Self-made shoe tycoon extends reign as Taiwan’s richest person

Who''s the richest person in Taiwan? According to the latest ranking in Forbes magazine, it''s still footwear tycoon Zhang Congyuan, who rose to No. 1 last year. Zhang is the founder of Huali Industrial Group, the second-largest contract shoemaker in the world. Zhang has a net worth of US$11.7 billion dollars, or NT$336 billion.

Financial expert
His main factory is in Vietnam, but he has some 21 factories across the world. He has as many as 116,000 employees and can produce more than 300 million pairs of shoes a year. Perhaps because of the pandemic, people have actually been buying more shoes. His main clients are Nike and Converse, both of which have released quite impressive financial reports.

Zhang is a self-made billionaire who started his shoe business in Yunlin 50 years ago. Today, his company supplies to dozens of global brands, and has gotten a revenue boost from the pandemic''s e-commerce boom. He''s No. 163 on the Forbes world billionaires'' list. The top spot went to Tesla''s Elon Musk. He displaced Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who dropped to No. 2 for the first time in four years.

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