Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
Talk about life Li Xiting could be similar to the novel entitled ‘Suffering Brings Favors.’ The reason is, amid the economic pressures caused by the covid-19 pandemic that many people in the world face due to job losses, property richest man Singapore it’s getting fatter.
Quotes Forbes.com, Li’s wealth touched US $ 20.5 billion or equivalent to Rp. 292.12 trillion (exchange rate of Rp. 14,250 per US dollar) as of Friday (26/11). His fortune skyrocketed due to a surge in shares of Mindray, a high-tech medical device company founded by Li and two of his colleagues, Xu Hang and Cheng Minghe.
The company’s stock jumped due to high demand for ventilators manufactured by Mindray. Suddenly, Li’s wealth multiplied by US$1 billion every month during the COVID-19 pandemic. His wealth even touched US $ 22 billion in April 2021.
How did the story of the first richest person in Singapore begin?
Li was born in 1951 in Dangshan County, a village in Anhui, China. He received his higher education from the China University of Science and Technology with a bachelor’s degree in physics.
In the period 1976-1987, Li worked as a researcher assisting scholars at an institute in Wuhan, China. He also briefly became a visiting lecturer at the University of Paris, France, in the early 1980s.
At first he was just a worker at the high-tech company Anke Shenzhen, a state-owned company partially founded by CAS.
The company is arguably China’s first home medical device developer and successfully launched a scanner magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for the first time in 1989.
It was only in 1991 that he founded Mindray. The company, together with two colleagues, got its first contract for medical equipment worth 360 thousand yuan.
From there, Mindray continued to grow into a company that manufactures high-tech medical devices. In 2006, the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and managed to raise fresh funds of up to US$270 million.
During the covid-19 pandemic, December 2019 to date, Mindray has created a ventilator which is the most sought after medical device in the era of the covid-19 pandemic. No wonder, his wallet is getting thicker.
Li is very secretive about his personal life. There is no information on his family and children. He has also become a citizen of Singapore, but it is not known since when.
In 2020, the 70-year-old man was still the second richest person in the neighboring country, but this year he has crawled to the first rank of Singapore’s richest person ahead of Eduardo Saverin, Goh Cheng Liang, and Zhang Yong & Shu Ping.
In the world, he became the 82nd richest person and the 19th richest in his homeland, China.
(sfr)
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