Posts tagged ‘AMC Theatres’

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13/10/2016

China tops US in numbers of billionaires – BBC News

Property magnate Wang Jianlin of Dalian Wanda tops the list of 594 billionaires in the country, ahead of 535 billionaires in the US.

Alibaba‘s Jack Ma was second, with his wealth having risen 41% from last year.

The annual list is compiled by Shanghai publishers Hurun and often compared to the Forbes list in the US.The Hurun Report’s rich list is one of the most closely-watched and accurate assessments of wealth in China. The annual report has been published for the past 18 years.

Earlier this year, the publisher released a separate, global list, showing that the number of billionaires in China outnumbered those in the US for the first time.

However, none of China’s super-rich make it into the global top 20.

Global reach

At the top of the China rich list is Wang Jianlin, who sits on a personal fortune of $32.1bn (£26.4bn).

His company Dalian Wanda has made headlines throughout the year with a number of high profile forays into the US movie markets. It has taken over Legendary Pictures, as well as stepping into US and UK cinema chains and striking an alliance with Sony Pictures.

Alibaba’s Jack Ma is a close second with $30.6bn, and Pony Ma of internet and online gaming giant Tencent comes third with $24.6bn.

Image copyright REUTERS

The biggest increase came from Yao Zhengua of investment and real estate firm Baoneng Group, whose wealth jumped by 820% to $17.2bn, putting him in fourth position.

Hurun chairman Rupert Hoogewerf said Mr Yao’s rise illustrated a shift in China’s maturing economy.

“Yao’s financial investment model represents the new wave of wealth creation in China,” he explained. “The first money made in China 20 years ago came from trading, followed by manufacturing, real estate, IT, and today it is about using the capital markets for financial investments.

“Robin Li and Melissa Ma of search engine Baidu have a fortune of $14.7bn, ranked eighth while founder of smartphone makers Xiaomi, Lei Jun, dropped out of the top 10 to number 14 as competition in China’s smartphone market intensified.

Most of China’s billionaires live in Beijing, followed by Shenzhen, Shanghai and Hangzhou.

Globally, the Forbes rich list is topped by Microsoft founder Bill Gates with $75bn, followed by Amancio Ortega of Zara and legendary investor Warren Buffett.

Source: China tops US in numbers of billionaires – BBC News

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18/02/2015

China maps out vision of future prosperity along a New Silk Road | The Times

About half an hour west of Kashgar, China’s westernmost city, a chic estate agent bristling with pamphlets presents a vision of the future. Buy a place here — a short hop from the Uzbek border — and soon the global economy will pivot around you.

Her pitch boasts an artist’s impression of the villa complex a buyer might expect: miniature European palaces nestled between crystal lakes, arcades of high-end boutiques and a pine forest.

It takes (to put it mildly) an imaginative leap to square this idyll with the blistering desert and sheer, barren mountain range just outside the showroom, not to mention stories of ethnic bloodshed in the villages near by.

Yet the large image on the wall is a show-stopper. Kashgar, normally shown on the far left-hand side of Chinese maps, is a red dot at the centre of the world. Around and through it, planned road and rail lines on an epic scale twine and lunge towards Calais and Rotterdam at one end and Guangzhou and Shanghai at the other. Spurs dart off to Karachi, Tashkent, Helsinki, Moscow and Tehran. Australia and Turkey are mentioned as eventual waypoints. This Kashgar villa project, the saleswoman says, will sit at nothing less than the heart of the New Silk Road, a project viewed by some as the most important piece of geo-economic engineering we will see in our lifetimes.

Cheerleaders of the New Silk Road story have plenty to back their optimism, not least the fact that the vision is the unambiguous focus of President Xi. Talk about the Silk Road will ride high on China’s domestic political agenda this year; the global trade implications will start to reverberate soon afterwards. In 2013, when Mr Xi first laid out his ambition of building a Silk Road economic belt and a maritime Silk Road to run in parallel, he did so with the glint of a nation that is getting better and better at turning expansive blueprints into reality.

Mr Xi’s rhetoric doesn’t feel empty. China has buckets of cash to invest and a rising sense that it is deploying those funds at an historically perfect juncture: Europe is light on leadership, Putin’s Russia is not a natural builder of partnership and American domestic politics are a long-term drag on Washington’s capacity to build cohesive global visions. All around it, Beijing sees countries that may be wary of China’s ambition but, at the very least, are underwhelmed by the alternatives.

Yesterday, China’s central bank officially opened its new Silk Road fund, a $40 billion wedge of cash that supposedly will be run like a private equity investor and will drive the construction of the rail and road infrastructure on which all of President Xi’s strategic vision depends.

The blossoming of the Silk Road vision marks an even greater inflection-point in China’s economic advance — the moment when its outward direct investments, as a percentage of global investment flow, outpace inflows. Its investments abroad rose from $45 billion to more than $600 billion between 2004 and 2013. Since 2010, its two largest state-owned development banks have annually lent more to developing countries than the World Bank and China is the predominant funder of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Brics Development Bank.

This all needs to be built into the way European leaders see the world, because at the moment, Mr Xi has a vision that could be internationalised or forever belong to China. While the initial stages of the Silk Road expansion will involve dreary-looking handshakes between China’s leaders and their various central Asian counterparts, the moment is fast arriving when the European economies have to work out the extent of their buy-in to Mr Xi’s dream.

via China maps out vision of future prosperity along a New Silk Road | The Times.

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10/04/2013

* China’s Dalian Wanda Makes a Play for European Movie Theaters

WSJ: “Just months after grabbing a chunk of the U.S. movie-theater market, China’s Dalian Wanda Group Corp. is moving toward becoming a global power in film exhibition, holding talks to purchase a European chain.

The talks follow Wanda’s $2.6 billion purchase last year of the second-largest U.S. chain, AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., which has nearly 5,000 screens at 344 locations in the U.S. and Canada.

A Wanda spokesman said the conglomerate has held talks to buy a European chain but declined to provide further details.

People familiar with the situation said the conglomerate has shown interest in at least two of the Continent’s largest chains, Odeon & UCI Cinemas Holdings Ltd. and Vue Entertainment Ltd., both based in the U.K. and with thousands of screens in multiple countries. There are other European chains that Wanda could target as well.

In addition to AMC, Wanda operates 1,000 screens in China, the world’s second-largest movie market, and is aiming to expand to 2,000 by 2015, Chairman Wang Jianlin said last year.

Acquiring a big chain in Europe could make Wanda a major player in both ends of the film business; Mr. Wang has said he wants to invest in making movies in China and elsewhere. Wanda representatives have had talks with Hollywood studios about co-financing a slate of U.S. productions, people close to the discussions said.

Owning European theaters also could give the Chinese company significant leverage when negotiating the terms under which it splits box-office revenue with Hollywood studios.”

via China’s Dalian Wanda Makes a Play for European Movie Theaters – WSJ.com.

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