Blazing a Paper Trail in China – By David Barboaza
HONG KONG — Just five years ago, Zhang Yin and her husband were driving around the United States in a used Dodge minivan begging garbage dumps to give them their scrap paper.
She and her husband, who was trained as a dentist, had formed a company in the 1990s to collect paper for recycling and ship it to China. It was a step up from life back in Hong Kong, where she had opened a paper trading company with $3,800 to cash in on China’s chronic paper shortages.
“I remember what a man in the business told me back then,” Ms. Zhang said. “He said, ‘Wastepaper is like a forest. Paper recycles itself, generation after generation.’ ”
Ms. Zhang took that memory all the way to the bank. As a result of her entrepreneurship, Zhang Yin (pronounced Jang Yeen) is now among the richest women anywhere in the world, including Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart and eBay’s chief executive, Meg Whitman. Her personal wealth is estimated at $1.5 billion or more, with members of her family worth billions more.
Late last year, Forbes magazine named Ms. Zhang the wealthiest woman in China. She may even be the richest self-made woman in the world, challenging a handful of others, like Giuliana Benetton, who started the clothing company with her brothers, and Rosalia Mera, who co-founded Zara, the Spanish clothing retailer, with her former husband.
Most of the world’s richest women inherited their wealth: from the Walton women of Wal-Mart fame to the daughters of the men who created Mars candy bars, L’Oréal cosmetics and BMW.
But not Ms. Zhang. A petite 49-year-old woman with a cherubic smile and a fancy for diamonds, she started out from a modest background, the daughter of a military officer. Now she dominates the world’s paper trade through her giant companies, one centered in Dongguan just outside Hong Kong and the other based in Los Angeles.
“She’s a visionary,” says Herman Woo, an analyst at BNP Paribas, which helped her paper company list shares in Hong Kong. “She doesn’t mind putting a lot of money in at the beginning, to build the company.”
“My goal is to make Nine Dragons, in three to five years, the leader in containerboards,” Ms. Zhang says emphatically in a short interview in her glistening Hong Kong office. “My desire has always been to be the leader in an industry.”
In person, Ms. Zhang is filled with nervous energy and hearty laughs. But she rarely grants interviews, and when she does, they are brief and controlled by an army of handlers.
Ms. Zhang is cagey about how she made her fortune. In a society known for close ties and hidden deals between government officials and business leaders, she says simply, “I’m an honest businesswoman.”
Ng Weiting, who was her partner in Hong Kong in the 1980s, says Ms. Zhang was driven and tough and had figured out how to get the best performance out of her workers.
“When her employees asked for a pay raise, she would grant it if it was reasonable,” he recalled. “But when her employees made mistakes, she would criticize them severely. She made it clear when to reward and when to punish.”
Analysts say Ms. Zhang’s ebullient personality made her a great saleswoman and a sharp deal maker.
There were occasional threats from competitors, yet being a woman was not a problem, she says. "Actually, I didn’t find it difficult," she says. "I found men respected me."
Analysts have been nearly unanimous in their praise of Ms. Zhang, though she came under some criticism for appointing her 25-year-old son as a nonexecutive member of the Nine Dragons board of directors.
Ms. Zhang jumped to No. 5 this year in the Forbes ranking of the wealthiest people in China, from No. 107 last year, largely because of the huge public stock listing.
She hasn’t lost her ambition, though. Sometimes called the queen of trash, she doesn’t disown the title. But, she said, “Some day, I’d like to be known as the queen of containerboards.”
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