive wealth creation and fertile ground for entrepreneurs. “I don’t look at it as an unachievable goal,” he says. “But it’s going to be tough, and it’s going to need not only strong strategic thinking but also excellent execution.”
Godrej expects to see the company grow its share of the personal care, hair care, and household products markets. “We have leadership positions in some of these categories, so that will help us grow strongly,” he says. “And there are underpenetrated categories, so the opportunity to get nonusers to become users is strong in a country like India.” He adds, “In fast-moving consumer goods, we are very competitive with any producer anywhere in the world. In consumer durables, I would say the Chinese probably have an advantage over us because of scale, size, and volume.”
Adi Godrej reflects the best of the accelerator mind-set that we see in China and India: successful business leaders who clearly see significant growth opportunities ahead and who have a well-formed vision and a strategy for capturing it. They possess a confidence to invest and to act—knowing that the markets are booming around them and that their own actions can spur the growth of the markets.
Many entrepreneurs in China see similar opportunities and have been busily building empires—while also envisioning more substantial growth ahead. One is Zhang Yue, founder and chairman of Broad Air Conditioning (Broad Group). This engineering company is headquartered on the outskirts of Changsha, a city of seven million where he was born fifty-one years ago. Zhang, with a fortune estimated at $780 million, has become a crusader against pollution and the emission of greenhouse gases. The company motto is “Champion of Earth.”5
The corporate campus is called Broad Town. White-collar workers wear blue blazers, while factory workers wear blue uniforms and get free food (grown on company-operated organic farms and fishponds) and housing. Slogans designed to inspire the workforce are spread around the campus and include quotes from Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Zhang, who trained as an artist and interior designer, has steered his company toward sustainable development. It is one of the leading manufacturers of air conditioners, and the nonelectric coolers use lithium bromide and natural gas. The company claims that the units are twice as effective as conventional air conditioners and yet have just one-quarter of the carbon dioxide emissions. One of his most recent innovations is the Broad sustainable building, or BSB for short. The BSB is an energy-efficient system for designing and assembling prefabricated buildings strong enough to withstand earthquakes. It took one of his teams just six days to fully construct a fifteen-story hotel; the video of this stunning demonstration of building prowess is on YouTube.6
We estimate that there were nearly four hundred ultrawealthy households—those with more than $100 million—in China in 2010. That put it eighth in the world ranking. The year before, it was thirteenth. If we add Hong Kong’s ultrawealthy residents to the list, China would surge into the world’s top five, ahead of Russia and just behind the United Kingdom.7
Below this select group, there is a burgeoning number of millionaires. China boasted more than 1 million millionaire households in 2010, behind Japan’s 1.5 million and the 5.2 million in the United States. The year before, China had recorded just 670,000 such households. India, ranked eleventh in the world, has 190,000 millionaire households.8 Some of these will soon reach the billionaire threshold.
The key to success for many of these people has been working out how to serve the new domestic markets, while at the same time managing government stakeholders for necessary support. Robin Li’s Baidu figured out how to overcome the challenges of developing a Chinese-language search capability and serving advertisers while ensuring a position as the government’s preferred company in the Internet business. Likewise, Liang Wengen’s Sany figured out how to deliver an ever-higher-quality range of construction equipment in a highly competitive market while ensuring sufficient government sponsorship in a sector where state-owned companies are the major buyers.
In each case, the business leaders secured positions on the crest of massive waves of growth: the Internet user base zoomed from tens of millions in 2000 to nearly five hundred million by 2011, and the construction sector has grown by 30 percent a year for a decade. Then, they turned to overseas stock markets to translate the sweat equity of their Chinese domestic businesses into globally tradable hard currency. The listing of Baidu on NASDAQ and Sany Heavy on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange created shares traded outside China in foreign currency, transforming the two founders into U.S. dollar billionaires on the world stage.
In India, the top wealth creators have a diversified set of businesses. Some of these, such as Nandan Nilekani, have decided to give something back to their country, taking on public-service jobs at no pay.
Nandan Nilekani: From Global Entrepreneur to Best-Selling Author to Public Servant
Nandan Nilekani is a man of the world. For thirty years, he was the public face of tech giant Infosys. He traveled the globe convincing companies that Indian engineers could deliver world-class programming at much lower prices. As the company moved from a start-up in 1981 to a global competitor with a market cap of nearly $30 billion, he served as chief operating officer and later CEO. Nilekani is also the author of Imagining India—a sweeping best seller that chronicles India’s dynastic past, complicated present, and hopes for a bright future.
He is now an unpaid public servant and the mastermind behind a scheme to give every one of India’s citizens an official identity. Three years ago, he began the third chapter of his life when he was asked by India’s prime minister to create