For the first time, the founder of ByteDance has surpassed Tencent and Nongfu heads to top China's rich list.

• According to Hurun Research Institute's China Rich List, Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, is now China's wealthiest individual.
• Zhang, worth $49.3 billion, surpassed Zhong Shanshan, who had held the top spot for three years, on the list of wealthiest Chinese individuals.

For the first time, Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, has surpassed Nongfu Spring Chairperson Zhong Shanshan as China's wealthiest individual, according to a Hurun Research Institute list.

In February, Zhang, 44, surpassed 'bottled water king' Zhong, whose wealth decreased by 24% to $47.9 billion, to become the fifth richest person in the world.

TikTok, with over a billion active monthly users worldwide, contributed to ByteDance's 30% profit increase last year, according to Hurun.

Despite a 13% increase in his wealth to $44.4 billion, Pony Ma Huateng, CEO of Chinese internet giant Tencent, fell one spot to third place on the Forbes World's Billionaires list.

Colin Huang, the founder of e-commerce platform Pinduoduo, dropped from first place to fourth on the wealth list due to a 9% decline in his wealth. He Xiangjian, founder of Midea, and Zeng Yuqun, CEO of CATL, took fifth and sixth places on the list.

According to Hurun Research, the number of Chinese individuals with wealth over $700 million decreased by 147 to 1,094 in the past year, while their combined wealth dropped by 10% to $3 trillion.

The number of billionaires in the country decreased by 142 to 753 from the previous year, representing a 30% drop from the 2021 peak of 1,185.

For the third consecutive year, the Hurun China Rich List has decreased, according to Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of Hurun reports, due to the challenges faced by China's economy and stock markets.

Entrepreneurs from the technology, consumer electronics, and new energy space now make up the majority of the current rich list, according to Hoogewerf.

He stated that the tales of the people on the Hurun China Rich List reflect the narrative of the Chinese economy.

The new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs are more international than their predecessors, as observed by Hoogewerf, who cited ByteDance's Zhang's global expansion of TikTok and Pinduoduo's Huang's creation of Temu as a global e-commerce hub.