Wang Jianlin, founder and head of Dalian Wanda Group Co. Photograph: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg
(Bloomberg) -- Reclining in a beige leather seat in his Gulfstream G550 private jet, Wang Jianlin barks an unlikely order as the aircraft descends into a remote pocket of Southwest China.
From Beijing to Hollywood to London and elsewhere in his expanding property, film and entertainment empire, Wang, the billionaire chairman of Beijing-based Dalian Wanda Group Co., is known as a stickler for formality. Not only does he favor dark business suits and ties, he empowers his receptionists to fine employees who fail to meet his dress standards. Today, though, China’s second-richest man is clad in khaki pants and sneakers. And as the jet prepares to land in China’s poorest province, Guizhou, he instructs his entourage to follow his example.
“This is a trip to lift poverty,” Wang tells them. “Suits are not appropriate.”
Swiftly, all jackets are discarded, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its March issue.
Despite Wang’s efforts, his reception on the ground is anything but casual. Local officials in pressed black suits stand to attention in a piercing December wind. A police escort clears roads for his motorcade. As he approaches the hardscrabble city of Danzhai (population 170,000), neon signs along the four-lane main street flash the message, “Warmest welcome to Chairman Wang.” It’s the kind of treatment typically reserved for visiting government ministers. And though Wang, 60, has no political rank, he has rapidly growing financial clout, in China and abroad.
Fortune Doubles
Following the December initial public offering of one of Dalian Wanda’s listed units and the January IPO of another, Wang’s fortune almost doubled in the space of three months to $28.6 billion as of Feb. 9, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That moved him closer to China’s richest man, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Jack Ma, who was worth $34.3 billion as of the same date.
Wang’s empire had revenue of $40 billion in 2014. He controls the world’s largest chain of movie theaters, measured by number of movie screens, and the second-largest commercial property company, measured by leasable floor space. Wanda’s malls, offices and luxury hotels boast a total floor space of 93.5 million square meters (1 billion square feet), 1½ times all the leasable space in Manhattan.
Among the marquee projects: Western Europe’s tallest residential building, One Nine Elms, in London; and Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis, which upon completion in 2017 will be the world’s biggest movie studio and theme park. For the studio’s 2013 groundbreaking ceremony, in the Chinese coastal city of Qingdao, Wang flew in Nicole Kidman, Leonardo DiCaprio, John Travolta, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Ewan McGregor and Kate Beckinsale to provide star power.
Wealth Gap
In lesser deals, Wang has also snapped up a British yacht manufacturer, Sunseeker International Ltd., and bought a 20 percent stake in Atletico Madrid, the reigning Spanish football champions.
Wang has even taken a shot at helping tackle one of China’s most intractable challenges: narrowing the wealth gap between the rural poor and the country’s new rich such as himself. Hence his appearance at Danzhai, where far from treading the red carpet with Hollywood royalty, he trudges through pigsties while talking up the $160 million worth of philanthropic investments he has planned. Wang hopes his efforts, which include awarding scholarships and building food-processing plants, will double the living standards of 2 million farmers in the next five years.
The tycoon visits a crumbling hovel inhabited by Huang Jinhe and...
Wang Jianlin, founder and head of Dalian Wanda Group Co. Photograph: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg
(Bloomberg) -- Reclining in a beige leather seat in his Gulfstream G550 private jet, Wang Jianlin barks an unlikely order as the aircraft descends into a remote pocket of Southwest China.
From Beijing to Hollywood to London and elsewhere in his expanding property, film and entertainment empire, Wang, the billionaire chairman of Beijing-based Dalian Wanda Group Co., is known as a stickler for formality. Not only does he favor dark business suits and ties, he empowers his receptionists to fine employees who fail to meet his dress standards. Today, though, China’s second-richest man is clad in khaki pants and sneakers. And as the jet prepares to land in China’s poorest province, Guizhou, he instructs his entourage to follow his example.
“This is a trip to lift poverty,” Wang tells them. “Suits are not appropriate.”
Swiftly, all jackets are discarded, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its March issue.
Despite Wang’s efforts, his reception on the ground is anything but casual. Local officials in pressed black suits stand to attention in a piercing December wind. A police escort clears roads for his motorcade. As he approaches the hardscrabble city of Danzhai (population 170,000), neon signs along the four-lane main street flash the message, “Warmest welcome to Chairman Wang.” It’s the kind of treatment typically reserved for visiting government ministers. And though Wang, 60, has no political rank, he has rapidly growing financial clout, in China and abroad.
Fortune Doubles
Following the December initial public offering of one of Dalian Wanda’s listed units and the January IPO of another, Wang’s fortune almost doubled in the space of three months to $28.6 billion as of Feb. 9, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That moved him closer to China’s richest man, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Jack Ma, who was worth $34.3 billion as of the same date.
Wang’s empire had revenue of $40 billion in 2014. He controls the world’s largest chain of movie theaters, measured by number of movie screens, and the second-largest commercial property company, measured by leasable floor space. Wanda’s malls, offices and luxury hotels boast a total floor space of 93.5 million square meters (1 billion square feet), 1½ times all the leasable space in Manhattan.
Among the marquee projects: Western Europe’s tallest residential building, One Nine Elms, in London; and Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis, which upon completion in 2017 will be the world’s biggest movie studio and theme park. For the studio’s 2013 groundbreaking ceremony, in the Chinese coastal city of Qingdao, Wang flew in Nicole Kidman, Leonardo DiCaprio, John Travolta, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Ewan McGregor and Kate Beckinsale to provide star power.
Wealth Gap
In lesser deals, Wang has also snapped up a British yacht manufacturer, Sunseeker International Ltd., and bought a 20 percent stake in Atletico Madrid, the reigning Spanish football champions.
Wang has even taken a shot at helping tackle one of China’s most intractable challenges: narrowing the wealth gap between the rural poor and the country’s new rich such as himself. Hence his appearance at Danzhai, where far from treading the red carpet with Hollywood royalty, he trudges through pigsties while talking up the $160 million worth of philanthropic investments he has planned. Wang hopes his efforts, which include awarding scholarships and building food-processing plants, will double the living standards of 2 million farmers in the next five years.
The tycoon visits a crumbling hovel inhabited by Huang Jinhe and his family. There, surreptitiously, Wang has his personal assistant slip a wad of cash to the 64-year-old farmer: 10,000 yuan ($1,600), the equivalent of two years’ income for the Huangs.
Bond, Hobbit
Wang, a former soldier in the People’s Liberation Army who still retains a ramrod-straight military posture and close-cropped hair, made his first pot of gold developing real estate in Dalian, a northeastern coastal city. Then he started buying up movie theaters across China. In 2012, he began producing and distributing locally made films, including the English-language Man of Tai Chi, directed by Keanu Reeves, star of the Matrix movies.
That same year, he paid $2.6 billion plus debt to acquire AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., the second-biggest U.S. cinema operator. Now, he says, he’s in talks to buy a majority stake in Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., the Hollywood studio that made the Hunger Games films. And he says he’s also keen to invest in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., producer of the James Bond and Hobbit franchises.
‘Big Players’
In readiness for those deals, and deals to come, Wang in September paid $1.2 billion for land on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, California, on which he says he will build the headquarters of his nascent U.S. movie empire. As Wang tells it, U.S. movie studios are falling over themselves to sell stakes to him.
“Many people come knock at my door, but Wanda is only interested in the big players and we want control,” Wang says. Spokesmen for Lions Gate and MGM declined to comment on any discussions.
Wang, however, is less reticent. Cocooned in the wood-paneled luxury of his Gulfstream, he describes his Hollywood strategy as key to transforming Dalian Wanda from a company heavily dependent on China’s volatile property market into a more-diversified global business empire. “I give myself six more years to make Wanda a world-class company in the league of Microsoft and Wal-Mart,” Wang says while devouring a simple breakfast of plain congee (rice porridge) and corn accompanied by a bowl of fresh cherries.
Overtaking Hollywood
More specifically, Wang says that by 2020 he wants to increase revenue by 2½ times to $100 billion -- more than the current annual sales of International Business Machines Corp. His target for net profit is $10 billion, more than Coca-Cola Co.’s estimated earnings for 2014.
Last year, 70 percent of Wanda’s revenue came from its property arm. By 2020, Wang aims to reduce that dependence to 50 percent, with much of the rest of his income coming from the burgeoning Chinese film industry, which is now the world’s second largest by box office receipts, surpassed only by Hollywood.
China’s movie box office is growing at 40 percent annually and in 2014 came to an estimated $4.9 billion, according to the Chinese Film Producers’ Association. By contrast, U.S. theater takings rose just 1 percent in 2014, to $10.9 billion. If that trend holds -- and Wang predicts it will -- China will overtake the U.S. as the world’s biggest movie market by 2017. Buying Hollywood studios, Wang says, will give him the expertise, content and distribution he needs to conquer that market.
‘Great Thesis’
“Wang has a great thesis,” says David Tawil, president of Maglan Capital, a New York–based hedge fund that owns about 1 percent of MGM. “We all know the boom-and-bust cycle that occurs in property markets, and it could be particularly bad in China. Wang knows it the best. It’s wise of him to be diversifying away.”
The U.S. motion-picture industry, however, may not be entirely convinced. “Everyone respects that Wang has the clout and money,” says Robert Cain, president of Santa Monica, California–based Pacific Bridge Pictures, an indu
